

### The Lords of Power

### by

### James Whitesell

Copyright@2015 by JamesWhitesell

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you liked this book, feel free to encourage others to download their own copy at Smashwords.com--where they can also discover other free works by this author.

Thank you for your support.

### Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Lila Mannering

Chapter 2 The Lootenant

Chapter 3 Jehosaphat!

Chapter 4 Scapella

Chapter 5 David Saul

Chapter 6 The Last of O'Toole

Chapter 7 Two Bulls

Chapter 8 The Southwest

Chapter 9 Mexico

Chapter 10 The Ghost

Chapter 11 The Author and Sample Chapter

### The Lords of Power

### Chapter 1

### Lila Mannering

Air Force One had long ago lifted off from its last trip to his California home. The Pres was gone but sure as hell not forgotten. President Ronald Reagan, before the onset of his sad, slow slide into the oblivion of Alzheimer's, continued to rattle and/or entertain the American public with his quick wit. Fred Redbird was still chuckling at the way the whimsical Reagan verbally blindsided a pushy reporter on the late news that night before Redbird came in for the graveyard shift. Fred Redbird came from a whole different cultural universe from most of those who voted Reagan into office, but that didn't bother Fred any. He had little interest in politics or politicians, but he did like a good joke and a ready wit. And that made him a fan of Ronald Reagan. The only other person who'd made Fred laugh more was that crazy black guy, the comedian Richard Pryor, who Fred considered to be hands down the country's funniest comedian. Period. Talking about it earlier that day, when his buddy Charlie Cooper was coming in for his day job and Fred coming off graveyard at the condos where they both worked, Charlie took issue with Fred's casual comment about Richard Pryor being the funniest comedian. An issue, however, delivered with twinkling mischievous jerk-your-buddy's-chain eyes.

"Mark Twain, Fred," Charlie insisted. "He's the best. Always was. Always will be."

"I'm talking about _living_ comedians," Fred retorted, feigning indignation. "Dead guys don't tell jokes." To which Charlie had nothing further to say, though he did wink that mischievous eye at Fred. But they did agree on one thing. Ronald Reagan, completely aside from any questions of effectiveness or legacy, was without a doubt the funniest President in American history since the troubled days of Mark Twain's contemporary, President Abraham Lincoln. Who, despite the huge weight on his wartime shoulders, still managed to crank out the one liners and break up--and/or (like Reagan) deflate--his listeners. The same Abraham Lincoln who had the soul crushing task to decide which among the over 300 convicted and condemned Dakota Indians from the 1862 Minnesota Sioux uprising to hang. Fred Redbird was an Ojibwe, a people who in the old days were inveterate mortal enemies of the Minnesota Sioux. Still, enemies or not, the thought of nearly forty Sioux Indians hanged at once rattled Fred's Native American bones at the historical ethnic one-sidedness of American justice. A subject Richard Pryor was sure as hell not afraid to tackle.

How, Fred thought to himself, could Lincoln, in the middle of that horrific civil war, still have a sense of humor after condemning nearly 40 Dakota to hang in what would be America's largest mass hanging? But then he remembered that the bitter and furious surviving settlers in Minnesota, hundreds of their fellows, mostly German and Scandinavian, murdered by the Sioux in the uprising, wanted, even _demanded_ , that Lincoln hang all, over three hundred, of the condemned Indians. Lincoln, humane even as he waged a sanguine fratricide with the South, tempered necessary justice with mercy.

But Fred still thought Ronald Reagan was funnier.

After his retirement from twenty-three years in the U.S. Army, and after a few attempts at other jobs he soon found disagreeable, mostly because of jackass bosses, Redbird was in his third year as the senior security guard at the exclusive Lakeside Villa condominiums. The pay wasn't the greatest but the work was OK. Low key. Not much stress, even though the management wanted his combat veteran's wary presence on the graveyard shift where serious crime was somewhat more likely to happen. He had plenty of stress in the Army and goddamn well didn't need any more. He had his military pension and benefits to supplement his salary and it all added up to a comfortable living. Having his military pension and benefits to fall back on also meant he didn't have to take bullshit from some pufferbelly supervisor. One guy had tried. Fred set him straight right way. He'd survived Viet Nam. Twice. No way some goddamn walking donut with a bloated ego was gonna fuck with him.

The guy never tried to mess with Fred again.

Things hadn't always been that way. Not even close. The notion of a comfortable living, if even thought of at all, was as alien to his world as a 15th Century Ojibwe would be on the skyways in contemporary downtown Minneapolis. Redbird's early life started out in the wild country of the Leach Lake Indian Reservation in the jack pine and paper birch forests of northern Minnesota, a land dotted with azure lakes chock full of walleye and northern pike and vast stands of wild rice, a land laced by cold running streams and rivers mostly too far north to be part of the vast Mississippi River drainage. The Ojibwe called the place Gaa-zagaskwaajimekaag, a name Redbird never could pronounce, having only an imperfect grasp of the Ojibwe language. He didn't know much about his language or his heritage. He did know that the Leach Lake Reservation, with the unpronounceable name of Gaazagaskwaajimekaag, was a wonderfully beautiful natural area. That was the way casual sightseers and prosperous hunters and fishermen from the Twin Cities saw it. But the little piece of that wonderfully beautiful natural area that was Fred's real world growing up was one of hard hungry years of long frigid winters, of poverty and abuse, and Fred got the hell out as soon as he could by managing to stay in school until he got his high school diploma and then joining the U.S. Army. It was a decision he never once regretted. Not even a little. Just about the only times he returned to the reservation were for funerals. And even then he had to force himself to make the grim trip that never failed to bring back memories he would rather stay buried in the past. Which was all the more startling, considering Fred had more than his share of horrific memories after two tours and three TDYs to Viet Nam and other places in Southeast Asia--some still shrouded in secrecy from the American public--during the war.

Fred left the guard kiosk in the dank parking lot basement, inured to the pervasive malodors of oil and car exhaust and no longer even noticing them, and walked to the brightly lit doorway leading to the stairs. He unlocked the door and swung it open, noticing that it creaked on its hinges, and making a mental note to pass on to his buddy Charlie Cooper, the condominium maintenance supervisor. A man who, ironically from Fred's veteran's viewpoint, was a conscientious objector during the Viet Nam war. Conscientious objector or not, he still ended up doing his own government ordered tour. 15 months in the Federal prison at Sandstone, but out after six months and later pardoned by President Carter, himself a former military man, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and a former commander of a nuclear sub. Charlie's anti-war history didn't stop the pair from becoming friends, even close friends, and regular hunting buddies during the fall hunting seasons. Deer, waterfowl, pheasants and other game birds, and fishing partners, summer and winter. Lolling in Charlie's bass boat in the summers. Hunkering in Fred's ice fishing shack in the winter. Charlie could call a wild turkey with such natural skill that Fred puckishly proclaimed him "an honorary Native American.....in the Turkey Clan." Not that Fred had any idea what the hell a Turkey Clan was. Fred thought of himself as a soldier, not as a Native American He could live with the label of Native American soldier. It never occurred to him that it could have a potential double meaning.

Thinking of Charlie triggered off a string of associations in Fred's memory ending with the memory of Charlie forgetting to load his shotgun before their final pheasant hunt in a southwestern Minnesota cornfield the previous autumn. As sure as there was water in Lake Superior the mischievous Gods of the Hunt chose that moment to scare up a bunch of rooster pheasants right in front of empty-gun Charlie. He reacted instinctively, jerking up his Remington 12 gauge and squeezing on the trigger. _Click!_ A tiny sound that reverberated way out of proportion in his surprised ears. Shortly followed by Charlie's emphatic excursion into, as Charlie's English teacher wife would describe it, 'an extensive sampling of vernacular American English expletives.' Which instantly made him the butt of a whole bunch of jokes among their crowd of hunting friends. Fred was chucking at the thought as he began to climb briskly up to the first floor to begin his regular inspection of the condominium complex's upper corridors and doors. "That Charlie," he said, chuckling at the thought. "What a character."

"You just never know what to expect next."

The door had hardly closed behind him before a shadowy hooded figure in dark clothing slipped inside the underground garage's entrance and disappeared inside the cavernous concrete depths of the garage.

Twenty minutes later Fred Redbird was almost finished with his upstairs rounds when a sleek red Ferrari pulled up from the deserted rain swept streets outside and paused at the underground garage entrance while the driver pointed a remote at the electronic eye of the vehicle barricade. The barricade, to the driver's mildly drug-tinged eye, oddly reminiscent of a horizontal version of an old-fashioned barber pole as the red and white painted barrier arm jerked itself to the vertical. The Ferrari roared off down the garage ramp, wet tires squealing on the dry basement concrete as the driver slammed on the brakes and pulled into one of the reserved parking spaces of the exclusive condominiums above. The door swung open and the shapely tanned legs of a tall, lean woman, sensuously clad in a diaphanous light summer dress that dramatically clashed with the chill of the early spring weather. She uncoiled her long legs from the Ferrari and stepped into the dank chill of the garage. Hers was a regal presence, theatric, even if there was no one there to watch. Her filmy fuchsia skirt shimmered as she walked, reminding the hidden watcher of the iridescence of hummingbirds in dappled light. It was the only thought that was even remotely pleasant as he watched the woman from where he lay hidden a hundred feet away in the puddle of shadow thrown off by a parked Lincoln Town Car. Had he known the owner was a prominent Minneapolis defense attorney he would have been darkly amused.

Always theatric in her movements, like a fashion model strutting on a runway with a lithe, saucy loose-jointed erectness, the woman strode with self confident sensual athleticism for the elevator, typed an access code into the control module, then pushed a button and waited for the door to open. She stood impatiently under the harsh light, drumming her fingers on the elevator door. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, but the beauty was a cold and hard one under the judgmental harsh light of the dingy basement garage.

A single drop of hopelessly impotent sperm fell from the inside of her thigh just when she noticed the odd little shiny object on the wall next to the elevator button. The long, graceful fingers of her right hand inched over to probe and lightly caress the shiny object. At the exact moment she touched it the flat crack of a silenced rifle rang out dully in the cavernous underground garage. A small red hole instantly appeared almost in the very center of her forehead.

All the human flavorings that were Lila Mannering, along with the momentary puzzlement over the shiny thing on the wall, fled as the life left her face. She pitched over backwards and came to a final supine rest obscenely spread eagled on the cold garage floor. Even in death she had a cold, striking beauty.

Fred Redbird found her body less than five minutes later. The first of the police arrived in another five minutes. More continued to come. Then came the media. Less than twenty-four hours later Fred Redbird would be out of a job. He was a convenient scapegoat. The first.

But not the last.

Two old men sat cross-legged before the pungent smoke of a ponderosa pine campfire. Their skins were baked a deep bronze from long years under the glare of the shortgrass prairie sun. The age-wrinkled pair spoke in low, murmuring tones in an ancient language very unlike English. Off somewhere in the rolling prairie undulations cascading off the Black Hills a family of coyotes caterwauled into the star-filled night. Wood smoke rose lazily in the still night, hazing over the thin sliver of a waning moon. One of the old men, in the intense fervor of his conversation, was eerily reminiscent of the crazy-eyed prophets from the distant days of the Old Testament. He kept pointing towards the east.

Towards where the morning sun would rise.

Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Thompson, Ben to those who knew him, stood in the locker room staring at his bare chest in a mirror. He flexed his muscles and smiled approvingly. Even deep into his forties he still had the powerful body of a linebacker. Not big enough for the pros, maybe, but certainly enough to tear the hell out of a backfield of cocky college running backs. And also enough to knock the cover off a softball and send it sailing out of sight. He put on his uniform shirt and went out into the stadium where the department's softball team was playing. A teammate beckoned at him to take his turn at the plate. Thompson grabbed the heavy hard maple bat he favored and strode for the plate, pulling his cap down to protect his eyes from the dazzling light of the sun.

He looked over at the scoreboard and saw his team was down by one run, and that there were already two out in the last inning. Then he squinted towards second base and saw the lanky, awkward form of Sergeant Ed Davis standing on the sack. It'd have to be at least a double. Davis would never make it otherwise. Thompson swung his hips, adjusted his hands on the shaft of the bat and bent his powerful body to receive the pitch with all the power the symbiotic Thompson/hard maple bat construct could muster and send the ball rocketing over the fence.

The dark-uniformed pitcher of the opposing team, silhouetted in the dazzling sun, wound up and sent the pitch whistling at him. Thompson coiled, ready to swing. Then he recognized the aquiline profile of the opposing pitcher. It was Scapella, the police chief. He was so surprised that the pitch sailed by him before he could react.

"Strike one!" Yelled the umpire. Thompson turned to scowl at the official. He was surprised again when he saw that the umpire was one of Scapella's aides, a man Thompson considered to be a fawning toady. As he stared at the form of the umpire a second pitch came in past him.

"Strike two!" Yelled the umpire. Thompson immediately jerked towards the pitcher, just in time to see the dark form silhouetted against the sun hurl another pitch at him. He coiled once more, cocked his bat and felt something grab it. He wheeled to find that the catcher had hold of his bat with both hands. Behind the catcher's mask was the face of another of Scapella's police toadies, Captain Thornton. Thompson roughly pushed him away, whirled towards the onrushing ball and swung to meet it. He knew when the bat struck the ball that it was gone.

The softball hurtled six feet off the ground at the pitcher, ricocheted off his head and knocked him down, then began to gain altitude. The outfielders didn't even bother to give chase. The ball was high in the air and sailing far over the fence. Thompson watched the ball as he began to lope around the bases. Just as he rounded second he saw a dark shape come out of the sun and descend towards the soaring softball. As Thompson watched in amazement a huge eagle dropped from the sun, pounced on the softball, took the ball in its talons and began to fly away with it. Sergeant Ed Davis was scoring and Ben was rounding third base when he heard the phone start to ring. Ben walked the rest of the way to home plate, then over to the pitcher's mound where he shoved aside the prostrate form of the pitcher and reached down to pick up the phone underneath him.

His eyes snapped open. There was Betty's sleeping form reassuringly beside him. The twilight of sleep tattered as he recognized all the familiar things of his bedroom and he shook his head slowly in a dazed confusing goulash of dreams and consciousness as he listened to the voice talking over the phone.

It was the night police dispatcher with the news of Lila Mannering's death.

Sergeant Ed Davis, along with half of the uniforms on the dog shift that night, was waiting for him in the dank underground garage where Mannering's corpse lay bloody and still under the harsh light. Davis was kneeling by the body, pretending to be a detective, but Thompson knew he was more likely giving the dead woman's body a lecherous appraisal. The woman's skirt rode high up her thighs when she pitched over backwards and didn't leave much to the imagination as she lay spread eagled on her back. At least not to Sergeant Ed Davis' testosterone-fueled imagination. _Damnit, Ed!_ Ben thought to himself, is there ever a time when you don't have your brains in your dick?

The lieutenant winced. Getting out of bed in the middle of the night to see the milling throng of a police circus that always happened with violent crimes, and Davis panting over a corpse, only reconfirmed his growing desire to get out of police work after he hit retirement age in another eighteen months. He was growing increasingly weary of it and his job was weighing him down, in spirit if not in body. Davis glanced up at him.

"Can you imagine this? Who would want to take out a babe like her?" Thompson grunted grumpily at the lanky redhead without saying anything. He looked over at the flashing lights of the squads with their crackling radios, at the milling crowd of police officers looking for some excitement in the boredom of the dog shift, at Davis staring up the dead woman's dress. Suddenly he thought of the peculiar dream he'd had that night and he had a fleeting feeling that he was dreaming again. He clamped his eyes shut, opened them again slowly and shook his head, but the mad chaos was still there. And so was the bloody corpse of Lila Mannering. Her dead eyes stared back at him and he had the peculiar thought that even in death she was an intimidating woman.

"What a waste," Davis mumbled to himself as he knelt over the body. "What a goddamn shameful waste."

"That it is, Ed," Thompson replied softly. And he wasn't just thinking about the dead woman.

Lieutenant Thompson finished his minute hands-off examination of the woman's body and the immediate surroundings, taking care not to upset the newly reorganized forensics team's procedures when they sleepily arrived a few minutes later, then rose to go towards the elevator. He'd seen something glinting there under the light. As he approached it he saw what it was, hunched over the object and scrutinized it carefully without touching it. Davis detached himself from his morbid sexual fantasies and walked to Thompson's side.

"What ya got here, Ben?"

"Odd," Thompson replied in a thoughtful voice. "It's a nickel. Seems to be fixed to the wall somehow. Old-fashioned kind of nickel, too. Indian Head." He straightened up out of his awkward hunched posture. "Have the crime scene folks check it out, Ed. Might be something important."

Thompson then began a meticulously scrupulous examination of the underground garage for some shred of evidence. He might have been growing weary of his job, but he remained a dedicated and competent professional. He was as solid as the granite mountains in the homeland of his Norwegian ancestors and even dutifully went off to fight in a war he never had believed in on the other side of the Earth in Southeast Asia. He bent to his minute investigation with the studied fastidiousness of a Jesuit scholar.

The red dawn came and was long gone before he was finished.

The man came with the red dawn. He was a small man, short, compact. His face was narrow and angular, his body lean, taut, wiry. His movements were beyond the merely quick. They were explosively sudden, and his arms seemed to jump from place to place without passing through the spaces between. A shabby transient who was sleeping in the bushes of an isolated corner of the city park woke to nearby movement and secretly, thinking himself hidden, watched as the quick little man went through a series of martial arts exercises. He was in a secluded patch of meadow surrounded by the maze of bushes the Minneapolis Park Department intentionally left alone to provide a vestigial fragment of animal habitant in the human jungle. The homeless man's watching began as curiosity, changed to amazement and then became something of an altogether different order of magnitude.

Fear.

### Chapter 2

### The Lootenant

In the nostalgic way of the older quartiles of the modern population, Ben Thompson was old-fashioned. But not obdurately so. He had been foremost among his contemporaries in embracing the new technologies that were revolutionizing police science. Thompson pushed for the hiring of degreed police scientists, forensics and technical specialists and for the computerization and digitalization of the department. Still, among the avalanche of technical improvements of the past twenty years, Lieutenant Thompson considered the best single improvement to be a human one. Seamus O'Toole. The hulking bear of a man was, in O'Toole's own words, 'a bloody modern day Druid wizard with me computer lovelies,' and arguably the finest natural investigator Thompson had ever encountered.

O'Toole was the first person he went to see when he arrived at police headquarters that morning.

"Lootenant!" O'Toole grinned when Thompson came in. "Top o' the mornin' to ya. And how is me darlin' Lootenant this morning?"

"You've never even been to Ireland, Seamus," Thompson said in an amused voice. "How come you talk like that?" O'Toole smirked.

"It's in the genes, Ben. The DNA. The ancestral genes of the Celtic Diaspora." On the wall of his little cubby hole of an office were an USMC plaque, two framed photos and a peculiar amateurish painting of several monks in a bowl shaped boat with a crude mast. One of the photos was of Michael Collins, an Irish Revolutionary Hero. The other was of a tough looking rugby team with a grinning Seamus O'Toole--what else would you expect?--front row center. And then there was the painting.

"What is that supposed to be?" Thompson asked the first time he saw the strange painting.

"It's St. Brendan the Navigator," O'Toole said matter-of-factly. "The true discoverer of America."

"You might get some argument about that from Native Americans," Ben replied, amused.

"I will grant you that there are some alternative theories," Seamus shot back. "And I will amend my comment to make St. Brendan the first _European_ discover of America."

"That would be Leif Eriksson, Seamus," Norwegian descended Ben Thompson said in a totally serious Norwegian-American voice. "He actually did discover America about a thousand years ago. Archaeologists found the site on the Canadian coast."

"I also am aware of the historical fact of Leif Eriksson's voyage, Mister _Norwegian-- American_ Thompson," Seamus retorted. "But I point out to you that was some five hundred years," he paused to gesture at the painting of St. Brendan the Navigator, " _after_ our Irish Saint made his jaunt across the stormy deep."

Thompson shook his head slowly in friendly admiration. If there was a single memorable personality in the entire Minneapolis police force, it had to be none other than the mischievous burly presence of Seamus 'Celtic Diaspora' O'Toole. But....back to business.

"Seamus," Thompson began in his deep, gentle voice. "I have this hunch....."

There was something about the quiet intensity of the athletic little man that terrified the shaggy transient. As quietly as he could, the ragged homeless wanderer slipped away through the bushes. Years of living on the edge had taught him to recognize danger in its many forms and disguises. His instincts screamed at him to get away, and fast. Behind him, the quick little man glanced only once in the direction of the fleeing transient as he continued to work his way through his exercises. The smile that touched his face was as quick as the rest of his movements. He had not failed to notice his not so secret watcher. The man could hide his body.

But not his body odor.

Thompson didn't often get angry, but he was growing close to it now. It was nearly noon and he had spent the first part of the morning trying to learn something about Lila Mannering's background. Quirks, hobbies, friends, associates, hangouts, enemies, jilted lovers, anything that might give him some idea of where to start looking for her killer. His first impression was that she was very well connected--the pressuring phone calls had already begun--and also highly educated. Mannering had a Stanford doctorate in social work she earned at the age of 23 and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Minnesota earned just after her 26th birthday. In three years she rose to the position of deputy director of the Hennepin County Welfare Department. This was a woman, Ben concluded, who wasn't just on the way to the top. She was going there on a rocket.

With a two dimensional skeleton of the shape of her life outlined, Thompson had then hiked through the underground tunnel from the venerable Minneapolis City Hall to the welfare department's offices in the Hennepin County Government Center, hoping to get a flesh and blood three dimensional sense of who and what Lila Mannering was. And was surprised and frustrated when he ran into the peculiar reticence of Lila Mannering's coworkers to say anything substantial about her. After a series of them his temper began to simmer towards the boiling point. Every one of them dodged his questions, couched their replies in bureaucratese and generally averted their eyes from his questioning gaze. He grew more and more impatient until, with the eighth one, hungry and tired, and very unlike his usual professional equanimity, he lost his cool for a verbal moment.

"Jesus!" He thundered. "Isn't there a single straight-talking person in the whole freaking welfare department?" The woman he had been interviewing, a silver-haired sixty year old with the rangy, loose-jointed look of the serious bicycler that she was, froze in shock. Then the shock slowly faded from her face and she began to laugh.

"This is funny?" Thompson demanded testily. The outwardly prim silver-haired woman had dissolved into a sparkle-eyed salty character pounding on her knees in hilarity. Thompson's anger crumbled. He was reduced to dumbly staring at her.

"Would you like to tell me just what the bloody hell (a phrase he picked up from Seamus O'Toole) is going on?"

"Did you ever wake up one day and realize that you had wasted your life in a bunch of bullshit?" She abruptly said, the humor retreating and a sharp, challenging air to her expression. Thompson nodded. He had, indeed. And recently. _Very_ recently.

"Well, it just hit me," she continued. "You should hear the caterwauling out there," she nodded towards the door. "They're scared spitless."

"Scared of what?" Thompson said, confused.

"Scared that they'll say some little thing that will get them in trouble. Scared that it'll come back on them and cost them a raise or a promotion or even threaten their jobs. Scared that they might lose some of that little bit of security they have built their pathetic little lives on." Thompson stared at Agnes Silver, perplexed, even more confused.

"What? This isn't the Inquisition, for God's sake. This is only a police investigation. We all work for the same government." Agnes Silver stared at Ben Thompson with the same cynical expression he had so often seen on the faces of veteran police officers.

"We certainly do, Lieutenant. That's what I mean. You want to know about Lila Mannering? Really know about Lila Mannering?" She leaned towards Thompson, her eyes blazing with intensity.

"Lila Mannering was the most well-connected person I have ever known. Judges, businessmen, lots of professionals, local politicians, state regulators and legislators, even congressman and a U.S. senator." She paused a moment. "And, yes, police officials, too. She knew them all, and intimately." She paused to laser Ben with her superheated gaze. And by intimately, I mean _intimately!_ "

"I kind of figured most of that out already, Agnes," Thompson said, thinking of all the pressuring phone calls coming into the department. "But why would her influence make your coworkers so paranoid?" The cynical expression snapped hack on Agnes Silver's face.

"Power. That's what drove Lila Mannering's engine. Everything reduced to that single word. Power. She was obsessed with it. I wouldn't have been in the least surprised to see her declare her candidacy for the U.S. Senate in another few years. That was the kind of rising star she was."

"Oh, she was competent," Silver continued. "Extremely so. And bright as they come. You couldn't fault her on that. But her intelligence and ability only made that relentless ambition of hers that much worse. You didn't work with Lila Mannering, and you didn't work for her. You didn't do anything but fear her. She made us afraid, afraid of what she could do to us, afraid for our careers and our future. She was pure power and this place became an absolute hell for all of us. There isn't a single person here who worked for her who will mourn her death."

"Lila Mannering," Agnes Silver said, hurling the words like verbal spears, "was a first rate bitch if there ever was one." Then Silver began to laugh again, softly, bitterly. "It's ironic, isn't it?" Thompson blinked in surprise as Agnes spit out the words. Especially since he had earlier had a similar thought.

"She's still intimidating us, even in death."

After corroborating Silver's story by prying it out of a less-than-forthcoming pair of Agnes' co-workers, Thompson returned to the courthouse building that housed the police department along with the city government and some of the county offices. It was a jarringly unmodern building that seemed to him like it was lifted out of the 19th Century and plunked into downtown Minneapolis. In a way, he was right. Except that it was actually a 19th Century building in its beginnings and the glass and steel modern metropolis of Minneapolis grew up around it. Whatever its origins, Thompson loved the old building. To him it symbolized character, tradition, solidity, permanence. Even with its many warts and imperfections. The skyscrapers popping up all over the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and even their suburbs always struck Ben with the peculiar impression that they were contemporary American phallic symbols. Or, as the irrepressible Seamus O'Toole once put it. 'Can't get laid? Build a skyscraper.' Which doubled over the usually serious minded Thompson in utter hilarity when O'Toole said it, another in a long line of what Thompson called Seamus' 'O'Tooleisms.'

The venerable courthouse building seemed to Thompson's bemused eyes like it should be residing magisterially in 19th Century British Empire London. Totally inaccurate architecturally, he knew, since the building was actually an American architectural take on ancient western European public buildings. Still that was the way he saw it--the way he _wanted_ to see it. Or, sometimes, diving even deeper into the imaginary world of factual inaccuracy, he visualized the building brooding over some misty loch in Scotland or towering over an icy fjord in his ancestral Norway.

Thompson far preferred the archaic look of the building to the soaring glass and steel box where most of the county's offices were close by in the Hennepin County Government Center. Granite built, the old building's floors polished by generations of anxious feet, turrets perched archaically atop the upper story and a towering clock and bell tower in its center, the aging relic of different days felt more comfortable to him than the antiseptic modernity of the county building. He privately called the new structure the County Lingam Building. Those times he did offer that assessment to someone else they invariably stared back at him with blank eyes. The only exceptions being none other than Seamus O'Toole and the plain-tongued silver-haired bicyclist social worker, Agnes Silver.

He had the flesh and blood to go with the bones now, and he was once again reduced to the bedrock of professionalism. There would be no zeal to this one, either, nothing clear cut, no flaming sword of justice, nothing to prove but the principle of the rule of law. He stopped at the ballistics lab, learned only that the murder weapon was a 30.06, then headed for O'Toole's tiny workspace just off the main squad room in what had once been a janitors' closet. No complaints about that from Seamus. At least it had a door and he could shut out noise--and snooping eyes and ears. O'Toole thought of himself as an artist at work and did long abide distractions. With a few exceptions. One of whom was just coming through the door.

"Well," Thompson said as he inched his way into the crowded little room and found O'Toole's huge form hunched over a keyboard, "what do you have?" O'Toole turned to him with a smile, but with eyes grown bleary from staring at computer screens. Seamus grabbed a serious expression and waggled a finger at Thompson.

"Where's yer manners, Mr. Norwegian-American Thompson?" He pointed at the awkward yet strangely compelling painting on his cubby hole's wall. "You didn't offer yer respects to his Saintship, Brendan the Navigator." Without missing a beat Thompson turned to look at the painting of a gaggle of monks in a tubby boat that didn't look like it could make it across the Mississippi, much less the Atlantic.

"Good day to you Saint, sir, and Erin go brah."

"I would prefer braless, " O'Toole shot back, but I'll accept that." Then it was back to police business. "All I got so far, Lootenant, is just routine stuff. Background." A sudden grin. "Only background. No foreground. No aboveground. No underground. Just ground from the back. Anyhow the printouts are already on your desk. Another grin, with just a slight blush of disapproval. "And also copied to your computer, though you probably won't notice." Thompson nodded and wheeled to leave, thinking as he walked out the door that O'Toole had told him he came from a large family and all of them 'were just like me.' How, Thompson had to wonder, had O'Toole's parents managed to stay sane with a house full of Seamuses? Three kids of his own, who, by comparison to Seamus O'Toole, were as saintly as Saint Brendan himself, had at times put him at the outer limits of vexation.

The big black man seemed like a mountain to Van Thuy Nguyen, a refugee whose extreme thinness had earned him the unwelcome nickname of Bamboo. A disrespectful and vulgar name that bruised his hypersensitive ego, Nguyen having been an assistant provincial governor in South Viet Nam before the Communist takeover. Never mind that he was also one of the most corrupt South Vietnamese officials. A generation later his status in life had devolved to being a courier for the Vietnamese mafia in Los Angeles. Nguyen felt no personal fear for he knew that the power of his bosses was known and feared everywhere in their seedy chunk of the so-called City of Angels where some said 'even the angels feared to tread.' Nobody would dare try to stop one of their couriers. It was sure death. And likely a lingering and horrific one. Apparently no one had told the giant black man that. He grabbed Nguyen by the throat, muffling his screams and shouts, and pulled him into an alley. There, in the fetid garbage strewn darkness, he broke Nguyen's neck with one mighty twist of his huge arms and robbed him of the sack of money Nguyen picked up on his nightly rounds.

The huge black man knew well enough who Van Thuy Nguyen was, and who he worked for. He didn't care. Sam Taylor wasn't afraid of anyone or anything. He was back out of jail after his latest extended visit behind bars and nobody was going to keep him from showing he was boss of the streets where he was born and raised. The Vietnamese mafia assholes were new to his streets and Sam Taylor had to set the Vietnamese straight right off. And the way to do that was to kill off their couriers one by one until they had to make a deal with him. Sam Taylor figured if he worked it right he'd be set up for life and never have to worry about money again. He stopped on his way out of the alley and began to laugh.

He wouldn't even have to commit any more crimes.

"Lootenant!" O'Toole almost hooted to Ben Thompson as Ben peeked into the big man's cubby hole of an office later that day. "Got somethin' for you this time. There is a connection. Just like you figured there might be. Got a match on the MO." Thompson edged closer in the small room to Seamus' truncated work space and his bank of terminals and monitors, not forgetting to nod a greeting at his Saintship on the wall to avert any possible additional O'Toole protestations of feigned disrespect.

"Fresno," O'Toole continued. "Out in California. Same trip. Some welfare broad was offed with a 30.06. An old nickel was left at the scene. Happened last week."

"Ballistics?"

"In the works right now."

"Did the Fresno report say anything about the kind of nickel?" O'Toole looked puzzled.

" _Kind_ of nickel?" He turned to his machine's keyboard, punched up the Fresno report and scanned the video terminal. "Yeah," he said, looking surprised. "They did. Here it is." He looked up at Thompson. "Indian head on the front, buffalo on the back....

"What they used to call the Indian Head Nickel back in its day."

Thompson went back into his own cramped office. There was no O'Toole style painting of Leif Eriksson on Thompson's walls, but there were some framed photos. Of his class at the police academy. Of the Mankato State college's regional champion football team where he was a starting linebacker. And another of a half dozen grinning soldiers in Viet Nam flashing the peace sign. On his desk were photos of his wife, Betty, and each of their three kids. He'd received a double handful of awards and commendations over the years. There was no sign of them in Thompson's office. He considered such displays tacky.

No printouts this time. Thompson punched up the Fresno report on his own terminal and found nothing fresh there, either. Suddenly he felt tired again and he leaned back in his chair and turned to stare out the dirty window in his office. His eyes closed and in a few moments he was looking curiously at an eagle soaring in an eerie half-light. He woke with a start to his ringing intercom phone and groggily picked it up.

"Double bingo, Lootenant!" O'Toole said. "Punch it up on your machine. The ballistics match. The same gun offed both them welfare broads." Thompson looked past the phone receiver to the growing shadows of evening falling on his office's dirty little window. He shook his head. It wasn't like him to fall asleep on the job. Before he hung up Thompson asked O'Toole to start a computer search the next morning for names that matched up with both of the dead women. Then he punched up the ballistics reports, studied them, and left some notes in his personal computer's open case file for the next day's work.

The woman had taken care of her body. Only the little things showed her age. The lines around her eyes, the wrinkles around the knuckles on her hands, the veins that stood out on her wrists and ankles. But her body was youthful and lithe and eager, and it was with a genuine hunger that she took the handsome, dark-haired man to her.

It was only after it was over that she felt the guilt.

Thompson peered into O'Toole's cubby hole of an office. "I'm done for the day. Heading over to the Painkiller. You coming?" O'Toole looked up at Thompson from his computer terminals. He shook his head negatively, though Thompson could not miss the impish expression on his face. What O'Toole called his 'leprechaun face.'

"Not tonight, Lootenant," he said. "But before you go, let me give you a bit of Irish wisdom." The big man leaned back and stared at Ben with what neither believed was anywhere near the neighborhood of a really serious expression.

"A biology teacher in County Cork," Seamus began, still trying to look serious, "was giving a demonstration to his class. The man, he was a unhealthy and seedy sort of fellow and probably part English, took two earthworms and held their squirming beings up in front of the class for all to clearly see. Then this sallow teacher fellow dropped the first worm into a beaker of water where it swam to the bottom and wriggled about as though nothing had happened. Then the teacher, who, being part English was lacking in good sense as well as good health, dropped the second worm into a beaker of Ethyl alcohol. It immediately shriveled up and died.

'Did you see that?' The poor deluded man said. 'What the alcohol did to the worm? What does that tell you?' He asked of the class. To which a lad in the second row, with flaming red hair and more freckles than you could count, shot up his arm.

'Yes, Liam.' The poor misguided teachers says. 'What does it tell you.'

"Well, now, it's as obvious as can be,' the lad says.

'Yes....,' the poor man says, expectantly.

"If you drink alcohol, you won't have worms."

Ben Thompson groaned. O'Toole chuckled.

"True story, Lootenant," O'Toole said. "Enjoy yerself at the Painkiller. And have a whiskey with a beer chaser for ol' Seamus himself!"

The Painkiller. A cop bar. Murky. Noisy. Smoky. Thompson had never really liked it much, but it was a cop ritual that he accepted as being a necessary part of the job. Almost all the police officers stopped at the Painkiller when their shifts were over. Ably assisted by the verbal lubricant of Brother Alcohol, the informal and/or off the record information passed between the officers was as crucial to them as cops as all the official stuff at the station. Thompson sat with Davis, but the red-haired sergeant was already busily scanning the availables among the women that liked to hustle cops. Police groupies, Thompson called them, and he was constantly amazed at the number, variety and marital status of women who were ready to do the ball boogie with cops. Sergeant Ed Davis didn't have to sleep alone very often. Thompson had been tempted himself a time or two, but had so far kept his sexual excursions confined to the marital bed. At least Ben had. But Ben's wife, Betty? That was a subject he tried not to think about. Thompson finished off his drink and left, a long-legged blond sliding off a bar stool to join Sergeant Davis even before the Ben had gone out the door into the darkening night. Davis was grinning from ear to ear.

The blond was the one Sergeant Chang claimed was 'like an acrobat.'

'Ben,' the note began. 'I have a meeting tonight. Won't be home until late. Anita is out with Tom. There's plenty of food in the frig. Love, Betty.' He grumbled to himself over coming home to an empty house again, then went to change into his comfortable lounging clothes. He came back out into the kitchen in faded blue jeans, a fraying sweatshirt with a Mankato State logo and scuffed up Nike tennis shoes, made himself a salami and cheese sandwich with horseradish mustard and sweet onions, grabbed a cold Bud out of the frig to go with it and went into his sanctuary, his knotty-pine paneled den. Unlike his office at the police station, Ben gave his vanity a nod or two with a handful of plaques and commendations on one wall. The other inhabitants on the walls were of two very different types. One wall was home to photos of Ben and his kids holding trophy (in their minds, anyhow) fish they'd caught in Minnesota's innumerable lakes. Walleyes, northern pike, pumpkinseed sunfish, small and big mouth bass and a scary looking muskie. Another wall was lined with bookcases filled with books that already had been, or soon would be, read. With a weary sigh he settled into the scuffed venerable leatherette chair that was his favorite, took out the latest volume on American prehistory that he was reading and settled in to let his mind wander far away from the grim realities of a police detective's world.

An hour passed before the call came. By then Thompson was deeply into the ancient world of the Anasazi, the ancient ones of the American Southwest. Thompson picked up the phone, his mind slowly returning to the telephone's reality from the other, distant one.

"This is Vincent Scapella," the voice on the other end of the line said. Thompson was immediately alert. Scapella was the Minneapolis police chief.

"How are you coming on the Mannering killing, Thompson?"

"I think I'll have a name tomorrow," Lieutenant Thompson replied in a voice that tried to hide the wariness he always felt when dealing with Scapella, who was a politician first and a policeman a somewhat murky and distant second. Scapella was surprised.

"Tomorrow? That quick?"

"Tomorrow, sir," he repeated. "I'm almost positive of it." What he didn't say was that having the name was a very long way from having the person that went with the name. He already had an intuition that finding the owner of the name was not going to be nearly as easy as identifying him.

"Well, I hope so, Thompson," Chief Scapella continued. "This Mannering woman had a lot of friends in high places." Into Thompson's mind leaped the acerbic comment by Alice Silver about Lila Mannering being _intimately_ acquainted with the movers and shakers of society. Including who? Scapella? The permutations of that idea flooding his brain made him almost stammer when he answered Scapella.

"We...we'll get the killer," Thompson said.

"I'm sure we will," Scapella said in a tone Thompson couldn't identify, which was one of the things about the man that irritated him. But it was clear enough that his boss was laying the pressure on him. A look of disgust crept on Thompson's face. Did this guy think he needed to be reminded to his job right?

"Keep me informed," Scapella said before he hung up the phone. Thompson stared at the receiver for a moment, then put it roughly back on its cradle.

" _Asshole,"_ he muttered, voicing the common opinion of almost the entire police force, with the minor exception of the sycophants and toadies, or, as the inimitable Seamus O'Toole put it, "the Departmental Triple A--Association of Asskissers and Asslickers." Thompson's face reflected his revulsion. This was going to be another of those times when the pressure was on all the way to the end. It disgusted him when that happened. Underneath, and not very goddamn far underneath, lurked the implication that the amount of effort expended and justice due to any one person had more to do with their political and social connections than some naive abstractions like the principles of equality before the law. His resistance to that attitude, and his occasional blunt outspokenness about it, more than anything else had kept Ben Thompson from rising higher than the rank of lieutenant in the police force. Scowling, he turned again to his book on the old ones of the Southwest, the Anasazi, and their world, one he increasingly would have preferred to live in over the one he was now in. He wouldn't go so far as he say he was trapped in his world. But the image of having one foot stuck in quicksand wasn't so far off, either.

