But Bud turned from that spectacle and instead walked through the dark to a lower building a hundred yards away.
He tried not to notice the high, unkempt grass or the beer cans and coke bottles that lay in it, and he tried not to notice the graffiti defacing the nice new buildings.
Comanches. Once dog soldiers, the most feared of the Plains Indians, a magnificent people, ride a week on pemmican, fight and win a major cavalry engagement against numerically superior and better-equipped foes, then ride another week on pemmican. Now they tended their gambling franchise and watched their customs crumble as their young people were lured away to the cities. Bud shook his head.
He reached his destination, which bore the designation comanche tribal police, and slipped into what could have been any small-town cop shop, a dingy, government-green holding room with a sergeant behind a desk and two or three patrolmen lounging at their desks. All of them wore jeans and baseball hats and carried SIG-Sauers in shoulder holsters.
They were lean, tough young men, none too friendly.
“Howdy,” he said to the sergeant.
“Name's Pewtie, Oklahoma highway patrol.” He showed the badge.
“I'm looking for a lieutenant called Jack Antelope Runs. He around?”
“Oh, you state boys, you always come by when you got a crime to solve and you can't solve it. Gotta be an Indian, don't it?” said the sergeant.
“As a matter of fact, it don't,” said Bud.
“It's gotta be a piece of white trash man killer that makes the average brave look like your Minnie Mouse. But I got a matter Jack might be able to help me on.”
“That's all right, Sarge,” said Antelope Runs from an office, 'don't you give Bud no hard time. For a dirty white boy, he's not as bad as some I could name. Howdy, Bud.”
“Jack, ain't you looking swell these days?”
Jack Antelope Runs had a cascade of raven black hair running fiercely free and was wearing a little bolo tie that made the thickness of his neck and the boldness of his face seem even more exaggerated. He was a huge man, approximately 240 pounds, and his eyes beamed black fire.
“Come on in. Bud. Glad you still walking among the palefaces, brother, and not with the wind spirits.”
“Well, old goddamned Lamar Pye tried to show me the way to the wind, I'll tell you.”
Bud walked in and sat down.
“So what's it all about. Bud? Is this a Lamar thang?”
“Yes it is.”
“I figured a Gary Cooper boy like you'd take it personal.”
“Now, Jack, it isn't that way, no sir. I just had an idea I wanted to talk to you about.”
“So, talk, brother, talk.”
“I seem to remember a circular some months back. Isn't there a big Indian gang making a move to take over narco from the bikers? Seems I been bulletinized on that item a few times in the past few months.”
“They call themselves N-D-N-Z,” said Jack.
“Mean and nasty boys, yes sir. Started up in prison. You put our brothers in white prisons and sure enough they going to start up their own gang, to stand against the niggers and the Mexicans and the white boys.”
“It's another thing we're guilty of, yes it is,” said Bud.
“It ain't strictly a Comanche thing, though some of our young men have done the dying. But it's run mainly by Cherokees. You might talk to Larry Eagletalon at the Cherokee tribal complex. He's—”
“Now, actually, I ain't interested in the gang.”
“Except you think maybe Lamar might be profiting from native American hospitality in some jerky tribal backwater?”
“No, it's not even that. One of the hallmarks of N-D-N-Z, as I recall, is a really and truly fine ceremonial tattoo around the left biceps?
No? Yes?”
“Why, yes it is.”
“Now, sir, I got me a funny feeling whoever's doing that work is a real fine tattoo boy. Maybe the best in these parts.”
“The N-D-N-Z braves wouldn't have any less. That's what cocaine money buys these days. Fast cars, white women, bold tattoos.”
“Yes sir. Now, suppose Lamar wanted such a fine tattoo.
Where'd he go? To those goddamned scum joints on Fort Sill Boulevard?
Catch hepatitis B in them places.”
“It don't sound like a Lamar, but you never can tell.”
“But he wants the best. And isn't the boy doing this work the best!”
“So it's said.”
“Where'd such a boy be found?”
“Hmmm,” said Jack Antelope Runs.
“I just want to check it out. See if Lamar been around.
Maybe that's another step. Maybe we stake out. Lamar shows up, our SWAT boys are there, and Lamar goes into the body bag. No one has to know any information came from the Comanche Tribal Police.”
“Bud, for a white boy, maybe you ain't so dumb.”
“I'm just a working cop.”
Antelope Runs thought a minute, and then finally said, 'You know what happens to me if I start giving up Indian secrets to white men? The N-D-N-Z boys leave me in a ditch and nobody comes to my funeral and nobody takes care of my widow and my seven little kids.”
“I hear what you're saying.”
“I'll ask around, but that's all I can give you. Understand?”
“I guess I do. Jack. I just hope Lamar doesn't decide to stick up your high stakes bingo game next. He could send a lot of boys to wander among the wind spirits.”
“I hear you, yes I do. But it's a white-red thing. I can't change that. You can't change that.”
“Okay, I see I been wasting your time.”
“Here Bud. Give you a card. Let me write my home phone in case something comes up and you have to get in touch.”
“It ain't—” But Jack Antelope Runs scrawled something and handed it over to Bud, who took it and sullenly walked out.
He felt the laughter of the boys in the squad room as he left. Another white boy bites the dust.
In the parking lot he heard, 'N-2. N-2. Last call, N-2.”
He got into his car, feeling old. Another wasted trip.
Then he looked on the card, and at Jack Antelope Run's writing.
It said: Jimmy Ky. Rt. 62, Indiahoma.
It looked deserted. The neon was out, but if you pulled up you could see that, if lit, the sign would have read-under three or four Chinese letters—tattoo key. You'd have to know where to look, though. The parking lot was deserted and the place was way out on Route 62, near Indiahoma.
It was a clapboard shack by the roadside, across from a deserted gas station.
“Nobody's home,” said Richard.
“We'll have to come back.”
“I think tonight's the night. Come on, Richard. Y'all wait here while we take us a lookiesee.”
Lamar got out, and bent to check his .45. Richard heard mysterious clickings. Then Lamar walked up to the door and knocked hard.
Time passed. The wind whistled through the high grass out back. Above, the stars seemed to fizzle and pop like silent fireworks—the sky was the record of a huge explosion. Violence was everywhere, or at least the hint of it.
There wasn't a sound to be heard anywhere in the universe except for the persistence of the wind.
Eventually definite shuckings and shiftings were heard, and deep inside the house a light came on. The door
