Red Knife

  The tops of the pines that edged the water were burning with yellow sunlight as morning broke over the lake. Bobby Oakgrove, one of the Red Boyz, stood sentry in front of the warehouse. The vehicles parked along the trail and the men piled out.

  “Anything?” Blessing said to Oakgrove.

  “A few loons arrived for breakfast, nothing else.”

  LeDuc scanned the woods around the warehouse. “Let’s get those vehicles back up the trail and out of sight. Then find yourselves a place in the trees to settle in and we’ll wait.”

  Kingbird said, “And what? When they arrive we just open up on them?”

  “More or less,” LeDuc said. “Unless you want to greet ’em with a handshake.”

  There were a couple of quiet laughs among the men.

  “I figured we’d give them a chance to talk first,” LeDuc said seriously. “Maybe we can reach an agreement.”

  “The only agreement men like this accept is that you die and they don’t. This is war,” Kingbird said. “If they come, and if they’re smart, they’ll make a couple of flyovers to reconnoiter. With the sun up, any reflection off the windshields or chrome on those vehicles will give us away. We shouldn’t just move them. We should cover them with netting, if possible.”

  “Do you have more netting?” LeDuc asked Blessing.

  “All you need.”

  “Anything else?” LeDuc said to Kingbird.

  “Yes. If they have any concern that the Red Boyz might give them trouble, and again, if they’re smart, they’ll come prepared. By that I mean with men and with good weapons. I expect these people can afford both. If it was me, I’d come in with assault rifles, AK-47s or maybe XM8s. We give them a chance, they’ll simply lay down a sweeping fire that’ll cut the woods and everything in it to shreds. We’ll probably take them down eventually, if we don’t lose our cool, but a lot of us will go out with them.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” LeDuc admitted.

  “And there’s another problem. They all die. I don’t think you want them all dead.”

  “No?”

  “My guess is that the Latin Lords would just send someone else, more men, more weapons, and next time you won’t know when they’re coming. I think there’s a way you might get everything you want and that will keep the Latin Lords away for good.”

  “I’d love to hear what it is,” LeDuc said.

  “It’s going to take someone familiar to them, someone with the guts to pull it off.” He scanned the gathering and his eyes settled on Blessing, the young man who’d taken the name of the war chief Waubishash.

  Without hesitation, Blessing said, “What do you want me to do?”

  The plane came not long after, hours before Ortega had told Blessing they would arrive. Just as Kingbird had predicted, it made several passes over the lake, almost scraping the tops of the pines that enclosed the warehouse. Cork, with his field glasses, could make out the face of the pilot and the man sitting next to him. The floatplane completed a final loop and came at the water from the north. The lake was so calm that Cork could see the reflection of the plane racing along the surface as the floats touched down. The plane taxied toward the shore. As it neared land, the passenger door opened and a man clambered out and nimbly leaped to the pontoon and from there to solid ground. He had an assault rifle slung over his shoulder.

  Cork and Kingbird lay behind a hastily constructed blind of branches and brush forty yards west of the warehouse. Prone between them lay Elgin Manypenny, barely seventeen and the youngest of the Red Boyz present that day. He held a walkie-talkie in his right hand. The fingers of his left loosely gripped a nice Ruger Mark II that rested on the ground beside him. Each of the groups positioned among the trees and hidden behind blinds consisted of a mix of Red Menz and Red Boyz. Each had a designated leader and instructions, generally speaking, concerning what to do in several possible scenarios that Kingbird had talked them through. LeDuc and Blessing together had made the decisions about the makeup of the groups and chosen a radioman for each. There’d been some grumbling, but in the end every man accepted and understood his assignment. Kingbird had deployed them in such a way that there wasn’t a square foot of ground anywhere around the warehouse that was not in their field of fire, but he was also careful to place them so that they didn’t risk shooting each other. There was nowhere for the enemy to hide. The skill and efficiency with which he’d organized the operation that morning had impressed Cork and the other men. Kingbird had been given the responsibility for instituting any firing action that might be necessary, and each group awaited his command.