Betty Thompson came in sometime late that night. Thompson stirred awake when she crept into bed. He started to reach over to touch her but stopped when, for the third time that month, he detected the faint odor of a man's cologne on her body. The faint smell scorched his nose and his eyes burned with bitter fire in the dark quiet over the marital bed. The third time did it. Like the third strike in a baseball game.

Ben Thompson never used cologne.

During the night Ben had another dream. He was in a room with his wife, but he was invisible to her. Betty was sitting before a dresser, looking at herself in a mirror. She was naked, gently fondling her own breasts. Then she slowly rose and stood in front of the mirror, motionlessly staring at her naked reflection. In the dream, as in waking life, she had the taut, lean body of a much younger woman. Ben was aroused, and tried to inch towards her. Nothing. He couldn't move a single muscle. In the dream he saw himself as immobile as the statue of one of his Norwegian cultural heroes, the violinist Ole Bull, in Minneapolis' Loring Park. With one difference. The face on the statue? I wasn't Ole Bull. It was Ben.

He blinked his eyes and it was as though the shutter of a camera had clicked and reopened onto an entirely different scene. It was a dark, cavernous place. Betty was fully dressed, carrying a suitcase and was walking briskly away from him. He started after her, calling her name. She didn't seem to hear him, nor could he close the distance between them.

Then a waiting train materialized out of the gloom and Betty swiftly boarded it. Ben ran after her, but the dream wouldn't let him get any closer to the train. He struggled helplessly as it slowly pulled away into the faint dream-lit gloom. He turned to walk away. Twenty feet distant a woman stood in the shadows. He could only make out the dim outline of a female shape. The shadowed woman slowly raised a hand and beckoned to him. Ben stopped and stood staring at the dark beckoning figure.

Then the camera clicked again and he was suddenly awake in a strange ferment. He lay in bed for a long time, puzzled by the dream, puzzled he had even remembered a dream, puzzled over his emotional turbulence.

Next to him Betty lay in a deep, secret sleep with her own troubled dreams.

The sun rose in a clear sky with the promise of a warm spring day. Far off to the west, on the prairie, an old man sat cross-legged on the dry, brittle grass and watched the sunrise. A nearby prairie chicken puffed up and thundered out its mating call under the first rays of light, but the old man paid the bird no heed. He was transfixed by the sunrise. There was something very magical and profound about that morning and that sunrise and especially the direction of east.

The old man started to chant softly.

Hundreds of miles away, in the direction of east that the old man was peering so intently towards, the morning sun didn't reach into the basement of the funeral parlor where T. Edward Stark was beginning his day. The nude body of Lila Mannering, sewed up and freshly arrived from the medical examiner's lab, lay on Stark's table, ready to be embalmed. The mortician lingered before he began, marveling at the cold beauty the dead woman still exuded despite the indignities of an autopsy. For just the tiniest moment his mind toyed with the idea of necrophilia. The moment passed and he purged himself of the ghastly thought. Stark began to gather together the tools of his trade.

His day's work was about to begin.

### Chapter 3

### Jehosaphat!

Ben Thompson habitually rose very early. He learned years ago that the pressures and stresses of police work had to be countered with a rigorous mental and physical personal discipline. The veteran cop had seen too many good police officers cave in under the stresses of the job and sink into various addictions or mental conditions that either pushed them straight out of police work or seriously inhibited their professional effectiveness.

Thompson's personal discipline was deceptively simple. He ran, he worked out regularly at home and in the police gym, he began each day with prayer and meditation and he went fishing every chance he could get. Though not at all a religious man, Thompson had to accept a belief in an underlying spiritual principle in the universe as the only way he could preserve his mental equilibrium. Faith in man alone, especially for a police officer, was just not enough. At least not for Lieutenant Ben Thompson.

His mind, clear and fresh from a short but brisk workout, pondered the various realities of the current state of his life as he drove into work on the empty early morning streets. By the time he arrived at headquarters his thoughts had reaffirmed a growing feeling in him about his future. He would be eligible for retirement in eighteen months with full time and grade benefits. Ben Thompson, despite his physical and mental health, was ready for it. Deep down his soul was weary of police work.

Seamus O'Toole was already there."

"Sleep late this morning, Lootenant?" The big man said with a toothy grin. Thompson glanced at his watch. It wasn't quite 7:00 AM.

"Well, you sure didn't get much sleep."

"Stuff like this don't come along often, Lootenant," O'Toole replied. "I could hardly sleep. Finally I just come back and started punching up different programs and databases to see what I could come up with." He paused a second to throw another grin, a quick one filled with amused intelligence, at the lieutenant.

"This is a kind of a puzzle, ya know, Lootenant. A game." Another quick, impish, grin. "I call 'em Cop Games." Cop games? Somewhat unsure of how to reply to O'Toole, Thompson nodded, shrugged and wordlessly retreated to his own tiny office.

"Jehosaphat! The big man yelled. An hour and a half had passed and the police department's offices were clogged with the morning's activities. O'Toole had continued to work through the hubbub. He pulled a list off a computer linked secure printer and hurried for Thompson's office. O'Toole came thundering in with a beatific look on his face and thrust his meaty fist with the list of names on it at Thompson.

"Here it is, Lootenant," he said triumphantly. "Odds are your boy's one of these three." Thompson looked at the three names on the list. Erwin Smith. Michael Johnson. Luis Flambeau. The Indian Head killer was probably one of the three.

And now to figure out which of the three he was.

It had been towards the end, when things seemed hopeless and he'd fallen into a suicidal funk and heavy drinking. One night he went into a little ethnic bar, Stovik's, in the northeastern part of the city. The place had a reputation for being tough, probably racist, and he knew it, but he was already drunk and nothing seemed to matter except getting drunker. It was with a single thought, of getting enough alcohol into him to pass beyond the magic plane where he became oblivious of existence, that he went into the tough gritty bar where he didn't belong.

They were on him in a few minutes, the three brothers who had always been bullies and had kept their neighborhood in terror of them since they were adolescents. The Karski brothers wanted no strangers in their neighborhood, in their bar, especially one who had brown skin and looked like an Indian or a Mexican. They took him outside in an alley and beat him so mercilessly that he was in a hospital for nearly a week.

It was many months later when he walked back into the same bar. The small, wiry man walked up to the bartender and scanned the crowd. They were there, the Karski brothers, all three of them, at the pool table. One of them, the one who had started it the first time, was already staring at him. The wiry little man ordered a Coke...

....and waited.

Thompson spent the next hour reading as O'Toole kept sending him more and more information. It was the same thing with all three men on the list. All had been under court order to pay child support. All had been delinquent and fled, all were tracked down in Fresno County in California's sprawling Central Valley. The welfare department official there in charge of their cases was Carmen Morales. Lila Mannering was the local case worker. That made Thompson wonder about something. He put down the stack of information and picked up the phone.

Agnes Silver was at her desk in the county welfare department and took his call right away.

"Agnes," Thompson began. "This is Ben Thompson. The police officer you talked to about Lila Mannering."

"Oh, yes," the peppery, silver-haired woman replied. "I remember you quite well. You asked some good questions." A pause. "The _right_ questions. At least in my mind."

"I've got some more questions," Thompson continued. "Would you answer them?"

"If I can, lieutenant. Shoot."

"Was Lila Mannering still actively carrying a case load?"

"That she was, Lieutenant."

"Why? I should think in a high supervisory position like hers she would have to devote her time to administration." He could almost hear Agnes Silver simmering.

"You want the official story? Or the truth?"

"You know what I want, Agnes," Thompson said, smiling at the elderly social worker's frankness.

"Lila liked to give some flowery reasons for her keeping a case load," Agnes said. "But the truth was something altogether different. There was a side to her, a mean-spirited side, that took her mania for power over the top."

"Over the top? Agnes, what...what exactly does that mean?"

"It means she liked to squeeze people, the little people who couldn't fight back. Make them squirm. Make them suffer. Persecute them. Don't ask me why. That was just the way she was. A bitch on steroids. Though she never heard any of us say it, we called her the Wicked Witch of the Upper Midwest."

"But....but.....how could she get away with something like that? That is criminal. It's malfeasance. And worse." Ben could hear Agnes snorting contemptuously

"She was slick about it. Goddamn slick. The Wicked Witch was clever. Nothing documented. No witnesses. Come on, Lieutenant. You live in the real world. The big shots get away with screwing over the little people all the time. Besides, from the viewpoint of anyone investigating complaints against her, who was going to believe some marginal guy who didn't pay his child support? They'd go after the little people, not someone like Lila. Especially Lila. She had some very powerful friends. Old money. New money. And God knows what else." Then she said what Ben was already thinking.

"My gut feeling is that she pushed one of those poor bastards one step too far."

Sergeant Ed Davis, chewing on a Milky Way candy bar from the vending machine in the lunchroom, stood in the doorway of Ben Thompson's cramped cubicle.

"So what do we have so far, Ben," Ed said, "O'Toole come up with anything yet?"

"Maybe yes, maybe no," Thompson replied. "I think the computers are going to tell us who our perp is. But I'm not at all so sure they're going to tell us _where_ he is." Davis looked skeptical.

"Like it or not, Ben, and I'm not so sure I like it even if I am a cop, this is the age of Big Brother," Davis' voice sounding muffled as he bit off another hunk of his candy bar. "There are all kinds of ways to track people down. Tax returns. Social Security records, insurance information, highway department records, pay stubs, credit cards, police records, surveillance cameras, all kinds of other stuff. Much of it nowadays increasingly stored neatly away in computer data banks. My bet is that this guy is some poor slob without the knowhow to stay hidden. O'Toole will turn him up in no time." Thompson remained unconvinced.

"We'll see, Ed," he answered. "Maybe so." A frown. "But I wouldn't bet on it."

After Davis left Thompson returned his attention to the growing stack of paper O'Toole was sending him. Ben had the same information on his computer, but was still enough old fashioned in his habits to prefer separate sheets of paper in his hands rather than words on a computer monitor. Though he could have underlined, italicized or cut and pasted the information that interested him on the computer into separate files, he preferred the feeling of using different colors of felt tipped pens on paper to mark and annotate his inquiries. He quickly became absorbed in searching out the one clue that would give him the name he wanted. The three names rolled over and over in his mind. Erwin Smith. Michael Johnson. Luis Flambeau. Which one of the three was it? How to find out which one it was? Within an hour O'Toole was back. The big man came wheeling into Thompson's office with his usual wide grin.

"Lootenant," he said playfully. "Do ya love me?"

"Damn right, Seamus." Thompson said, smiling inwardly at O'Toole, whose antics and language--usually--amused him. "What you got?"

"Well, I got me a little tidbit here, Lootenant," he said, hiding something behind his back. "Just a little tidbit that might interest you." Thompson was used to O'Toole's sometimes overdone theatrics, but this time he was just a touch impatient. This was, after all, a murder investigation with a lot of pressure on the police department, much of it on him, to get it solved.

"Come on, Seamus. What is it? What do you have?" O'Toole brought one muscular long sleeved arm from behind his back. O'Toole's thick arms were visual reminders of a fondness for both strong drink and tattoo parlors back in his Marine Corps days. He was holding another printout.

"Your list is down to two. Erwin Smith's been in the slammer in L.A. since before Chief Nickel went on the warpath." That struck Ben. Chief Nickel? Warpath? Something jingled in his mind. The thought hung on the fringes of his consciousness. Not coming any closer. But not going away, either.

Of the three, Erwin Smith was virtually eliminated as the Indian Head Killer. He had been doing time in a California jail for the past five months and hadn't so much as caught a single breath of free air outside the slammer. The contempt of court charge was an extension of his troubles with Lila Mannering and Carmen Morales. Non-payment of child support. And Smith compounded his troubles by having a baggie of weed on him when he was arrested. Thompson made a note to double check on whether or not Smith might have been on some kind of unofficial work release program and to find out whether any other welfare department officials in Los Angeles had been involved with his case. Thompson was checking his loose ends, though he had already effectively eliminated Erwin Smith as one of his suspects. That left just two.

Something else began to creep into Ben Thompson's mind as he closed in on the killer's identity. Why? Why would a man be motivated to kill over something like welfare department harassment for child support, as now seemed to be a good bet for this nutcase's motive? The punishment didn't seem to fit the crime. It didn't add up. Why kill these two women just for abusing their jobs as welfare officials? Being a bitch was hardly a capital offense. And why, he thought, single them out among all the public officials who had to be involved in welfare and child support cases? A fleeting thought he would later revisit with no little recrimination.

He continued to pour over the accumulating records of the men, the two dead women, and the relationships between them. It didn't quite make sense to Thompson. If the guy was a revenge bent kook, which he probably was, why then not go after bigger game? Why not judges or prosecutors or legislators or even cops? Why welfare department officials? The entire line of thought jangled Thompson's instincts and made him feel uneasy. But it remained just that. An uneasy feeling.

But not for long.

Assistant County Attorney Banning Davidson was an inveterate runner. His friends and co-workers considered him a fanatic. Summer and winter, in snow, rain, ice or fog, day or night. He almost invariably pounded the pavements at least ten miles a day. When his job caused a disruption in that strict regimen, he would go to extremes to make up the lost running time. Davidson was often seen running at bizarre times of the day, late at night, very early in the morning, at any time of the day when he could scrape up some free hours or even minutes. Give Davidson a half hour free time and he'd have on his running shoes and be out the door before the clock on the wall showed more than the modest hint of movement.

Although born to wealth and privilege, Davidson wasn't running on the high road to success. He might have been raised in a prestigious country club world of golf and tennis and an Olympic sized swimming pool, but he was a man of only modest abilities and everyone knew it. He was more cynical than his fellow attorneys in the County Attorney's office. Davidson was a rigid thinker by nature, a pessimist, a skeptic about the intrinsic value of human nature. He was not a legal star by the stretch of anyone's imagination and his lusterless legal career further soured his already dyspeptic disposition. His unwanted reassignment to the county's welfare department as the prosecuting attorney had deepened his natural morose inclinations. His only true release was to run, as far and as hard as he could, forgetting everything to the runner's high and the exhilaration of the moment. Vacations were no exception to his passion. He ran the Boston Marathon four times in the last six years and was planning on running again the following April for number five. He might not be a legal hotshot.

But he sure as hell could eat up the miles in his running shoes.

The small man stood at the bar in the dim light of Stovik's, a neighborhood ethnic tavern in Northeast Minneapolis. The Coke he ordered sat untouched on the bar as he watched the three Karski brothers staring at him from a pool table in an open side room twenty feet from the battered old bar that was already scarred when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The Karski brothers had terrorized their neighborhood since they were teenagers. And not just three of them. Two other brothers were locked up in prison at Stillwater and another, who picked a fight with the wrong guy, was the first of the seven Karski brothers to make the one way trip to the graveyard. The seventh brother, to the amazement of just about everyone, including himself, had taken a very different road in life. He was a Catholic priest working as a missionary in Rwanda, where he would soon see that human brutality could go a genocidal infinity beyond the gutter thuggery of his bully boy brothers.

The three brothers glared at the small man standing at the bar in Stovik's pub. He was brown. Not one of them. He didn't belong in their ethnic bar. The pot bellied balding bartender, who was intimidated like almost everyone else by the Karskis, but who inwardly detested them--as did many others--leaned towards the small man. His cautioning voice lingering just above a whisper.

"Hey. Buddy. You'd better get the hell out of here. Those guys are gonna come after you." The little man slowly moved his head to where he could look into the bartender's eyes. And promptly stunned the bartender with his answer.

"I certainly hope so," he said in calm and unworried voice. Even as he was saying it, the older of the Karski brothers started towards him. He was the oldest brother, the leader, the one who had initially challenged the small man many months earlier in the bar in what soon accelerated into a savage beating that put the little man in the hospital.

"We don't want your kind here," the elder Karski said. "You'd better get the fuck outta here before you get hurt." The little man remained calm. And, the bartender was now noticing with an odd mixture of dread and surprise, very confident. Unusually goddamn confident, he was thinking, given the explosive nature of the moment. He had the sudden thought that he wished there was a surveillance camera recording this. It just might make for some interesting viewing later on.

"I think I'll just finish my Coke," the little man said, reaching for the Coke and taking a drink. But, the bartender also noticed, the Coke did not linger in returning to its place on the bar. Leaving both of the little man's hands free. That did it for the elder Karski. He reached out to grab the small man's shirt.

"I'm gonna throw your frickin' ass out of here, dickhead!"

His hands never reached the little man's shirt. A flurry of blows sent Karski to the floor. Then they all came rushing at him, the other two Karskis and a pair of their rowdy acolytes, the oldest Karski getting sluggishly to his feet to join in on what they thought would be one hell of an ass whipping. They swarmed over the little man, forced him into a corner and nearly had him down. But then one of them pulled a knife and slashed it across the quick little man's chest, bringing blood, and something awesome came over him. It was as though he had only been playing with them up to that point. The scraggly homeless man who had earlier watched the little man's explosive moments as he worked out in the park wouldn't have been one bit surprised at what happened next. The little man's hands and feet became blurs moving with incredible speed at their human targets. To most of the people watching in the bar, the change was obvious. What had started out as an ordinary bar fight had turned into what looked more like a grim and relentless warfare. And, it quickly turned out, a one sided one.

The little brown skinned man pursued them one after the other, beating them mercilessly, aiming to maim, to injure, to hurt, until some of them begged for him to stop. The Karskis were brutal, arrogant bullies, but they were not cowards, yet every one of them, and the two others, unraveled in fear. They were ordinary street fighters, more than tough enough in most confrontations, but this man was of a different order altogether. They might not actually have used the word, but they recognized that this man was someone from a world apart. A warrior, a finely tuned fighting machine. All of the Karskis had been in brutal fights. Nothing like this. The elder Karski, the instigator, had his ribs splintered and there was not a one of them who had come through the fight in much better shape than that. They hadn't just been beaten, they had been broken as well, and every person in the bar realized it. As the quick little man, his eyes strangely calm and his face a stoic mask, backed away from the broken bodies around him, the people in the bar began to cheer him. The tyrants had fallen.

"It's about damn time somebody put them bastards down," the bartender said behind him. The little man turned to him, quickly, and reached over to put something in the bartender's hand.

"Tell them they were very lucky," he said. The quick little man was gone out of the door before the bartender could reply. He looked down at the object in his palm the man had given him, but it would be weeks before any of them understood what it meant.

It was an Indian Head nickel.

O'Too le skipped lunch in his excitement to narrow the list of names to one. While he sat hunched over his terminal, Thompson and Sergeant Davis went out for a quick lunch at a very un-upscale sandwich shop a short walk from the police station where nobody gave a damn that the place was run by slender and small brown skinned people. Thompson spelled out what he was thinking to Davis while they ate.

"Makes sense to me, Ben," Davis--who, despite being skinny, had a voracious appetite with a passion almost equal to that of his ever persistent gonads--said through a mouthful of ham on rye. "The guy's a kook. Getting even. Zaps the women and leaves an old nickel at the scene. Sounds to me like it shouldn't be too hard to find him once we're sure of his name. Ben didn't reply. He didn't need to. Davis couldn't miss the skepticism in Thompson's expression. As they quietly ate and talked neither of them had the slightest inkling their lives were about to get complicated.

"Complicated," the quick tongue of O'Toole would later put it, "don't begin to describe the frickin mess we're in now, boyos!

And, possibly a first for Seamus O'Toole, he wasn't exaggerating.

The assistant county attorney assigned to the welfare department, Banning Davidson, was predictable in his running patterns. He chose routes unlikely to have obstructions like traffic or too many pedestrians or, the increasingly frequent and, to Davidson, goddamn irritating, bicyclists. He rounded a corner into a quiet alley where he ran the wind sprints he regularly used to test his stamina. Davidson picked up speed and the narrow alley, which was hemmed in by garages and hedges, echoed with the sounds of his labored breathing and his Nikes slapping the spider webbed cracks of the aging blacktop. At the far end of the alley a man lay hidden behind a bordering privet hedge. He was prone. A scoped 30.06 rifle was zeroed in on a spot in the middle of the alley. When Banning Davidson hit that spot, the hidden man squeezed the rifle's trigger. Banning Davidson threw up his arms, hurtled forward and slid face down to a stop. Or, as the quick tongue of Seamus O'Toole would also later describe it.

"A dead stop."

Back in his office, Lieutenant Ben Thompson decided to call the Fresno police to see if he could find additional information on the murder of the county welfare worker, Carmen Morales, in Fresno. After a couple of minutes of call forwarding pinball he got a Fresno detective on the line, told him who he was and what he wanted. After exchanging a few bits of information that didn't do much for either of their investigations, Ben asked the question that was increasingly troubling him.

"Do you think this nutcase is gonna expand his circle of targets?" Ben said to Lieutenant Eduardo Herrera, the Fresno County detective who had investigated the murder of the county welfare worker, Carmen Morales. And, it turned out, not just the welfare worker. Thompson was about to have his fears make a lethal jump into reality.

"Put that in the past tense," Lieutenant, Herrera said. "Edwin Bannock, the assistant county attorney who took the suspects to court, also was whacked. He was tree hugger type and took a few days off to go camping and hiking at Kings Canyon National Park in the Sierras not far from Fresno. He had a thing for the big trees there. The Giant Sequoias. The Park Service didn't find his body until yesterday. Just got the forensics this morning. Exact same MO. Offed with a 30.06. Indian Head nickel glued on his tent pole. " All the color drained out of Ben's face.

"Oh, Christ! That must have really stirred things up in your world. Dead county attorneys make for a lot of trouble for police lieutenants." Herrera almost spit out the words.

"Trouble? You want to hear about it? And it could get worse. We've been trying to keep it quiet to keep the country employees from panicking and spreading all kinds of pandemonium. How'd you like something like this to happen in your jurisdiction?"

"I'd rather not," Thompson answered with a sinking feeling in his gut.

"For your sake, man, I hope you don't. It sucks. I mean, really, _really_ sucks. The big shots are into their cover-your-ass mode and acting like the cops are to blame." He was started to get irate, but caught himself before going off on a rant that could have been echoed by a sizeable percentage of police officers in the entire country. Instead of preaching to the choir, in this case Lieutenant Ben Thompson, he got back onto the investigative track. "So what else can you tell me?" Thompson gave him the three names and asked that Herrera try to track down their movements in his area. He also told him that it was unlikely Erwin Smith could be involved. It seemed to pretty much boil down to Michael Johnson or Luis Flambeau. A check of the files in the two counties could very possibly eliminate one of them. Whoever had done the killing had probably had Carmen Morales, Lila Mannering and Edward Bannock involved with their cases.

And, as it was just now turning out, also Banning Davidson.

Thompson hung up the phone just as Sergeant Davis came barging into his office. The flushed look on the sergeant's face told the lieutenant that whatever was agitating Davis, it had to be something big. Davis didn't give Thompson a chance to say anything.

"A call came in while you were on the phone. One of the uniformed squads found a homicide in an alley by Lake Harriet. Some neighbor reported it. An officer just radioed in to say that they found an Indian Head nickel alongside the body." Thompson stood up slowly, his face ashen, his broad shoulders slumping.

"I'm afraid that we're going to find that the corpse was an assistant county attorney," he said in a low, gravid voice. Davis' eyes widened and he let out a low whistle.

"Now that would be one royal fucking mess."

It was.

A responding patrol officer had already identified the body by the time they got to the scene. Thompson and Davis were slapped with the news that they had feared, that the dead man was an assistant county attorney by the name of Banning Davidson. And just as the officer had said, close by the body was a shiny Indian Head nickel.

"Jesus, Ben," Davis whispered to Thompson. "This is getting really fucking heavy."

"I'm beginning to feel like I'm back in Viet Nam," Thompson said gloomily. Then, blurting it out in a loud voice. "Damn! If I had only known about Bannock a little sooner, I could have prevented this." Davis moved closer, speaking slowly and earnestly in a reassuring I've-got-your-back voice.

"You might also not have had O'Toole do his computer searches and come up with the match in Fresno. In that case we would have two dead bodies here and hundreds of names linked with the two of them. Can you imagine what that would mean?"

"The press won't see it that way. And neither will the politicians. And certainly not Chief Scapella." Davis shrugged, nodding agreement. After the two of them completed their preliminary investigation of the crime scene, leaving it to the department's CSI team, they got back in their unmarked squad to head back to the station. Both were pensive, lost in pondering the possibilities of what was easily the most confounding of all the investigations they had been involved with. Davis finally broke the silence.

"For this being a so called crazy man's vendetta, this guy seems awfully fucking professional to me."

"That's part of it, Ed," Thompson replied. "But there's something else. That remark I made about feeling like I was back in Viet Nam?" Davis shot Thompson an intense look.

"Yeah. And what were you getting at?"

"A few years ago, when the country was in a political turmoil, the department trained a lot of us in guerilla warfare and urban terrorism counterinsurgency." Davis gave the lieutenant a very strange look.

"Christ, Ben! You don't think that's what we got on our hands, do you?" Thompson shook his head slowly.

"I don't know one way or the other. But it's a distinct possibility that we can't afford to overlook." He looked at Davis again. "We'll just have to wait and see what evidence turns up."

"I don't know about that," Davis said. "But I do think you were right when you said this guy was going to be hard to find. He's too good. Either we got a pro involved here, or else maybe a dedicated and trained fanatic like you think, or else we got ourselves a fruitcake who's done one hell of a lot of homework."

"I think it's altogether possible he might slip through our protection and make another hit." Davis snapped a hard look at Thompson.

"That would make Chief Scapella real happy," he said cynically, "to hear us say that."

"So we don't say it." Thompson gave Davis a look that any seasoned cop would understand. "Right?"

"You're damn right we don't say it," Davis said. Then he pulled off onto a main road, accelerated and headed towards city hall and at least one very irate public official.

### Chapter 4

### Scapella

Thompson was hardly in his office a minute before Public Safety Director Vincent Scapella, known publicly as 'the Chief' but privately by a handful of derisive and unflattering nicknames, loomed in the doorway. Scapella came in regally, a tall, lean man, impeccably tailored, with wavy dark hair, an aquiline Mediterranean face and the cold, gray eyes of a raptor. He was a vain man who was acutely aware of his handsomeness. Though ostensibly happily married, there was plenty of barroom gossip in the Painkiller about Scapella's numerous peccadilloes.

"Benjamin," he began after he settled into a chair. "I believe you can imagine the pressure I am getting. I _hope_ you can imagine the heavy pressure that I am getting."

"I think so," Thompson said. "I certainly feel the pressure _I_ am under." Scapella smiled thinly, humorlessly.

"I certainly hope so, Benjamin. For your own good. I would hate to see your record spoiled so close to retirement." Thompson suppressed a scowl. That was heavy handed, even for Scapella.

"I'll have the name of the killer within a few minutes. That much I can guarantee you. Finding him will not be so easy. But at least we will know who we are looking for. When we get the name we'll put protection on everyone who might conceivably be on his hit list."

Ben took Scapella's boss rant with a hefty dose of skepticism. It was a ritual that had to be performed. At least in Scapella's eyes. Nor, thinking back to his Army days and the occasional arrogant career officers, was Scapella alone in his penchant for autocratic rants. But there was still something about the man's behavior, a kind of underlying ruthlessness, that Ben didn't like. He was an easterner, an outsider brought in by the patrician old money mayor and Thompson didn't know the man well enough to really understand him. Scapella had hardly gone before Sergeant Davis came in. He handed Thompson a thick file.

"Here's our man," he said. "Michael Johnson."

"You sure?" Davis nodded with certainty. Thompson saw it, but Davis couldn't. The mustard stain on his shirt just under his chin. Into Ben's mind jumped a conversation he'd had with Seamus O'Toole a couple of weeks earlier after Davis had finished, while eating a donut, recounting his latest conquest from the Painkiller's groupies. Davis had just left the room that day.

"Food and sex," Ben said to O'Toole. "Outside of being a cop, that pretty much sums up Ed Davis." That was all Seamus O'Toole needed to be off another verbal lope.

"Which brings up several subjects, Ben. Food and sex? Does he actually eat while having sex? Does sex make him hungry, or does being hungry make him horny? I'm sayin' it's both. The man is a walking advertisement for a penis sandwich." Thompson pushed the conversation out of his mind and tried not to look at the mustard stain on Davis' collar.

"He's the only one who connects with all four of the deceased. Morales and Bannock in Fresno," Davis continued. "Mannering and Davidson here. Johnson's the only one who's got a direct link to all of them." The lieutenant turned his attention from Davis to the file he had handed him.

So what did you bring me on this Michael Johnson."

"You've got everything the welfare department had, you've got copies of what they had in Fresno, plus what we've been able to dig up. The report that Hellerman and Suzuki are working on isn't done yet. They went out on a background check on Johnson this morning. I'll bring you their report as soon as it's done." Davis left. Thompson opened the files and began to read, his mind filtering through the words.

Michael Johnson. A mixed race man born on a reservation in South Dakota but raised in Minneapolis. Graduate of West High School. Gulf War veteran, honorably discharged. Married, two kids, worked at the post office. Then his life seemed to suddenly fall apart. Drinking, maybe drugs, marital discord. Allegations of spousal and child abuse. Protection orders. Lots of negative contacts with the welfare czars in both Minneapolis and Fresno. Guy went off the deep end and turned into a bloated homeless drunk. Or so said the welfare departments. Not in so many words, but the implications were clear enough. Then a single paper in the file riveted Thompson's attention. Johnson had been trying to get custody of his children or, if not that, joint custody. That's when the protection orders started. Then, in a tragic accident, Johnson's ex-wife, her boyfriend and Johnson's two kids were killed in a car crash somewhere out west. After that Michael Johnson seemingly stepped off the edge of the earth and disappeared.

Motive. Thompson thought. That's it. Solid as the statue of Ole Bull. Johnson is blaming the system for the death of his kids. Could it be that this guy wasn't the hopeless abusive loser the files painted him to be? Maybe it wasn't so outrageous that he was the clever killer who had already successfully murdered four people. The clustering of indicators that Thompson always looked for a case certainly pointed towards Johnson. But Ben Thompson needed more than a theory.

He needed proof.

Several hours later a Frontier Airlines jet was approaching the Rocky Mountains. Among the passengers who had boarded in Fargo was a lean, thin-faced man of small size. He wore cowboy boots and a western style suit. No one would notice him among the many others who looked much the same. The thin-faced man was stretched back comfortably in his window seat. He wore his dark hair short and had no facial hair at all. His weight was perhaps 150 pounds. He looked very much in shape, very capable of handling himself. And confident. A member of the U.S. military who saw him would likely have guessed that the small wiry man was current or former Special Forces. The man smiled. No one from the old days would ever recognize him. He was a different person.

His name in the old days had been Michael Johnson.

The detectives sent out to do a quick check on Johnson's background that morning had returned and completed the preliminary report on their findings. Thompson had it on his desk by 4:00 that afternoon. No one had been able to locate Johnson, or even trace his whereabouts for close to a year. The man had vanished.

Thompson's original investigative image of his quarry was as poor soul, a loser, an ignorant and clumsy fat man who beat up those who couldn't fight back. He was a bully. That at least was the impression he got from the welfare department's records. Johnson had been to court several times, for divorce hearings and child support actions. The court had levied 150 dollars a month for each child as his support obligation. He was given the typical 'reasonable' visitation rights and joined the legions of divorced men as weekend fathers. His attempts to get custody, or at least joint custody, went nowhere.

Johnson was hauled into court again. His wife brought a complaint against him for beating her and the children. She won an injunction restraining him from visiting her house or seeing the children until he had satisfactorily completed some sort of court ordered rehabilitation program and appeared before the court again. At the request of the welfare department's case worker and a supporting assistant county attorney, an unsympathetic judge added another $150 a month in spousal maintenance to Johnson's support obligations. The name of the welfare department case worker? Lila Mannering. The name of the assistant county attorney who handled the case? Banning Davidson. A single word jumped into Thompson's mind. Motive. But...but....

Was that _really_ enough to drive a man into becoming a calculating murderer?

Thompson found it somewhat discordant that Johnson had brought a suit against his wife seeking full custody of his children. By the time his suit reached the court, he had already been hauled in and slapped with a protection order. His custody petition was summarily denied on the grounds of his being an unfit parent. And he was thrown in jail for being in arrears with his child support and spousal maintenance payments.

Soon after that Johnson disappeared from sight. He didn't reckon with the computer age or the sophisticated tracking machinery that the state and Federal governments had perfected to search out parents who were not performing the government's idea of their financial responsibilities to their children. It was called the Parent Location Service and Thompson was mildly surprised to find that the long arm of child support even reached into some of the Canadian provinces.

Johnson was tracked down in Fresno through his Social Security number. He was hauled into court there, temporarily jailed and the meager wages from his menial job garnisheed. After that he was jailed once more, for contempt of court coming out of his failure to pay the full amount of his accumulating back child support. A stern judge ordered that Johnson be sent to a tough Los Angeles lockup rather than the local jail, according to Carmen Morales, 'to give this deadbeat dad a healthy sense of perspective.' After Johnson was released he vanished from sight completely following a short hospital stay.

A whole new question was raised in Thompson's mind when he read the reason for Johnson's hospital stay. He had tried to commit suicide while in jail. If he had vanished so completely a year ago, could it be because the man had killed himself in some forlorn place where the death would never be reported? Were they onto a investigative dead end leading only to a lonely unmarked grave?

This unsettling thought was soon compounded when the image developed of Johnson in Lieutenant Thompson's mind was jarred as he began to read his detectives' preliminary report. According to them, the family, friends and neighbors of Johnson said he was a reliable family man who always held down a steady job and brought home his paychecks. He drank only moderately until near the end, when something seemed to snap in him after he lost his right to see his kids. Johnson almost literally fell apart before their eyes. The neighbors said that he wasn't a wife beater or a child beater and that it was his ex-wife who did the child beating. One neighbor had gone so far as to turn Mrs. Johnson in for brutalizing her children. And her new boyfriend, who moved in suspiciously close to when Michael was booted out, was even worse.

That put wings to Ben Thompson's feet and he was soon in Johnson's former neighborhood to check it out for himself. The first door he knocked on was adjacent to Johnson's old address. It was an old two story house in an old neighborhood dating to well before the explosion of post war prosperity. Some of the houses in the neighborhood were shabby. Not this one. These home owners took pride in their home. The latest coat of paint had yet to see its second winter. The occupant was not only willing to talk, she was bursting with words anxious to soar off her tongue. She was wearing a heavy gray wool sweater that looked old enough to be an heirloom. The woman was middle-aged and middle sized, dark haired, dark eyed, careworn. Frazzled on the edges, as Ben's mother used to say of hard working folk. Her body. But not her mind. It was in gear and roaring to take off. What did she think of the former Mrs. Johnson's new live-in boyfriend?

"He was mean," Hallie Chenault, the next door neighbor said of the Alice Johnson's new boyfriend. "He had mean eyes. Mike's kids were scared of him. You could see that plainly on their faces. And Mike, with that stupid protection order against him, couldn't do anything about it." Hallie looked Ben directly in his eyes with what he thought seemed like an accusatory expression. "He came to the house once to confront that jerk, but all that happened was his ex-wife called the cops and they hauled him off for violating the protection order." She suddenly stopped to snort in derision. "You could tell the cops knew what was going on, they weren't at all rough with Mike, but they said they had no choice but to enforce the protection order. They told him to get a lawyer and go back to court." Another derisive snort. "Get a lawyer? A guy with no money? Go to court? They're the ones that screwed him in the first place It was as though the whole system was conspiring against that poor man. Everywhere he turned, the door was slammed shut in his face."

"So why didn't you report the abuse of the kids to the welfare department?" Ben replied, unsure of how reliable a witness Hallie was. Too often he'd seen so-called witnesses twist facts to fit their own agendas. Was Hallie one of them? Did she have an axe to grind against Michael Johnson's wife or her boyfriend?" Then came an answer, accompanied with a dark scowl that left no doubt as to the accusatory force behind it.

"I did. _Three_ times. The last time I was accused of trying to get at them because of personal animosities." A light bulb went on in Thompson's policeman's brain.

"Who did you talk to in the welfare department?" A whole different expression took control of Hallie Chenault's face. One Thompson couldn't quite decipher.

"Who? It was that woman who was killed. Mannering. Lola Mannering."

"Lila," Ben replied, his bass voice so soft it was barely audible. "Mannering. Lila Mannering."

"That's the one," Hallie replied in a distinctly unsympathetic tone of voice. She didn't say what she was thinking, and what Ben believed she was thinking. _The bitch got just what she deserved!_ Hallie tapped on her chest. "I'm part Native American. Like Michael, although he is Dakota and I am Ojibwe. We know what a lot of people think of us, the way they look at us, the patronizing way they treat us. That is where that Mannering woman was coming from." Ben was about to take exception to that claim of prejudice until his memory grabbed onto the many times he'd heard white--and black-- people say very unflattering things about 'drunken Indians.' And the fact was, like it or not, in past years the sight of a drunken Native American was not uncommon in the large population of Native Americans living in the poorer parts of Minneapolis. Enough to feed the stereotype and keep it alive.

"And that's not all," Hallie continued heatedly. "That Mannering woman was a snob. Upper class stuck up bitch. Never had a hungry day in her life. I work two jobs, and so does my husband, and we barely stay afloat. No silver spoons here, Lieutenant. A lot of rich people like Mannering look down on us blue collar working folk. Almost as though we're something less than fully human." She stomped on the ground and put her hands on her hips. "Mike Johnson stood up to her trying to protect his kids and something dark and ugly in that woman crawled out of her insides. She had it in for him from then on."

While they were talking, a second neighbor came out of the house next to Hallie's, caught on to what they were talking about and promptly strode over to join the conversation.

"You talking about Mike and that useless wife of his?" Said the woman, who was a full-blooded Dakota from the same reservation where Michael Johnson's family was from in the vast dry grasslands of western South Dakota. "She was carrying on with that piece of white trash while Mikey was off working. He had a second job. Long hours, too. Trying to make ends meet." A disgusted expression spread over the aging but still strikingly attractive face of the second woman, Dorothy Black Elk. "That wife of Mike's wasn't no more than trash herself. Wouldn't work, let Michael do everything, yelled and beat her kids. I don't know how Michael could stand it."

"The kids," Hallie interjected. "He did it for the kids. I think he gave up on his wife long ago." Her voice grew angry. "I finally had enough of her and that white trash junkie yelling and beating on the kids, so I called child protective services," she continued. "This time they came," she jabbed a finger in the air before Thompson's chest. "And, for once, they paid attention." Ben looked confused.

"Didn't that change things?"

"Not hardly. Those deadbeats knew trouble was coming so they up and cleared out in the middle of the night. No forwarding address."

"Mikey tried to track them down," added Dorothy Black Elk," but he couldn't find out where they were. If anyone in the welfare department knew where they were, and I think they knew because a friend of mine who works there told me they were still hounding him for back child support, they wouldn't tell him. Maybe because that bullshit protection order was still hanging over his head." Ben was thinking, considering the murders, it probably was a damn good thing Michael didn't find them. He probably would have killed the man, and maybe even his ex-wife.

"And then everything went straight to hell," Hallie said, so angrily it took Lieutenant Thompson aback. "That deadbeat junkie that Alice Johnson ran off with got stinking drunk and drove their car right into the path of a semi. The whole family was killed. The driver, the bitch of a mother and, goddamnit to hell, both of those little kids."

"How long ago was that?" Thompson asked.

"Over a year ago," Hallie answered, thinking back.

"No less than that," Angie added. "A good year or more."

That did it for Ben Thompson. He had motive for the killings.

And a damn good one, at that.

It was too much for Thompson to swallow. How could there be such wildly conflicting views coming from different investigations? When he returned to his office he called Suzuki over the intercom and asked him to come into his office. Dino Suzuki was a racial hybrid, part Italian and part Japanese. He had the curly black hair and the prominent nose of an Italian and the eyes and lithe body build of a Japanese. But Suzuki was also something besides an interesting physical specimen. He was the sharpest judge of character and the most thorough street detective Thompson had. When Suzuki finally got around to venturing an opinion, Ben intently listened.

Thompson handed Suzuki the welfare department's reports to read. When he'd finished Thompson asked the questions he wanted answered.

"Between your report and the welfare department, how do you get such a wildly different view of the same man, Dino?" Suzuki did not hesitate with his answer.

"Sloppy work, Ben. Whoever did this took heresay. They didn't really check it out. That's the least negative take on it." A short pause. And a scowl. "But I'd bet on something more sinister. I stand by our report. I don't think any further checking is going to alter the thrust of it." He paused and threw the cynical expression that resided much of the time on his veteran police officer's face. "I don't think this guy just fell through the cracks," Dino said.

"I think he was pushed."

"Then this Michael Johnson was shafted by someone in the government?" Suzuki shrugged.

"He wouldn't he the first one," he said sourly. Suzuki's paternal Japanese-American family had been in the concentration camp at Tule Lake during World War II. It gave him a different perspective on things. He understood the government screwing people.

"The guy was just an average type, Ben," he said. "Not a rock star, but solid. Then his world fell down on him. He went off the deep end." Suzuki narrowed his eyes and his voice subtly changed its tone. It always perplexed Thompson when Suzuki did that because he was never sure what the man was thinking. And when Suzuki eventually said something it was as often as not likely to have a fresh, and sometimes startling, perspective.

"There's plenty of guys like that out there, Ben. They don't have the clout to make the system respect them. And a lot of them end up getting screwed." He tapped the welfare department's reports with a finger. "This Michael Johnson is one of the ones that got screwed."

"What exactly are you saying here?" Thompson said, still resisting an ugly truth he didn't want to face. "Just what the hell are you implying?" Suzuki's expression didn't change.

"I'm saying he was set up. I'm saying somebody wanted to get him. Is that clear enough for you, Ben?" Thompson slumped back in his chair. Although it filled him with loathing, Dino confirmed what Ben had already concluded but resisted accepting. Even after all the years of seeing the rotten side of life, he still didn't like the implications of what he was hearing. The government itself, _Ben's_ government, had crushed this man's life.

"Yeah, Dino," he said sourly. "It's clear all right."

Lila Mannering might have looked like a goddess, hut it was becoming more and more apparent that she was a bitch goddess if there ever was one.

Thompson read through the files again, and also the thin one on what they had from Fresno. Both county welfare departments gave the same view of Johnson, a view Thompson's detectives and Thompson himself had refuted. Four names were prominent in the files. Lila Mannering, Banning Davidson, Carmen Morales and Edward Bannock. A whole new thought came into Thompson's mind. Maybe they weren't such innocent victims after all. Things were taking on a different hue to the lieutenant. He now understood Michael Johnson, or at least thought he did, and why he had done what he had done. He slapped the files shut.

"Now I have my motive cast in stone," he said to the empty room.

Ben was still brooding on his conviction that Lila Mannering had ruined Michael Johnson's life, for reasons Thompson didn't fathom, when Seamus O'Toole came bursting into Ben's office.

"Hey, Lootenant, you're really gonna love me now," the big man said through his toothy grin. Thompson looked up with a touch of confusion, his mind having to recalibrate from Lila Mannering to the hulking Irish-American character in front of him.

"What.....what is it, Seamus?" He said softly as he emerged from the mists of thought. "By the looks of you, it's something big." It was. O'Toole slapped a file on Thompson's desk.

"I sent this to your computer, too," he grinned, "but I know how you are still holding on by your fingertips to the world of paper." No comment from Thompson. O'Toole was absolutely right--although the reasons behind Thompson's attitude went far beyond simply being old fashioned. O'Toole continued. "I got hold of Johnson's military records." A pause while he mocked something akin to guilt. "Don't ask how. Anyhow, read the file, Ben," O'Toole said, no longer grinning. Ben picked up the file and started to read. His brow furrowed in concentration as he read, unconsciously nodding his head as his body punctuated his thoughts. He finished reading, and looked up at O'Toole with what O'Toole knew was a look of both appreciation and satisfaction.

"That sure as hell explains a lot, Seamus! The guy was a special unit in the Army that included martial arts and weapons training."

"And demolition, too," O'Toole added. "Some kind of crazy-assed military experiment. Sabotage behind enemy lines, or something like that. Whatever those Army psychos had in mind, they gave up on it and disbanded the unit." A sharp look from O'Toole that was not as puckish as it might have seemed. "The Marines wouldn't have fucked it up like the Army did before they closed it down."

"But not," Thompson said somberly, "before Johnson was trained."

"Somewhere between six months and a year of it, I figure," O'Toole continued. "Enough to make him potentially a very dangerous man." Seamus stopped, rethought his comment, adding, "strike the potentially, Ben. The guy _is_ a very dangerous man."

"And now we have to figure out a way to find him. Any ideas?"

"I'll let you know," O'Toole said, starting to pivot on his heels to leave. "I do have a theory or two. And when we get this bad guy nailed down we'll show Scapella what _real_ cops can do!" Then O'Toole was out the door. Thompson couldn't help chuckling. O'Toole was still pissed at Scapella for ordering him to wear long sleeved shirts to cover his--Scapella called them 'vulgar and unprofessional'--Marine Corp tattoos. No surprise that Scapella had never served in the military. But something of a surprise that O'Toole didn't lay Scapella out on the spot with a straight right to the jaw when the autocratic Scapella insulted both Seamus' tattoos and the Marine Corps. It was close. O'Toole's fists quivered, but stayed at his side. He loved his job too much to lose it because of a jerk like Police Chief Vincent Scapella. But that could change.

Anytime.

Lieutenant Ben Thompson had little time left to develop his theories. Only a few hundred yards from Ben's cramped office Judge Leland Delaney opened his car door in the portion of the government parking lot reserved for the judges. The car had been sitting there since morning while the Judge was in court. Judge Delaney climbed into his car, put his briefcase onto the seat next to him and inserted the ignition key. As he turned it the contacts were closed on the homemade TNT compound bomb under the dashboard and the primer ignited the main explosive in a blinding flash of light and shattering metal that nearly severed Judge Delaney's head from his body.

Leland Delaney was the judge who had heard the case of Michael Johnson and barred him from seeing his children.

Pandemonium broke out in the police station, which was so close to the scene of the explosion that the windows shook in all of the offices, including Ben Thompson's. He was on his feet in a second and on his way to the parking garage with a flood of other officers and civilians. Ed Davis came puffing up to his side.

"I got this sinking feeling," Davis said in a rasping voice as he lumbered in his awkward gait towards the center of the spreading pall of smoke. Thompson said nothing. He didn't have to. He had the same feeling.

It was a ghastly scene. Two officers were putting out the flaming car with extinguishers while others were looking in shock at the charred bloody pieces of an as yet unidentified body that were lying grotesquely on the parking ramp floor.

"Jesus Christ!" Thompson blurted in stunned anger. "That's Judge Delaney's car." Davis had spotted something on the concrete wall of the ramp. He walked over to it, looked for a second, then motioned for Thompson to join him.

"Take a look, Ben," he said gloomily. Thompson walked over to peer at what Davis had seen. "Its a goddamn cryptogram," Davis said. Thompson bent over to study what Davis had called 'a goddamn cryptogram.' There was a shiny Indian Head nickel, as with the others. But this time it sat at the head of a pyramid of three nickels. Below it were two more nickels of the same type, with the reverse sides, buffaloes, facing up.

"An Indian head and two buffaloes," Thompson said. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

One of the things it meant was waiting for Thompson in his office. Chief Scapella's handsome face was twisted in deep anger. When he saw Thompson enter with Davis and two other officers, he curtly sent the others away. As they left Scapella slammed the door behind them and turned to Thompson with the bitterest expression Ben had ever seen on any police official in his long years on the force.

"That ices it, Thompson. We have three dead officials of the county government. How many more are there going to be?" Thompson didn't try to reply. He knew this was going to he a completely one-sided discussion. What they called an ass reaming. Besides, he wasn't a man for making excuses.

"You were already in trouble when Davidson was killed, Thompson," the chief went on. "And now this, with Judge Delaney, it's too much."

"So I'm off the case?" Thompson didn't really need to ask the question. He knew by Scapella's behavior that he'd be replaced.

"You're off the force," Scapella snapped. Thompson stiffened and clenched his fists.

"Off the force? For this? Why?"

"Because you screwed up, Thompson. You screwed up worse than any police officer has ever screwed up in this city. You ought to consider yourself lucky that no criminal charges are brought against you." Thompson was seething. He had his limits and Scapella had him right up to the edge of those limits. Like O'Toole had done in his confrontation with Scapella, Thompson's fists were tightly clenched, almost ready to strike out at the distorted vindictive face of Vincent Scapella. Which he knew, even in his impolitic outrage, would be a very, very bad idea.

"There is a mandatory retirement provision in the police contract for officers with more than twenty years of service. You can retire with full pension if I enact the provision."

"And if I won't do it?"

"Then you'll be suspended without pay, there will be a series of hearings, you'll be raked over in the newspapers for months and the end result will be the same anyhow. The men on the inquiry board are my people, you know." Thompson struggled, mightily, with holding his temper while the chief continued his rant. He had never come anywhere this close to striking a superior officer, even including that incompetent arrogant Captain Brengo who led their company into a VC ambush in Viet Nam despite repeated warnings from the veteran soldiers in the company. Six men died. The Captain not only was not held accountable, his buddy at Battalion HQ recommended him for a Bronze Star, ostensibly for Captain Brengo saving his surviving soldiers by leading them out of the ambush. The reality was that a badly wounded veteran sergeant, a dark skinned Puerto Rican named Bernal, was the man who led the remnants of the company, if not to safety, at least out of the ambush. When Captain Brengo was awarded the Bronze Star and Bernal only a Purple Heart, a thoroughly disgusted Ben knew there was no way he could ever make a career out of the military. And now, after all these years, here comes a Captain Brengo clone to mess up his life again. Ben was on the very knife edge of violence towards Scapella. It wouldn't take much to trigger it. But Scapella pulled one of his moves and detriggered Ben's impetus. Just in time, too. Which even Ben, in his ire, recognized.

"Take my offer and I'll give you good references," Scapella said, his tone suddenly softening, his face less hostile. "Save yourself, and your family, any further embarrassment." _His family_! Thompson then understood why the man had risen so high. He had a talent for manipulating people. It didn't make any difference anymore. Thompson's decision was made. A conceptual switch clicked in his mental switchboard. From on to off. This was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Or, in language Seamus O'Toole would have used, 'the final load of bullshit that broke the bullshit cart.' Thompson had already grown weary of police work. It was pointless to try and fight this, especially considering what it might do to his family. And at that critical moment he had a sudden peculiar and unsettling intuition--that he was on a similar path to the one Michael Johnson had been on. One that ran on the wrong side of the rich and powerful.....and, with one of them staring at him right now, also vindictive.

"When do you want me to leave?" He said quietly.

"Now," Scapella shot hack so fast it almost made Ben stagger from the shock of it. It was so final, so unexpected. Like a play that without warning ended in the middle of the final act.

"I'll clear out my desk before I leave tonight."

"Good," Scapella said as he turned to open the door. "I'll make the necessary comments to the press. Don't worry about that. It's best that you stay away from any public comment." Ben said nothing, though he grasped what was going on all too well. The Chief needed to cover his ass with a scapegoat. And that was him. Lieutenant--now ex-Lieutenant--Ben Thompson. Ben the Scapegoat, he thought glumly to himself. Ben the one time good cop now a disgraced scapegoat. Christ, what a way to end a career. Still, he kept his tongue. His tongue, but his mind was already starting to jump out of the box of police thinking and wandering off into the unexplored wilderness beyond.

The tall, patrician police chief wheeled and went out the door leaving Thompson standing alone in his room. As the door slammed shut, Thompson's body gradually sagged. Slowly, he turned to begin the task of ending a lifetime's work by clearing out everything in the office that no longer belonged to him. He got a couple of boxes from the property room and began filling them up. Halfway through his somber work the door opened and Sergeant Davis came in. The lanky redhead looked even more awkward than usual.

"I just heard, Ben. I....1....don't know what to say."

"Then don't say anything. Give me a call when you're free and we'll go have a drink." The sergeant hesitated at the door for a moment, looked as though he wanted to say something, then shrugged and started back out the door.

"O.K." He said in a weak, uncertain voice before he disappeared into the next room. Thompson went hack to gathering up the pieces of a broken way of life and throwing them into two boxes on a police lieutenant's desk that also was no longer his.

This was one evening Ben Thompson needed a drink. He wanted to stop at the Painkiller and get drunk. But he wanted his family even more so he drove straight home, stopping only to throw one of the two boxes from his desk into a dumpster. There would hardly be good memories associated with the stuff any more. He kept only a small box with a few papers and various little things in it. Just little things--but with big memories.

The house was empty again. It was becoming almost a ritual. For years he had been gone long hours and his family had stayed home waiting for him. Now he had been making attempts to get home to his family early whenever he could and usually found them not there. It struck him as ironic. There was a certain balance in life and now he was receiving what he had given. But it was all in the past. There would be a new life now. He wouldn't be coming home late from a dangerous, paranoid, dirty job that his family couldn't understand. They could pick up where they left off, make up for the lost years, wring some good times out of what was left of life.

He knew it as soon as he opened the door. A sensing. There was something different about the house. An empty feeling. He couldn't quite put his finger on it. Then he noticed that here and there a few things were missing. An antique clock, an heirloom vase, a piece of signed artwork, family photos. All possessions or favorites of Betty's. He went into the kitchen and found another note on the table. His hands began to tremble as he picked it up.

"Dear Ben," it began. "I can't bear to face you when I tell you this. I am leaving you and filing for divorce. There have been too many lonely years and I have too many scars. No woman should ever be a policeman's wife." Tears began running down Thompson's face. He paused to wipe at them with the side of his hand.

"This is something that has been building for a long time. Don't try to talk me out of it. It's too late. I've only been waiting for the last of the children to grow up. Now that Anita is going away to college I am finally free. Keep the house if you want it. All I want is my freedom. Don't try to find me. Goodbye. Betty."

Thompson let the note slip out of his fingers and flutter away from him. Then his legs gave out and he fell heavily onto his knees on the kitchen floor. He sobbed for a long time, tears that were for many things, for his wife, his children, his career, the carnage he saw in Viet Nam, the hundreds of tragedies that he had seen over the years on the force, the daily tragedy of the human race that had paraded before his eyes for so long. Tears that had been building for a long time.

After the tears and sobs finally ebbed away, he slowly pulled himself upright, went into the bedroom and changed into blue jeans, a sweatshirt and tennis shoes, took a can of beer out of the refrigerator and went into his den. He switched on the light, popped the tab on a can of beer and plopped down into his favorite chair. He picked up the book on the Anasazi, the ancients of the desert Southwest.

This was a very good night to lose himself in another reality.

Four hours and three beers and seven chapters later he went into the kitchen to fix himself a sandwich. He came back into the den and took a stack of papers out of the box he had brought home from the police station. They were the files on Michael Johnson. He had no right to them, but he'd taken them anyhow. It was another of his instincts. If anybody asked, which he doubted since they were only one set of several copies, he'd just say he threw them into the shredder with other papers from his office.

He read through the files again, then put them down. The thing that puzzled him more than anything was Scapella's behavior. Thompson hadn't really been derelict in his job. Scapella should have known that. No, he _must_ have known that. So why the heavy scene and the forced retirement? It didn't fit. Even with Ben cast as a convenient scapegoat.

It just didn't make sense.

Despite the heavy blow to his personal and professional ego, Ben Thompson would soon begin to segue into the very early stages of acceptance. He wasn't the kind of man to linger long with bitterness. He'd still retain his peculiar interest in Johnson, and probably would follow the flow of events. But there was something he couldn't quite identify that made Thompson relieved he wasn't personally involved in it any longer. Almost as though it would put him on the wrong side of things. That was an odd thought, for Ben Thompson. He didn't linger long with that though, either. It was all part of the past now. There was a new life before him. The trouble was he didn't know what it was going to be. His mind began to wander towards what he would do with the rest of his life. And that is when it crossed over into the as yet unexplored wilderness that would be home to all sorts of surprises.

As Ben Thompson pondered on the future, over a thousand miles away Michael Johnson was comfortably settled in at his mountain cabin in southwestern Colorado. He had taken a Frontier feeder flight out of Denver, flown to Durango and taken his pickup truck parked at the Durango airport back the thirty miles to the cabin he rented in the mountains near Mesa Verde National Park. Be it synchronistic, ironic or the casual roulette of coincidence, it was the country of the Anasazi, the pueblo builders of the Southwest who had mysteriously vanished from history nearly a millennium earlier, and who had so intrigued Ben Thompson. After he had returned to his cabin, Johnson took out a piece of paper he had in a desk drawer. On it was a list of names. The first three names on the list had black lines drawn through them. He took a black felt tip pen and carefully lined through another. More lines remained on the list. They were blank. Underlined, but blank.

All had question marks after them.

Ben was deep into his book on the ancient ones when phone rang. It was Davis.

"How you doing?" Davis asked in a tired voice.

"Hanging in there, Ed. Thanks."

"How about a rain check on that drink until tomorrow? I'm dog tired. We've been running our tails off ever since Delaney got blown away. The whole department's gone nuts."

"That's O.K." Thompson said. "It's late, and I'm still not much in the mood to talk. But thanks for the thought."

"I'll call back in the morning," Davis said before he hung up. Thompson put the phone back down and thought about going to bed. It was a strange feeling to sleep alone after all the years of being married. A melancholy slowly came over him.

Being alone was going to take some getting used it.

Another dream came that night. Thompson was in a crazily bizarre house such as could only exist in a surreal dream, one filled with strange asymmetrical rooms filled with an incoherent jumble of furnishings, some of them seemingly defying the laws of gravity. He rambled curiously from room to room until he found the study. It was a miraculous place, filled with bookcases and artifacts of ancient cultures. One section was devoted solely to the peoples of North America, and a sizeable subsection on the ancestral peoples of the American Southwest. Ben instantly felt at home. He walked over to a massive antique wooden desk and sat down. On the desk was an expensively bound volume on the Anasazi. Thompson picked the book up and began to go through it. Page after page was full of brilliantly colored pictograms, strange hypnogogic images and a flowing text written in some archaic script that was unintelligible to him.

Just as he was becoming absorbed in the book, he felt the house quiver. The quivering grew steadily worse. Alarmed, Ben jumped up and ran out of the study into a hallway as the house began to shake violently. He ran out of the front door into a yard. Behind him an implosion shattered the house and it crumbled inward. In less than a minute it lay in pile of rubble.

There was no fire. After a few moments of hesitation he made his way back into the ruins. The destruction of the wondrous study, so recently discovered, had shaken him badly. He searched for some trace of it. Just finding the marvelous book he had been looking at would have been enough to sate the mysterious cravings he felt. Ben found nothing but a flashlight and something he had not seen before. An opening into a basement. Slowly he worked his way down the rubble strewn stairs. Halfway down he switched on the flashlight. Then he picked his way down the rest of the stairway into the basement and began to look around at what was there.

It was not really a basement. There was something very odd, very ancient about it. A cave? A catacomb? As his mind struggled to make some sense, some connection, he suddenly realized what this basement really was. It was a kiva, a subterranean ceremonial kiva such as the Anasazi had. On the walls were more of the peculiar, brightly colored pictograms and designs he had seen in the book in the study.

Then he was aware of a shape in the corner of the kiva. It was a human shape, a woman dressed in what looked to him like the robes of a priestess. He could not make out her face. The woman raised her hand and beckoned at him. He stared at her for a long time. Then he took a single step towards her.

He was awake immediately, sweat beading his forehead, his emotions in turmoil. Another odd dream to tease the corners of his mind, another nagging, peculiar feeling of something at once very alien and also very close. He lay awake for some time after that. The dream had set his mind racking with a firmament of thoughts that he couldn't seem to stop.

The next morning Ben could have slept in for the first time in a long while, with no job to go to and no active cases to worry his mind, but he didn't. Old habits. He was up not long after the sun, made a pot of coffee, half pricey Hawaiian Kona, the other half store brand Columbian decaf, and was dressed, ready for his morning run. A run he needed more this morning than almost any other in his long history of running. It was a way to vent off the anger, the frustration, the sadness, the emptiness. But also a run that would give continuity from the past to the present and into the future.

There was a knock on the door. Ben was hoping it was Betty coming back to say she'd changed her mind. With a glimmering of that hope, he opened the door. It was Sergeant Ed Davis. In his hand was what Davis called the Policeman's Nemesis. A bag of assorted fresh bakery donuts from the town's premiere pastry shop, the German Bakery. Davis had what Seamus O'Toole called 'a Guinness Book of World Records sweet tooth, specializing in donuts.'

"How you doing, Ben?" Ed said as he stepped inside, laying his free donutless hand on Ben's shoulder. "We're all really pissed off about this and ready to stand behind you if you want to fight that asshole Scapella." Ben shook his head slowly.

"No, thanks Ed. But no. I don't want to fight it." Davis looked quizzically at Ben.

"You sure?"

"Believe it, Ed. It's true. I'm all right." Then Davis noticed something. He looked around the room curiously.

"How's Betty taking it? I don't see her. She out already?" Thompson's face grew pale.

"She's gone, Ed," Ben said. "She left me. I came home last night and found a note that said she's filing for divorce." Davis' expression froze.

"What? You're kidding!" Thompson shook his head slowly.

"I wish I were. Kidding. I'm not. She left me." Davis' eyes flashed.

"Well, she sure as hell picked a fine time to do it."

"It kind of wrapped everything up in one nice neat package," Ben said in a tone that tried to hide any emotion. He was quick to change the subject.

"What's going on with Johnson?" He asked. "Anything new?" Davis shook his head.

"Nothing. The guy disappeared from the face of the earth. No one has any inkling of where the hell he went."

"So he's out there somewhere waiting to make another hit?" Davis answered Thompson just as he always had, ignoring the fact that the old and trusted working relationship with Thompson was a thing of the past.

"Yeah. As far as we can tell, the odds are that he had three people on his list here and three more in Fresno. The welfare department official who had his case, the county attorney who prosecuted him and the judge who heard his case."

"So Delaney was the judge here?"

"Sure was. It was Delaney who denied his petition for custody and issued the injunction keeping him away from his kids."

"And not on very sound evidence, it would now seem," Thompson said thoughtfully.

"Tragic, I'd say," Davis replied. Thompson blinked.

"In what way?"

"We finally tracked down those kids of Johnson's that he was so hung up on. His mother took them out to Oregon."

"And?"

"And, like you heard from the neighbors here. They were killed in a car accident several months ago. The mother and her boyfriend were both drunk. But the neighbors were wrong about one thing. The drunk guy didn't die. He was the only one to survive it."

"And what happened to him?" Davis threw Thompson a cynical, veiled look.

"He was discharged from the hospital." Another, harder, look. "And disappeared." Thompson frowned as he mulled on what might have happened to the man. Nothing good, that was for damn sure. Suddenly he had a thought. Of a whole different, but still very police-like, nature.

"Hey. We haven't opened up your Pandora's Box of donuts yet. How about a cup of coffee?"

"I don't know any babe named Pandora, the inveterately gonad-driven Davis shot back with a grin. "But I sure could use that cup of coffee." Ben motioned at Davis to follow him into the kitchen where he poured Davis a cup of coffee, refilled his own and put napkins and plates on the table. Davis pulled a fresh cruller out of the bag of donuts and was in the process of relocating it from his fingers to his stomach, speaking with a mouth not yet totally emptied of what all the cops who tried the German Bakery's donuts were convinced were as good as donuts get. And, to them, donut connoisseurs that they considered themselves to be, that was pretty damn good. At least the old hands among them. The newer hires tried to pretend they preferred salads.

"You know, Ben," Davis continued. "It's very goddamn odd that Hellerman and Suzuki came up with such different backgrounding on Johnson from what was in the welfare department files. It seems like a lot more than just the Mannering woman having it in for Johnson. A hell of a lot more. I can't quite figure that one out."

"Michael Johnson figured it out," Thompson replied. "Or at least he thought he did. The system screwed him over and I'm thinking he figured that the system, the welfare department, the county attorney's office, the judge, combined to kill his kids. True or not, that was what he thought. So he decided to get even."

"I have to say that thought has occurred to me, too, Ben," Davis responded. "But that is only a theory."

"Then you have to find proof," Ben answered in the thoughtful tone he'd used so many times before in investigations. Davis' reply, however, was not like it usually was back then.

"What do you think I'm doing right now?" Davis snapped, with more than a touch of testiness to his voice. Thompson was a little surprised, but chose not to remark on it. Davis went on to relate to Ben that the department figured there was only one person left on Johnson's hit list. The judge in California who had heard his case and thrown him in jail. It was Davis' opinion that if Johnson was able to get the judge he would disappear permanently and they might never find him.

"He's been pretty damn good at staying off the radar so far," Davis said in a voice definitely lacking in both confidence and enthusiasm.

When Davis left Thompson fell deep into thought. What would make a man who seemed to be gentle turn into a killer? His military background? That was not such an impossible connection. And another thought that gnawed at Thompson was his summary dismissal by Chief Scapella. That didn't quite make sense, either.

But it all made perfect sense to Vincent Scapella.

Thompson might have let it all go had it not been for Sergeant Arno Hokannen. They were in the same rookie class at the police academy and kept in close touch throughout the years, though only infrequently working together. Hokannen dropped by Thompson's house that afternoon as he was coming off his shift in the burglary division.

"Hey, Ben," Hokannen said as Ben opened his front door to see the sympathetic face of his old friend, "this really sucks. We all think so." Thompson greeted him warmly and invited him in for a beer. The two men could have been brothers. They were well into their forties, both powerfully built, sandy haired, green eyed and close to six feet tall. It soon became clear that Hokannen's visit had more than one purpose. He had come to commiserate on Thompson's dismissal, true. But he had also come to tell Ben something that he should know. The information he had made Hokannen look decidedly uncomfortable, awkward in his movements, halting in his speech. Thompson noticed it and tried to steel himself for more bad news. It wasn't long in coming. The frank and often brash Finnish-American was uncharacteristically reticent in his manner and words.

"Ben," he began in a hesitant and awkward voice, "there's something I....I....I got to tell you. I don't like to gossip, Ben. You know that. But this ain't really gossip. It's....it's....well, it's goddamn rotten. I just got to tell you this." Thompson tried to steel himself for another body blow to his life. When the usually brusque Hokannen took this long building up to something, then it must be one hell of a bombshell.

It was.

"I was on a stakeout of a jewelry store over on the east side. By the Crosswinds Motel." Hokannen paused. "You know the place?" Thompson nodded. He'd patrolled the area back in his uniform days.

"Well," Hokannen continued, with obvious discomfort. "I was there for hours. You know how that gets. Pretty goddamned boring. You start looking around for diversions. So I started watching the goings-on over at the Crosswinds Motel across the street." Ben grew even more uneasy. Something very unpleasant was on the way. Triggering off a mental image of a fully loaded semi coming straight at him on his side of the highway.

"I seen this couple drive in and the man check in with the room clerk. Then they went out back to one of the rooms. It was maybe 11:30. About an hour or so later they came out again and drove off." Hokannen stopped, looking plaintively at Thompson.

"Ben, the woman was your wife. Betty." Thompson's expression remained immobile. Only his eyes flashed with anger and sadness. But not surprise. He already knew she was cheating. The odor of another man's cologne on her body at night in their bed. A bed that had long since ceased being one of conjugal relations between them.

"And the man?" He asked coldly. Hokannen's voice came out whispery and rasping.

"This is why I had to tell you this," he said in his halting, whispery, rasping voice.

"It was Chief Scapella."

Ben Thompson's mouth actually dropped open in a tandem of shock and revelation. "I figure the asshole used the murder investigation as a way to get rid of you," Hokannen added, now with a much stronger and even strident tone. "It had absolutely goddamn nothing to do with your competence in the investigation. The fuckhead wanted you out of the way so he could grab your wife." Then it was Hokannen's turn to be surprised.

"I think he already did." Ben said. She left me the same day I was fired." Hokannen shook his head in genuine disgust.

"You think they planned it that way?" Ben looked at his old friend with a sadness and pain in his eyes that was unlike anything Hokannen had ever seen in Thompson over the long years of their acquaintance. Years which included the two of them getting together with their wives. Now, with Betty gone and Arno's wife gone to another man and divorce a few years ago, the old friends had something new in common. Cuckolded husbands.

"Did they plan it? I don't know, Arno," Ben answered in a very soft, slightly quivering, voice. Then, more firmly, looking at Arno's sympathetic face.

"And I don't think I want to know."

Thompson switched on the local news early that evening. He wanted to see what the media had to say about the killings. They had plenty to say, of course. It was the lead story on all the stations. The sniper killings of an assistant county attorney and a welfare department official and the blowing up of a county judge were big news. _Very_ big news. And not just local. The major networks picked up the story. There were film clips of the scenes of the Mannering killing and the Davidson murder. There was a longer clip of the chaos around the municipal parking garage where Judge Delaney was blown to pieces. Then Chief Scapella appeared before a news conference. As usual, he was strikingly handsome, impeccably tailored and unctuous. Undoubtedly many people mistook his slipperiness for charm. Thompson clenched his fists when he saw the man on the T.V. screen, so hard his knuckles grew white from the blood flow cut off by his clenched fists. He was a strong man, including his hands. Strong enough to throttle that unctuous son of a bitch Scapella. Which, had Scapella actually been in reach of those strong hands at that moment, would almost certainly have throttled the son of a bitch.

"I would like to announce," Scapella began, looking surprisingly calm under the pressure, "that the police department has identified the killer. We are now in the process of tracking him down. We expect an arrest momentarily."

"Chief Scapella," a skinny reporter with an unruly cowlick that wouldn't stay slicked down, a local known in the industry to be friendly to the police and who didn't pose troublesome questions, asked. "Can you tell us the identity of this man?"

"Not at this time," the chief replied coolly. "It might jeopardize our investigation." A female reporter elbowed her way to the front of the crowd. Unlike the obsequious first reporter, who she referred to as either Cowlick or Cowprick, she had her own sources in the police department and was not afraid of asking tough questions.

"Can you tell us why you took Lieutenant Thompson off this case?" A flicker of anger passed across Scapella's face, but it came and went so quickly that only someone looking for it could have seen and identified it.

"Lieutenant Thompson was not taken off the case. He has chosen to retire at this time." The woman reporter persisted.

"There are rumors, Chief Scapella, that Thompson was...." Scapella smoothly cut her off.

"I repeat. Thompson has chosen to retire and that is all there is to it." Then he shifted his eyes to the cacophonous crowd in front of him. "Next question?" He said, flashing his unctuous smile. There was commentary later on, however, by the same woman, Melissa Hunt, when her TV station ran the story. She said that sources within the police department and city hall believed Lieutenant Thompson had been made a scapegoat and forced to retire.

This was followed by footage of the killings in Fresno and the comment that they could well be connected to the local killings. But nowhere was there a mention of Michael Johnson or of his motives. And buried even deeper in secrecy was the suspicious discrepancy between the files of the welfare department and those of the police department on Michael Johnson. Or the marital infidelities of Scapella with Thompson's wife. And, Ben was thinking, God knows what other skeletons still lay hidden in Chief Scapella's closet--as well as those of Mannering, Davidson and Delaney and probably others. Lots of closets. Lots of skeletons. Lots of others.

Thompson didn't think that these things would ever come to light. Not unless some outsider, like that gusty female reporter Melissa Hunt, had the journalistic chutzpah to shine a light on them. It was the first time he had ever thought of himself as being an outsider, as being outside the mainstream, what some called the establishment. He had always thought of himself as being a kind of officer in a modern Praetorian Guard, a captain of the Pope's Swiss Guard, a sentinel of the forces of civilization, of law and order and progress. But now? Now he was an outsider. Worse. He was having some very strong doubts about the inside and the insiders. Ben Thompson had never felt so alone in his whole life. Yet, oddly, there was a certain different feeling to it, as well. Not bad, either. Calmness? Integrity? Then, a truly startling thought. Could I be? Could it be that this was what it was?

A sense of .....direction......of....purpose?

During the day he wandered the house to see what was gone. Betty had moved out all her clothes and the few personal belongings she was attached to. Their youngest daughter, Anita, was also gone. Her room was cleared of all the things that were hers. She was scheduled to leave for college that month, anyhow. Anita had probably known what was happening and left early in order to avoid a family quarrel. She was a young woman who avoided strife whenever she could.

The other two children were already out on their own. Cyra, the eldest, had her master's degree in international relations and had already been assigned to a minor level Foreign Service post in Malaysia. The boy, Tom, was in Europe somewhere having his usual good time. Ben had always not so secretly hoped that when his son finally chose a lifetime career he would choose a career as a police officer. Now he was not so sure.

Thompson ate supper and was just settling in with his book on the ancient ones when the phone rang. It was Davis.

"Got a piece of news for you, Ben," Sergeant Davis said. "The judge who heard Johnson's case in California. His name was Earl Peters."

"Was?"

"That's right, Ben. Was. He's dead."

"Then Johnson got him, too?" Davis chuckled over the phone.

"Only if his talents include faking a coronary. Peters kicked off three weeks ago in the middle of a game of handball. Looks like a natural death."

"Then Johnson's list is complete?" Thompson said.

"If we're right about it, yes," Davis replied. "And if we're not right about it then we'll hear from Mr. Johnson again someplace we aren't expecting."

"You are sure there are no other officials involved with Johnson?"

"None living," Davis said rather dryly. "None on our list of possibles."

"Then let's hope Johnson has the same list," Thompson said.

"I certainly hope so," Davis replied in a weary voice. "I never want to go through anything like the last few days again. Its been a freaking zoo down here." Then he changed his tone. "You still interested in tracking down Johnson's motives?"

"Yes," Thompson said after a moment's hesitation. "What you got?"

"His attorney. Pro bono dude. Apparently he really went to bat for the guy. Even got himself whacked with a contempt of court and an official censure for his behavior in Johnson's defense. Word is Johnson liked him. A lot. You want his name?" Thompson hesitated a moment, realizing he might be heading down a dark and possibly dangerous road.

"O.K." Ben said, picking up the pen and pad from the table next to him that he used to jot down sudden ideas when he was still on the police force. "Let me have it."

"It's Saul. David Saul. His office is in the Lang Building." Thompson wrote it down. He wasn't at all sure how far he wanted to go with this, but he would at least make an effort to pay Mr. David Saul a visit. After Davis hung up he returned to his book on the old ones, the Anasazi, the ancients of the Southwest--

The very place Michael Johnson had chosen to hide.

### Chapter 5

### David Saul

Though actually into his early thirties and admitted to the bar six years earlier, David Saul appeared to be a youngish rumpled man seemingly not long out of law school who was still struggling to build a law practice. His marginally shabby office in a faded neighborhood near downtown Minneapolis plainly showed Saul was not rolling in the big bucks of the financially successful lawyer. This professional penury was largely self-imposed and a self-fulfilling prophecy rooted in Saul's iconoclastic attitudes and his naive retention of some of the vestiges of scholastic idealism. Which was not received well by his colleagues in the legal profession who were more fixated on billable hours than hallowed principles of justice. They called it reality. He called it 'venal bullshit.'

"I'm a little surprised you are talking to me," Thompson said after being seated in Saul's spacious--plenty of office elbow room one of the percs of renting from struggling landlords in marginal neighborhoods--but sparsely furnished office. "After all, your relationship with your client is privileged communication and I'm a police officer." Saul peered amusedly over his thick glasses.

"An ex-police officer, the way I understand it." Thompson didn't take offense. "At any rate, _former_ Lieutenant Thompson, what we have with Michael Johnson is a textbook example of class warfare." That took Ben Thompson aback. He sat straight up in his chair. Saul was framing Michael Johnson's case far more radically than what Thompson would even have thought of doing.

"Class warfare?" Thompson snorted. "You must be out of some radical college where they float stuff like that around. I saw it with my eldest daughter and now she's in Malaysia trying to raise the masses from poverty and exploitation." He snorted again. "Or so she says." Saul shuffled his chair backwards, both physically and mentally distancing himself from Thompson.

"Maybe it was a mistake talking to you, Lieutenant Thompson. I thought you might have a more sympathetic attitude." Thompson started to throw back a barbed reply, but something stopped his tongue at the last moment. Whatever it was, it was telling him to back off and hear this guy out.

"O.K. You're right. I'm being narrow minded. I apologize. Go on. I'll listen and keep my redneck mouth shut." Saul untensed from the threat of a confrontation, but remained distant and somewhat suspicious of a man who had literally represented the authority of the elite who, in Saul's view, were the Machiavellian string pullers of society.

"Michael Johnson was a good man. I know that sounds trite. But he was. The kind of rock solid person who makes this country what it is." He noticed Thompson's clouded expression. "I know. I know. That sounds trite, too. But a part of you must recognize the legions of unsung ordinary people who daily go out and do the work of America." Saul was about to say ' _heroically_ do the work of America,' but caught himself, realizing it would sound too leftist to this mainstream ex-cop. Thompson was still dubious. Class war? Working class heroes? But he did, as promised, keep his (not so much) redneck mouth shut. Besides which, he also believed that the ordinary people of America were the ones that kept America running more or less smoothly. Assholes like Scapella took the credit. Guys like Seamus O'Toole did the real work.