  Cork had begun the morning still hoping that bloodshed could somehow be averted. But if what Kingbird predicted proved true—that the Latin Lords had come with men and with firepower—he knew any hope for a peaceful resolution was almost dead. With so many guns and so much tension, there was only one way for this confrontation to go and only one question in the end: Who would be left standing?

  “Walking point,” Kingbird whispered, as the lone gunman moved toward the warehouse.

  The man circled the structure, then studied the trees and the trail that ran along the lake toward the trapper’s shelter. Finally he walked back to the plane and signaled. The pilot cut the engine and the props ceased spinning. Another man climbed out carrying a rope, which he attached to the nose of the plane. He tossed the line to his cohort onshore, who caught it and tugged until the pontoons touched solid ground. He tied the line to an aspen sapling a dozen feet inland. From the description Blessing had supplied, Cork recognized the second man as Estevez, the enforcer. He was compact, with a head like a block of polished maple and a scar that ran diagonally from just above his left eye to his right jaw. Blessing said he’d heard it had been made by a machete.

  The pilot disembarked next. This was Ortega. Blessing said that Ortega always piloted and that he claimed he could land a plane on a postage stamp. He joined the other two men on shore and they talked.

  “Only three?” Kingbird whispered to Cork over Manypenny’s back. “That doesn’t feel right.”

  The men walked together to the warehouse, where Ortega checked the lock.

  “Give Blessing the word,” Kingbird said to Manypenny.

  The young man spoke quietly into the walkie-talkie. “Now, Waubishash.”

  From a distance up the trail came the diesel clatter of an engine approaching and the rattle of suspension negotiating the rough terrain. The three men at the warehouse came instantly alert. Ortega and Estevez stayed in view, but the third man slipped the assault rifle off his shoulder and disappeared behind the warehouse.

  In a minute, Blessing arrived in his Silverado. He stopped twenty yards short of the warehouse and got out. He walked to the other men and they shook hands. The third man slid around the corner of the warehouse and stood behind Blessing. If Blessing was aware of the rifle at his back, he gave no sign.

  Blessing spoke with Ortega and Estevez. He pointed to his watch and then to the plane and said something that made the others laugh. They talked quietly for another minute or so, then Blessing began to gesticulate fiercely and his voice rose, so that Cork could hear him.

  “No. There’s no negotiation. You’re on Anishinaabe land. In Chicago, in L.A., things may be different, but here what the Anishinaabeg say goes. Here, we make the rules.”

  In a blur of motion, Estevez had Blessing pinned to the warehouse. The sound of Blessing’s body slamming against the door exploded the stillness of the morning. Before Blessing could recover, the third man had his assault rifle inches from Blessing’s temple.

  “Now?” Manypenny asked anxiously. His fingers were tight around his rifle and he gripped the radio fiercely. He held his body tense and his breathing was shallow and fast.

  “Relax,” Kingbird said. “If we try anything now, they’ll kill him. And something about this is still off.”

  Manypenny yanked his eyes from the scene in front of him and looked nervously toward Kingbird. “What do we do?”
>
  Before Kingbird could reply, a familiar old voice hollered, “Boozhoo.”

  George LeDuc had come from out of nowhere. While the attention was focused on Blessing, he’d opened the door of the Silverado and, using it as a shield, he’d laid his rifle through the open window and sighted on the men.

  “What the hell does he think he’s doing?” Kingbird whispered.

  “Go home, old man,” Ortega called out in a jovial tone. “Go home and take a nap.”

  “I might do that,” LeDuc allowed. “After you let my young friend go.”

  “Old man, you should choose your friends more wisely. This one, he won’t be your friend long.” Ortega squinted at LeDuc and grinned. “What is that you’re holding? Hell, that rifle’s as old and worthless as you.”

  “The bite of an old bullet will hurt as much as a new one.”

  “You’re outnumbered, jefe.”

  “There are only three of you. Target practice for me.”

  “Only three?”

  Ortega whistled and from the plane spilled three more men, all carrying assault rifles. They spread out quickly along the shoreline.