"Anyhow," Saul continued. "Michael was naïve. He believed in the system, in justice and fairness. When he encountered that witch in the welfare department, Mannering, he refused to be intimidated. He knew damn well he was a good father and not only did he have a right to see his kids, they had the right to see him. And, given the dissolute life his wife fell into, those kids needed him more than ever. When he tried to adamantly impress that on Mannering he was so intense and dogged about it that she did a knee jerk reaction and took it personally. How dare this mere cipher of a person dare to challenge her authority! Her, Lila Mannering, the patrician superstar! Michael Johnson went to the very top of her shit list." He shot a sardonic look at Thompson. "And, from what I have heard about Mannering, no one in their right mind would want to be on her shit list, and especially not on the top of it."

"So she did everything she could to screw with him," Thompson interjected. "I figured that much out. But what exactly did that mean? How did she go about it? And did anyone help her in her vendetta against Johnson?"

"I admit it, Ben," Saul said, sliding slightly off the subject. "I'm an idealist in a world of pragmatists. Swimming against the current. Always been that way. Always rooting for the underdog. And with Michael Johnson I had an extra incentive. My wife left me, too, moved to goddamn Miami with my kids and is trying to deny me joint custody or even reasonable visitation. I'm a lawyer, for God's sake, and even I'm having trouble getting the judicial system to give me equal time over the zealots and bullies and hordes of diffidents who populate so much of the system. I'm in danger of losing my kids, too. So I really tuned into Michael Johnson. Fighting for him and his kids was also fighting for me and my kids." That got to Thompson. Was that why Betty had waited so long to leave him? So there were no messy confrontations over custody and visitation rights when the kids were still minors? If that was the case, then he had to give her a reluctant pat on the back. That much, at least, he could agree with. But cheating on him? With Vincent Scapella? David Saul saw Ben's eyes losing focus on their conversation and quickly added....

"Listen, Ben, we live in an oligarchy. A plutocracy."

"Not a democracy?" Ben said, breaking his promise of silence. "I can't buy that, David. Sure, I know the rich and powerful run things. But the ordinary people still have their freedom and Americans and those in the European democracies are the most prosperous common folk in all of mankind's history. You're not going to convince me otherwise."

"I wouldn't try. But general prosperity doesn't change the fact that, as you said yourself, 'that the rich and powerful run things.' And here is the main point, Ben. The rich and powerful don't like it when little people like Michael Johnson challenge their authority. In their view unanswered challenges to authority lead to unrest and unrest leads to upheaval. And upheaval threatens the foundations of the power of the elite. A power that in their minds has not only enriched them but brought order and prosperity to the masses. In this case, the offended member of the elite was Lila Mannering. She was born with a sense of entitlement and it only grew more intense with her string of achievements and successes." Ben snorted in disdain again.

"You're sounding like some book bound college professor who has little experience in the real world. A lot of theory. Lots of words. Lots of smoke. But no fire."

"No fire? With three people murdered here and God knows how many others? That sure as fuck is no vapid Ivory Tower college professor's pet theory. It's reality!" He leaned towards Thompson and waggled an index finger at him. "And who would know that better than you? You, who actually saw the bodies!" That stopped Thompson. He _had_ seen the bodies. He _had_ seen the reality. Saul shot Thompson a heated look.

"Now we come to your other question. Did she have any help?"

"Did she?" Thompson said, now, though not liking Saul's leftist rhetoric, finding himself at least invested in hearing him out. Irrespective of Saul's claptrap about class war, Ben had plenty of experience with people who considered themselves entitled and expected preferential treatment from the law. It never failed to put a sour taste in his law enforcement mouth. Especially when, more often than not, they did get preferential treatment. If nothing else, the ability to hire high priced clever lawyers. It wasn't a joke to cops like Ben when someone would say that the outcome of a prosecution and trial had more to do with who had the cleverest lawyers than with any notions about guilt or innocence or the abstract concept of justice. Case in point. The O.J. Simpson trial.

"The Lords of Power don't like people weakening their authority," Saul said in a dour voice. That struck Thompson.

"The Lords of Power?" Thompson repeated. "That's a curious way of putting it."

"Curious, perhaps," Saul snapped. "But goddamn accurate." He jabbed a finger at Thompson again, his rhetoric animating his hands along with his voice. "Much more so than words like establishment or system." Thompson thought back through the quarter century of police work and all the powerful people he had encountered over those years. The Lords of Power? He didn't argue with Saul's label. In fact he thought it apt. Then he asked the question that was lingering on his mind.

"But why did you get an official censure out of all this?" he said. Saul began to waggle his head animatedly with his signature idealistic, admittedly naive, passion.

"Because I did my job. I tried too hard. I asked the right questions to the wrong people. And they came down on me but quick. That Judge Delaney slapped contempt of court on me and the only reason I could come up with was that he wanted to silence me after I challenged the facts behind the welfare's department's case against Michael Johnson. And he got his legal cronies to slap me again with an official censure."

"But why?" Thompson insisted. "You still haven't come up with a reasonable explanation for all this. Why? Why all this trouble to shove it to a little guy like Johnson. He had no power. No redress. He might as well try to blow through the front four of the Minnesota Vikings. Not a chance in hell of success. So why bother with screwing him?" Saul leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment. His eyes darted across the dirty ceiling tiles, his mind ruminating the possible scenarios.

"You want to know what I think? Here it is. Someone had a personal grudge against Michael Johnson. That someone, we both believe, was Lila Mannering." He glanced over at Thompson. "You find out what kind of a bitch she was?" Thompson nodded a yes. He knew, all right. "Mike didn't squirm enough for her," Saul continued. "He was like that. Johnson was naive about the law and the anonymous presence of the Lords of Power and thought he should get his rights with his kids. And he had the guts to speak up. To have the goddamn gall to confront her Lordship, Lila Mannering." Saul glanced at Thompson again, this time with an intense expression. "You know that poor man was absolutely shattered when he found out the truth of things?" Thompson was growing frustrated.

"Just what the hell is the truth of things? What are you getting at with all this?"

"What I'm saying is that we came up against a system that is notorious for being overloaded and superficial. Nobody wants to mess with family feuds over child custody. Mannering, and whoever else might have been behind it, was able to push a shaft job through on Johnson's case because of that. Malevolence on her part. Made possible by disinterest and inertia and rigid impersonal bureaucracy. Nobody much gave a damn." Thompson thought about all the court cases he'd been involved in as a police officer. He knew that Saul's view of the way things worked was true more often than he cared to admit.

"And what else?" Thompson's voice had an edge of irritation. "What else is there? Where's the conspiracy?" Saul thumped himself on the chest. So hard it surprised Thompson.

" _I_ caused it. Damnit! It was me. I kept after the system for Michael Johnson and eventually they noticed. An honest look at the basic facts made it clear. Johnson was the victim of a combination of malfeasance and bureaucratic indifference." He leaned forward, his eyes boring into Thompson. "And that was when they started to suppress the whole thing. Rather than grant just redress, they tried to cover it up."

"But why? Damnit, Saul, why?" Thompson's irritation was giving way to impatience. And he was also again having his doubts about Saul's credibility. "That sounds pretty lame to me, David. Is that the best you can do? You sound like a whacko conspiracy theorist."

"Come on, Ben. Surely you can see it. Mannering called in the Big Guns. You must know how connected the woman was. She was a darling of the Lords of Power. My old law school buddy, Hiram Davidoff works for one of the hot shot law firms in town. He told me that Mannering was being groomed to be the next junior Senator from Minnesota. She was their ideal candidate. We know what she was really like, but she projected a balanced public persona very different from the real Lila Mannering. Just when women are breaking through the glass ceiling, along comes this articulate, bright, educated and elegant woman to quietly protect their interests in Congress. They circled the wagons. They had to protect her. Besides, protecting her was protecting themselves. Think of a stacked line of dominoes. Knock one over and the rest might well follow. Mannering's fall from power would make them look bad, man. It would make the system look bad. The system that had condoned or ignored her imperiousness. Can you imagine how it would have looked in the media? And the media can really stir things up in a hurry. Make mountains out of molehills. Imagine how that would have played out in the popular mind. " Thompson was still trying to follow Saul's logic. And having some trouble doing it.

"So instead of grant redress to this little guy, Johnson, they began to suppress the whole thing to keep it from public eyes?" Thompson shook his head slowly. "I'm afraid it all sounds pretty dumb to me, David. These are smart people. Doing this? That's just impossibly dumb." Saul shot back his retort.

"So was Watergate! But it happened. And a molehill became a mountain than toppled a President!" Thompson had to look at Saul for a long moment after that but Saul was on a roll and didn't give Ben a chance to say anything. "And what about Bill Clinton? A man who was a good President found himself in disgrace and under impeachment for something as inconsequential as an unwise impromptu blow job!"

That got to him. Ben had to agree with that much. OK, so smart people did sometimes do dumb things. Sometimes dumb little things that became dumb very big things. Ben wasn't quite as skeptical as before. Into his mind jumped images of all the hell that would break loose if the media found out that Chief Scapella was cuckolding the same man he fired for alleged incompetence. Scapella would not only lose his job, he might very well face criminal charges. Not to mention civil suits. Damn good reasons, Thompson was thinking, to keep his philandering from public knowledge. Ben had a sudden disquieting thought. Just how far would Scapella go to keep the truth of his affair and Thompson's dismissal secret?

And if Scapella had cause to cover up his misbehavior, so did Lila Mannering. And, Ben was now thinking, very probably others. Like Judge Delaney. Or even the assistant district attorney, Banning Davidson. The others in Fresno. And, in a flash of suspicious insight, there might be others not yet identified. The words jumped in his mind and from there onto his lips--

"The Lords of Power!" He blurted out, surprising David Saul. "I get it now. I can see your point there, all right. So this was another major cover up, and Michael Johnson got caught in the middle? What they euphemize as collateral damage." A pause, a pensive look on Thompson's face. "But it still is one hell of a whopping logical leap to an organized conspiracy over something like Michael Johnson getting a royal screwing." Suddenly Saul smiled. A strange, wolfish smile.

"Oh, it gets way better than that! The real crisis hit when those two kids were killed in that drunken car accident out west. If some journalist got their head out and tracked that story down it would have made for one hell off a goddamn mess for the Lords." He leaned towards Ben, his finger waggling in double time. "Those dead kids. The two drunks that got them killed. The same two drunks Michael Johnson tried to get his kids away from. Imagine how that would have played out in the popular mind, Ben! At the very least Mannering, Davidson and Judge Delaney would all get one hell of a public roasting. The Lords had no choice. They had to cover it up." Another strangely wolfish smile.

"But it boomeranged like no one would have ever imagined!"

"Jesus, David! You can't be in sympathy with what he's doing." Saul's animated behavior subsided. He became closed, even defensive.

"You ever have your kids ripped away from you?" He said, with obvious bitterness.

"No," Thompson admitted. But he was thinking of his pending divorce and what that was doing to his relations with his kids. The girls, who didn't know of their mother's infidelities, but did know all too well of the years of long hours when Thompson was at work and not at home with his family, were siding with their mother. It gave him a fresh bit of insight into Michael Johnson and his motivations.

"Are you able to prove any of this," Thompson said. "Or is it all suspicion and theory?" Saul leaned forward on his desk. He grinned broadly.

"I'm pretty slim on hard facts, Ben." His grin broadened and he leaned towards Ben. "And that's where you come in." Thompson's sour reply was what Saul expected.

"I was afraid of that."

Sam Taylor's size twelves were again prowling the streets of Los Angeles. His time in the slammer was over. Taylor gave little thought to the lost time and absolutely none to the fat little greaser who'd been his woman in the jail. Now he was back on the streets where there were plenty of real women and he didn't have to settle any more for the rectum of some miserable little Mexican or whatever the hell he was.

Taylor was big and mean and as black as a moonless night. He was tough. No doubt of that. He might have made a good professional heavyweight boxer if he'd had the discipline to stay with the training. Or a NFL defensive tackle. But he took the lazy, easy way to money and had been in and out of jails for years. It'd been a long time since he cared for anything or anybody except himself. There wasn't much humanity left in Sam Taylor and it was only a matter of time before he did something that either got him killed or put him behind bars for life. But as he left Big Willie's Jazz Club that dark night he had no idea that the end was coming one hell of a lot quicker than even he expected. It was waiting for him in the alley outside.

"Taylor! A voice yelled from far down the alley. "Sam Taylor!" The big black man stopped and peered into the shadows.

"Who's there?" He said in a harsh and directly challenging voice.

"An old friend," the voice said. "Come closer and see." Taylor hesitated a moment, puzzled, then slowly began to move deeper into the alley. Fifty feet in he saw a small, slender figure standing by a brick wall. He breathed a little easier, seeing the small size of the man and no visible weapons, then stopped.

"Who the fuck are you? And what the hell do you want?" The slender figure remained unmoving in the deep shadow next to a pitted dirty brick wall.

"I want to talk about old times, Sam," the shadowy figure said. Taylor began to grow impatient.

"What old times? Who the hell are you, motherfucker? What the fuck do you want?"

"I want you to remember," the figure said. He moved out of the shadows and approached Taylor. The big black watched him closely. A vague disquiet settled over his face.

"You are fucking weird, man," he said. "You crazy. You lookin' to get youself hurt?"

"No, Sam," the slender little man said in a voice that held no obvious emotion. "I am here to recoup a warrior's honor." Sam Taylor's mouth dropped open. Who in the hell was this freaking nutball? His hand reached inside his shirt to the knife hidden there. He knew better than to carry a firearm. One stop and frisk by the cops and he'd be back in the slammer as a prohibited carrier. Anyhow, between his strength, size and his knife, he was as dangerous a person as walked the streets of L.A.

"Man, do you know who you messin' with? This be Sam Taylor, man. I'll chew you up and spit you out in little pieces and them stomp on 'em. Are you crazy, little man? You wanna get hurt?" The figure began to move at him until he was within a few feet. Taylor drew out the knife and held it hidden behind his back.

"You don't remember me, do you, Sam?" The man said. Taylor shook his head.

"No," he said, though there was now something about the voice that seemed familiar. "Am I supposed to know you from somewheres?" Taylor held off on making any moves. There was always the possibility that whoever this person was there might be some money in it somewhere for him. Maybe he had a job he wanted him to do. Or maybe he would just beat the shit out of the motherfucker up and rob him.

"What you want?" He snorted impatiently. "Get on with it and tell me what the hell you want. Or else get the fuck out of here before you get bad hurt."

"I already told you, Sam," the little man replied as he moved to within a few feet. Taylor held the knife behind his back, ready to bring it out if there was trouble. "I came to recoup my warrior's honor."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean? What drugs you on, man? You tweakin'?"

"Do you remember the jail, Sam," the voice went on. "Do you remember the fat little greaser you called Little Michael?" A look of recognition came into Taylor's eyes. It was the voice.

"Little Michael? Is that you? What the hell happened to you, man? You done split in half from what you used to be."

"The spirits have shown me the way, Sam," Michael replied. "They took little Michael and made him into the Lakota warrior Two Bulls."

"You gotta be on drugs, man," Taylor said. "You talkin' like you on drugs."

"It's too bad, Sam," Two Bulls said, inching closer to Taylor. "You're a victim, too. But you should never have shamed a Lakota warrior like you did. You've left me no choice." Taylor was beginning to catch on that Little Michael really was going to challenge him. He spit at the ground defiantly.

"Shit! You little half-assed excuse for a man. You a fool, pussy boy. I'm gonna grind you into the dirt. Gonna fuck you up!" The knife flashed from behind his back and he lunged at Two Bulls with a surprising quickness for such a large man. To Sam Taylor's surprise, and his first real glimmering of what he was encountering, he completely missed, was agilely tripped and fell heavily onto his face. Two Bulls waited for him to roll to his feet. Anger and outrage ruled the big black's face.

"You shouldn'ta did that, little man. Now I'm gonna hurt you bad. Real bad. Nobody puts Sam Taylor down and get away with it." Two Bulls said nothing. He only waved at Taylor to come at him again. The big man charged again, aiming to pin the foolish little man against the filthy brick wall and gut him with his knife. Two Bulls deftly dodged him as easily as before. Taylor's look turned into shock. How had the slow-moving greaser gotten so quick in the last year? He turned to face Two Bulls again. The look on the little man's face was so confident that for the first time Taylor felt a touch of fear.

"The Lakota warriors used to start each day with a saying, Sam," Two Bulls said in a voice that brought more than just a touch of fear into Taylor's face. "They used to say that today is a good day to die." Two Bulls pulled a knife from inside his own shirt.

"Today is a good day to die, Sam," the little man said. He held the knife up in challenge. "Come, if you have the courage." Taylor bellowed like a wild animal and charged with wild eyes at Michael. He slashed the knife down at the side of Michael's neck. Michael dodged to the side and Taylor's knife sliced harmlessly through the air. Before Taylor could react Two Bull's knife darted in and slashed across his genitals. Taylor let out a scream of anger and pain as the quick little man who had once been his compliant whore dodged agilely away.

Taylor held his wounded genitals in one hand, waved his knife in the other and howled in an insane, pain-wracked rage. His whole body shuddered and shook and his face was contorted almost beyond recognition. He had gone into a blood frenzy.

"You die now you little motherfuck greaser!" He screamed.

Taylor lurched at Two Bulls in his frenzy, slashing wildly with his knife in all directions. He just barely nicked one of Two Bull's shoulders as the cat quick little man dodged around him and drove his knife into Taylor's rectum as he darted behind the enraged black giant.

It was enough. As the bleeding, wounded man turned again, surprise and horror twinned on his face, Michael put an end to it. He drew a pistol from inside his shirt, placed one silenced bullet into Taylor's forehead, and left as the big man crumpled dead onto the filthy alley floor. Two Bulls left no Indian Head nickels by Taylor's body.

The old-fashioned Lakota knife with its bone handle and flint blade in the dead man's rectum was enough.

Time had passed. Spring gave way to summer and the early fall. Michael Johnson remained totally invisible to the authorities. People were beginning to forget about him and the killings. His name had still not been released to the media and those few people who had been questioned by the police or might have suspected something kept their silence. It seemed as though the murders would remain a mystery and slowly fade into the dim mists of memory for cold case detectives to ponder over a generation later. Only three men retained an active interest in Michael Johnson. Chief Vincent Scapella, who was still quietly searching out both Michael Johnson's past and his present whereabouts. And, to a lesser degree, at least in terms of available resources, David Saul and Ben Thompson.

Things were different now for Thompson. Betty had been resolute about the divorce. Though he didn't let on that he knew, Ben's knowledge about her affair with Police Chief Vincent Scapella was a hurdle he couldn't get over. He was not about to contest the divorce and the legal proceedings went through quickly. Thompson was a divorced man. He split the assets with his ex-wife, they sold their house and he used his share to buy himself a small, isolated lakeshore cabin on twenty acres in the backwoods not far from the Canadian border. He also bought a used camper, and began to travel, mostly on fishing trips.

At first Thompson set aside his interest in Michael Johnson and the challenge David Saul had given him. It was far more important to the ex-police officer to sort out the pieces of his broken life and rebuild them into something new and, hopefully, worthwhile. This was not something that happened overnight. Like a diver coming out of the depths, he had to go through a slow decompression.

Fortunately for Thompson, money was no problem. He lived simply and the generous police pension was more than enough. Especially with no alimony or child support payments. Betty was left with a comfortable nest egg and the children were grown and on their own, their bright-minded star athlete of a youngest daughter on a full ride scholarship to the University of Washington. At least the divorce hadn't happened until the girls and Tom had gotten off to a good start in their lives.

Thompson caught up on a lot of the fishing that his job had kept him from over the years. He traveled to Canada twice, once for walleyes, the other for bass. When he wasn't fishing, he read, mostly about the prehistoric peoples of North America. He continued to be fascinated by the Anasazi of the Southwest, those mysterious Native Americans who had vanished from history long before Columbus and left behind thousands of enigmatic stone-built pueblos. Thompson also expanded his interest further south, to the great civilizations of pre-Columbian Mexico.

He didn't do much that summer except read, fish and cut wood for his wood stove. The cabin was primitive. It might be summer, but on the Minnesota/Ontario border summer nights often were brisk and the wood stove saw frequent use. He had kerosene lamps for light, an outhouse and a hand pump for water. It was good enough for the warm season, and he was planning on traveling during the winter, first down to the Southwest and then into Mexico. He had considered going into Central America, too, but the political turmoil there made him doubt the wisdom of that idea. Though he did think he could go as far as the Yucatan to see the Mayan ruins that had slumbered abandoned in the jungles for centuries. Chichen Itza, despite its touristy reputation, was first on the list. Mostly because it had stuck in his mind since his teen years as sounding so much like Chicken Pizza.

As Ben Thompson, so recently an urban police lieutenant, reflected on his new found freedom to fish, to read, to travel, he thought that perhaps what had happened to him wasn't such a bad thing after all. Yet, deep inside him, there was something missing, something that was ...was....what? Bleak? Incomplete? A glass half empty? Like a book waiting to be written? Or, and this resonated strongly with him....

An adventure yet to begin.

Then one evening, seemingly out of nowhere, Ben had a minor epiphany while he was watching a fiery sunset send roseate tentacles over the water and onto the mixture of pines--jack, Norway and white--that stood sentinel over Thompson's north woods sanctuary. Whatever it was that triggered the change, his gut told him that he was now ready to face up to David Saul's challenge. Even though, Thompson's instincts cautioned him, it was one goddamn monumental challenge. Without the broad reach of his former police resources, to somehow search out the facts behind Michael Johnson's dark metamorphosis from ordinary citizen to serial killer. Thompson sat down and read through the file he'd kept on Michael Johnson. He decided to sleep on it. When he woke the next morning the lingering doubts were gone. His seismic emotions from those turbulent last days in the police department had subsided enough for him to accept Saul's challenge.

He knew just where to begin.

There was one man on the police force that Ben had served with who was familiar with the private lives of a good many of the more substantial citizens in town. That was because besides hanging out in the Painkiller in his free hours, he spent even more time in a working man's bar called The Blue Collar.

To this bar came the largely invisible and uncelebrated people who didn't carry much weight or status but were the human elbow grease that kept the wheels of the city turning. They were the plumbers and the janitors and the file clerks and the technicians, the waitresses and the cooks and the servants and the doormen and drivers and techs who served the 'higher' classes. These people, though they didn't circulate in the same world with their employers, often knew a great deal about the comings and goings and the more intimate details of the elite's private lives. Police officers were not often welcome among them, but one man was accepted by everyone. He came from a family of tough working class Irish-Americans in South Boston, many of them forced out of their homes by encroaching so-called gentrification, and he was not only uncomfortable but borderline hostile when he was anywhere in the vicinity of the elite. Who he habitually called 'the feckin' English blueboods,' no matter what actual ethnicity or race the high rollers were from.

This man's name was none other than Seamus O'Toole.

Thompson arranged to meet Seamus O'Toole at the Painkiller. O'Toole was more incensed than the other policemen over Thompson's dismissal. He liked and admired Thompson and took his firing almost as a personal insult. O'Toole's feelings were also considerably reinforced by his intense dislike for Chief Scapella. He considered the chief to be an arrogant, slippery patrician who didn't give a damn about the common people. And that was an attitude guaranteed to rile Seamus O'Toole. He had been raised by a hot-headed populist grandfather with roots going back to the socialist days.

O'Toole began by trying to lighten things up some.

"Lootenant," he said. "Before we begin, I want to tell you a little story." Ben had to smile, despite himself. Stories were, after all, vintage O'Toole. "And a true story it is, indeed," O'Toole said. "A bit of Old West history." The big man leaned towards Ben.

"A cowboy, an Irish lad originally from County Clare come to America because of the great famine the feckin' English bluebloods inflicted upon poor starvin' Ireland, came riding into an Arizona town on a hot and dry dusty day. The local sheriff watched from his chair in front of the jail next to the saloon as the cowboy wearily dismounted and tied his horse to the rail. The Irish-born cowboy then moved slowly to the back of his horse, lifted its tail, and placed a big kiss where the sun don't shine. He dropped the horse's tail, stepped up on the walk and aimed his weary body toward the lovely sight of the swinging doors of the town's saloon.

'Hold on there, cowboy,' said the sheriff. 'Did I just see what I think I saw?' You kissing your horse's ass?"

'Sure and you did, Sheriff,' the cowboy said, the Irish brogue still strong in his voice. 'I got me some bloody miserable chapped lips.'

'And that cures them?' The Sheriff asked, sitting straight up in his chair, incredulous as he was at this Irish cowboy's words and, especially, actions. "Cures your chapped lips?"

'Not 'tall,' the Irish cowboy replied, 'Not a cure....

...but it do surely do parvent me from lickin' 'em."

Thompson couldn't help himself. He had to laugh, if nothing else at the comical expression on O'Toole's face.

Then he got serious. They both got serious.

"Seamus," Thompson began. "I need your help." O'Toole grinned broadly at his ex-lieutenant. His breath carried its usual pungent force.

"Just ask, Lootenant," he said good-naturedly. "O'Toole will do all he can."

"I'm not a lieutenant any more, Seamus," Thompson replied. "Just call me Ben." O'Toole's huge hand reached over and clapped Thompson on the shoulder.

"To me you'll always be the Lootenant. Maybe that asshole Scapella bounced you, but Seamus O'Toole didn't. As far as I'm concerned, you're still Lootenant Ben Thompson." Thompson had to laugh.

"O.K. So I'm a lieutenant. But as a lieutenant without any authority, I'm pretty much cut off from things." O'Toole shrugged his huge shoulders.

"Yeah," he said cynically. "I know." Thompson was taken aback.

"That sounds like a remark with some depth to it." O'Toole shook his shaggy head.

"You might say that, Lootenant."

"Well? Just what do you mean?"

"I think you know already. That's why you came to me. They bounced you because they didn't want you to dig up the truth." The big man looked into Thompson's eyes with an irate disgust set hard on his ruddy face. "It's a cover up and you wouldn't play ball so they sent you walking." He shrugged matter-of-factly. "That's the way the real world works, Lootenant." Thompson, who, from his own investigations and from David Saul, already had a good idea of what had happened, needed independent corroboration. Forced retirement or not, scapegoat or not, he still thought like a policeman. Facts. Evidence. Double check. Corroboration. So he gave O'Toole the reins and let him run.

"But why? Why the hell would they want to cover up something like this?" The big man, who was a veteran cynic under his good-natured, grinning exterior, smiled sardonically.

"Well, I don't know all of it, Ben," he said. "But I know this much, that Judge Delaney was an randy fool if there ever was one."

"How's that?" O'Toole was suddenly amused.

"That broad Mannering. She knew how to get what she wanted. Anytime she needed a favor all she had to do was wiggle her ass at Delaney. He'd come runnin' like the horny old bastard he was." O'Toole chuckled at the thought. "And a stupid horny old bastard at that. Lots of people knew about it."

"What?" Thompson said, incredulous at what seemed on the surface to be absolutely goddamn absurd. "Mannering was screwing Judge Delaney?" O'Toole laughed again, this time edging into one of his hearty belly laughs. Faces on the other side of the bar turned to look at him.

"Its somethin', ain't it? But true. That broad screwed the old fart's socks off anytime she wanted somethin' important that she couldn't get some other way." The laugh and then the smile faded away and he leaned over the table at Thompson. "You can see how maybe they wouldn't want stuff like that in the Sunday papers, Lootenant."

"How in the world do you learn things like that, Seamus?" Thompson asked, still incredulous over what the big man had said. O'Toole heaved his massive shoulders innocently.

"People talk to me. There's lots of things goin' on, Lootenant. Things that only the little folks know about. And they don't usually let on to the cops." He winked mischievously at Thompson. "But there's some of us who know how to pry the good stuff out."

"So I'm not crazy after all?" Thompson said, as much to himself as to O'Toole. "There really is a coverup? There really is a conspiracy?" He looked curiously at O'Toole. "They got rid of me not because I wasn't doing my job, but because I _was_ doing it?" O'Toole waggled his big head animatedly.

"Bull's-eye, Lootenant," he said. "Lootenant Ben Thompson got the old heave-ho so that high-toned Mrs. Judge Delaney and her like wouldn't have no public embarrassment." He dropped his good-natured mask and the cynical look came back on his face. "Some reward for a quarter century of being a good cop, ain't it, Ben?" It finally fully sank in. Hugely compounded by the bitter knowledge that Scapella was cuckolding him with Betty. Muttering below his breath _, sure wouldn't want that in the news would you, Chief Scapella!_ Thompson balled up his fists.

"Son of a bitch!" Was all he could say in his complicated frustration. Yet, much as he detested, even hated, Scapella, Ben could never go public with what had happened. It wouldn't just hold Scapella up to public ridicule. The light of public disclosure would also shine on his Ben's ex-wife, Betty. And that was something Ben couldn't, wouldn't, do. Not only would it hurt Betty, it would devastate their three kids. Another thought shook him and brought an angry crimson tinge to his cheeks.

Did that son of a bitch Scapella plan that out, too?

While O'Toole tried to see what else he could come up with, Thompson as unobtrusively as possible gathered more information on the backgrounds of Michael Johnson and the three murdered officials. He talked to more than a dozen people, including Johnson's brother. George Johnson, a tall, blond man with a shaggy moustache that tried to hide his crooked teeth, didn't look a bit like his older brother, Michael. But he seemed to share his bitterness. Johnson corroborated what Thompson's detectives had discovered in the first days of the investigation. Michael Johnson simply had not been the person he was reported to be in the official welfare department and court documents Thompson had seen.

George Johnson had one more piece of information for the ex-policeman that vaguely interested him, though he had no idea what the connection might be. Michael Johnson, and his brother George, were part Indian. Their mother's maiden name was Standing Bear and she was a Sioux--they called themselves Lakota--from the great, sprawling reservations in South Dakota. Johnson gave Thompson a list of relatives on the reservations, though he said it was unlikely his brother would have gone there. Their mother had rejected her Indian heritage and the boys were raised as whites.

Johnson refused to believe that his brother was responsible for the killings. His theory was that his brother was probably dead.

"Suicide," the tall blond man said. "That's what happened to him. He had nothing left to live for after the kids were killed in that car wreck out in Oregon." The young man's face, he was handsome despite the crooked teeth and the drooping moustache, was distorted with bitterness.

"Mike didn't kill anyone," Johnson insisted. "It was the other way around. They killed his kids, and they killed him sure as if they'd put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger."

Thompson left George Johnson pondering once again the wide discrepancies over what kind of man Michael Johnson was. Or, more accurately, _once_ was. But that didn't change one fact. There still had to be a connection somewhere to his seemingly inexplicable metamorphosis from ordinary citizen to hapless drunk to lethal assassin. The why of it seemed within reach. He was driven to it. But the how? What were the specifics? Just how the hell had he made such a wildly dramatic change from a jailed drunk to a serial killer? As he ran into one dead end after another, Thompson began to think that perhaps he might find that connection far off in South Dakota.

"So I'm not a 'whacko conspiracy theorist' after all, huh, Thompson?" David Saul said the next day when Thompson came to his spacious, but somehow still cluttered, office with its chintzy thrift store furnishings. An office, Thompson knew from his veteran cop's experience, that was in a part of town where it was a good idea to be somewhere else after the sun went down. The acerbic rumpled attorney was clearly gloating over what Thompson had told him. Thompson was upfront with him.

"I still don't have direct proof," he said," and I gotta admit that I had lots of doubts at first, David. "Not that something didn't happen. That was obvious. But intentional? Organized? Directed by someone or a group of someones? Sounded way too much like paranoia. But it looks like you were right, after all, strange as it all seems to me. The coverup sure as hell looks to be there, just like you said." Thompson looked puzzled. "But I still can't really understand it. The whole thing seems awfully stupid and unnecessary to me. At least up until Thompson's kids were killed. Like you said before, they had no choice after that happened. But before? It all seems just....just... _.pointless._ " Saul's face lit up with his frequently visited--way too frequently, in Ben's mind--messianic intensity.

"The answer is simple, Ben," he replied heatedly. "It's economics." Thompson stared blankly at Saul.

"Economics?" Ben said with some irritation, thinking, was this more of Saul's class war bullshit?

"Damn sure, man!" Saul replied animatedly. "It always boils down to economics. The Lords of Power have feet of clay. Show them in all their human folly and people will lose their awe of them. And that could be the beginning of the end of their economic empire and their privileged status. That's why this whole thing came down."

"Michael Johnson was a threat to public order?" Thompson said. "That's taking your conspiracy ideas way too far out for this ex-cop. I'm not quite I'm buying it." Saul's eyes flared. The lawyer lurking just below the surface bubbled up and jumped into a virtual courtroom with impassioned Saul-style rhetoric. A speech he'd once tried to make in an actual courtroom before Judge Delaney peremptorily gaveled him into contempt.

"Not so much public order. That's only a symptom. The real threat is to their privileged status. To their bank accounts. Get the ordinary folk riled up and first thing you know the politicians will notice which way the wind is blowing. Either that or they soon become ex-politicians. Tax rates, loopholes, special interest legislation, the creative subtle ways they have of manipulating laws and regulations to make a profit, all will get fresh looks. Looks that might result in new laws that hit the profit margins and sly business practices of the one percenters. As a single example, think of the uproar in the board rooms of the exclusive old money country clubs if the inheritance taxes were doubled. It always boils down to bucks. And bucks, like it or not _former_ Lieutenant Thompson, is always at the root of everything. So be it. That's why things worked out this way." His expression suddenly changed, He dropped the Patrick Henry rant for the wily face of the calculating lawyer. "So we know that the conspiracy is real. What are we going to _do_ about it?"

Do about it? Thompson would believe Mother Teresa was a high dollar hooker on Wall Street before he'd buy any of Saul's febrile left wing rhetoric. Benjamin Franklin Thompson lost whatever naiveté he might have had the first time he got in a firefight in Viet Nam. He knew even then that America being in that distant place was bullshit. And so was a lot more of what the government and all kinds of other groups and organizations put out that was either downright bullshit or skewed almost beyond recognition. Still, bullshit abounding everywhere or not, Ben Thompson lived on a personal level, the level of the streets where he lived and the people on those streets. Friends, neighbors, family. Ordinary, live a day, sometimes just day to day, people. He couldn't do much about the powerful forces that manipulated society, but he could go after the malicious and dangerous individuals and small organizations that threatened the lives of ordinary people in his world. Malicious individuals like Police Chief Vincent Scapella and whoever the hell has behind him. . David Saul was intoxicated with his radical crusade. Not Ben Thompson. This was personal with Ben. Scapella had cuckolded him and ruined Ben's career and trashed his reputation. It didn't get any more goddamn personal that that. Yet, hopelessly naive dreamer that David Saul was, Ben Thompson had no choice but to ally with him in the search to understand the enigma that was Michael Johnson.

An enigma that, in Seamus O'Toole's inimitable choice of words, was 'An enigma that, to you, Lootenant, is one hell of a lot more like an enema than an enigma. It is,' the big man continued, in all seriousness...

'One hell of a shitstorm!'....

David Saul repeated it. "So, what do we do now, Thompson?"

"Let's hold off until we get more facts," Thompson replied, hedging behind his cautious policeman's way, which really did still hold sway over his behavior even if he was a forcibly retired ex-policeman. Saul nodded in surprising--given his balls to the wall incendiary attitudes--agreement.

"O.K. No surprise. I figured you'd say that. And you're right. Going off half-assed without nailing down definitive proof might fuck everything up. But let's not linger too long or it'll be yesterday's news and nobody will give a rat's ass about it any more." Thompson wordlessly returned Saul's nod. He didn't say that he was thinking that letting it fade into the past might not be such a bad idea. He wasn't ready to launch into a single minded crusade like Saul was. Not a political one, anyhow.

But that, like everything in life, could change

The rough outlines of what had happened to Michael Johnson were now distilled into--as yet unsubstantiated--fact in Thompson's mind. Michael Johnson was a naive man. He expected justice from the judicial system. What he got was a highhanded imperiousness. When he resisted, the haughty Lila Mannering had secretly tried to crush him. Judge Delaney had cooperated for his own, possibly carnal, reasons. Banning Davidson was at least somewhat aware of what was going on, but ignored it. He was too jaded by then to care any longer. After all, Johnson was a blue collar cipher who looked to be some kind of non-white minority. Who could possibly care about what happened to him? Davidson was so jaded that he didn't care much about anything, even himself.

Like a thoughtless cigarette thrown out a car window that ignited a huge lethal wildfire in the drought-stricken west, this callous crushing of a single human life set off a chain of events that resulted in the murders of the officials and the visceral response of the Lords of Power. But Thompson was still befuddled by one puzzling factor. How had this chain led someone, Michael Johnson, or whoever it might be if it turned out not to be him, into becoming a killer? Especially such an effective killer?

This thought continued to gnaw on the edges of his (ex)policeman's mind.

Vincent Scapella's agents, both in and outside the Minneapolis Police Department and his friends in the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office, had unearthed the same things Ben Thompson had. Though he could not comprehend the workings of the unlettered mind of an insignificant person like Michael Johnson, he did recognize the grievances the little man imagined he had suffered that apparently drove him to his bloody vendetta. What he didn't know was where Johnson was. Public revelation of the truth about Michael Johnson had been suppressed. There was no doubt that it would continue to be suppressed except for the possible interference of two men. David Saul and Ben Thompson. Two possible complications.

There was a third possibility, one that was a certainty if Scapella did not silence Johnson. The man would eventually disclose what he had done and why. Leaving the Indian Head nickels at the crime scene clearly indicated to Scapella that the man was on some kind of arcane mission that could only reach fruition by becoming public. The only thing that kept the lunatic from disclosing it up to that point had to be that Johnson's vendetta was not yet over. There would be more killings to come. Scapella was far more concerned with suppressing the reasons for the killings than in preventing any more of them. Vincent Scapella was a polished, graceful and elegant appearing man. But he had not yet been admitted to the cloaked world of the Lords of Power. Silencing Michael Johnson and keeping the entire affair out of the public eye was sure to accomplish Scapella's overriding personal goal.

It would be his lifelong pass card into the inner councils of the Lords of Power.

Vincent Scapella's sharp mind was very clear about it all. Where he came from, where he was, where he was going. And how he was doing it. He was descended from Italian immigrants. Specifically, his grandparents on both sides had come from the impoverished island of Sicily. Though no one had ever connected his immediate family with the secret societies of Sicily, they were nevertheless there. He had one first cousin and a half dozen not-so-distant cousins still actively involved in the underworld. These connections had been invaluable in his rise to the top.

No organized crime figures with connections to Vincent Scapella had ever been successfully prosecuted in a city where he was a high-ranking police official. A few rivals of the old family network had not been so fortunate. But Scapella had never considered himself a member of this ancient secret society. He thought of it as archaic and crude. Scapella was one of the new generation. Like numerous immigrant groups of the past, these criminal beginnings were the foundations of future legitimate enterprises of all sorts. The grandson of a pirate can be a senator--so long as the pirate was a successful one. Vincent Scapella's grandparents were successful.

His career was independent of the furtive--from the borderline legal sliding into the downright criminal--worlds of his relatives. He did favors, but then who didn't? It was the way the world worked. Break up the circles of influence and others would take their places. Just look at the South American and Mexican drug lords. Take one down and another would spring into the void. It wasn't a question of whether or not those power groups existed, but of who was in them. Democracy was a convenient concept. And very useful. It kept the masses pacified or at least preoccupied. But that only went so far. Did Julius Caesar need a referendum before invading Gaul? Societies are held together by strong leaders and groups who keep the wheels well-oiled. Vincent Scapella considered himself to be one of those leaders.

He rarely spoke of such things to anyone.

The thing with Michael Johnson was very touchy, especially with Thompson and Saul still poking around. Scapella knew that there were informants in the police department who would keep Thompson apprised of any official investigations. He was also aware that Thompson would keep in touch with Saul. Scapella therefore decided to conduct his own investigations outside the normal channels. And for that he made a few phone calls to certain cousins of his on the east coast.

His primary goal remained unchanged. To track down Michael Johnson and permanently silence him. To do this, Scapella had two powerful forces working for him. One was access to the full machinery of law enforcement throughout the country, with the exception of agencies of the Federal government. Scapella was careful to exclude them, for the situation might then escape his control. The second powerful organization working for him was the underworld, which would use its unofficial ties into places no police force could penetrate in the search for Michael Johnson.

Scapella continued to keenly watch the movements and actions of David Saul and Ben Thompson. He had hoped to shake Thompson loose by getting him off the force. It had apparently not worked. Scapella had several reports of Thompson recently questioning people about Johnson. And David Saul was a foolish loudmouth who had to be monitored closely.

Dealing effectively with keeping those two silent could be far more complicated than finding and removing Michael Johnson. Eliminating a serial killer would hardly bring a public outcry. But to eliminate an outspoken civil rights attorney and a former police lieutenant? That was, as the overworked saying goes, 'complicated.' Neither Saul nor Thompson realized it yet, but they were in danger of losing either their integrity or their lives or both. Vincent Scapella had already grasped that it was not a question of whether or not Saul and Thompson would publicize the truth about Michael Johnson. It was only a matter of when. Scapella was determined to implement his blocking action before that happened. A blocking action that would, as Seamus O'Toole would put it, 'make a bone crusher of a cross body block by a 300 pound NFL lineman look as insignificant as a mosquito biting an elephant's big toe.'

Scapella had been able to keep a fairly close surveillance on the men without their knowing it. It was not a physical surveillance, but one through informants. Vincent Scapella knew people's weaknesses. His grandfather had always said that among every twelve people there was at least one Judas. Vincent Scapella knew to find the Judases as well as his grandfather had.

Hiram Davidoff was a close friend of David Saul. They went through law school together, joined the A.C.L.U. together, both worked for the Legal Aid Society and the Tenants' Union. But Hiram Davidoff also had ambitions. Scapella reached out to his extensive world of contacts and then, after a frank talk with Davidoff coupled with the concomitant offer of a coveted position with the Cook County Attorney's office in Chicago, which was generally considered a stepping stone to even bigger things, got Chief Scapella an inside pipeline into the actions and thoughts of David Saul.

He also found an informant on Ben Thompson. A trusted former police coworker of Thompson's, who kept in contact with him and in whom Thompson confided, told Scapella much of what ex-lieutenant Ben Thompson was doing. The man suddenly had been put on the promotion list after making his arrangement with Scapella. His name was Davis. No longer Sergeant Ed Davis. He was now Lieutenant Ed Davis. He had Ben Thompson's old job.

Ed Davis still had a lot of years to go until retirement.

Through his informants Chief Scapella learned that Thompson and Saul had an intense discussion about Michael Johnson two days earlier. Among the things they discussed was the possibility of going public. Thompson was eventually convinced of everything Saul had alleged when they first met. He also recognized some of the dangers and thought it might be wise to go public right away--with the caveat that Scapella's affair with Thompson's wife remain secret. Public disclosure would not only help protect Thompson and Saul's safety. It would also give Michael Johnson more of a chance to surrender if he were found by those searching for him. Despite the discussions, Davidoff dutifully reported to Scapella's contact, the pair had yet to make a decision about going public. Scapella, possessor of a sharp, if devious, mind grasped with crystalline immediacy that the time for 'corrective' action had arrived.

"Get the fuckers before they blabbed," was the way his not so elegant old country grandfather would say it.

According to the informant, Hiram Davidoff, David Saul was leaving that evening for Miami, where his wife had moved with their children. They would be going to court the following Monday morning on his dual custody suit for his children. He wanted to postpone a decision about going public about Johnson until after then. Vincent Scapella knew what to do after he had heard this, honing in on what Davidoff said about Saul's anguished feelings concerning his children. Scapella picked up the phone and within a half hour several phone calls were placed from various points on the east coast to certain people in Florida.

On Sunday night David Saul received a phone call in his Miami motel room

"Mr. Saul?" A deep-voiced man asked. Saul acknowledged. "I have good news for you, Mr. Saul. You will win custody of your children. And you are being offered a job as assistant corporate council with a large international firm headquartered in Tel Aviv. Your starting salary will be well into the six figures, plus bonuses, and you will have Israeli authorization for both you and your children to live in the country and be granted citizenship, should you so desire. You'll be hearing from me again soon, Mr. Saul. Congratulations--and goodbye."

The man hung up, leaving David Saul dumbstruck. He could do nothing but stare at the phone for a very long time. Even the blaring phone disconnect signal that came over the receiver didn't phase him.

David Saul had a very sleepless night.

The next morning he received an official offer of employment via registered mail, delivered directly to his hotel room, just as the stranger on the telephone had said. And that day in the courtroom he was amazed to find the judge sympathetic and the case quickly decided in his favor. He even won sole custody. His ex-wife at first grew pale and faint at the decision, then went ballistic, screaming and threatening retribution and loudly demanding an immediate appeal. But for now David had custody of his children until they were aged twelve, when they could make their own decisions about which parent they would like to live with. He also was given permission by the court to take the children to Israel. That evening he received another phone call. It was the same man.

"Mr. Saul," the deep-voiced man said. "You will remember me from last night. You will note that what I told you would occur did indeed take place. The impossible has happened. And now I have another prophecy for you, Mr. Saul, so listen carefully. What can be given can also be taken away. I want that to be very, very clear, Mr. Saul. Now goodbye and good luck in your new life in Israel. I trust you will not return to this country for a very long time, nor discuss certain rather delicate matters that you are aware of." With that the phone went dead.

David Saul was on his way to Israel with his children two days later.

### Chapter 6

### The Last of O'Toole

Thompson picked up the phone.

"Lootenant," the familiar voice said. "This is O'Toole." A smile lit up Thompson's face. O'Toole ! He was always a day brightener.

"Seamus! How the hell are you?"

"There was this Irishman who loved the taste of the ol' grog a wee bit too much."

Thompson interrupted, teasing O'Toole just 'a wee bit."

"A wee bit?" That's Scots. Aren't you mixing your Celts here, Seamus?

"The Scots were originally Irish who jumped the pond." O'Toole said. "Close enough for me." A pause, and a voice intended to display some degree of indignation." Now, _Mister_ Thompson, if I may continue?"

"Continue away," Thompson replied, grinning at the phone as though O'Toole could see him. And, maybe, in some way, he could.

"So," O'Toole says, "there was this Irishman who liked his alcohol a _wee bit_ too much, and they called him Thirsty Mick." The smile stayed on Ben's face. Seamus was about to launch into another of his locally famous tales, the advent of which was as unpredictable as an Atlantic rogue wave or Seamus himself.

"Thirsty Mick went strolling on the lovely coast of the Dingle Peninsula one fine summer day," O'Toole continued, "and in his strollin' about came across this quaint little pub. One such as his blue Irish eyes had never seen before. The sign overhead said _The Bottomless Bottle._ 'Now isn't that a lovely thought, indeed,' the Irishman said to himself. 'I'm thinkin' I should be stoppin' by to have a drink or two to moisten me lips.'" O'Toole chuckled into the phone. "Are ye listenin', Lootenant?"

"That I am," Ben replied, pleased to have O'Toole lighten his otherwise colorless day.

"So," Seamus continues, "Thirsty Mick opens the door and goes into this strange little pub. No one is there. Just the bartender. A man hardly much taller than the bar and looking suspiciously like a leprechaun, except he was blacker than me first wife's heart.

'I'd 'tink you war a leprechaun, but fer yer black skin, boyo.' Says Thirsty Mick.

'I _am_ a leprechaun,' the black skinned little person replies in a miffed tone.

'Then how's come yer skin is black!' Thirsty Mick demands.

'And are you the only poor benighted soul in all of green growing Ireland who's never heard of the Black Irish?' Replies the peeved black leprechaun. To which Thirsty Mick had absolutely nothing further to say on that subject.

'What does your sign mean?' Says Thirsty Mick, returning to the absolute main subject of his thirsty interest.

'Just what it says,' the dark skinned leprechaun barkeep snapped back. 'The Bottomless Bottle.'" O'Toole's voice was morphing by degrees into his take on a bucolic Irish accent, which may or may not have been anywhere close to accurate. "'A bottle that never empties.'

'Oh, now dat is bloody feckin' nonsense if'n I ever heard it!' Snorted the Irishman.

'Here,' the bartender said, plunking a whiskey bottle down in front of Thirsty Mick. 'See for your own thick-headed skeptical self.'

"Are you still listening, Lootenant?" O'Toole said, pausing in his narrative for a moment.

"How could I not be?" Replied Thompson. "Your tales are as legendary as your somewhat Irish self."

"Well, O'Toole continued, trying to feign at least some indignation, "my _somewhat_ Irish self will now finish this cautionary tale."

"Cautionary?" Ben said. "That doesn't sound like you."

"Just wait," O'Toole said, both dramatically and mysteriously.

"So this Thirsty Irishman Mick goes at the bottle, scoffing as he pours drinks from it. One chasing the other. And, just as he suspected, the bottle starts to empty. He pours the last of it into his glass and thumps a hand on the bar in triumph. 'There,' he says. 'Empty as an Englishman's brain. So much for yer Bottomless Bottle!' The bartender looks at him for a long moment, then points at the bottle. 'Take another look.' Scowling at the barkeep in semi-sloshed skepticism, Thirsty Mick takes another look. And does a stunned double take. 'Good God Almighty! The bottle! Tis full again!'

Still unconvinced, Thirsty Mick gives it a second try. He is so drunk he is about to fall off the bar stool, but he manages to drink his way through the bottle a second time. Finished, he suddenly flings the empty bottle at the wall in what he thinks is triumph. But the bottle doesn't break. The black leprechaun picks up the bottle and thunks the unbroken bottle down in front of Thirsty Mick.

'It's also unbreakable,' he says, 'as well as bottomless. Look!' Mick looks, does a double take once more, rubs his eyes, looks again. The bloody bottle is full again! He is now a stone cold, if not stone cold sober, convert. Thirsty Mick says to the barkeep. 'How much fer one'a these here unbreakable Bottomless Bottles?'

The barkeeps says, 'forty euros.' Thirsty Mick reaches into his pocket to fish out his wallet, pulls it out and slaps a hundred euro note on the bar.

'I'll take two,' he says."

Ben stared at the phone.

"That doesn't sound like you, Seamus," he said, puzzled. "What's going on?"

"What is going on is that some people, like Thirsty Mick, are never satisfied."

"And?"

"I don't want to be one of them. The unsatisfied, the unrequited, the ....

"OK," Ben interrupted. "I get it. But what _specificall_ y are you getting at."

"What I'm getting at is being a cop and never feeling as though we're getting anywhere. Never ending. Always another bad guy around the corner. Always the dirty underbelly of humanity in our faces. I'm tired of the ugliness, of being frustrated, much as I loved the job."

"Loved?" Ben said, now alerted to where this was going. "Past tense?"

"Which is why I phoned you up, Lootenant. Wanted to say goodbye to the best goddamn cop I ever had the pleasure to know, as well as a true friend. And, I might add," chuckling, "a mostly attentive good listener, even with yer bloody Norwegian police skepticism." In an ordinary conversation with O'Toole, Ben would have countered saying he had never been in the Norwegian police. But this was not an ordinary conversation.

"You all right, Seamus?" Ben said, thinking maybe Seamus was--very atypically--depressed and might need some encouragement. That wasn't it.  
"I'm just fine as frog's hair, Lootenant," the big man replied. "Things ain't never been better. I wanted to tell you the news. Remember that CIA job I been tryin' to land for years?" The smile fled Thompson's face. Had the Lords of Power gotten to O'Toole, too?

"Yes," he said in a subdued voice. "I remember you trying to get the CIA job. Did you finally get it?"

"Hell, no," O'Toole chuckled. "But it got me to thinking. What do computer whizzes like me do with the CIA? Why, they tinker around tryin' to figure out what other folks are up to. And I reckoned that if the CIA didn't want old Seamus, then maybe I should go straight to the source."

"Source?" Thompson said, puzzled.

"The other folks. The ones with the supposed secrets the CIA's trying to crack."

"And?" Thompson replied, a little less suspiciously.

"So I did. Put out a bunch of feelers. And bingo! Got me a job in Saudi Arabia. Gonna help the police force there set up a more modern system. Real space age stuff." He laughed. "The best that oil and your gas dollars can buy." Did the Lords of Power get to Seamus, too? Or was this just an unhappy coincidence? Ben had no choice. He had to take O'Toole at his word. The man had earned it. Many times over.

"Sounds terrific, Seamus!" Thompson said, switching channels and tuning in to O'Toole's enthusiasm, though O'Toole's departure would leave a big hole in his world. "When are you leaving?"

"Sunday. Got my passport and a bunch of holes in my arm and my hairy butt from all them goddamn shots. About all packed up. Just wanted to say goodbye to you, Lootenant. I still think you're a damn good cop, no matter what them assholes did to you."

"That's ex-cop, Seamus," Thompson answered.

"That don't sound like my darlin' Lootenant." O'Toole chided. "You ain't still fumin' over getting bounced, are you? Christ, Ben, let it all go and get on to livin' a new life. The way them shitheads are acting you wouldn't wanna be their bloodhound anyhow." Then his voice dropped and grew distinctly cynical.

"I ain't so sure what Chief Nickel is doin' is all that bad." He paused, then added. "You know what I mean?" Thompson hesitated with his answer.

"Yes," he said in a soft, hesitant, voice. "Much as I pains me to say it, I do."

"Well, I can tell you one thing, Ben," O'Toole continued. "I'd rather be workin' for them A-rabs than back where I was. The crap that was goin' on in the department went against my grain. Goddamnit to hell, I wasn't even sure who were the good guys and who were the bad guys any more. When a man gets to feel that way, it's damn well time to pack his bags and move on."

"And you're moving on, all right," Thompson said. "In a way I envy you. Sounds like it'll be exciting." O'Toole chuckled again. Thompson could visualize his sizeable belly shaking with mirth.

"You can write me care of O'Toole's Harem," he said. "I'm gonna get me some of them A-rab women right off." Ben straightened, concerned again.

"Whoa, big man. You better be careful about that, Seamus," Thompson warned. "Those strict Islamic countries can be dangerous." O'Toole laughed loudly into the phone.

"Shoot, Lootenant," he said heartily. "That's only the official side of it. Boys will be boys and the boys over there in Saudi Arabia filled me in on the details. Seems they got their way around things just like everybody else. Old Seamus's already got it scoped out. Don't you worry none about O'Toole. He'll make out just fine." Thompson had to laugh at the big man.

"Seamus, I have not a single doubt that you will!"

They talked on a while after that and when Thompson finally hung up it was with mixed feelings. He was happy for Seamus' sake. But he also felt an abiding sense of regret at O'Toole's leaving. Since he'd begun to grow apart from Ed Davis, O'Toole had been the last close link he had with his old friends and colleagues in the detective division. And now O'Toole was going, too. And with him his good cheer and humor.

It made Thompson feel even more isolated and alone.

The next day Ben left the backwoods cabin in his used, 'but very low mileage' according to the car salesman in Minneapolis, F-150 Ford camper and headed west. He had a pair of purposes for the trip. Out to the Black Hills and the Badlands to take a look around. Smell the mountain air, see Mount Rushmore, the buffalo herds in Custer State Park and the stunning landscapes of the Badlands and the Black Hills. And while he was there give a shot at trying to dig into Michael Johnson's heritage and perhaps come up with some clues. But nothing heavy. This was going to be a leisurely trip. As he drove west the pine and paper birch forests of the borderlands between central Minnesota and Canada gradually yielded to a mixed landscape of softwoods, hardwoods and patches of grasslands and then to the rolling tallgrass prairie. It was lovely, rich country. The eastern prairie was dotted with lakes, streams and groves of trees. The fields were lush and nearing harvest. The early fall days were mellow and hazily sun-filled. The evenings were delights of cool air.

Mother Nature changed her cloak as he crossed through South Dakota and approached the Missouri River. There were fewer trees, fewer streams, fewer buildings. The lush green of the rolling hills was fading into a tawny brown. He was leaving the prairie for the Great Plains, the shortgrass prairie, a rain hungry, harder and more relentless land. It grew even more relentless and parched beyond the Missouri. The historic river divided the Great Plains from the tallgrass prairie of the eastern plains. The division often meant the difference between an uncertain life of struggle and a more comfortable and secure one.

It was in this harsh land that the Sioux, known to themselves as Lakota, Nakoda or Nakota, Dakota or Santee or Hohe, had been forcibly settled over a century earlier by their conquerors. The very river, the Missouri, that had been the highway for the explorers, the soldiers, the priests and trappers and traders and finally the settlers was where many of the great Sioux reservations lay, mired in poverty, shunted away from the American mainstream as the country hurtled through the twentieth century towards the new millennium.

Up in North Dakota was the Port Berthold reservation. Along the border between the Dakotas were Standing Rock and Cheyenne River,. Farther down the river in South Dakota were Lower Brule, Crow Creek and Yankton. And just over the southern border of the state on the Nebraska side of the river was Santee. There were others, scattered throughout the country that once was the homeland of the widespread Sioux peoples.

But it wasn't to the line of reservations along the Missouri that Ben Thompson was headed. Farther west, snuggled down on the southwestern border of South Dakota, not far from Wyoming and abutting Nebraska, were two more big Sioux reservations. The Rosebud and Pine Ridge. It was here that Michael Johnson had been born. Ben Thompson thought that it also might be the place that Johnson had returned to try to make sense out of his life.

Thompson was not one of those easterners who was repelled by the Great Plains. Many were overwhelmed, intimidated by the aridity, the lack of trees, the vastness and the seeming monotony of the rolling open spaces and the harshness of the land. Not Ben. He thought it was beautiful and, somehow, spiritual.

And so did Wallace Standing Bear. He was the first of Johnson's relatives Thompson was able to find on the list George Johnson, Michael's brother, had given him.

Wallace Standing Bear was hardly anybody's stereotype of an Indian. He was a rancher with a grizzled face and gnarled hands. Standing Bear wore a sweat stained straw cowboy hat and faded blue jeans. If anything, he was the stereotype of the western farmer/rancher. Hard working, weatherbeaten, laconic, stubborn, independent. Probably the only reason he even would talk to Thompson was because he could see the stranger liked his country as much as he did. And that was one hell of a lot, because Wallace Standing Bear loved his land every bit as much as his free ranging ancestors had. It was just a different kind of loving.

Thompson told the Indian rancher that he was a private detective searching for Michael Johnson as part of an insurance investigation. Standing Bear didn't press him for any more details.

"I haven't seen my nephew since he left here with his mother more than a quarter century ago," the tough old man said. "I don't think I've heard from my sister more than two or three times since then." He squinted and pulled down his hat to shade his eyes, pointing off to the distance. Thompson turned to look.

"Antelope," Standing Bear said. Thompson nodded, though for the life of him he couldn't see the antelope.

"My sister," Standing Bear continued, "didn't much care for Indians. She hated this place and she was ashamed of her people. Far back as I can remember, all she ever wanted to do was get the hell out of here." He waggled his head a little sadly.

"And she did. She didn't even want to be buried here."

"Michael was born here, then?" Standing Bear kicked absent-mindedly at the dust with a boot.

"Yep. He was about a year old when his mother took up with that Johnson fella and went east." Thompson was startled.

"What? You mean that Johnson wasn't his father?" Standing Bear crooked his neck and studied Thompson's face.

"I thought you knew that already," he said, sounding a little suspicious.

"Like you said," Thompson answered quickly. "Your sister covered up the past. I don't think Michael's own brother even knows that they have different fathers." That seemed to surprise Standing Bear.

"I didn't think she'd go quite that far," he said wistfully remembering the sister that was lost to him long before she died. "She must've really hated us. Oh, well," he said with a shrug. "I don't suppose that no-count Bennie Two Bulls would be much to brag about anyhow."

"That Michael's real father?" Thompson asked. Standing Bear frowned.

"Not according to Bennie Two Bulls. He swore up and down that he had nothing to do with it. But my sister said he was the father, and my sister wasn't one to lie or do much teepee creeping. She loved that Two Bulls, even if he was a no good son of a bitch."

"He still around?" Standing Bear shook his head slowly as his mind probed the thoughts and memories.

"Nope. He's long dead. Got himself killed down in Denver in some kind of fight. Probably in a bar. Been fifteen, maybe twenty years now."

"You know," Standing Bear continued, his face solemn. "There's always been a split among us. There's those that say the past is past and let's live in today. And then there's those that won't let go of the past. Bennie Two Bulls came from a big family of diehards. A bunch of troublemakers and no-counts as far as I'm concerned. All they accomplish is to keep the Lakota divided and hold us back from making any progress."

"I take it you're one of those who say the past is past," Thompson remarked.

"Yep," the rugged rancher replied, swiveling on his boot heels and sweeping his arm around in a semi-circle. "I ain't done so bad. All this is mine. Just outside the res. And I did it all myself." He turned to Thompson and for the first time there was a sparkling intensity to his eyes.

"You know something, stranger, I got me a son over in the law school at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He's gonna come back when he graduates and he'll do more good for the Sioux Nations than a whole army of war whoops like Bennie Two Bulls and his clan. That's the difference between them and us. Some of us live in today. But the Two Bulls of this world want to ride a horse race on a dead horse." The wizened old rancher spit disgustedly into the dirt.

"Shit!" He spat out. "It's not the whites keeping the Lakota down. Its the Lakota themselves."

Ben talked on with Wallace Standing Bear a good while longer. The tough Lakota rancher told Thompson a good deal about Michael Johnson's real father and his Two Bulls family, most of it on the definitely uncomplimentary side. Standing Bear and his children were the last close relatives Johnson had on his mother's side of the family. All the other names on Thompson's list were dead. It must have been drawn from memories of years earlier, before Michael's mother severed all the ties completely.

But there were plenty of relatives on the other side, aunts and uncles and a whole host of cousins. The entire troublesome Two Bulls clan. Standing Bear thought the old man who might know the most, and who Standing Bear called the Old Diehard, was Michael Johnson's grandfather, the father of Bennie Two Bulls. The old rabble rouser was still alive, Standing Bear said, though he wasn't sure where he was. The spry old man traveled around a great deal and visited many of the reservations all through the middle part of the western grasslands and into the mountains. It seemed like he had relatives on all of them, Standing Bear said harshly. "They breed like a bunch of goddamn rabbits," the wizened rancher snorted.

Something discordant, out of place, like a piece that wouldn't quite fit in a puzzle, struck Thompson as he listened to the wizened rancher talk. Even in the barbed comments that Wallace Standing Bear had for the Two Bulls clan there seemed to be a note of respect for the old man he called the Old Diehard. Michael Johnson's grandfather. The old man's name was Lee Two Bulls and Standing Bear suggested that to find him Thompson ask some of the many Two Bulls relatives living nearby.

And that was the end of the conversation with Wallace Standing Bear. He watched Thompson drive away from his ranch and then mounted his horse to head out onto his range.

His horse was a cherry red 4wd Chevy Silverado pickup.

Thompson drove out onto a lonely spot on the prairie, parked his Ford camper pickup and sat there for a long time thinking about what he'd just learned about Michael Johnson. Up to then his interest had been waning and he was about to give up any further involvement with the bizarre string of murders that had cost him his job.

But, now? The talk with Wallace Standing Bear reignited Ben's interest. More than just reignited. A lot more. Like a prairie fire born of an untended campfire. What had seemed like a bitter little man's own personal vendetta against an insensitive governmental bureaucracy had taken on a whole new meaning. And that meaning was one that grabbed Ben Thompson's interest and held it tighter than Thompson's special issue Hiatts handcuffs on an unruly and dangerous perp back in his gang unit days on the force. The thoughts rolled over in his mind as he stared out at the superficially empty rolling prairie. Michael Johnson was a full-blooded Lakota Indian. And from a family notorious for being against integration and assimilation. The Two Bulls wanted the Lakota Nation to be like it had been in the old days. Thompson saw a raptor soaring far off above the prairie. He slowly nodded his head. In the old days the Lakota had been a nation of formidable warriors, as was the raptor, a Golden Eagle, ranging the sky above him, ready to pounce on unwary prey. Michael Johnson? A great warrior, as some might put it, thinking of his fascination with the Anasazi of the Southwest, of the Eagle Clan?

It all made sense. The Indian Head nickels and the Indian notions about the recovery of personal honor by killing those who had brought insult or injury. And the group of three nickels by Judge Delaney's body. One an Indian Head, the other two reversed with the buffalo side showing. Two buffalos. Two buffalo bulls. Or just two bulls. Two Bulls. The thought jolted Thompson so much his body actually jerked spastically. Of course!

Two Bulls!

Michael Johnson had been back to the reservation, learned of his heritage and changed his name. He had left his signature by the murdered judge's body. It was the signature of a Lakota Indian warrior named Two Bulls. Thompson shook his head almost in disbelief. Good God! This was starting to look like a genuine one man Indian war. And not, reader of American history that Thompson was, the first one. Not by a very long shot. There had been many of them. Crazy Horse and the Apache Kid were two that jumped to mind, men who were known to sometimes go off by themselves to launch intensely personal one man Indian wars. Or, if not actually wars, raids. Bloody ones. So Ben thought somewhat bemusedly, if it had happened before, why not again?

The thought repeated itself, morphing a little each time, so incessantly he could hardly think of anything else.

Wallace Standing Bear had given Ben the names of Two Bulls family members that lived within reasonable driving distances. Ben tried two of them before he hit on some luck with a woman Standing Bear thought might be helpful. This woman, Angie Two Bulls, was a past member of the elected tribal council who had taken a year's sabbatical to write a history of her people. A foundation had given her the money to live on while she did her research and wrote her book. Standing Bear seemed to be less critical of her than other members of the Two Bulls family, so Thompson thought she was a good bet for some helpful information.

But he first visited the Two Bulls family members according to how far away they were. That was when he encountered two very hostile families of Two Bulls, one of the men so incensed at a white man asking questions about the family that he came at Ben with a piece of 2X4. Ben dodged the man, tripped him and had his knees on his chest before he could react.

"I'm not here to cause trouble," Ben said. "I'll leave." As Ben stood up the recalcitrant Two Bulls young man tried to punch Thompson in the scrotum. He missed. Bad move. Bad choice. Ben, who boxed in the Golden Gloves as a teen, put a straight right to the young man's nose and probably broke it. The Lakota collapsed into a heap and lay still, the unwise recipient of Thompson's first KO in a quarter century. As the young man's lights went out his aged grandmother stepped to Ben's side and put a hand on Ben's shoulder.

"The boy has a drug problem, mister. He's not really like this. Not when he's himself." Ben rose, took out his wallet and gave the old woman a hundred dollar bill.

"Take him to a doctor," Thompson said. "He might have a broken nose. I should know." He tapped at his own nose. "Happened to me once." That brought a chuckle to the old woman, and also from a young girl of about sixteen who was standing nearby.

"Try Angie," the young Two Bulls girl said. "Angie Two Bulls. If there is any one of us who knows what is going on, it'll be her. The old woman nodded agreement" That did it. First Wallace Standing Bear and now these two. An hour later he found Angie Two Bulls at her modest secluded cabin in a wooded draw along one of the rare creeks in the countryside.

The smell of junipers in the wooded draw scented the air as Ben pulled in from the dusty rutted track that passed as a road. An old Volkswagen sat outside the cabin and a windmill turned lazily in the light breeze atop a nearby hill topped by a single tree. A wind-twisted jack pine brazenly surviving in the sere unwatered hills by tapping into the same underground vein of fossil water beneath the creek bed that the windmill mined. Ben smiled, his eyes squinting in the naked prairie bright sky. He loved trees, had every since he was a kid, and jack pines towered at the top of his favorite tree list. They were, Ben once opined to Seamus O'Toole, 'trees with character.' O'Toole, almost unique among Ben's co-workers, actually understood what Ben meant by a tree having character. He was, after all, at least in his mind was well as Ben's, a modern day tree-worshiping Druid..

Angie Two Bulls heard Ben drive in and came out the cabin door. When she saw Ben was a stranger, and a white man, she reached inside the door and put her hand on a 30-30 Winchester rifle propped just out of sight. She kept her hand there, out of sight but ready, while she searched out the meaning of the stranger's presence.

And well she might have been leery. Angie Two Bulls was a beautiful woman, even in her faded blue jeans and long-sleeved threadbare denim shirt. She was also, which for some reason stood out in Ben's mind as he looked at her, barefoot. Young-looking, though in fact butting up next to the supposed benchmark of two score, she was slender and willowy and darkly beautiful. She wore her black hair loose and down nearly to her hips. Her skin was baked deep bronze from long hours in the sun and her big almond eyes looked out from a thin, sculpted face that carried the proudness of her heritage. She was a stunning woman. Just the kind of Indian woman a wandering drunken redneck might want to ravage. Angie kept her hand tightly on the rifle.

"You Angie Two Bulls?" Thompson called out as he climbed out of his camper.

"Yes," she answered in a suspicious and definitely unwelcoming tone. "What do you want?"

"Information," he said. "I'm looking for a man by the name of Michael Johnson. And I'm also trying to learn where I might find Lee Two Bulls."

"What for?" Came the quick, still suspicious, reply.

Thompson slowly approached the cabin, stopping a dozen feet away from the wary woman, nearly transfixed by her totally unexpected beauty. He only gaped at her for a few moments before he caught himself and began to explain that he was looking for Michael Johnson and had talked to his uncle, Wallace Standing Bear. When he had learned that Johnson was related to the Two Bulls family he was now looking for Lee Two Bulls by searching out other members of the Two Bulls clan to see if anyone knew where he could find the old man or Michael Johnson. Could she tell him where to find either of them?

Angie Two Bulls remained suspicious, but the mention of an unknown possible relative whetted her curiosity enough to not drive the stranger away. Not yet.

"How is this Michael Johnson related to the Two Bulls?" She asked.

"Standing Bear says he is the son of Bennie Two Bulls," Thompson replied, unknowingly opening the door to Angie Two Bull's life. The beautiful Lakota woman's almond eyes flashed, her lithe body tensed. Bennie Two Bulls? She was Bennie Two Bulls' daughter. If what this white man said was true, Michael Johnson was her half-brother.

Though she was dubious about Thompson, his questions to her soon convinced Ben that the woman really didn't know anything about Michael Johnson. She hadn't even been aware of his existence. Not until Ben popped up at her cabin door. Ben had opened more than the cabin door with his revelation of a previously unknown brother. She looked through that open door and did an abrupt reversal of roles. Ben the former investigator, interviewer and interrogator was now being bombarded with questions. She peppered him with one question after another, some of them very astute, so that in a matter of a few minutes she had him trapped.

"All right, mister. Come out with it. What are you holding back?"

"Nothing," he said lamely. Her dark eyes flashed.

"Bullshit!" She snapped hack. Something about her got through to him. Thompson suddenly began to laugh. He was mildly surprised when she began to laugh along with him.

"You're right," he admitted. "It's bullshit. There's a whole lot I'm holding back." He looked up at the striking Indian woman who somehow managed to look proud and fierce along with her willowy beauty. Thompson took a step closer to her, his expression growing somber.

"You're about to hear one of the strangest stories you've ever heard in your entire life." For some reason he couldn't put words, or even thoughts to, Thompson decided to tell Angie Two Bulls the full truth. Her skepticism gradually faded as he told the story. Astonishment took the place of the skepticism. She took her hand off the rifle inside her door and invited Thompson into the cabin. There she continued her close questioning of him.

"Do you think that this Michael Johnson is really behind the killings?" She asked. Thompson hesitated with his answer. How could he soften the blow of bringing the wildly clashing news to her of an unknown sibling who was a murderer?

"I....I....I....," he stammered. "I....I'm afraid so. There's too much evidence pointing to it." The woman eyed him sharply.

"And you want me to help you find him?" Thompson looked at her almost in embarrassment.

"Yes," he said gently. Her almond eyes, Thompson thought, seemed to glow from a mysterious light that had to come from within. He was, almost, transfixed.

"So you would bring me a brother and then take him away before I have even seen him?" Thompson's awkward embarrassment deepened. He was uncharacteristically equivocal. The frustration plainly showed.

"You want an honest answer?" He began slowly. "Well.... I don't know. I just don't know. A few months ago it would have been clear." He looked over at her with searching eyes. "But now I'm not so sure. Things are different." He paused, trying to collect his thoughts and put them in some kind of order that made sense to him. Finally he shrugged in exasperation.

"This sounds strange as hell for me to say," he said, forcing out the words. "But it almost seems as though I've changed sides." His troubled eyes fell onto the floor. "God, it's hard to believe, but I feel more, if not any kind of ally, for sure not his enemy."

Angie Two Bulls' crisp intellect honed in on Thompson. She was evaluating his words, and his behavior, turning them over in her mind to see if they rang true. Another series of incisive questions fleshed out the skeletal impression she had of him. This man was a victim of the same forces that this unknown brother of hers was fighting. It had caused a change in attitudes that was even then under way. He was not an enemy, that much was sure. But was he a friend? She couldn't answer that for the simple reason that Thompson himself didn't know. Again, at least not yet. To her surprise she suddenly realized that she liked this white man far more than was comfortable for a woman who was after all a Lakota patriot. And, though she was loathe to admit it, Angie herself was uncomfortably close to being ethnically and racially biased. Into her mind slid something her grandfather Lee Two Bulls, once said to her. 'Racism,' the old man once said to her, 'comes in many colors.'

It was a very unsettling feeling for her, a Lakota patriot, to be drawn to this white man.

Then Angie Two Bull's life got even more complicated. Thompson looked up and began for the first time to notice the details of the interior of her cabin. Along one wall was an office with shelves of books over it. He got up and walked over to look at the books on the wall. His eyes fixed on one shelf in particular.

"Hohokam, Anasazi, Puebloan, Zuni, Hopi, even Clovis," he said, turning to her. "I see your interests go far beyond the Lakota." She looked at him very curiously.

"Do you know about such things?" She asked, already intuiting the answer. Thompson approached her, a serious expression beginning on his face.

"Did you know that the Anasazi...."

They talked on for hours, sitting barefoot on the floor--Angie suggested Ben get more comfortable by freeing his feet along with this mind--heedless of the passing time. Completely aside from the bizarre matter of Michael Johnson, they found they had a great deal in common. Angie was astounded to find that this white ex-policeman was avidly interested in American prehistory. His knowledge very nearly matched hers. And he even surpassed her in his extensive familiarity with the American Southwest. Then Angie asked the question that was troubling her.

"But why would a white man want to know so much about the history of what you call the Indians?" There was as much genuine curiosity in her voice as there was a racial skepticism.

"I don't think of it as Indian history," he replied. "To me it's American history. I'm not a European. I'm an American. Therefore a Native American. These people are the spirits that haunt the land of my birth."

Angie looked at Thompson for a very long time after he said that. Despite herself, she was deeply intrigued with this stranger who had brought such startling news into her life. The feelings stirring inside Angie made her uneasy, even angry. She didn't want to be involved with any man, especially one who was something she had vowed she would never accept. A white man. But the mystery of Michael Johnson, or Michael Two Bulls, would keep her and the white man bound together into the future. Each would be handicapped without the help of the other. She needed him for information and news of what dangers might be stalking her new-found brother. He needed her for insight and connections. It made a convenient excuse for both of them.

They talked on late into the night before Thompson retired to his camper.

The sun had yet to rise over the sun-bleached plains when Ben started out. In the soft light of early dawn the land was enchanting. He felt its raw power and mystery as he had never felt it before. He had the peculiar impression that this land was still untamed. Just before he disappeared around a bend in the bumpy dirt track, he turned to look back at Angie's cabin. She was standing in the front door. When she saw him look, she waved. He smiled and waved back. Then the camper disappeared around the bend.

Angie stood in her doorway gazing after him for a long time.

The trip back to Ben's north woods cabin was leisurely and pleasant. He felt no need to hurry, no urge to get home. The superficially barren rolling plains of western South Dakota looked beautiful to him. An austere, powerful and, when the light was just right, sublime beauty. He smiled often, broke out into occasional songs and whistled many an old tune he hadn't thought of in years. The lovely sun-bronzed face of Angie Two Bulls floated lazily in his mind. He passed into the greener, better watered country of eastern South Dakota and into the prairies and woodlands of Minnesota. At dusk he was pulling into the muddy road threading though the resinous pines of northern Minnesota that led to his cabin. A letter was waiting for him in the mailbox.

He read it when he got to the cabin. It was from David Saul. The young attorney had last minute pangs of conscience. Unable to call because Ben had his phone switched off, he sent an express letter to Thompson trying to justify his actions. Saul didn't come right out and explain what had happened, but it was plain enough to Ben. Someone had gotten to Saul and bought him. It was one hell of an enticing bribe. An exciting new life and custody of his children. Ben was more sad than angry about it. Whoever was pulling the strings behind the scenes had an unsettling instinct for a man's weaknesses. Ben crumpled up Saul's letter and tossed it into the wood stove.

"So much for the crusading attorney," he muttered as he went out the cabin door to bring in a load of wood.

That night he had a supper of pike he caught casting off the shore and then settled down to a can of beer and a book. Two faces kept interrupting his reading. David Saul. And Angie. Especially Angie. The thoughts of her more than made up for the disappointment he felt about David Saul. Towards midnight he went to bed.

Though Thompson didn't pay much heed to his dreams, nor remember many of them, that night he dreamed vividly. A powerful dream, filled with light and color and energy, what the only psychoanalyst Ben thought had his head on straight, Carl Jung, would have called a numinous dream. It began sometime in the middle of the night, and was even stranger than the two or three other odd ones he did remember from recent months.

In the dream he was driving up Angie's rutted dusty road. The stars were twinkling overhead, brighter than he had ever seen them. As he came around the last bend he saw her waiting for him in the cabin door. She was naked. Thompson jumped out of the truck and went running up to her. She pulled him inside the cabin and anxiously pulled him pull free of his clothing. Then she lay back, spread her legs and pulled him into her. As Ben thrust deeply into the darkly beautiful Indian woman, she began to chant softly to him in her native tongue of Teton Lakota. It seemed no surprise to him that he could understand every word.

Sew your seed in Mother Earth,

Die, that you may find rebirth.

Yield, that you be as one,

One with the rising of the New Sun.