  “The rear guard,” Kingbird said with satisfaction. “That’ll be all of them.”

  “Old man, if I give the word, what’s left of your body won’t even feed the worms. Put the rifle down and we’ll talk.”

  “Let my friend go and we’ll talk.”

  Ortega shook his head slowly, as if he couldn’t quite believe this old man. “Cojones,” he said and laughed. He spoke to Estevez. “Let him go.”

  Estevez released his hold on Blessing and stepped back. In that instant, Blessing tackled Ortega and threw him to the ground.

  “Now!” Kingbird said.

  “Fire!” Manypenny cried into his walkie-talkie, then took up his rifle.

  Kingbird pulled off the first round. A red bloom appeared on the warehouse wall directly behind the man holding the assault rifle and he collapsed. From all sides of the woods enclosing the warehouse came the crackle of gunfire. The men on the shoreline staggered, and one by one they went down, their bodies rent by a hail of bullets and their weapons unfired. Estevez drew a huge handgun from a holster under his jacket, but Cork, who’d had the man in the sights of his Remington the whole time, put a round into his shoulder and Estevez spun to the ground.

  “Go, go, go!” Kingbird yelled and leaped to his feet.

  “Close in!” Manypenny hollered into his walkie-talkie.

  They rushed the warehouse, sending up war whoops as they came, a sound to put ice in the blood of the fiercest enemy, and they enclosed the fallen Lords in a loose circle of readied weapons. Blessing still fought with Ortega on the ground. Ortega had produced a knife and was trying to wrench his hand free of Blessing’s grip in order to use it.

  “That’s enough!” LeDuc shouted.

  Suddenly aware of the situation that had developed around him, Ortega ceased his struggle. He let go of the knife and it fell to the dirt with a soft thud. Blessing pushed himself free of the man, stood up, and took his place with his comrades.

  “Check the others,” Kingbird said, gesturing to Cork and Many-penny.

  Cork checked two of the Lords who’d formed what Kingbird termed “the rear guard.” They’d each sustained multiple gunshot wounds and were stone dead. He waded through reddened lake water to where Elgin Manypenny stood over the third member of the rear guard. The youngest of the Red Boyz, a kid who shaved at most once a week, stared down into the face of another kid not much older than he. Incredibly, the Latin Lord was still breathing.

  “What do we do?” Manypenny asked Cork.

  Kingbird called to them, “Put a bullet in their heads to be sure.”

  Manypenny put the muzzle of his rifle inches from the head of the kid in the water, then hesitated.

  “I’ll do it,” Cork told his young companion.

  “No,” Manypenny said. He fired point-blank and turned quickly away.

  Cork took care of the other two, then called out, “It’s done.”

  Though badly wounded, Estevez was still moving. He pressed a hand to his right shoulder, where his jacket was soaked with blood, and he tried to sit up.

  “Help him.” LeDuc signaled to Gagnon and McDougall, who grabbed the wounded man and yanked him to his feet. Estevez’s tan, Latino face had gone white—loss of blood or shock or both—but he angrily shook off the hands of the Shinnobs who’d lifted him.

  LeDuc loomed over Ortega. “Get up,” he ordered.

  Ortega stood slowly. He looked at Blessing then LeDuc. “Going to scalp me?”

  LeDuc said, “We’re going to give you a choice. You can fly out of here, or you can be burned alive along with the drugs in that warehouse.”

  “You’re kidding.” He stared into LeDuc’s eyes and saw that the Ojibwe leader had spoken truly. “Hell, I’ll fly out of here.”

  “There’s one thing you have to do first.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “Kill Estevez.”

  “What?”

  “This is the father of Alexander Kingbird,” LeDuc said, indicating Will. “He demands justice. It’s right that he should see this man die. Toss me his pistol.” LeDuc reached toward Neadeau, who’d picked up Estevez’s weapon. When LeDuc had the pistol, a nine-millimeter Beretta, he ejected the clip and emptied it of all but a single round. He slapped the clip back into place, worked the round into the chamber, and held the firearm out toward Ortega. “Kill him and you’re free.”