Thompson ejaculated almost immediately and in the peculiar numinous dark light of the dream cabin saw that his semen spewed as thousands of tiny lights, sparkling like the distant stars. Angie's face changed to someone who was not Angie, dimly seen in the unlit room. The dark woman sat up, draped a white cloth around her, ritually lit four candles and began to chant very softly about a long journey over treacherous, snow-covered mountains. Ben Thompson woke, bolted straight up in bed and shook his head at the strange clearness of the odd dream.

It was some time before he could get back to sleep.

The next morning he was out early in his canoe casting for bass. Thompson liked to fish whenever he wanted to do some thinking. It was as though casting in the water was a way of catching ideas. And the odd—was it _really_ odd?--thing was that the ideas often came.

But this morning his mind kept returning to two thoughts. The odd dream of the night before, which confused and disturbed him so much that Ben tried to push it out of his mind every time it reappeared. And another thought which had begun to nag at him. He was wondering what the weakness was that the Lords of Power would discern in him and exploit when the time came for them to try the same thing with him that they had successfully done with David Saul and, he strongly suspected, also with Ed Davis.

Thompson allowed himself a single 'modern' luxury in his primitive backwoods home. The thought amused him. Just a single modern luxury? The Ojibwe who once lived here, and whose descendants still lived nearby, would have thought Ben's snug cabin, his woodstove and his hand pump delivering fresh water on demand to be wonderful luxuries. _Perspective_ , Ben thought. There's always more than one way to look at things. Ben's single 'modern luxury' was an old fashioned telephone. There was a phone line running along the dirt road a mile out from his cabin. People were low key and informal in the nearby small town telephone company and nobody had objected to his running the phone line out to the road himself, tying the cable to pine trees along his winding driveway. It was much cheaper that way, Ben careful with his expenses, especially now that he was--maybe permanently--on a fixed income. He had also put a switch on the phone so he could turn it off when he didn't want to be bothered.

The switch was usually off.

Towards evening he switched it on. Angie was supposed to call him that evening to tell him what she had learned about her half-brother and her grandfather. Thompson was supposed to have checked to see what new developments might have taken place in the police search for Michael Johnson. But he hadn't been able to contact any of his old friends in the police department, except for his old sergeant, Ed Davis. Again Davis had little new to tell Ben, though he once more asked what Thompson thought were an awful lot of questions.

A little after 5:00 pm the phone rang. Ben thought Angie was calling early. He reached over to pick up the receiver.

"Hello!" He said with no little anticipation.

"Mr. Thompson?" A rich male voice answered. The smile dropped from Ben's face.

"Yes," he said. "This is Ben Thompson."

"I represent the National Park Service," the deep voice said. "You have been highly recommended for the position of chief of security for the southwestern division. Our previous chief has just retired."

A half-smile twisted Ben's lips. Chief of security for the southwestern division of the National Park Service? That would include the ancient homeland of the Anasazi, his single greatest interest. And it would also involve his lifelong profession of police work. These people sure as hell could pinpoint a man's weaknesses.

"What are the conditions?" Ben asked, still with the sardonic half-smile on his face. The man feigned surprise.

"Conditions? Only the usual. That you embrace this position as a full time one. All previous commitments must be left in the past. There is no room for anything less than a single minded dedication to this job. We are offering you this position. Do you accept?" Ben didn't bother pressing the man. That was as much as he would get. Everything had been said without having to be directly crude or blunt. The implications were clear enough.

"Do you mind if I give it some thought before I make a decision?" The man's voice remained calm, even pleasant and reassuring.

"Not at all. Consider it carefully." His tone changed just slightly to one with undertones of hidden meanings. "Consider _all_ of the alternatives," he said, sounding to Ben at once both threatening and encouraging. "I will be talking to you again soon. Goodbye."

Ben put down the telephone and stared at it for a few moments. It was tempting, all right. As a matter of fact, had it not been for something these people didn't even know about, the truth was that he probably would have grabbed that job offer and run all the way to the Southwest with it. Why the hell not? It was there, within his grasp, the literal, palpable embodiment of a lifelong dream. But there was this one complicating factor, one particular that doomed him to continue his potentially self destructive connection with Michael Johnson. A pretty, dark-haired woman by the name of Angie Two Bulls. It was just no longer possible for Ben to take the tempting offer. He thought of Angie's face and didn't regret his decision for even a fraction of a second.

Then he thought of something else and it seeped onto this face. Caution! Quickly, he reached over and switched off the phone. So long as they didn't know about Angie they couldn't come up with some other clever trap. One that could possibly endanger Angie. They could not, must not, know about her. He suddenly had the thought that these people were quite capable of having his phone tapped, improbable as that seemed in this isolated location. He didn't want to take the chance of Angie calling and possibly revealing her existence to the Lords of Power.

The single modern luxury in his home would remain switched off.

Though it would mean an all night drive, he climbed into his pickup and headed back towards South Dakota. There was no way he could call Angie to warn her, for she had no phone. She had to go to a neighbors' place to call him and neither of them wanted the neighbors, or anyone else, to know about Michael Johnson Two Bulls. Before he left he took out all the information he had on Michael Johnson, put it into an envelope and brought it along.

It was a warm autumn night with a full moon. Thompson watched it as it rose flaming orange and tracked yellow and then egg shell white across the cloudless night sky. His mind wandered during the trip to many things, to David Saul, to his ex-wife, his children, Chief Scapella, Seamus O'Toole, Ed Davis, the dead officials, Michael Johnson. And, of course, to Angie.

The ancient V.W. was parked outside the dark little cabin nestled in the wooded draw deep in the Dakota plains. But when he pulled up and switched the camper off he saw the door open. As soon as the pickup lights were off and she recognized Ben's Ford, Angie stepped out of the darkness. She was scantily dressed in a thin, thigh length nightgown. Not at all what Ben would have expected from the no-nonsense Native American feminist, Angie Two Bulls.

Ben?" She called out. He answered. When she heard his voice Angie, her long hair unbraided and billowing out behind her, rushed out to meet him as he ran towards her. Ben Thompson made love to a woman, really made love, for the first time in a long, long while that night. He slept far into the next day. Thompson had never been more content.

He'd completely forgotten about the numinous dream.

Miguel Santos was a man of many talents and many assets. He lived in literal--not relative--splendor in a hacienda outside of Tijuana. It did not bother him that his hacienda was surrounded by the squalor of Mexican poverty. In fact, he preferred it that way. It was symbolic. For it was from this squalor that Miguel Santos had come and it was the sea in which he had found the opportunities for his own success.

The poor people of Mexico were desperate for any way to make a living, to raise themselves from the grinding poverty of their country. It made many of them reckless. Miguel Santos had known how to make use of these facts without often having to expose himself personally to the dangers implicit in his chosen profession. Miguel had seen the places for riches while still in his teens. The rich Americans on one side of the border and the poor peasants on the other. The one side had money to buy, the other had the need to sell. Both had the corruption necessary to make Miguel Santos a very wealthy man.

Deep in the Mexican foothills of the Sierra Madres they grew the two plants that the rich people of the north coveted. The hemp plant and the opium poppy. There were always those willing to grow the plants, there were always those willing to sell the plants, there were always those willing to buy the plants. And a sub rosa firmament of people who imbibed of the siren call of the transitory pleasures of the plants' psychoactive--Miguel's brother Juan called them 'God given'--distillations. Miguel Santos was a man who knew how to make the connections from one to the others. It had made him wealthy.

When the Mexican government began to make it harder and more dangerous to make these connections, Santos was already ahead of them. He derisively called government officials, on both sides of the border, 'caracoles.' Snails. Slow to act. Sluggish to react. He was aware of the growing penchant of the American elite for a new drug resident in the leaves of the South American coca tree. Santos' money went to South America to buy cocaine, Santos' cocaine went to America and the profits went to Santos. He grew even richer.

And he saw another way to make connections across the border. To the north were manual jobs which few of the pampered North Americans wanted to soil their hands with. To the south were starving peons with rough hands desperate for any job. Again Miguel Santos knew to make the connections between the one and the other. His wealth continued to accumulate.

But there were two small problems in Miguel Santos' otherwise ordered and opulent life that were soon to cause him problems. One was his younger brother, Juan. Juan was half-grown by the time Miguel began to raise the family out of poverty. Juan had too much of the peasant in him, too much of the simple country person suddenly raised from poverty by someone else's efforts. He had never been able to adapt, to develop a sense of balance, of responsibility. Juan was, Miguel darkly grumbled, like a child with his toys. Juan liked his tequila too much, he liked his marijuana too much, he liked his cocaine too much, and he liked his women too much. He was an embarrassment to Miguel. The kind of embarrassment that could have lethal consequences in their violent world. Such an unstable person in Miguel's organization would soon end up in a morgue. It had happened more than once. But this was different. This was Juan.

This was own brother.

The second problem in Miguel's life also came from his younger brother. Or, more accurately, was soon to come from him. When Juan was far into his tequila and his drugs he talked too much. It was Miguel's misfortune that a person Juan singled out as a confidant was a man he took to be a Mexican-American. The man said his name was Michael Villela. Others knew him as Michael Johnson. But he thought of himself simply as Two Bulls, the Lakota.

They had met in the fleshpots of Tijuana, where Two Bulls had gone seeking just such an opportunity as Juan. He had learned some Spanish when living with Carmelita on the ranch in California before the government found him and sent his life plummeting into the depths yet again. And he had also learned there that he could easily pass for a Mexican anytime that he wished. Many, if not most, had Indian blood and Michael moved easily among them. Of the Mexicans who had gone north to live a great number had been raised with English and spoke imperfect Spanish. Juan was not suspicious of this American Mexican with his poor Spanish. There were many like him.

There had been nights of drunken revelry for Juan Santos in Tijuana. In the very late hours he would always grow serious and want to talk. Especially when he had been smoking marijuana heavily. Always by his side to listen was the gringo Mexican. The tough, hard-bodied man intrigued Santos. He thought he could trust him.

And so, in the very late hours in the sensuous nights of summer in Tijuana, Juan Santos talked and Michael Two Bulls listened. This was where Two Bulls had disappeared to during the summer after the killings. He was preparing for the next phase of his mission, seeking a bank to finance it.

In Juan Santos he found that bank.

Michael Two Bulls drove across the southern mountains towards the California coast. He avoided Phoenix and the hours long bumper to bumper traffic of Los Angeles by taking I-10 to just beyond Tucson and then the lightly traveled I-8 to the unavoidable urban congestion of San Diego. Though embarked on a intense, and dangerous, mission, Two Bulls had to marvel at the sight of entire valleys along Arizona I-8 filled with the signature cactus of the Sonora Desert. The saguaro. Forests of them, towering as tall, often taller, as the palo verdes and ironwoods of the Sonora desert, their arms jutting out from their thick trunks, the saguaro forests peppering broad valleys and the flanks of the enveloping mountains. How, Michael thought, could one not consider this so-called desert to be beautiful? And, in the slanting diffuse light of the evening, even hauntingly ethereal.

It was dark well before he drove beyond San Diego to the border town of San Ysidro. There, in a motel room on the outskirts of the American town, large amounts of money were routinely exchanged between Miguel Santos' agents and the Yanqui buyers. Sometimes it was for heroin, sometimes it was for marijuana, sometimes for other things, frequently for cocaine. Often the money exchange concerned illegal aliens. The biggest payments always came on the third Tuesday of every month at precisely 1:00 AM.

It was a powerful network, protected by corrupted and/or intimidated local officials and even some police. Few people would dare trying to rip it off. It had been tried in the past and the Pacific sharks got a free meal as a result. In the local underworld no one would dare challenge such power. And in that arrogance of power lay the weakness Michael Two Bulls was about to exploit.

They did not bother to take elaborate extra security precautions.

This was for several reasons. Miguel Santos was a thorough man or he would not have been as successful as he was. Unusual security brought too much attention and there was always the possibility that an unknown and uncompromised narcotics agent might sniff out the operation. Santos always tried to be inconspicuous in his dealings.

There was no danger of an inside leak, for all insiders knew that to betray the network meant certain death. Three had tried and their gruesome fate had chastened all others who might have had such thoughts. Once with the Miguel's organization, it was for life.

An outsider, some wild-eyed tweaker looking for money to buy a fix, would not have the information necessary to threaten the transactions. The place of exchange was always rotated according to a random pattern that had no fixed schedule. There was only one small flaw in Miguel Santos' system. Juan. Miguel's brother had known of a single exchange to take place at a certain motel on a specific date. And his brother had told this to a strange man one drug-befuddled night a month earlier in a brothel in Tijuana.

Miguel Santos' agent arrived with one bodyguard in an inconspicuous gray sedan. The agent was a rather plain looking middle-aged woman. The bodyguard was an equally plain looking middle-aged man. In their drab car the two were inconspicuous to the point of being almost invisible.

Sitting in another gray sedan outside the motel was the lookout that Santos always sent along to such meetings independent of the others. It was another of Miguel Santos' precautions. This was something else that Juan Santos had touched on in his long, rambling talks with Michael Two Bulls in Tijuana.

A second car, as nondescript as the first, pulled up outside the motel alongside the gray sedan of the middle-aged pair. A young black man and an older white slowly climbed out and approached the room where the money was to change hands. They knocked and disappeared inside.

The lookout sat in his car, watching the darkened doorway at the rear of the motel. His attention was drifting a little, but that suddenly ended. _What_? Somewhere behind him, and close, a man was singing. The tough looking young Mexican in the car jerked around to glare at the noise. He saw a dumpy Mexican peasant staggering drunkenly down the middle of the street. Warily, the young Mexican watched the staggering, singing drunk approach. As the shabby peon came abreast the car, he lurched towards it and stopped. Barely able to stand, the bedraggled drunk peered into the dark car at the figure lurking there. An ominous scowling figure that would set anyone's feet to making a hasty exit. But not the staggering drunk.

"Hey," the man said in slurred Spanish. "You got any money for a poor man?" The lookout snarled and leaned out the open window to whisper angrily at the drunk in their native language.

"Go on! Get out of here!" The drunk fell against the car, holding himself up with one hand clutching at the door handle. His head drooped, then raised to blear in at the lookout.

"Just one dollar," he said, belching. "Just one dollar for a thirsty poor man." The lookout leaned out the window, grabbing the drunk peon's arm with one hand, his dirty shirt with the other. He pulled him to within a few inches of his face, grimacing at the peon's stink.

"Get out of here right now, boracho!" He snapped. "Or I will cut you up into little pieces." The hand clutching the drunk's shabby shirt let go and reached back into his pocket, in an instant returning with something held tightly in his outstretched hand. A bright metallic click sounded unnaturally loud in the still night. A knife blade dully flashed in the light of a distant streetlight. The blade touched on the drunken peasant's chest. "Go away!" The lookout commanded in a hard voice..

The movements were a blur of agile speed. Two Bulls grabbed the man's knife arm with one hand and hit him a single blow in the throat with the closed fist of the other. The lookout instantly lost consciousness. In less than two minutes he was gagged, blindfolded, securely trussed up and dumped into the car trunk. Then Two Bulls took the man's place and sat behind the car's steering wheel watching the darkened doorway of the motel. Time stretches in such situations, of hiding, waiting to act, to ambush, but even so there wasn't much stretching of Two Bulls' personal fabric of space/time before the young black and the older white returned to their car and drove away. As soon as their car disappeared from sight Two Bulls climbed out of the lookout's car and swiftly crossed over to the gray sedan of the middle-aged Santos agents. They would be coming out momentarily with the money. Two Bulls slipped up to position himself next to the doorway and waited for it to open. Not even a little stretch this time.

The door swung open.

The pair were expecting no trouble, they knew Miguel Santos' must have someone watching and protecting them. They were totally unprepared for the hurtling shabby form that came at them as the door was pulled open. They barely got a glimpse of the man before they were forced to lie face down on the floor in the dark room. Swiftly, deftly, the man who smelled of tequila and filth tied, blindfolded and gagged the pair. When he was done he took the brown briefcase the woman had been carrying, cut the telephone cord with the lookout's knife, took their car keys and left the motel room, closing the door behind him.

He took their car to within a block of where his pickup truck was parked and left it in an alley. First checking, and double checking, to make sure no one was watching even at that late hour, he walked briskly to his camper, climbed in, stripped off the shabby peasant's clothing he was wearing, changed into American western dress complete with a cowboy hat and boots and was on his way out of San Ysidro within fifteen minutes of his entry into the motel room.

Two Bulls drove nonstop, except for gas, fast food and coffee, back to his mountain hiding place near Mesa Verde on the Colorado-New Mexico border. Only then did he open the briefcase and count the money. Altogether it added up to $175,000.

Miguel Santos must have been a very unhappy man.

### Chapter 7

### Two Bulls

Michael Johnson was forged into Michael Two Bulls slowly, painfully, only after he had suffered degradation and humiliation such as would break most men. He lost everything in a span of only a few months. One day he was a working class family man mired in the apparent mediocrity of his life but giving it little thought. He was content. Then, so suddenly it bewildered him, his world lay in ashes.

It was a chance occurrence of factors. His wife being bitten by the self-liberation bug making the rounds of bored housewives and quickly escalating her experimentation from a fondness for alcohol to the slippery slope of drugs; a sleazy infidelity she didn't even try to hide; her becoming vindictive and unreasonable about the children; the unfortunate combination of Lila Mannering, Banning Davidson and Judge Leland Delaney all being on his particular case. All of these added up to send Michael Johnson's life crashing down in flames.

Then another day he woke up and he was bloated and shabby, a drunk, labeled as a deadbeat, without a job and without hope. He was so disgusted that he ran away, as much from himself as from anything else. His flight took him to the central valley of California and anonymity among the itinerant farm workers there. No one asked too many uncomfortable questions. There were too many illegal aliens among them.

And then he had met Carmelita and Poochigian had offered him the full time job on his ranch. Johnson quit his drinking and slimmed down. He and Carmelita began to talk about building a new life together.

But they had found him there, too. He gave his Social Security number to Poochigian and that was the key for the relentless witch hunt under the name of the Parent Location Service to track him down. One day he was summoned to court. A bored judge scolded him for not meeting his responsibilities, a county attorney who seemed like a reincarnation of the county attorney back east mocked and demeaned him before the court, a social worker was assigned to watchdog him. They garnisheed the greater part of his paltry farm worker's wages.

And that left him without the money to start a new life. There was not enough left for Carmelita and a future with her, to even hope for something better. Again Michael Johnson lost all hope. Again he began to drink. He ballooned in his weight once more, grew slovenly and soon lost his job. He took to drifting and one day woke up in the drunk tank in Fresno County. Bleary-eyed, sick, he vaguely heard another judge sentencing him to a jail term for contempt of court. He did hear, and was confused, when the judge said he was being sent to the tough Los Angeles County jail to 'teach him a lesson.'

The jail. That hell hole. That was where he hit his bottom. Three big blacks cornered him the first night and let it be known they controlled the place and Johnson had better obey them. To prove their point they beat him and then took turns raping him, joking as they brutalized him. For the rest of his time in jail Johnson was the woman of one of the men, a mean-spirited brutal man named Sam Taylor. He had no choice but to do whatever the big black told him to do.

Some of those things left such a burden of self disgust that Johnson gave up on life. Then, three days before he was to get out of jail, he learned of his children's death. That did it. He plunged over the edge. Michael managed to get his hands on some prison hooch and got as drunk as he could. Then, so drunk he could hardly sit up, he cut his wrists with a sharpened piece of spoon he had hidden away. Bleeding to death in his cell, lying in his own puke and blood, Michael Johnson thought he was seeing the last of his life. He was ready to leave it.

They found him. A guard on a routine night check flashed his light in Michael's cell and saw him on the floor. There was a frenzy of activity while they rushed him first to the prison infirmary for emergency first aid and then to the county hospital. Johnson woke up the next morning with a pumped stomach and stitched wrists and the worst hangover he had ever had. Standing over him was a reed thin young Native American woman in a white nurse's dress.

"Johnson," she said in a harsh voice. "You are disgusting!" He shook his head, closed his eyes, opened them again and focused on the hostile face of the young Indian nurse.

"What? Who? Why....." He said confusedly. Still she hovered over him menacingly.

"You are disgusting," she repeated in the same harsh tone. "A disgrace to the Indian people." Johnson shook his head again and tried to lift himself up.

"Indian? I'm no Indian. I'm Michael Johnson."

"Michael Johnson the Indian," the hissing voice of the nurse answered. "I know an Indian when I see one."

"But....but..." Johnson was incapable of argument or even the effort of raising himself up. "Oooooh," he groaned. "I'm sick."

"Not sick enough," the angry young woman said in her low, hissing tone. "It would be better if you had died. The world has enough drunken Indians already." Johnson tried to protest, to lift himself up, to answer her words, but he didn't have the strength. He could only lie on the bed and groan as she wheeled and stomped out of the room. But she had hit a raw nerve and in between the fits of nausea and the headaches and the pain, he had to think of what she had said. A drunken Indian. Michael Johnson the drunken Indian. It was a new thought for him. A new thought in that for the first time he was starting to really believe it and accept it. He was an Indian. A full-blooded Indian.

He had already known he was half Indian. From the time he was a small child. But he was also half white, he had been raised white and his mother disdained their Indian heritage. Michael Johnson had been raised as and thought of himself as being a white. Yet there had always been something underneath, below the surface, teasing at him. Why had he and brother George looked so different? His brother tall and blond, Michael short and brown.

His thoughts went back to that gloomy day, the leaden sky outside compounding the gloom inside, when his mother lay on her death bed. It was in the middle of his court battle to win custody of his children. Things were already bad enough without having to go through the death of the last of his parents. But he had stuck with it, staying off the booze, until the end had come. He would never forget the words his mother spoke to him before her mind slipped into the oblivion of the final coma and then death. They cut into him with the searing intensity of an acetylene torch slicing through a fender in the body shop where he once worked.

"Michael," the dying woman said, reaching out her withered hand to him. "There is something that I must tell you before I die. Something that has been held from you all these years. I think it is your right to know. It's not right for me to keep it from you." Johnson took her hand and listened bleakly to his dying mother's words, tears running down both their faces.

"Tom Johnson was not your real father, son," she said. Shock drained what color was left in his face. "He married me when you were still just a baby. Your father was an Indian in South Dakota. His name was Bennie Two Bulls. He is dead now, but some of your relatives are still alive." Despite the pain, the dying woman propped her frail body up and ran a trembling hand through her son's hair.

"I can see you heading for trouble, Michael. Perhaps you will find some answers with your father's people. I have no right to keep them from you any longer. They are Lakotas, as myself, and they live on the big reservations in southwestern South Dakota."

That conversation came back to Michael as he lay in the Los Angeles hospital bed. It had been one more shock in a series of shocks that had brought him to his own hospital bed faraway from his north country homeland and his mother's death bed. But how had this young Indian woman known he was an Indian? There was nothing special about Michael to point to it. People often took him for a Mexican-American, perhaps. But an Indian? As he lay in bed thinking about it he began to grow curious.

The nurse came back an hour later.

"Well, how's the drunken Indian doing now?" She said in a curt tone. Johnson surprised both of them by abruptly jerking himself upright in the bed. At first he was startled by the return of his strength, but the source of the sudden surge of strength was obvious to them both. Anger.

"Why the hell do you keep calling me that?" He blurted out. "I am not an Indian. I..." He stopped in mid-sentence. But he really was an Indian. At least by blood. His face became oddly curious. "How did you know I am an Indian?"

"I know," the young nurse said in a softer tone. "Another Indian knows. Don't ask for explanations. Wasn't I right?

"Yes," he nodded. "You're right."

"I am a Navaho," or what outsiders call Navajo. We are Diné." The Indian woman in the crisp nurse's uniform said. "Here to learn something that will benefit my people. That is what I call an appropriate response." She leaned over Johnson's form and waggled a scolding finger at him, her voice not quite so hostile as before.

"Getting drunk is what I call an inappropriate response. It comes from weakness, cowardice, ignorance and self pity. It especially comes from a lack of faith and of vision. How long will you go on feeling sorry for yourself before you begin to fight back?" The thin form of the young nurse straightened proudly.

"The Navaho, the Diné, survive. We have suffered. We were demeaned and insulted and mocked. We were marginalized. We were defeated. But we were not beaten. We have learned self respect. We have learned to fight back." She leaned over Johnson's stunned face and looked directly into his face, saying the words that would forever change his life.

"And that is because we have not lost contact with our ancestors and our heritage."

Johnson might still have been sick, but he was no longer drunk. With a clearing mind he soon realized that he had stumbled across a most remarkable young woman. She was a person with a mission in life. It was no accident that she had discovered him in the hospital. She was there because she was looking for just such people as himself. It was part of her mission to help rebuild the Indian people wherever she could.

Michael's jail term ended while he was in the hospital. An official of some kind, Michael was not clear on just who the woman represented, came to tell him he was free to go. But where? Weak and penniless. Where was he to go? The answer was quick in appearing. In the form of the Navajo nurse. Haseya Begay. She took him into her modest apartment and tended his wounded body and nursed his tortured soul. She brought him back to a measure of physical and mental health, and one day he walked away with a new determination to his life. Still penniless, his former life remaining an outward wreck, he was no longer defeated and hopeless. Michael Johnson stood on the highway with his thumb out, beginning the long journey--one that was far more than a mere traveling through a blur of topography--to the place or his origins. The great Sioux reservations of South Dakota. Oddly, he felt elated. As though he were finally going home after a very long time away in some distant and alien place.

And perhaps this was not so far from the truth after all.

He tracked down his father's father, the old man they called the Diehard. Lee Two Bulls immediately sensed something familiar about the small man who approached him at a powwow on the Cheyenne River reservation. The old man watched like a hawk as the younger man walked up to him and put out his hand.

"I am Bennie's son, grandfather," Michael said. The old man took his hand and held it.

"I know," he said softly.

This was the watershed, the landmark, the wellspring, the single event that more than any other marked the final end of Michael Johnson's former life and the real beginning of Michael Two Bulls' new life. From this point on he began to become Michael Two Bulls, a warrior, son of a warrior, grandson of a warrior, descended from a line of warriors reaching back before the ancient voyages of the foreigners that had changed everything.

The grandfather took his new-found grandson out into the isolated prairie where no one might interfere. Here they lived for months in a canvas teepee the old man set up next to a sweat bath hut while Michael learned of his ancestry, of his people, his family, and especially of the ways of the people and their beliefs. The hard old man who was his father's father was a tough master to Michael. But he also had the most willing of pupils. It was as though Lee Two Bulls had learned all he had learned and held onto it for the single purpose of passing it on now to this most willing and determined of all pupils.

Lee Two Bulls grew increasingly proud of his grandson. Here was the Two Bulls warrior he had always wanted. In his proud grandfather's eyes here was the leader, the brave, fearless shining star that would show the way for the others. Before those sharp grandparent's eyes Michael blossomed out like the prairie flowers outside their camp. Or, more directly to the warrior point, like a young eagle spreading his wings. He spoke in Lakota, translating when he had to, and Michael soon grasped the basics of their language--and the thoughts that went behind the language. Lee Two Bulls taught him how to talk to the spirits and to the ancestors. The old man showed him the peyote helper and the visions that came to the man who is pure, or at least sincere, in purpose. The old man taught him all he knew. Michael Two Bulls' presence was a secret few knew about. Only the Indian man who had been a Green Beret came often, to refresh Michael's military fighting skills and to show him new techniques and moves. The grandfather wanted no one to know of this new Two Bulls before his grandson was ready. Finally the day came when both grandfather and grandson agreed. It was time for Michael to receive his personal vision.

They first took the purifying sweat bath, then built a fire with enough wood stored nearby for the entire night. Another old man, a brother of the grandfather, came to help. When it was time, as the full moon rose over the prairie night, Michael was given the peyote in a ritual way. Then he prepared to receive his vision, the sole, personal vision that would guide him in the rest of his life.

It began with the wind seeming to caress him and whisper softly of ages long past. He listened closely and lost all sense of time.

"Hou!" Cried the grandfather suddenly. Michael looked up to see what the old man was pointing at. High in the night sky, on the northern horizon, a bright shooting star was flashing across the sky. The meteor was by far the brightest he had ever seen as it streaked with a trail of bright sparks across the star-studded dark sky. It went completely across the horizon to the south and then was gone as suddenly as it had come.

Michael returned his gaze to the fire as his grandfather and the other aged Lakota, who was Michael's great uncle, chanted softly to themselves. It was then that Michael Two Bulls saw himself as a warrior with fire shooting from his fingertips. He tried the fire and saw that he could direct it. The faces of all those who had destroyed his life appeared in the fire. Michael raised his fingers and sent the fire at them. The faces vanished. Then a voice speaking in the ancient Dakota tongue cried out from the fire.

"A warrior must have honor. You have no honor. A warrior must recoup his lost honor by striking down those who have shamed him. This is the beginning of a warrior's path." The voice spoke no more, though another voice seemed to be speaking to him inside his mind. The voice speaking to him from within said that everything that had happened to him was directed by his own personal guardian spirit and it had all been necessary to bring him to where he was now. It was all part of Michael Two Bulls' destiny.

But it was up to him to discover that destiny.

During that night of the flaming fingers and the talking fire and the smiling moon Michael became aware of the first details of his vision. The next day he began walking the path that was his and his alone on the Earth. The beginning lay in recouping his warrior's honor against those who had shamed and humiliated him, and through him, his entire people. Was it real? A drug induced fantasy? A combination of the two? Did it matter? No. To Michael it was real.

And that was all that really mattered.

Even the fertile, Machiavellian mind of Vincent Scapella could not have imagined in its wildest flights of fancy the true nature of Michael Johnson's mission. It would have been outside his comprehension. Such motivations as Johnson's were beyond the pale, in the realm of the incurably mentally ill, to Scapella. There was no understanding the ravings of the psychopath. He could not have begun to fathom the metamorphosis that transformed Michael Johnson into Michael Two Bulls. Nor that Two Bulls was in a far different universe than the demented lunatic world Scapella imagined.

Scapella did not have that kind of understanding. He considered Michael Johnson to be a bitter little man who had sought outlet from a lifetime of powerlessness through a vendetta. The chief could understand that kind of a motive. He was enthralled with power, its acquisition, its use, its retention. Especially its retention. Though not to the manor born, Chief Scapella was nevertheless down to the very marrow in his bones an elitist. This was above all what counted. His own mission in life, and it was a fully conscious one, was to reach the inner circles of the elite and win permanent membership there for himself and his progeny.

Michael Johnson was Scapella's ticket to ride on the Elite Express.

To Chief Scapella, Michael Johnson was a non-person, a cipher, a convenient vehicle to power. Johnson was Scapella's key to the door of the inner sanctums of the Lords of Power. But only if the crafty chief orchestrated things properly. He would never have anticipated gaining the access he so coveted through such a manner. It all seemed so incredibly stupid to him. Michael Johnson had them all running scared. The petty vindictiveness of Lila Mannering, the unprofessional indifference of Banning Davidson, the lecherous personal corruption of Judge Leland Delaney. These foolish people's actions, and their subsequent violent deaths, had brought a visceral response from the elite. In the direct physical person of the elite's leader, Chief Judge Miles Crowley.

Delaney and Davidson had both belonged to the elite from birth. Mannering even more so. Their deaths had naturally upset their colleagues. It was one thing for rednecks and blacks and Indians to kill themselves in drunken brawls. It was quite another for three members of the upper class to be struck down by an assassin. Particularly an assassin who remained at large.

But what really struck at the elite and made their guts boil was the threat to the whole system. The foolish mishmash of incompetence, imperiousness and malevolence that had crushed Michael Johnson would outrage the public. Any alert journalist could have done some digging and found a widespread network of venality, corruption and an endemic systemic utter indifference to the powerless. So far none had figured it out. Police Chief Vincent Scapella was determined to keep it that way.

Scapella had long since known that Chief Judge Miles Crowley was the leader and spokesman of the Lords of Power. A shadowy group of bankers, lawyers, corporate CEOs and powerful families with old money were behind him. There were less than a dozen of them in the epicenter of power and they collegially made decisions that Judge Crowley arranged to be implemented. One way or another. Some public. Others very much not public. Support a sympathetic politician here, discredit an unsympathetic one there, lobby the city government and the state legislature, cozy up to government regulators and other officials. As always, money talked. But so did power and influence. And, in rare cases, there were the options of coercion and even blackmail. They had the power to anonymously make or break nearly anyone in the Twin Cities and far out into the rural parts of the state. Very few suspected their influence and even fewer tried to fight it. None had succeeded.

Vincent Scapella met Chief Judge Crowley at the City Club for a game of handball and then a discreet private chat in the steam room. Crowley was frankly impressed with Police Chief Vincent Scapella. The man was a natural athlete, as graceful as the judge and not nearly as bulky. Scapella had the kind of lean athletic frame and elegant carriage that the elite liked to see in its leadership. He also had shown himself to be extremely bright and competent and a gifted public speaker. Crowley also carefully noted that Scapella was unencumbered with any vestigial bourgeois sentimentality. The man had already absorbed the heart and soul of the elite's ethos. He was definitely in the first rank of candidates.

There was always room for some new blood among the Lords of Power. The elite remained the elite from generation to generation primarily by having effective leadership. If this leadership was not forthcoming from inside, then it had to be found on the outside and brought into the inner circle. Scapella had only to prove himself on one very important issue to be accepted into the inner circle. He had to find and silence Michael Johnson and remove any threat there was to the elite. By protecting and perpetuating the Lords of Power, Chief Vincent Scapella was assured a seat at their table.

His grandfather would have been proud of him.

The two men showered and dressed and took the elevator to the club's top story. An elegant restaurant crowned the building there, surrounded by huge picture windows with magnificent views of the city. The underlying reason for their meeting had not yet been discussed as they left the elevator and entered the sumptuously appointed dining room.

"How are things progressing thus far, Vincent?" Crowley asked as they took a table next to a window. Scapella was staring out the big windows, seeing if he could catch a glimpse of the Mississippi where it flowed through the city on its two thousand mile meander to the Atlantic Ocean. He returned his attention to the judge.

"Quite well, I believe, Judge, "Scapella answered, his calm face belying a mind racing to find just the right choice of words. "There has been no scandal in the media. There will be no scandal in the media." He pursed his lips pensively, one of the many mannerisms the handsome man had that intrigued women.

"The one serious problem is the man. Johnson. He remains at large."

"Yes," the judge said, his brow slightly furrowing in consternation. "That is troubling. Just how dangerous might that be?" Scapella waved his fine-boned hand in a dramatic gesture passed down from his old country ancestors.

"Who can say for certain? Perhaps it is best for everyone that he is never found. To apprehend him alive would undoubtedly mean at least some publicity." Judge Crowley looked intently at Scapella.

"I could interpret that more than one way," he said. Scapella returned his look with half-hooded eyes.

"Yes, you could." A small smile played on the judge's lips.

"I think I would prefer not to know any of the details." Scapella's face became a mask, like a well practiced poker player, which was another of the attributes to the man that the judge liked.

"I take it that means I shall proceed with some rather special solutions?" The judge glanced over at the black waiter approaching their table from the kitchen. He nodded almost imperceptibly.

"Yes," he said in a low voice, his eyes now also hooded. Then, as the waiter came up to the table, he brushed aside his subdued demeanor and became his typically confident, outgoing self again. His arm moved in an expansive gesture at the waiter.

"Let's eat," he said robustly.

Ben Thompson drove back once more through the baked plains of South Dakota and into the greener countryside of Minnesota. If anything, he was happier and more jubilant than he had been the first time he'd made the trip from Angie Two Bulls' secluded cabin to his own isolated cabin. He hadn't felt this way since he was a young man.

He and Angie had agreed that it would be best if there were no contacts between them that might make the powers searching out Michael Two Bulls aware of her existence. Thompson was becoming increasingly uneasy about just how far these people might be willing to go. His thoughts were gradually changing from reflection on their motivations to wariness of their possible actions. Thompson was aware that the Lords of Power were potentially very dangerous. Including lethally dangerous. When he got back to his cabin Thompson was careful not to switch on the phone. He didn't want that stranger to call him again. Not yet. He still wasn't sure what he might say. And he was also vaguely leery about what the man would say--what additional bewitching trap the Machiavellian bastards were laying to snare him.

The next morning Thompson left for the city to learn what he could about the efforts to track down Two Bulls. He wanted to at least have a feel for what was officially being done. The best place to find that out was with his old friend and colleague, Ed Davis. He found him that evening at the bar they had frequented in their days together on the force. Ben went to the Painkiller, knowing he'd find Davis there.

Davis saw Thompson come in and waved him over from the booth he was sitting in with three other policemen. Thompson saw him and went directly for the booth. He was somewhat surprised, and disturbed, to see that Davis was sitting with a group of officers who had the reputation of being suspect when it came to the fine print of professional ethics. They were the ones who were known as being willing to bend the rules for the right people. Thompson suddenly felt uncomfortable.

They all were friendly enough, with the usual remarks about retirement and men of leisure. There were no comments about the injustice of his dismissal. Davis, who was now Lieutenant Davis, recognized Thompson's discomfort and left the booth, guiding his old friend to an empty booth in a corner. The lanky, loose-jointed redhead looked older and more tired to Thompson. Perhaps it was the added responsibility of being a lieutenant. Perhaps it was the cynicism of seeing Ben cashiered. Or perhaps it was something else.

"Something to drink?" Davis asked after they had settled down in the booth.

"A beer," Thompson answered. "Just a glass. Light." Davis raised his eyebrows at him.

"Cutting down?" Ben smiled as Davis yelled their order to the waitress.

"Gotten out of the habit, I guess. There's not as much need to unwind as there used to be." Davis considered the thought and seemed to agree.

"I see your point," he said. "And now tell me what brings you down to the corrupt city from your pristine retreat in the woods?" Thompson studied his old friend. There was no doubt of it any longer. Davis had changed. He couldn't quite identify it, but it was there. Something was different about the man.

"Just a parting shot," Ben said, choosing his words carefully. He now realized that the something different about Davis was also something to be wary of. There could be no more good buddies straight talk with Ed Davis.

"A parting shot?" Davis asked curiously, his rusty eyebrows arching. For the first time Thompson noticed the wrinkles that were forming around Davis' eyes.

"I'm leaving the state," Thompson replied. "Got a nice job offer with the National Park Service down in the Southwest. I'll be selling my cabin and moving out before winter." Davis did not remark on the new job. He was only interested in Thompson's remark about a parting shot.

"And what else?" Thompson tried to smile at him, but it came out a pale shadow of what it had been in the old days of trust.

"And I'd like to know whatever happened to Michael Johnson before I go." He gave up trying to smile, adding. "I'm still curious." Davis accepted what Thompson said at face value. It was in character with the Ben Thompson he knew. Lieutenant Ben Thompson's continued curiosity, and stubborn determination, had cracked more than one case the other detectives had given up on. Curious? Vintage Thompson.

"Nothing," Davis answered. "The guy never was found and I don't believe he ever will be found. We've put the case on inactive and as far as I can tell that's where its going to stay."

"You mean there's not a lot of pressure on you to find the man?"

"None," Davis replied. "There's not much inside the department and the public pressure has died out. You don't even see it in the newspapers any more."

"Its hard to believe it would fade away like that. You'd think they'd track him to the very gates of hell." Davis shrugged in obvious disinterest.

"I guess they figure he's hit everybody he's going to hit and to stir things up will only give a lot of people ulcers." He glanced off at a pair of young women who had just come into the Painkiller, lingered on their legs for a moment, then returned his eyes to Thompson.

"As far as the guys on the force are concerned, he didn't kill any cops so who cares? Mannering and Delaney and what's-his-name the attorney weren't everybody's favorite people." Thompson didn't bother to comment on the change in attitude of his ex-sergeant. Nor did he bother to remark any further that normally the murder of members of the elite would trigger a manhunt that would scour the country until the killer was found.

"So what have you found out?" Davis asked, trying to seem nonchalant.

"Me?" Ben answered with mock puzzlement. Davis smiled wryly at him.

"Yeah, you. I heard you were nosing around. Pumped O'Toole, talked to Johnson's brother, stuff like that."

"Came up a dead end, Ed," Thompson said. "Like you said, the man just disappeared from the face of the earth. I don't think they'll ever find him, either." Then he changed his tone and his expression and picked up the chilled glass of beer the waitress had just brought.

"What the hell," he said. "It's all in the past. I'm on my way to a whole new life that I'm going to enjoy far more than I ever did that goddamned cop's job." He raised his glass to Davis. "Here's to a new life." Davis' eyes blinked, as though Ben's remark had hit upon a touchy subject. His voice came out sounding cynical as he slowly raised his glass.

"Yeah," he said. "Here's to a new life."

Ben drove back north that evening. There would be no information from Ed Davis or anyone else. His sources in the city had dried up. Whatever was happening, it was beyond such people as Davis and the others Ben knew. This was something coming from high up and Thompson could only guess at the particulars. It was a cover up, there was no doubt about that. But as to how far it would go? He wasn't sure. Yet he was fairly certain he would have a better idea after a phone conversation that he knew was as inevitable as mosquitoes in the Minnesota summer.

When he returned to his cabin he stayed only long enough to get a change of clothes and put his canoe onto his camper. Then he headed off into Canada for a two day fishing trip. When he returned he switched the phone on. It took only three hours before it rang.

"Mr. Thompson?" It was the same voice as before. Ben acknowledged. "I'm glad to see your phone is back in operation."

"I had it switched off," he said dourly.

"I know," the voice answered with some amusement. "But that doesn't matter. I want you to know that I am pleased with your decision. You will be expected to report to Mr. Ernesto Goins at the Albuquerque office no later than November First." Thompson looked glumly at the floor as the man spoke. Ed Davis had been the only person he had told about taking the Park Service job. The conspiracy David Saul had spoken of was real, and it was closing in on him. He now knew what he had to do.

"Congratulations on the wisdom of your decision," the man said. "And I trust that you will be permanently discreet about certain matters of which we both are aware."

"Oh, I'll be discreet all right," Thompson said in the same dour tone.

"And always remember, Mr. Thompson," the voice continued, "what can be given can also be taken away."

"And God don't grow little green apples and it don't snow in Minneapolis in the winter time," Thompson retorted sharply.

"What?" The man said in some confusion.

"I'm not taking your job," Thompson said hotly. "You can take your goddamned Park Service job and shove it. I don't want any part of you or your job or Michael Johnson or anything to do with the whole goddamned mess. To hell with all of it. Just leave me alone!" A short pause. "I'm going fishing!" With that he slammed down the phone, reached over and quickly switched it off. Then he looked at the receiver and grinned sarcastically.

"That ought to confuse the son of a bitch but good," he grumbled, then adding as an uneasy afterthought. "At least for a while."

He moved quickly after that. He called up a local realtor who had made an offer of a reasonable price for his property not long after he had bought it. Was the realtor still interested? Damn right he was. Even this far from the Twin Cities, lakeshore property was a solid investment. One sure to pay off when the economy got better. Thompson said he could have the place right away. The realtor jumped at the offer, agreeing to get the necessary documents ready and bring them over for signature the next morning. The remainder of that evening and night Ben Thompson spent in going through the cabin that was not long ago to have been his lifelong retreat, picking out those few things he wanted to keep. The rest he either threw away or left for the new owner. Sometime after midnight he went to bed for a few hours.

He was up again at dawn and busily packing the pickup when the realtor came driving in before 8:00, the savvy realtor knowing full well he would eventually make a tidy profit and not wasting any time in cementing the transaction before Thompson had second thoughts. They signed the papers and the man gave Ben a cashier's check for $10,000, with the balance to be paid in one year. At 8:30 that morning Ben left his cabin for good with the few worldly possessions he wanted to keep packed into his pickup and a cashier's check for $10,000 in his pocket.

He drove directly to the city where he had once been a policeman. Minneapolis. He still had a savings account there with more than $15,000 in it. Thompson had $10,000 more converted into a cashier's check, took $5000 in cash, and left instructions for his police pension checks to be received at the bank and retained in the savings account. After that he stopped at the pension office to leave the same instructions. Early that evening he was on the highway, well on the way to South Dakota. It had been barely twenty-four hours since the telephone call. He doubted that they would move fast enough to have even a glimmering that he was already gone.

Angie was not there. He slept the rest of the night there in his pickup. When she had not returned by the middle of the next day, he left her a note and headed out again. His destination was south and west, to the land of the Anasazi, the country he had always wanted to live in.

He had no idea it was also the country where Michael Two Bulls had his own secluded rented cabin in the southeastern Colorado high country.

Ben did not find Angie at home because she had left to find her grandfather. She wanted to see what the old man had to say about this Michael Johnson who probably was her half-brother. The reservation grapevine had her wandering grandfather on the huge Pine Ridge Sioux reservation at a cousin's home. Angie drove her battered but reliable old Volkswagen to Pine Ridge looking for the old man, her grandfather, Lee Two Bulls.

As she drove she reflected on this white man who had come into her life. She still found it hard to believe that she could have such feelings for a man at all any more, and especially a white man. Angie was a woman of many faces. She was a scholar, Lakota patriot, teacher. She was also a feminist and an independent thinker and an experimenter. She had been to bed with whites before, in her college days, her partying days, out of hungry youthful hormones more than any kind of genuine passion. And she had been fond of certain white men she had known. But to combine the two, to feel romantically towards one and to also like him as a person? It was something new and alien to Angie Two Bulls that made her feel unsettled and conflicted.

Angie had a better idea of how to find her grandfather than she had led Ben Thompson to believe. He was after all someone new in her life and she really didn't know much about him. She didn't want to do something rash and inadvertently betray her family and her people. They remained her first loyalty, far more important to her than any romantic notions she might have about a peculiar white man who had come wandering into her life and upset her cultural equilibrium. 'First Things First' they had said when she accompanied her then husband to an AA meeting on the Rosebud. Her husband didn't listen. Angie did. When he started in to drinking again and beat on her one besotted evening, he quickly became an ex-husband and remained forever a resident in ex-husband land. She told him never to come near her again. He tried. Once. Angie's 30-30 slug went right between his legs. He got the message.

She found Lee Two Bulls in the dusty yard of the cousin's home at Pine Ridge. The old man never changed. It seemed he had always looked ancient and always would look ancient. Yet his leathery, wrinkled skin stretched over a lean body still agile and quick. His eyes shone out with bright intensity from his weathered face, making her think of a pair of hot coals. Two Bulls was a powerful, compelling, proud man. He intimidated many people. Even, at least a little, his favorite grandchild, Angie. But she still loved him. They spoke in an old-fashioned dialect of Lakota Lee Two Bulls preferred to use.

"So the granddaughter finally comes to see an old man," he said in a tone that plainly betrayed his fondness for the younger woman. Angie, unlike the cautious mask she often presented to the world, looked warm and relaxed and perhaps even a little vulnerable.

"The granddaughter never worries about the grandfather," she said with a wry smile. "There is no grandfather more prepared to take care of himself." That made the old man laugh.

"So! What is it that you want from me, Angie?" He chuckled. "I have seen your sly ways too many times to be fooled any more." The smile spread across her face.

"A white man came to me this past week with a strange story. He said that I have a brother named Michael Johnson. And that this brother is a warrior who strikes down those who have wronged him." The old man's face was immediately a stony mask. But his wily old eyes darted intelligently.

"What man brings you such a story?"

"A man who was a police lieutenant to the east where this happened. In Minnesota. He is a man who lost his job because of it. He comes not as an enemy but as a man seeking understanding." She continued to converse in the archaic way all the Two Bulls were taught from childhood. The old man remained impassive.

"Did you send this white man on to me?" Angie smiled again.

"I have come instead." He nodded.

"I understand," the old man said thoughtfully.

"What of this brother?" She asked, trying not to betray her roiling emotions. "Is this true?" Lee Two Bulls stared at his granddaughter, then slowly turned to look out at the undulating parched countryside. He seemed lost in thought. Finally, he spoke.

"This is for your ears alone," he began, still looking out at the rolling plains. "The story of the brother is a true one. You have a brother who now calls himself Michael Two Bulls. He stayed with me out there on the prairie for months while I taught him all the old ways." The old man turned his disconcerting eyes to Angie.

"He was the most willing of pupils. He is now more of an old one that any of us. You, me, your father, any of the Two Bulls. He is a warrior. And he is a warrior avenging his people." Angie stared, unblinking, at her grandfather.

"I _must_ meet him," she said, her voice gravid with interest and determination.

"And soon!"

' _Damage control! Containment!'_ Those were the words Judge Crowley used so forcefully in his last blunt discussion with Police Chief Scapella about the 'powder keg' that was Michael Johnson. Scapella understood the implications, that he would have to act beyond the ordinary parameters of his working life. Beyond the world of a police chief. It was here that the old, loose associations with certain covert elements of society were to prove invaluable. Scapella had maintained these contacts and intentionally ingratiated himself to them for just such an eventuality. Now he asked that they return the favor. He needed a name. A most special name. Someone who was highly competent, completely trustworthy, could be depended upon to maintain his silence, was either an Indian or a Hispanic and was above all a professional.

The name came back within two days. Those who knew him--or knew _of_ him--called him el Espectro. Which in Spanish can mean spook or ghost or specter. All three definitions fit him. But the one that most fit him was the Ghost. His name was Munoz. Luis Munoz. Munoz, aka el Espectro aka the Ghost, had performed extremely well on all the assignments given him. He came highly recommended. He was also currently available. For the right price. One sure to soar into the six figures.

On a Friday evening Chief Scapella quietly slipped out of town in a wealthy businessman's private jet and flew to Chicago where he met Munoz in a suburban motel. He gave the Miami based Cuban-American his instructions, handed him an envelope with half the agreed fee of $150,000, provided by Judge Crowley from a secret sheltered contingency fund, and left the motel barely a half hour after he had arrived. The arrangements were complete. Michael Johnson, one of Scapella's and Crowley's dangling dangerous loose ends, would soon be tied up and disposed of.....

Permanently.

Scapella was home in his bed long before the night crept away from the dawn. Sophia Scapella, his wife of nearly three decades, didn't question him about where he had been. She never did. She knew well enough that he was an adulterer and that probably was where he had been. It didn't matter. Vincent Scapella was providing what was of overriding importance to her. Access into the inner circles of the elite for herself and especially for her children. Her husband's sexual fidelity seemed trivial by comparison. Especially since she had lost most of her desire for sex after the difficult and very painful delivery of their youngest child. She far preferred he bed his string of trollops over him inflicting upon her his vulgar randy bedroom antics.

Counterintuitive though it might seem, for a man called the Ghost by those who knew of him, Luis Munoz was one of those men most people instantly like. He had the kind of smiling, friendly face that disarmed all but the most cynical misanthropes. Munoz was a man who seemed without guile, without dubious personal ambitions, without a hidden agenda, without the girdling blinders of a preening ego. He struck almost everyone as a gentle, humble man who was at peace with himself and the world.

Besides being a supremely talented natural actor, Munoz actually was at peace. He had little guilt about what he did. Not since the first two or three. It was a job, a job that he was very good at. Munoz was the best in his profession, the one the others spoke of in hushed, awed and usually jealous tones. The man who came and went as though he were in fact, el Especto. The Ghost. It was not the actual killing that excited him. That was anticlimactic. It was the chase that excited him, the challenge of taking on a difficult assignment and tracking down the quarry until he had him--or, sometimes, her--trapped. The Ghost returned to Miami and his canal side home, sat in a chaise by his lap pool and studied the file Scapella had given him. Munoz's calm equanimity gave little indication of what he was thinking about his latest assignment. Michael Johnson. Yes. He was definitely intriguing. This quarry, this person known as Michael Johnson, promised to be a most elusive and interesting diversion. Perhaps even a challenge. Yes. Munoz slowly nodded affirmation. This Johnson might fulfill Munoz' professional expectations. Munoz considered himself a kind of big game hunter. The biggest of game.

Humans.

The first step was to use a reliably discreet, yet competent, detective agency to find Johnson's tracks. For that Munoz used part of the money Scapella had given him as a retainer. It was no problem for Munoz to select the proper agency. He had done business with them before. The owner was his cousin, a man who had known him since childhood--and who also knew better than to get on Munoz' bad side.

The slender, smallish man remained in his home in Miami to make his preparations and to await news from the agency. It was not long in coming. There was a good deal of background information, but nothing at all current. Johnson had indeed disappeared without a trace. The last record of him was in the Los Angeles county hospital nearly a year earlier. There were no Social Security records of him more recent than that, he had no automobiles registered to his name since then, his name appeared on no licenses or records that the detective agency's computer links could find. The elusiveness of the man did not discourage Munoz. On the contrary. It whetted his appetite for the hunt.

Munoz did have some leads. If Johnson had vanished after his stay at the hospital in Los Angeles, perhaps a trace might be found there. And then the brother in Minnesota might also give a clue to where he might be found. Munoz was also interested in the fact that Johnson's mother had been a Sioux Indian from a reservation in South Dakota. That seemed a likely possibility to pursue, as well.

He arrived in Los Angeles on a regular commercial flight looking no different from the thousands of other businessmen who passed in and out of the city continually. His Hispanic appearance would hardly draw notice in a city with millions of Spanish-speaking inhabitants. From the airport Munoz went directly to the county hospital and spoke privately with one of its administrators. He was carrying credentials identifying him as a Federal narcotics agent.

The administrator, Hernando Gutierrez, was more than happy to cooperate in finding a man suspected of being a primary supplier of heroin to the school children of Los Angeles County. He had seen far too many drug related tragedies pass through his hospital, one of them his own nephew. Though it was a violation of both medical ethics and hospital policy, the administrator was disarmed by Munoz' intense, sincere manner--plus Munoz' DEA credentials. He let Munoz see the hospital records on Michael Johnson.

"Does it tell you anything?" Gutierrez asked, Munoz shrugged.

"I'm afraid not. Was there anything that happened that might give us a clue as to where this man went?" The administrator puzzled for a moment, then took the Johnson file and looked at it. A look of recollection slowly dawned on his face.

"The Navaho woman," he said. "He was another of her lambs." Munoz bent towards the man.

"The Navaho woman, you say?" His eyes narrowed in quiet intensity. "Could you tell me more about her?"

That night Haseya Begay came straight home after the swing shift at the hospital. There wouldn't be many more of these late shifts in the city for her. She'd receive her final certification in less than a month and could go back to the Navaho reservation. Soon it would be time to return home. There was so much to be done there. The thought of finally going back to her family and her people excited her. Especially now that she was equipped with a real skill that could help the Navaho. The missionaries and the self-proclaimed holy men and women claimed they could heal the soul. Haseya was not so sure. She was sure she could help heal the body. Haseya was absolutely certain of something else.

Without the body there would be no soul to heal.

She opened the door into her apartment, stepped in and reached over to switch on the light. A hand grabbed her around the mouth and pulled her into the room, pushing the door shut behind her. Another hand held a knife at her throat.

"Do you feel this knife?" It was the voice of a man with some kind of faint Spanish accent. Terrified, Haseya Begay shook her head in agitated fear. The voice moved closer to her ear, whispering in an ugly bone-chilling tone that seemed to pierce her body and crawl up her spine.

"Cooperate and you will be unharmed. Resist and you will die slowly and painfully." The Ghost touched his carefully honed sharp knife lightly on her throat and drew it along the skin just enough to draw a trickle of blood. "I want you to know what might happen to you if you don't do as I tell you. Now, little girl, tell me all you know about Michael Johnson." He took her by the hair and pulled her face close to his.

"Tell me the truth and you will never see me again. Lie and there is no place on Earth that I cannot find you." He hissed into her mouth. "Do you understand?" The young woman shook her head in terror. "Then tell me what happened to this Johnson." Munoz allowed his hand to come free from its grip on Haseya's mouth.

"He is dead," she said, whimpering. Munoz grabbed her mouth again and stuck the knife into his belt. Then he pulled up one of her arms behind her back and bent it up towards her neck until he felt the woman's body jerk from the pain. A muffled screaming came from her mouth, but Munoz' hand kept it from being audible more than a few feet away. Then he relaxed the pressure on her arm. The tiny young woman's body sagged and grew limp.

"He is not dead," Munoz said coldly. "Lie to me again and you will not believe the pain that I will give you." He jerked her body roughly. "Now where is he!" His hand came free of her mouth. She instantly began to scream. Munoz choked off the scream and angrily wrenched her arm up behind her back again. Haseya Begay's body bounced spastically from the flashes of pain. In a few moments she slumped into unconsciousness. Munoz let her limp body slide to the floor. He stared angrily down at her, then kicked her side.

"Dumb broad," he said. "You fucking dumb Indian broad."

When Haseya regained consciousness she was lying on her own bed in the dark apartment. No light. That was her first realization. The rest of them came in a rapid crescendo of horror. She was naked. Her mouth was gagged. Her arms and her legs were tied to the four corners of the bed, leaving her spread-eagled and, she realized in a flash of abject horror, vulnerable in ways she didn't even want to think about. And, worst of all. The vicious little man was hovering nearby. A Ghost there to torment her. She shrieked and screamed, but it was barely audible even to Munoz.

"Haseya, Haseya," he began in a mocking voice. "You are stubborn, aren't you? How much pain do you want before you give in? You will give in, you know. What is the point in putting yourself through this? Haseya screamed again and again and again for the help that would not come. No one could hear. And, even if someone could hear, would anyone dare or even bother to come in an America grown numb and fearful? Munoz leered malevolently down at her.

"You will talk," he said in a voice of absolute conviction.

Twenty-five hundred miles away Chief Vincent Scapella and his expensively dressed fine-boned aristocratic wife Sophia were just sitting down to dinner at the City Club. They were the guests of Judge and Mrs. Miles Crowley. Scapella was a newly accepted associate member of the exclusive Club. Crowley was his personal sponsor. Usually the lobsters were presented live and cooked in a steaming pot before the eyes of the patrons. But Mrs. Crowley was squeamish about such things and the restaurant management had cooked the lobsters discreetly out of sight in the kitchen. A fact that had Police Chief Vincent Scapella's roving mind dwelling on the many faces of irony.

Luis Munoz had one small weakness. His own private fetish, which was powerful enough to at times interfere with the speed and efficiency of his assignments. Munoz liked to torture people. He carried cigars with him for eventualities just such as this. He took out a cigar and lit it, slowly puffing on the cigar until a glowing ash built up on the tip.

"Haseya," he whispered as be bent over her. "Feel this, Haseya." He flicked the tip of the cigar and the glowing ash fell onto her stomach. The young woman jerked against her restraints with a panic-renewed intensity. Then Munoz began methodically touching the burning cigar tip to various parts of her anatomy, particularly the sexual organs. He liked to burn a woman's sexual organs more than anything. They really jumped when he did that.

Haseya Begay's tortured body jerked and strained and pulled against her bonds and she shrieked continually into the towel muffling her mouth. Then the awful searing pain stopped and she lay puffing and sweating profusely on the bed, her mind on the edge of both consciousness and sanity.

She heard a cracking noise and tried to crane her neck enough to be able to see where it came from. The Ghost was approaching the bed from the other side of the room. In his hand was a leg he had broken off her kitchen table. He was grinning broadly. A strange grin that lay somewhere beyond the borders of what most would consider to be sanity. He sat down next to her and she felt him pushing the narrow end of the table leg between her thighs. It went below her vagina to her rectal opening. She could feel Munoz's fingers working to find the anus and pry it open. There was grease on his fingers and on the table leg. Then she felt him begin to push the leg slowly into her rectum.

She had never known such pain could exist.

When she woke she was broken. She no longer cared whether she lived or died. The malignant man took the gag from her mouth and in torrents of words she was barely conscious of she told him everything she knew of Michael Johnson. The most interesting part to Luis Munoz was that Johnson had told her he was going to seek out his heritage in South Dakota. That would be where he would look next.

Munoz capriciously decided that this one he would let live. For now. He put the gag back onto the broken woman's mouth and furtively left the darkened apartment. Like a Ghost. There and suddenly not there. It had been a long night and he was tired. But there was no time for sleep. Not yet. He returned to his hotel, checked out and went to the airport. Only when the plane was airborne would be let himself fall asleep.

A sleep, despite being on an airplane, that was comfortable and pleasantly untroubled.

bookmark

Michael Johnson, or as he now called himself, Michael Two Bulls or simply just Two Bulls, packed up his few things and put them into the used camper pickup he had just bought. He was using the name of Michael Villela in whatever public transactions he had to make, such as the purchase of a vehicle or the renting of a house, using the cash he had 'repurposed,' as he put it, from the drug traffickers in San Ysidro. If one could say there was a positive side to being in jail, contact with a wide variety of criminals and their skills opened up Michael's mind to subjects like creating false identifies and staying off the law enforcement radar. He had listened. And learned.

Always wary, like the prowling puma in the densely forested Black Hills close by the Lakota homeland, he decided to get rid of his old truck and to change his residence. It seemed unlikely that anyone would track him down, but he habitually took extra precautions. The pressure to find him would undoubtedly intensify after he began a new series of activities he was planning. But for that he needed spiritual renewal. Two Bulls journeyed far to the north to the Sioux reservations to meet his grandfather. The chosen place this time was a relatively unknown reservation in Nebraska called Santee, the place where the survivors of the Minnesota Dakota were exiled over a century earlier in the first in a series of tribal cataclysms that would devastate the Sioux world. There, at Santee, he would meet his grandfather.

The wiry man, small in stature but compactly muscular and rugged looking, was not expecting to find a woman with his grandfather, but find one he did. Angie had been so persistent with the old man that he had finally agreed to take her along. He really had no choice. He knew that his stubbornly determined granddaughter would follow him if he refused to bring her. Michael Two Bulls climbed out of the pickup truck and cautiously approached the odd pair. The old man of the ancient ways and a tall, slender woman in blue jeans, her long hair braided and framing a darkly beautiful face. A face, he was sure, that was Lakota. Who was this woman? The old man stepped forward and embraced Michael warmly. The grandson returned the embrace. They spoke softly in the native tongue the old man had taught Michael, though Michael's grasp of it was still not quite fluent. Then they turned to face the long-haired woman watching them so closely from a few feet away.

"This is your sister," the old man said in Lakota. "Angie Two Bulls."

An eagle of a man stared at the woman. His gaze was met with that of another eagle. A spark was struck between them. They broke their frozen postures to embrace. The old man's eyes twinkled as he watched his two favorite grandchildren meet for the first time. Angie was taller than Michael, his mother was six inches shorter than Angie's mother, but both had the iconic aquiline Lakota face. The "face of a hawk," the old man said, "and the eyes of the eagle."

They were three days together there, on the Santee reservation in Nebraska. A few others came and went. Some from Santee, others from farther away. There were more than just the grandfather and the sister who were aware of the waxing power of Michael Two Bulls. Not many. But enough. Seeds. For the future.

Seeds.

Lee Two Bulls chose Santee because of its roots in the distant past. Here had been sent the broken remnants of the eastern Sioux after a hopeless war in the 1860's. They were a shattered people, as were the other Sioux tribes on the other reservations, but here at least there were some who knew the very ancient ways and tried to keep them alive. Here a very few retained the memories that went back to before the horse and the great herds of grasslands buffalo, to the days before the Sioux had moved out onto the prairies and the treeless plains. Before the newcomers from beyond the sea came and changed everything. The old man thought Santee was a fitting place for Michael to perform his renewal ceremony. There was singing. There was drumming. There was chanting. There were sweat baths. There were fasts. And there was the ancient helper. The old friend. The spirit guide. Known for millennia by some groups of Native Americans, including some in what is now the southwestern United States. The Aztecs called it peyōtl. The Spanish appropriated the name, changing it only a little.

Peyote.

Michael felt the peyote spirit begin to take him. He was not alone. The sister, the grandfather, one other old man and two young relatives, there as helpers, one a solidly built young man, the other a slender and beautiful young woman, were also there. All had taken peyote. Michael Two Bulls was not the only one to seek a personal vision. Angie had also chosen to take the drug to see what it would tell her. Or, rather, expand and distill what she already knew. This was not the first time she had taken the peyote. Nor was it the first for the grandfather and the others. Including Michael, who had already embarked on what some called the Peyote Road.

Michael was ready. The peyote took him quickly. He was sick and then that was over and he watched the fire for a long, long while that was but a few minutes in ordinary time. After the watching he rose and began to slowly move about the fire, chanting and beating a rhythmic dusty path around it as he swayed and danced. Once, his first time with the peyote, he had seen himself as a warrior with fingers that shot fire. That vision had been incomplete. He had first to recover his personal honor by avenging the wrongs that had been done to him, and through him, to his people.

He had now done this.

Michael stripped himself naked and chanted to the fire and the Peyote Spirit as he danced slowly around the fire pit and recited what he had done. He picked up his clothing and threw it into the fire, chanting that he was now clean and reborn and ready for the mission the Peyote Spirit would reveal to him. Then he danced more, and chanted more, and danced and chanted more yet again.

At the first blushings of the false dawn, Michael noticed that the fire had returned to his fingertips. He began to shoot the fire into the pit around which he was dancing. Soon the figure of an old woman rose up from the center of the glowing coals in the fire pit.

"I am a warrior," he shouted proudly at the old woman. She scowled at him and threw off the buffalo robe that had covered her. Beneath the robe she was naked. A horned owl sat on her left shoulder and her pendulous old dugs hung nearly to her waist. Yet she seemed as agile as a young pronghorn.

"Warrior! She spat back at him. "You are a snake!"

"What?" Michael yelled back her, both angry and confused. "You call me a snake?" He brought up his arms and shot fire from his fingertips at the old woman. She caught the fire in her hands and violently threw it down at her feet. Sparks showered out of the fire pit. She laughed mockingly.

"A snake," she repeated. "Who only knows to strike down those who step on him." Michael stopped stone still and stared at the old woman.

"What would you have me do?" He asked, confused.

"Show me an eagle," the old woman cried. "The eagle soars and sees far. The snake crawls and sees little."

"But how?" He demanded in his continuing confusion. "How do I become an eagle?"

"When you are four you shall know," the old woman said enigmatically. "A white man will show you the way." Her form began to fade back into the fire.

"A white man? Four? You give me a riddle," Michael shouted. "Only a riddle. How...." It was too late. The old woman was gone.

Michael Two Bulls stood naked and befuddled before the blazing fire. The first light of false dawn had passed. When day came he wrapped his naked body in a blanket and went out by himself to a remote, lonely place to reflect on what had happened. He did not return until dusk.

For Angie it was also not the first time she had taken peyote. It always made her violently nauseous At first she threatened to lose out to the sickness. But she persevered and saw herself standing strong and erect in a blinding sunrise that brought with it a promise of things to come. A strong, fresh, sweet-smelling breeze blew her hair out in billowing waves of shining black pearls. It was at that moment she knew that she must pass on the seed of this warrior to the following generations.

The peyote ritual was for Lee Two Bulls another pleasant encounter with the grandfathers he himself would be joining before too much longer. But not yet. Not until he had completed his holy task, his sacred mission.

The trio of Two Bulls relatives journeyed to Angie's isolated cabin on the Rosebud after Santee. It seemed a safe place. No one knew of the connection between Angie and the man called Michael Johnson. Or at least that's what they thought.

Ben Thompson left his note on Angie's cabin door over a week earlier. He'd already been to New Mexico, rented a place to stay near Farmington and was returning. As the three Two Bulls discussed what to do about Thompson after seeing his note, synchronicity, fate--or perhaps, just possibly, something else--intervened. Thompson drove up the winding, dusty road to Angie's cabin not two hours after they got there. She warned them as soon as the pickup came around the bend.

"It's Ben," she said to the others. Her eyebrows raised in the question. "Do you wish to meet him?" The grandfather was hesitant and suspicious. But not Michael. He was remembering the vision in the peyote fire. When you are four, the old woman had said, a white man will show you the way. There were three of them. This man would make four. And he was that dangerous cultural conundrum to the Native American, a white man.

"I am certain I must meet him now," he answered, his face keen and thoughtful. "Wave him on in."

"Perhaps it is best that we first take the measure of this man," the old man interjected, still suspicious. "He is only a shadow now." The three of them fell silent and watched the Ford camper bounce towards them. Ben climbed out of the pickup and approached the three people. He thought there was something peculiar, something unusual, about the three of them together. It was eerie. Almost...almost....could it be... _prophetic_? Angie moved from them and hurried up to Ben. They embraced briefly, like old friends, Ben noticed to his disquiet, rather than lovers. Then Angie took him by the arm and led him towards the two men.

"These are some people I would like you to meet," she said. They came to within a few feet of the two men. Lee Two Bulls stood impassively staring at Ben.

"This will be your grandfather," he said without having to be told. He held out his hand, waiting for the old man to take it. He didn't. The elder Two Bulls only nodded in a vague and distant way. Ben turned his attention to the other man. He was lean, wiry, but to call him small or little would miss the point of his compact athletic presence. This small man who was not small came towards Ben, his hand outstretched in greeting. He seemed amused by something.

"I am the one you call Michael Johnson," he said as casually as though he were remarking on the weather. There was nothing casual about Ben Thompson's reaction. Michael Johnson! Lightning surged through Thompson's body. His central nervous system went into gridlock He felt as though his body, his ability to think, to speak, to, act, were paralyzed. Slowly, his face full of surprise, he extended his hand to Michael. He had a surprisingly strong grip. Thompson was equally surprised he took the man's hand, and, which really left him even more confused, with no malice.

"Well, I'll be damned," Thompson blurted, unable to think of anything else to say. "You really are Angie's brother, then?" Michael Two Bulls grinned at Angie.

"After all these years I have found a sister."

It took some time for Ben to overcome his shock at meeting this man under such easy, and, if not exactly friendly, at least non-hostile, terms. Here was the man who had killed three people whose bodies he had seen while still a police lieutenant. This was the man who had probably killed at least two others. This was the man who had triggered his expulsion from the force and the gradual isolation from all of his old patterns of life. Yet Ben's reaction was not at all what he had expected. Angie had been right. He had come not as an enemy, but as a man seeking understanding. He was neither resentful nor suspicious of Michael Two Bulls. Nor was he either enemy or ally. Instead, he was curious, captivated, as he had long been by the ancient world of the Anasazi.

Before the shock at his reaction had fully left Ben, Michael took him by the arm and led him aside. "I think you might well have something to tell me," he said to the bewildered ex-policeman. He led Thompson to a place under the grizzled jack pine at the top of the hill overlooking Angie's cabin and motioned for him to sit down.

"Now tell me all you know."

Ben told Two Bulls everything, about how the power structure was trying to suppress the truth about what had happened, about how Chief Scapella was manipulating the cover up, of how even David Saul had been compromised. That bitter fact upset Two Bulls more than all the others. The one man he thought he could trust!

"How far do you think they will go?" Two Bulls asked. Ben shook his head.

"I can't say. My guess is that they'll go as far as seems necessary to them."

"Does that mean violence?" Thompson looked askance at Two Bulls.

"Haven't you made that inevitable with your own actions?"

"Yes, I know that," Two Bulls said. "But I was thinking of my family. Would they strike at my grandfather and Angie, or at my half-brother, George?" Thompson paused a long moment, trying to come up with a fair assessment of the extremes to which the power structure, as represented by Vincent Scapella, might go. Finally he had an answer.

"If it becomes necessary, in their view of things, I would say that, yes, they are capable of violence. And willing to use it if they feel threatened. Including against your family." Suddenly Two Bulls was on his feet and walking away, without bothering to explain what was on his mind. Ben Thompson was left alone under the ancient pine to ponder on this strange man and what he might be up to next. And especially to deliberate yet again why he was even here. Ben Thompson, long time cop, protector of the public, upholder of the laws of civilization, he, Lieutenant Ben Thompson, the homicide investigator who caught over a score of murderers. Just what the hell was he doing here in the company of a man he knew to be a serial killer? And for that Ben Thompson had no clear answers. Questions, yes. Plenty of them.

But no answers.

Haseya Begay survived. A co-worker found her the next morning. Tears of both rage and sorrow clouding her vision, the coworker managed to call called 911. Hardly ten minutes later Haseya was in an ambulance racing to the hospital where she worked. She was tendered very special care by the nurses and doctors who had grown fond of the selfless young woman. Her physical injuries were serious, the psychological ones far worse. Haseya lay in what seemed to the doctors to be a semi-comatose state for a full twenty-four hours. Suddenly she jerked straight up from a thought that may or may not have been an admonition welling up from the subconscious. Michael! She had to warn Michael! Over the fervent objections of the doctors she dressed and left the hospital, drew money out of her carefully husbanded but still slender bank account and immediately took a plane to South Dakota. There was but one thought on her mind. She must find Michael and warn him. That evil man might even now be on his trail.

She took a connecting flight to Rapid City and rented a car there. Michael had spoken to her about having relatives named Two Bulls on the big reservations just east of Rapid City. A few questions revealed that there were two of them, Rosebud and Pine Ridge. On a hunch, or maybe because of something Michael had said she didn't quite remember, she decided to go to the Rosebud first, though it was farther away. It was hard going. Painful. Haseya had to stop by the side of the road to rest a half dozen times before she reached a town on the Rosebud. She belonged in the hospital and was able to keep going only because of pure courage and the heavy dosage of painkillers she was taking. The guilt about exposing Michael to danger drove her on even more than the drugs and her courage.

She staggered a little as she walked into the Tribal Police Office. Had anyone ever heard of a man named Michael Johnson or a family named Two Bulls? Haseya was in luck. Amos King, the big, broad shouldered young policeman on duty knew Angie Two Bulls well from her work with troubled youngsters.

"I know a woman named Two Bulls. Angie Two Bulls. There are plenty of other Two Bulls around, but she is the closest."

The policeman abruptly stopped, narrowing his eyes. "You look strung out to me, girl. You on somethin?" Haseya looked at the open countenance of Amos King and thought the best thing to do was tell the young Indian policeman the truth. She told her story quickly. Time and her strength were both running out. When he had heard the chilling tale of her torture by the spectral figure in her darkened apartment, the big Lakota policeman dropped the mask of his gruff cop exterior. He became kind and gentle with Haseya, helping her to sit down and bringing her a cup of hot tea made of medicinal herbs his mother grew in her garden.

Fifteen minutes later they were on their way to Angie Two Bulls' isolated cabin. When they pulled around the road into view of the cabin, the sight of the reservation police vehicle startled the four people in the cabin. Michael quietly slipped out a back door and hid out of sight. Angie walked out to meet them. It surprised her to see a strange woman with Amos.

"Angie," Amos began. "This here's Haseya Begay. She's looking for a guy calls himself Michael Johnson. Says he might be related to the Two Bulls."

Amos King saw the movement out of the corner of his eye and reacted with the swift reflexes of a young policeman. His hand was on his pistol and his body in a crouch before he realized that the darting man coming out of the brush was rushing at the girl, not him. At the same moment he noticed the man the woman did, too. She started towards him with hesitant steps.

"Michael," she said in wonder. "Is that you?" At that instant she saw his face clearly and recognized him. "But you've changed so much." He came up to the unsteady young woman and gathered her into his arms, their roles now reversed. Where he had once been the lamb, now he was the shepherd. She told him quickly, in anguished, tearful tones, what had happened. The others came and gathered around and listened. Ben, Angie, the old man, Amos King. All eyes were sullen as she told of the attack by the vicious man who was looking for Michael.

"Just what the hell is going on here?" Amos King finally said after Haseya had finished retelling her story. "Who is Michael Johnson and who the hell is this maniac that's coming after him?" Lee Two Bulls stepped forward, his countenance stern and authoritative, his tone that of one who projects authority. He spoke to Amos in Lakota, in the old-fashioned way of speaking, but still intelligible to modern Lakota speakers.

"There is no Michael Johnson. You have never heard of any Michael Johnson. This man is the light of the people, my grandson, Michael Two Bulls. He must be protected above all other things on this Earth." A mocking look slowly came over Amos King's sharp face.

"More of that old-fashioned spirit world nonsense, huh, grandpa?" He said in English. "You just never give up, do you?" The old man glowered at him. "Now let me tell you something, Lee Two Bulls. As far as I'm concerned you're just a diehard of an old troublemaker. " He reached out with a muscular arm and tapped one finger on Two Bulls' chest. "And I don't want no more trouble on this reservation. Lord knows there's already trouble enough."

Michael Two Bulls detached himself from Haseya and began to approach the scowling policeman. "There is no need to treat my grandfather in that fashion," he said in English. The policeman whirled on him.

"Whoever the hell you are, the same thing goes for you. I don't want no trouble on my reservation. So cool it!" Amos King reached out to tap Michael on the chest as he had the old man. Michael became a blur. He grabbed King's arm and catapulted him through the air. The astonished policeman landed on his face and found an arm around his neck before he could rise.

"You treat the Two Bulls with respect," Michael said, speaking now in a hard, guttural Lakota. Then Michael pulled the surprised King to his feet, something that astounded Thompson, who was standing nearby. King was nearly twice the size of Michael, yet the small man threw him around easily. Truly the man had physical power.

Michael Two Bulls had more than mere physical power. He put his hand gently on the big man's shoulder and stared directly into Amos King's eyes and spoke softly in the old fashioned Lakota of Lee Two Bulls until the young Lakota policeman's eyes dropped in recognition of something beyond his understanding. To his mind came images of the great ones of the misty past. Crazy Horse. Sitting Bull. Red Cloud. And that enigmatic and controversial Lakota holy man, Black Elk. His manner became apologetic, deferential, almost awed. The light of the people? Such talk had just been the ravings of foolish old men as far as he was concerned. Such foolish talk had ended with the massacre at Wounded Knee. But there was something strange about this powerful stranger they said was a Two Bulls. Something very, very strange. Strange, and powerful. They would have no more trouble from Amos King.

King left Haseya Begay with the Two Bulls and the white man and slowly drove back out the rutted dirt track towards the police station. He shook his head often in wonderment as he drove. This had been the most unusual day of his life.