  “We’re Latin Lords. We’re hermanos,” Ortega said defiantly.

  “All right,” LeDuc said. “Then you burn with your brother. Tie him up,” he ordered.

  “Wait,” Ortega said.

  The smell of burnt powder lay heavy in the air. The sun, a fiery ball just risen, burned across the lake. The men stood waiting in the charged silence of the morning.

  “All right,” Ortega finally said.

  LeDuc handed him the weapon. “Everyone clear away.” LeDuc and the other Anishinaabeg retreated a few yards, leaving Ortega alone with Estevez.

  The two hermanos faced each other, standing in sanguine sunlight, casting shadows that stretched across the ground three times as long as the men were tall. Ortega raised the pistol until the barrel was level with the other man’s eyes.

  “Fuck you, puta,” Estevez spit at his executioner.

  No more than five feet separated the two men, but a long silence separated one moment from the next. Ortega stood as if cast from bronze, his arm outstretched. Then came the crack of the exploding cartridge powder. The bullet pierced Estevez’s forehead, slammed against the back of his skull, shattered the bone like a china plate, exited tumbling amid a bloody spray of fragmented brain, flattened itself against the tempered hasp of the lock on the warehouse door, and fell to the ground. The end of a journey, Henry Meloux might have said, that had been meant for it from the moment it was born out of molten lead.

  “Put the gun down,” LeDuc said in the stillness that had returned.

  Ortega set the Glock in the dirt at his feet.

  “Arthur,” LeDuc called. “You get that?”

  Arthur Villebrun raised a cell phone that he held in his right hand. “I got it.”

  LeDuc walked to Ortega. “What we have is video of you shooting this man, this Latin Lord, who you called hermano. We don’t care what you tell your other brothers, but whatever it is you better make damn sure it keeps them from ever coming back to the Iron Lake Reservation. We don’t want you and we don’t want your drugs. And I can’t imagine you want this video getting into the hands of the other Latin Lords. Who knows what they might think?”

  “I can go?” Ortega asked, clearly skeptical.

  “That was our bargain.”

  He eyed the warehouse. “You’re really going to burn all that merchandise? It’s worth a couple million dollars.”

  “We measure its worth differently.”

  Ortega let his gaze march across the faces of all t
he men still standing that morning, then he considered those dead. He turned and walked slowly back to his plane. He released the line tied to the sapling and shoved the plane away from shore. He hopped onto the float and climbed into the cockpit. The engine coughed, caught, and the props began to spin. He turned the floatplane toward the exit of the cove and guided it onto the body of the lake. In a couple of minutes, the plane lifted off, took a long curl toward the south, and vanished beyond the hills.

  LeDuc turned to Will Kingbird. “The man who killed your son and your daughter-in-law is dead. Are you satisfied?”

  “I would rather have killed him myself,” Kingbird replied.

  “This way is better for everyone.” LeDuc spoke to all the men gathered there. “The dead and the drugs we’ll burn. The Tahoe will disappear in the bogs. In the old days, there would be songs and stories about what happened here this morning. This is a different time. What we’ve done can never be spoken about. Never. We’re all in this together and our safety depends on our silence. But in our hearts, we will always know what we did for The People today. Build a fire now. A big fire. And let’s burn what doesn’t belong here.”

  FORTY-THREE

  Will came home smelling of fire but Lucinda didn’t ask where he’d been. She said, “Are you hungry?” and she fixed him huevos rancheros, one of his favorites, and gave him coffee and sat with him while he ate.

  “Where’s our son?” he asked.

  “He went to early Mass,” she said. “We can still make the late service at church, if you’d like.”

  “I’d rather just stay here with you,” he said.

  When he was finished eating, she washed the dishes while he showered and shaved. He called her to the bedroom where she found him naked, and for the first time in forever they made love. Afterward she lay against him, and although she wondered where he’d been and what he’d done, she didn’t ask. After a while, he spoke to her quietly. “There’s still Uly,” he said.