Luis Munoz returned to his Miami home after what he considered his 'pleasant interlude' with the girl in Los Angeles. His way of life paid handsomely and the home he returned to was a comfortable one on a canal connecting to the ocean. He shared the house with his father, a portly, silver-haired man who spent most of his time fishing or playing dominoes with his cronies. Luis Munoz was following in his father's footsteps. The elder Munoz had been a secret police official under the tyrant Batista in pre-revolutionary Cuba. His specialties were the suppression of dissent and the extraction of information from prisoners. Luis Munoz' talents came quite naturally.

The two lived a quiet life in Miami and could well have been the wealthy Cuban expatriates their neighbors thought them to be. Money in quantity always had the effect of bringing greater respect and fewer questions. People did not often argue with success, especially when success was cloaked in the form of wealth. The elder Munoz had in fact been able to escape Cuba with a sizeable amount of assets. He read the revolutionary handwriting on the wall and transferred his assets when it was still possible. In that respect he had been more fortunate than many of his compatriots. But, then, the elder Munoz had had access to certain funds few other people even knew about. It had built them a comfortable life in Miami.

The younger Munoz had once hoped to build a life as a counterrevolutionary against Castro's Cuba. But he soon tired of the politics and ineffectuality of that and sought out other avenues of endeavor. His father had had contacts with underworld elements in both Cuba and Miami. It was not difficult to arrange an entree' for his son. It proved to be a most fortuitous choice for everyone concerned--except for those Munoz hunted.

After taking part of the day to relax after lapping their backyard pool twenty-five times and working out on their home gym, Munoz set about making his plans for the next phase of his manhunt. He knew that Michael Johnson had disappeared after leaving the hospital in Los Angeles. The Indian woman Haseya Begay had told him after he broke her will to resist that Johnson said he was going to South Dakota to seek out some family he had there. The people were called Two Bulls. They probably lived on either the Rosebud or the Pine Ridge reservations. Munoz decided to fly to Rapid City. From there he'd rent a car and go to the nearest reservation, Pine Ridge.

There was a somber, intense conversation at Angie's cabin after Amos King left. The man who had attacked Haseya was aware of the name Two Bulls and the Sioux reservations in South Dakota. It was no longer safe to stay at Angie's cabin. They would have to leave. And _soon._

"My place," Thompson said. "We can go there." Michael looked at him curiously.

"The place you rented in New Mexico?"

"Yes. It's isolated, nobody knows who I am, nobody would be able to trace us there."

"I think not, "Lee Two Bulls interjected. "There will be the rental records with your name." Thompson flushed in mild embarrassment. He was doing things now that not long ago he wouldn't even consider doing.

"I didn't use my own name," he replied, almost sheepishly. "You forget that I was also trying to disappear." Then he turned to Michael.

"Are you going to stay and wait for him to come here?" He was thinking of what had happened to Haseya. If he knew Two Bulls' patterns of behavior at all, that would be what he would do. The bastard who had brutalized the young Navajo nurse would have hurtled to the top of Two Bull's enemies list. Michael's mind was elsewhere.

"No. The first thing to do is get everybody to a safe place." Two Bulls' urgent tone morphed into something very different. He became distant, veiled. Flashing momentarily into Ben's mind an image of the ground fog that sometimes engulfed the trees in the Tamarack swamps near Ben's north woods cabin.

"First we make certain everyone is safe, then I have certain _appointments_ I must keep," Two Bulls said in his, to Ben, maddeningly cryptic way. And Ben was absolutely certain he didn't want a single shred of knowledge about exactly what 'certain appointments' meant. For a fleeting moment Ben wasn't sure whether this was real or he was trapped in another of his recent bizarre dreams. He shook his head. Not a dream.

Two Bulls turned to the old man. "I know what I have to do now. This is not a fight with a hired killer. If I finish him, they will only send another, and another after him. That's what they want, but that's not what I'm going to do." He looked at each of the others in turn.

"I am going to carry the war to the enemy's camp."

The part of Ben Thompson that was still a policeman blew up at that.

"I would worry a hell of a lot more about getting out of this than going on the warpath, Two Bulls," he said hotly. "You're already a hunted man. Do you want to take the rest of your family down with you?"

"What we do is our own affair," Michael replied. "No one is forcing you to be involved in this." Angie interrupted.

"There is something you do not understand, Ben," she said gently.

"And what's that?" He demanded. The stocky ex-cop was still angry at what, at least the conscious self layered over his turbulent interior, still considered absurd nonsensical behavior by the three Two Bulls. Rendered even more absurd by him being involved in it seemingly contrary to the Ben Thompson he had considered himself to be.

"Michael must have time to play out his destiny. After that it won't make much difference what happens to any of us." Ben stared at her.

"That sounds like a lot of crap to me. Destiny? What the hell are you talking about? You call a vendetta destiny? I call it primitive and barbaric. And, especially now, goddamn foolhardy There's a sadistic professional out there stalking you and here you're talking about some abstract notion of destiny."

"Are you with us," Angie asked in the same gentle tone. "Or _not?_ " To Ben it was as though an opposing lineman had blindsided him like back in his college linebacker days. If not actually physically laid out, he was mentally knocked flat. Ben's head filled with clashing ideas. He knew this moment would come, the moment of decision, yet he still mentally reeled with the weight of the decision. It was so....so.....goddamn outlandish. So..... _weird._

"With you? With you? Why...."

"Now is the time to make your decision, Ben." She looked levelly at him. "What's it to be?" Ben would have spun on his heels and made tracks quicker than an Olympic sprinter off the blocks were it just a matter of Angie's crazy warwhoop brother or her obstreperous grandfather. There was something else. A something that made all the difference, though he didn't fully realize it then. Angie. It was her. Ben couldn't. Just couldn't. Leave. Angie. Couldn't. Wouldn't.

"I....I....oh, damn! I'm with you, I guess." He looked nearly helpless. "But I couldn't begin to tell you why." He was the only one. The others easily understood merely by seeing the way Ben looked at Angie. He was a man smitten, despite his wary, once bitten maturity.

"You will understand better after you have taken the peyote," the old man interjected. Ben's head snapped at Lee Two Bulls.

"Peyote? Me? No way," he sputtered. "No goddamn way!"

"There's a first time for everyone, Ben," Michael said. "Worry about it when the time comes."

"But...." Angie stopped him.

"Ben. Remember. You're with us. Quit fighting it." He looked at her, then the others. He fell silent. The decision had been made. Ben Thompson had nothing more to say.

No words. But his mind was a whirlwind of swirling, warring thoughts, clashing so loudly in his head that it almost seemed to him as though the others could hear them.

They took Haseya back to the airport in Rapid City before they left for Ben's rented tumbledown farmstead in northwestern New Mexico. Ben and Angie accompanied Haseya to the airport, Ben driving Angie's rental car back, Angie driving Haseya in her old Volkswagen. The old man and Michael did not accompany them. They had something else they had to do, something which the old man insisted be done before they all disappeared. He wanted to take Michael out among the people, from reservation to reservation, and let them see the man that would become a legend among them. The two men left even before the others.

Thompson thought it all was lunacy. But he kept his silence. There was lunacy. And then the antidote, the override, to lunacy. And a wonderful lovely antidote, at that.

Angie.

Haseya described Luis Munoz to them as best she could. The brutalized Navaho woman had only dimly seen Munoz in the darkness of her unlit apartment, but there were certain things about him she could recall. He was a man of small to medium size, he spoke with a Spanish language accent she thought was other than Mexican, he was slender. But the thing about him that was most remarkable was the cat like fluidity of his movements. Munoz was like a wild animal in the quickness of his reflexes. So quick he was almost ephemeral. A man, Michael Two Bulls realized with a start, much like himself. A specter.

Or a ghost.

They were all alert for such a man after that. No one anticipated that Munoz would send a woman in his place. The Cuban was a clever man and often used ruses to find out something rather than always rely on the crudeness of intimidation and violence. He felt a certain refinement in that. Munoz brought along a young, olive-skinned, Indian-looking woman with him to Rapid City. She was in fact genetically a Native American but ethnically and culturally a Hispanic from central America. The woman had a pretty little baby with her of close to one year. After settling into the motel room, Munoz sent the woman on alone with the baby. She drove onto the Pine Ridge reservation and started asking people where she might find the father of her baby, a man called Michael Johnson. Or perhaps he called himself Michael Two Bulls. Could they please help her? Her baby needed its father. Her innocent face and huge brown eyes veiled her true purpose. She actually passed Haseya and Angie in the Volkswagen with Ben following in the rented car on the freeway out of Rapid City. But she didn't continue on to the Rosebud reservation, pulling off instead into Pine Ridge as Luis Munoz had instructed her. It would give Angie and Ben a little more time than they otherwise would have had.

Haseya was on the airplane back to her hospital bed in Los Angeles and Ben and Angie were headed back to the Rosebud. It was the first time they had been alone since he returned from his Minnesota cabin. The cabin that was not long ago intended to be his lakeshore fishing paradise sanctuary but now was already just a memory.

"A year ago," Ben began, "I couldn't have imagined something like this. And here I am now actually caught in something as bizarre as my weird dreams. Life is so goddamned strange that I don't know what's real any more."

"It's real, all right, Ben," Angie answered, throwing a quick glance at him from behind the VW's steering wheel. "One look at Haseya Begay should tell you that." Ben grunted unhappily.

"There's a real bastard out there after us, Angie," he said. "God, I hope he never gets his hands on you." Angie snapped a look at him from behind the wheel.

"Not half as much as I do, Ben Thompson!" His face darkened.

"Do you really realize just how much trouble we're in, Angie Two Bulls? I mean, do you _really_ realize it? You act like this is some kind of kid's game or something."

"Would giving in to fear change anything?" He was taken aback by her seemingly diffident attitude.

"Well, no. I suppose not. But, for God's sake, Angie. Don't you realize that's a professional hit man who's on our trail? And whoever has the connections to hire one has the ability to hire as many as it takes." Angie didn't take her eyes off the highway.

"I know," she said calmly.

"You mean you can just sit there and calmly accept your doom?"

"Doom? We're only on this Earth a short time, Ben," she said. "We're all doomed from birth. It's only a matter of when we die, how we die, especially why we die." She flashed a quick glance at him. "I only care about one thing--accomplishing that which I must before the end comes."

"More mystical stuff, huh, Angie? More destiny?"

"Call it what you will."

"And your destiny is exactly what?"

"To see that Michael fulfills his destiny."

More bullshit, Ben thought. He scowled, but didn't reply. He remained silent for a full ten minutes while Angie silently guided the Volkswagen down the highway. What kind of woman had he gotten himself mixed up with? His mind still working its way through a minefield of doubts, Ben looked over at the pretty woman beside him. No, not just pretty. Beautiful. Stunning. Sensuous. Mesmerizing. As compelling in her own way as her brother and grandfather were in theirs. Unlike--way, way unlike--any woman he had ever known.

"Do they really expect me to take peyote?" He finally said.

"Yes," she answered, adding, with utter conviction, "and you will."

"Son of a bitch," he muttered. Then he turned his gaze to the countryside flashing by outside. He didn't look at her again for a long time.

### Chapter 8

### The Southwest

Lee Two Bulls had a battered old Chevy that was on its last legs. They would never have completed the trip if Michael had not been a mechanic in his younger years. The old man was against it, but Michael would not budge. They would take Lee Two Bulls' venerable Chevy. Michael didn't want to risk his own pickup being connected to him. "There are eyes everywhere," he said to his grandfather. "Not all are friendly." Michael was able to keep the old car running. They made the trip the old man enigmatically called a 'Voyage of Discovery.' From the Rosebud to Pine Ridge to Crow Creek, Lower Brule and Cheyenne River in South Dakota, all the big Sioux reservations. Then they went up into North Dakota and the Sisseton, Devils Lake, Fort Berthold, Turtle Mountain and the big Standing Rock reservations. From there the pair crossed over into Montana and the Fort Peck and Fort Belnap reservations and even up into the scattered Sioux and Assiniboine reservations in Canada.

Everywhere Lee Two Bulls carried the message to the Sioux and their cousins, the Assiniboine, that a living legend had come among the people that they would talk about for generations to come. He had pointed to his grandson and told everyone who would listen that here was a warrior who was not afraid to fight back. Here was another seer, as in the old days. A reborn Black Elk who was a warrior as well as a mystic. His meaning was simple, yet profound. Hope for the rebirth of the Sioux peoples, the Dakota, Nakota, Lakota, Hohe and the others.

A people--a _nation_ \--finally rising from the ashes of defeat..

The response? Hoots of derision. And worse. Utter indifference. Those who did bother to pay attention did so only to scoff. Only a few, young as well as old, women as well as men, listened and did not laugh. But only a very few. Just a few. Seeds. A handful.

Seeds.

The old man would not let them stay long in any one place. He wanted only that the people see Michael Two Bulls and know he was real. Then at least when word began to spread about him there would be many who could say that they had actually seen him and perhaps spoken a word or two with the odd little man. Yes, they would recall, there was a certain power about him that one noticed. He had been a very unusual man. Michael was not offended by this. He was patient and calm, even serene, through it all, though his grandfather's antics sometimes amused him. Their trip began to seem to Michael at times like an old time traveling medicine show. But above all Michael was thoughtful. He was still watching intently for some sign, some symbol, some omen, that would show him exactly what he must do next.

Munoz' innocent-looking young accomplice spent most of the first day on the Pine Ridge reservation trying to find traces of Michael Johnson. She finally traced down a Two Bulls family that thought perhaps some of their relatives over in the Rosebud might know about it. A Lakota woman there with a baby she said was fathered by Bennie Two Bulls had many years ago married a white man named Johnson and gone off somewhere to the east. The young woman returned with the news in the early evening to a motel room in Rapid City. Munoz was waiting for her.

It had been a difficult day for her with the young child, who was at times cranky from teething, but she was paid well for her work and a single woman with a baby had to make money some way. She was content with her occasional association with Luis Munoz. She was also completely unaware of the sadistic side of him. Munoz had fooled her as it had so many others. She believed Munoz when he told her he was a private detective specializing in unusual and difficult cases.

The young woman, her name was Maria Sanchez, was at the Rosebud at the end of the following morning. It was a long and, to her, boring drive from Rapid City over lonely prairie roads that made her almost nostalgic for the frenetic throbbing freeways of Miami. The day had moved well towards evening before she discovered a pair of clues for Munoz. They were talking about a crazy old man named Lee Two Bulls who was taking a younger man he called his grandson around and telling wild stories about him being an example for the others to follow. The rumor was spreading across the reservation accompanied by skepticism and scorn. The strange man, they said, was called Michael Two Bulls.

The second piece of information she learned would be of more direct use to Munoz. When the young woman had asked a big young Indian policeman if he knew anything about any Michael Johnson or Michael Two Bulls, the man's eyes had flashed and for just a tiny moment darted downward and to the side. Not much, but just enough for the woman, who had been schooled by Munoz on watching for signs of deception, to know Amos King was lying when he said nobody by those names lived on the Rosebud.

Munoz broke into a self-satisfied toothy smile when he heard what Maria Sanchez had discovered. The Indian policeman would he able to tell him where to find Michael Johnson. Munoz put the woman and child onto an airplane to Miami that evening and then returned to the motel to make his preparations for the next day.

Amos King was patrolling in his four wheel drive police cruiser when the call came over the radio.

"Amos," the familiar voice said. "This is Pete. Some guy is on the telephone and wants to talk to you. Says he's a federal narc. DEA. Should I patch him through?" King looked in puzzlement at the radio.

"A fed? Wants me?" The big man shook his head and shrugged. "O.K., Pete. Patch him through."

"Amos King?" A voice asked over the police radio.

"This is King," the sharp-faced Lakota policeman answered.

"My name is Matthew Gomez. As your friend so bluntly put it, I'm a federal narc. DEA. I drove in from Rapid City this morning. I'd like to talk to you about a heroin smuggler who goes by the names of Michael Johnson and Michael Two Bulls. I have information that you might be able to inform me of this man's whereabouts." Amos King was instantly alert, his nerves jangling in warning. He stared at the radio in shock. But not so much that he didn't know what he had to do.

"Johnson? Two Bulls? Heroin? Nope. Can't help you, mister. Somebody gave you some bad information."

"At any rate, officer King," the voice persisted. "Might I speak to you in private about this? I think you would find it most interesting." King agreed, reluctantly. Did he have a choice? To refuse might seem suspicious.

"I don't suppose that wouldn't hurt anything," he answered, trying to sound unconcerned.. "I'll come in on my lunch break at noon. You anywhere near where you could meet me?"

"I'll he waiting for you at the tribal office," the voice replied.

Luis Munoz disconnected the car phone, a pricey extra that was well worth the money, in the rental car he was driving and climbed out of the car to stretch his body as he waited patiently for Amos King to drive past in his police cruiser. Munoz calculated that King would have to pass this point no matter where he was headed on the reservation. This end of the patrol had taken him to the reservation's border. To reach anything within the reservation he had to return by this same road.

And he came, barely fifteen minutes later. Munoz watched the police cruiser pass from his hidden position behind a rock strewn small hill, wondering as he waited where the hell the rocks came from in this treeless rolling prairie. When King went by, driving very fast, he ambled down to his rented car and pulled out on the road behind King's path. It was a simple matter to follow him at a distance on the dusty reservation roads.

Amos King was deeply worried, even close to desperate, as he drove directly for Angie's cabin. For some reason he did not comprehend he felt compelled to do everything he could to protect the Two Bulls and that strange relative of theirs. Since Angie had no phone the only thing he could think of was to drive out to the cabin and warn them.

Exactly what Munoz had hoped for.

A half hour later the police cruiser was bouncing over a bumpy and rutted road that had to be someone's private access. The Cuban knew they were getting close. He stopped, popped the trunk and calmly, an observer would have considered him nonchalant, walked back to the trunk, little puffs of dust rising where his feet struck the bone dry dirt road. Munoz looked around him at the parched landscape in distaste.

"This country is fucking butt ugly," he muttered, thinking of the abundance of flowers and greenery at his Florida home.

He reached into the trunk and took out the sniper rifle he preferred, a specially modified Finnish 7.62 TKIV 85, broken down in an oversized attaché case, and assembled it with expert speed and skill. He climbed back into the rental car, put the weapon onto the seat beside him and resumed his pursuit of the unaware policeman. He was tingling with the excitement of the hunt.

Munoz's toothy humorless smile returned as he drove the last mile.

King pulled into the yard outside the cabin and violently braked the cruiser to a skidding halt. He jumped out of the driver's seat and rushed up to the door, pounding on it in agitation. The spooked policeman at first didn't notice there were no cars anywhere around. Angie and Ben had been to the cabin in the past 24 hours, gathered up their belongings and driven off in different cars, Angie's VW and Thompson's pickup already on the interstate in Colorado. Lee and Michael Two Bulls had moved both their vehicles to Santee before going on their whirlwind tour of the reservations. They would switch to Michael's pickup after they returned to Santee a few days later, secreting the old man's failing Chevy in an isolated gully at Santee and leaving Santee headed south on a Nebraska secondary road. Though several days apart, they would all head for the Four Corners. Amos King had no idea where they were or where they were going. There was nothing he could tell Munoz. No matter. Though he could not know it, there was reason, apocalyptic reason, for him being so spooked. The Ghost was coming.

There would be no witnesses this time.

"Angie! Lee! Michael! Hey! Anyone in there?" There was no answer. King threw open the door and peered inside. No one. There was hardly anything in the cabin besides shelves of books and an empty desk. They'd packed up and left. The big policeman took one quick tour through the cabin and came back out the door scratching his head.

"What the hell....," Amos said, puzzled as he stood on the cabin porch.

From one hundred yards away a sniper rifle centered its crosshairs on Amos King's right shoulder. The silenced sound of the rifle was barely audible. The bullet struck King's shoulder, shattered his clavicle and tore through his back and into the wall of the cabin behind him. The shock of the high velocity slug spun him completely around and dropped him off the porch of the cabin into the dusty yard.

He struggled to his knees, his uninjured left hand and arm awkwardly reaching to jerk the holstered pistol on his right hip, when the second slug came in, clipping the brachial artery and holing the scapula of his left shoulder. King rocked over backwards onto his head and then came to rest lying flat in the dust, his left arm flopping spastically. He was sobbing as much out of frustration as out of pain. But not so much that he didn't hear the footsteps approaching.

A small man, swarthy but probably not an Indian, maybe a Hispanic, with a queerly tranquil expression, stood over him holding a scoped rifle cradled in his arm. King remembered the man Haseya Begay had described. This was the same man. It had to be him. At that searing moment the young policeman grasped as clearly as he had ever known anything in his life that he was about to die. He began to silently make peace with his God and his ancestors.

"Where is Michael Johnson-Two Bulls?" The man said in a voice slightly touched with a Hispanic inflection.

"No idea. They're all gone. Don't know where....," a wave of pain surged through his body, "....wouldn't tell you if I did," King sputtered through his agony. Munoz reacted instantly and viciously kicked the wounded man in the shoulder. King screamed and cursed. Munoz waited patiently until King quit screaming.

"Where is Michael Johnson-Two Bulls?" He repeated. King looked up at the man and spit at him. The spit had not yet hit the ground before Munoz had kicked the helpless man three more times in his wounded arm. A tsunami of pain engulfed Amos King and it took a full five minutes before he was aware of anything besides the howling synapses of his wrecked body.

"This is only the beginning," Munoz said, smiling and looking more like a placid car salesman than an assassin. "I can make things very unpleasant for you. I think you are aware of that now. So why put yourself through any more pain than is necessary? Just be a good little Indian and tell me where he is?" Amos King reached inside himself for one last burst of strength and forcefully hurtled a gob of blood and spittle that struck Munoz in the face and shrieked at him.

"Fuck you, you butt fucking bastard! Your father is a cocksucker and your mother is a whore!"

As quick as a rattlesnake striking its prey, Munoz' rifle rose off its cradle in his arm and put a bullet into Amos King's forehead. Amos died instantly. It was exactly the reaction King had wanted. Munoz' regret was as swift as his action. He had a temper tantrum, pounding his feet again and again angrily into the dust alongside the dead man, the clouds of dust powdering his trousers. Then he gradually began to calm down. The innocuous appearance returned to his face. He smiled once more. An idea.

The catlike Cuban put his rifle down, drew a knife from his pocket and opened it. The blade, inevitably, razor sharp. Bending over King's body, he grabbed the dead man's hair in one hand. With the other he began cutting a circle around the top of the head. Munoz scalped him. When he was done he found a nail and pounded the scalp onto the cabin door with a rock. Then he gave the cabin a thorough search.

"Nice touch," he said as he came out and looked at the bloody scalp nailed on the cabin door. Then he picked up his rifle, swept the dust of his trousers with his hands, gave King's body one last kick as he passed it and went back to his car. He began to hurry.

Maybe he could get back to Miami in time for a late supper.

Angie followed Ben's pickup in her little VW bug all the way to New Mexico. They had left only eighteen hours ahead of Munoz. Had they stayed just one more day, Munoz would have found them. But luck was with them and they were several hundred miles to the south when Amos King died in the dust outside Angie's cabin. Lucky for them. As unlucky as it gets for Amos King.

Ben had gone to New Mexico and rented an old farmhouse a week earlier. The place was almost within walking distance of the sprawling Navajo, Apache and Ute reservations in the area widely known as the Four Corners. A place where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado do a four way stop where they collide with each other courtesy of 19th Century map making surveyors and politicians. Not only are the Four Corners historical Native American country, they are also contemporary Native American country. And a place where the residual echoes of clashing cultures could still be heard.

Ben figured the old farmhouse lingered on after some hardscrabble family that had tried to grub a living out of the stubborn soil had eventually given up and left. All that remained of the farm were some fallen down fences, an overgrown orchard and a half dozen weather beaten old buildings in various states of sinking back into the earth. Ben was somewhat surprised that the place hadn't been vandalized or used as a palette for the local puffed-ego graffiti artists. He didn't know it, but the cantankerous elderly owner of the abandoned farm lived on the property next door and was quick to chase away would be vandals. The old man was relieved when Ben moved in, believing he could ease off on what might have seemed like his overprotective, almost manic, vigilance. He had his reasons. The place had been his family's farm for three generations before him. Those three generations were buried in a plot behind the barn. Including his wife, who he had loved with an abiding intensity since they were children growing up on adjacent farms. When she died in a tragic accident on the farm his world fell apart and he couldn't bear living in the house anyhow. He had to leave.

But he didn't go far.

The house wasn't too bad. The aging owner made repairs from time to time and the place hadn't weathered as much as it might have in a less arid climate. The barn was still up, though unstable enough to make it an even bet it wouldn't make it through the next gale force windstorm. Two other outbuildings had already fallen in. Another building was still sound and served as a garage and tool shed. And, of course, there was the outhouse. That was the first thing Ben fixed.

Most important of all, the place had water. The pump still worked and, after Ben primed it, put out a reliable quantity of sweet, cool water from an underground vein no one had thus far managed to pollute or deplete. Ben figured that whoever lived there years earlier must have abandoned the place in a hurry, the old man he rented it from not having said word one about its history. There was a kitchen table, plenty of chairs and other furniture, beds, even some linen. Angie and Ben quickly went to work making the old house habitable. They had it done well before Michael and the old man showed up two days later. Ben went into Farmington and, after having to put down a sizeable deposit, got the power company to send out a crew to reconnect the power line that still ran to the weathered old farmhouse. They had electricity that same evening. Which meant lights--Ben picked up light bulbs amongst other necessities in Farmington--and power for the electric stove and Ben's radio. Not for the well, though. The previous inhabitants, probably because of having little money, had never installed an electric pump. Nor did they have an indoor toilet, though there was a sink with a hand pump and a big tub for baths. There was no furnace, either, but there were a pair of wood stoves at opposite ends of the house. And, Ben was quick to discover, a small stack of split fireplace wood and much larger pile of unsplit wood next to the old barn. Mostly oak, from God knew where Ben had to wonder, in this tree-challenged landscape.

At least there was a reasonably serviceable axe among the tools the fast-exiting former owners left behind in their haste, Ben noticed as he searched through what had been the farm's utility shed. Which set him to musing. Something sure as hell put wings to their feet. Were they running from something? Like Ben and the Two Bulls were now? More synchronicity popping up in his life? The answer was no farther away than the neighboring farm where the old man lived. There was no 'they' to the former owners. Just him. He was running from death. And so were the Two Bulls and, possibly, maybe even probably, also Ben. Knowing none of that, not yet, Ben shrugged, took the axe, sharpened it as best he could with a cross hatched file, and went forth to multiply the stack of split wood.

Later that week, on another visit to the town for supplies, Ben stopped at a local restaurant, Mandy's Place, to have a cup of coffee and not so coincidentally let the locals see who was renting the old place outside of town. Just a harmless retired guy who wanted to snoop around the ancient ruins of the Four Corners. A friendly waitress, who considered it an essential part of her job to keep the community informed of the latest news (she disdained the word 'gossip' as being far beneath her crucial community function) leaned over the lunchroom counter, her locally famous bust nearly touching the counter and drawing several somewhat furtive glances from other customers, and proceeded to tell Ben the story behind the old farmhouse he was renting.

"The old man," she said, referring to the owner, "never did get over his wife's death. He still mourns her. Kind of sad, really. He used to be a fixture at all the local dances and parties and community events. Almost like a community leader." She looked at Ben, shaking her head. "Now he's pretty much a hermit." That set Ben to remembering. He had lost a woman he deeply loved, too. Not to death. Not literal death. Death in a different sense. His expression darkened at the thought of being cuckolded by Police Chief Vincent Scapella. The waitress noticed.

"Something wrong, sir? You look kinda pale all of a sudden." Ben looked up at the middle aged, chunky, spectacularly busty waitress.

"A memory I'd just as soon not remember," he replied. The waitress slowly shook her head.

"A woman. Right?" Ben tried not to scowl. The waitress looked at him with the combination of understanding and compassion that she, the custodian and purveyor of local experience, felt obligated to show.

"Right," Ben replied tonelessly.

"It's always a woman," the waitress replied. Then, twisting a finger to jab in the direction of her own voluptuous self....

"Or a man."

Then she completely surprised him with the question that had been on her mind since Ben first sat down at the lunch counter.

"We hear there's an Indian woman with you out on the old farm." Her voice seemed to Ben to carry a faint touch of accusation. That was when Ben noticed. None of the other customers looked like Indians, though much of the Four Corners, including near Farmington, was heavily peopled with Native Americans. Ben didn't react by putting words to his thoughts. Reaction would only arouse more curiosity. Something which he sure as hell didn't want.

"Just a friend and colleague," Ben replied, "no romance. Being burned once was more than enough. She's a person of mixed race who some might think looks Indian." He paused to throw a thinly veiled expression at her.

"Whatever that means...." The waitress blanched. Her blue eyes and pale skin hid from almost everyone the genetic fact that she had a Cherokee grandmother in Oklahoma. A fact she had never come to terms with and still caused her no little confusion. She turned away and moved towards another customer who'd just entered the diner. The voluptuous waitress had no glimmering, at least not consciously, that she was a literal embodiment of her local world. Racial and cultural turmoil still struggling to find an equilibrium.

Ben finished his coffee, left a sizeable tip, and quietly left.

There was enough time for Thompson to dabble with a lifetime's dream. He and Angie went out from the farmstead to some of the nearby ancient ruins that dotted the whole area around the Four Corners. First up was a no-brainer. The spectacular ruins at Mesa Verde National Park just an hour away across the state line in Colorado. Part of their touristing was purely personal interest in the Anasazi, the old ones as the Navaho called them. But there was another reason for going to the ruins besides Ben's curiosity. They wanted to let people know who they were to keep gossiping tongues and prying eyes from learning too much. Thompson told everyone that he was a writer and researcher and that Angie was a colleague. And that seemed to satisfy the curiosity of the locals, who already had plenty of not always positive experience with good-looking Indian women and white men who called themselves writers or some other species of artist. An interracial sight that did not sit well with some of the cultural intransigents of all colors in what was still a racially charged world. The frontier wasn't so far in the past in the Four Corners. Not in the minds of some of the locals--red, white, brown and the occasional black.

By the time the Two Bulls men turned up the people around the old farm were accustomed to Ben and Angie. Thompson had already casually mentioned to his neighbors that he'd probably have visitors from time to time, and to just direct them on out to his place if they lost their way. So when Michael and the old man did show up one night no one paid much attention. They disappeared from the sight of outsiders without so much as a ripple. Or so they thought.

They put Michael's pickup and Angie's VW in the barn. Only Thompson's camper was parked outside where it was visible to a casual observer.

Michael didn't stay long. The execution and mutilation murder of Lakota policeman Amos King on the Rosebud Reservation made the national news and launched Michael into some dark place that Ben didn't want to even think about. The old man stayed at the farm with Ben and Angie, but Michael left again the next day. His parting words reverberated in Ben Thompson's mind for a long while after Michael left and almost tipped Thompson into changing his mind and getting the hell away from the Two Bulls family while he still could. Michael's parting words? Ones that Ben had not one a single doubt were absolutely prophetic.

"The war is now in the enemy's camp."

Vincent Scapella returned to the City Club from the airport and immediately phoned up an obviously upset Judge Miles Crowley. The usually unflappable judge had heard of the rumors from the Dakota reservations and knew of their meaning. Was this asshole Indian or whatever the hell he was going to go public with what he knew? He was unusually curt with Scapella about him fulfilling his obligations. Scapella assured the judge that arrangements had been made and that a 'satisfactory conclusion' to the affair was imminent.

"I have things under control, Judge," Scapella said. "It won't be long."

"It better not be, Vincent," Judge Crowley said in what was intended to be--and was--an intimidating growl. "The country is full of qualified law enforcement officers who would love to have your job." Scapella scowled at the unseen voice. But said nothing.

It was late at night and few people remained in the Club. The handful who lived in the private rooms there had gone to bed. All of the employees had gone home except for the two guards who prowled the building at night. One of them saw Scapella use the pool, then go into the steam room.

Vincent Scapella thought the soft footfalls he heard were those of the guard. He didn't bother to glance in the direction of the noise. These guards didn't deserve a second look. Not a one of them was fit to wear a real policeman's uniform. It didn't occur to Scapella that the low quality of the guards was primarily due to the minimal wages they were paid. He just thought of them as being second rate. It was another of life's dark jests that one of Scapella's pet phrases was that 'you get what you pay for.'

It was an easy matter for Michael to slip past the security and to find Scapella in the steam room. It was the only place where there were any lights besides security lights. He slipped up to the police chief in the thick haze of the steam and was upon him before Scapella knew he was there.

"Chief Scapella?" Michael asked in a soft voice. Scapella grunted irritably.

"What do you want?" He snapped. He thought the man talking to him was a guard.

"I have something for you," Michael said. Scapella turned slowly, his manner brusque and condescending as it usually was for the little people in his world.

"What? What are you bothering me for at this late hour? It had better be something important." The shadowy figure, obscured by the billowing clouds of steam, handed something to him.

" _It is."_ Two Bulls replied in a low voice. Scapella took the object in his hand and stared at it. It took a few seconds for him to understand. Scapella began to shake with fear.

It was an Indian Head nickel.

All three local television stations and the newspaper received phone calls within a total of less than five minutes. Each time a male voice said that they would find a spectacular murder in the steam room of the City Club. Whatever doubt and hesitancy the reporters might have felt was shattered by the man's assertion that he was the Indian Head killer of several months earlier. That put their feet into motion, despite any lingering skepticism. The remote cameras, the reporters, the photographers, all scrambled from their stations and offices to converge on the City Club. A confused guard at the door tried to stop them but they were too many and easily went around him. One of the TV reporters had done a piece on the City Club and knew where the steam room was. The whole group rushed to what had been a steam room but they would momentarily learn was now the scene of a crime room.

There they found Chief Vincent Scapella lying on a steam table with his throat cut. On his naked chest lay an Indian Head nickel. The door into the steam room had two things fixed onto it. One was a copy of a newspaper report of the bizarre murder and scalping of Rosebud policeman Amos King. The other item tacked to the steam room door was something that made several of the newspeople wretch.

Vincent Scapella's bloody scalp.

No one could have known that Michael Two Bulls forced Vincent Scapella to tell him who was directing his actions. He already had the name of Judge Miles Crowley, so he knew that would have to be one of the names. Scapella was so frightened by the hard-eyed man with the knife at his throat that he had blurted out everything he knew into the tape recorder Two Bulls' held in his other hand. Michael had Scapella carefully and slowly enunciate their names, and whatever other information Scapella knew, such as their occupations and some of their locations. There were eight of them, eight members of the inner circle of the elite who had known what was really going on and actively supported it. The threat to their power overrode any notions of justice.

"Trite as it might seem, as the old saying went," Ben Thompson would one day repeat.

'Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.'"

These eight now were added to Michael Two Bulls' list of enemies. He finally had penetrated into the aeries of the string-pullers. The highly placed people who quietly, and for the most part anonymously, manipulated the local and regional world unbeknownst to the mass of the populace. "Bread and circuses," Seamus O'Toole once snarked to Thompson. "Good for the Romans. Still good today."

Two Bulls killed Scapella quickly, without brutality. The scalp was something that had to be done because of Amos King. Then Michael slipped back out of the club the way he had come in. He drove to the outskirts of the city and then made his phone calls. Michael was already out onto the open road and headed to New Mexico when the reporters burst in on Vincent Scapella's body.

Of course it caused a humungous uproar. The airwaves were throbbing with the sensational news. The murder of a big city's police chief under such bizarre circumstances made the lead story in all the national headlines and many international ones as well. And with the headlines and the notoriety came a growing number of journalistic questions. Who was this Indian Head killer? Why was he doing what he was doing? And, which got a few of the more thoughtful journalists interested, what was the connection to the scalping murder of the Indian policeman on the Rosebud in South Dakota?

Scapella's murder shook the world of the elite to its very foundations. In language that Vincent Scapella might have used, the barbarians were at the gates and the chief of the protective Praetorian Guard had fallen. For the first time those who manipulated things from behind the scenes began to move to the visible edge of the violent flow of events. And also for the first time they began to feel something very different for them in their protected lives. Something real, nerve-jangling, visceral.

Fear.

The publicity surrounding Scapella's death made Judge Miles Crowley and his colleagues extremely uneasy, with some, almost panicky. Even the habitually unruffled Crowley was noticeably jumpy. No one had yet been able to crack into the facts behind the scenes, but they were getting too close for comfort. Crowley had Lieutenant Ed Davis, who was promised a promotion to captain, take all the files on Michael Johnson in both the police department and the courthouse and destroy them. _Personally_ destroy them. It was now more important than ever that Michael Johnson's name, and especially what he knew and the threat to the elite he represented, did not become public. Yet even the powerful reach of Chief Judge Miles Crowley couldn't control everything. The press sniffed the rumors coming out of the Dakota reservations and started investigating them. It was soon clear that the fabled so-called Warrior of the Sioux who was supposed to be a modern day prophet had some close connections with the killings. In fact, it seemed as though the Sioux warrior/prophet and the Indian Head killer might be the same man.

Crowley read an editorial in the evening paper on just that subject and crumpled up the newspaper in anger. This was going to require a meeting of the central figures of the elite. He called them together for an emergency session at 9:00 that evening in a private room in the City Club. They came in singly and in pairs, using the excuse of dining in the elegant restaurant in the upper floors or visiting the gym and spa. They tried to hide it, but Crowley knew the truth. They were worried. They gathered not in one of the elegantly appointed meetings rooms they kept to impress both themselves and visitors-- recently refurbished with illegally harvested rare hardwoods from supposedly protected forests in interior Indonesia--but in a plain, pedestrian, indifferently furnished room used for staff briefings and other inconsequential events. They were keeping this as low key and quiet as they could.

"This thing is going to blow up in our faces," Crowley said to the people assembled in the room, "unless we take immediate action." All but one of the people on the list Two Bulls had gotten from the doomed Scapella were in the room. It was a literal Who's Who of the regional power structure. Two, perhaps three, of the people present were nationally powerful and might be considered as belonging to the national elite. Judge Crowley was one of them.

"There is only one way to deal with this," Crowley told the others. "And that is with strict silence. Let them find out what they can. But if none of us break our silence there can be little they will learn to make a connection to us." The judge, a regular in the Club's gym and still muscular and fit despite his age, looked around the room at the assembled luminaries.

"We must be unified in this. In unity is our strength." His tone lowered and his eyes became slightly hooded. "I need not tell any of you the seriousness of the consequences of even the smallest of mistakes." No one offered any recriminations over the gory events that had forced them into the position they now were in. Had they been petty or stupid, they would not have been leaders of the elite. The more thoughtful among them even realized that a certain arrogance of power had trapped them in their own web of deception. One overriding imperative bound them together, and every one of them lucidly recognized what that imperative was--

It was now a matter of getting the spider before the spider got them.

"You are all aware that certain measures are being pursued to seek out and eliminate this psychopathic killer," Crowley continued. "Be assured that these measures are continuing and will soon be successful." The tough judge, he was known for tough sentencing practices as well as being physically tough, scanned each and every one of the assembled faces.

"We must be patient, and silent, until that time." Repeating, while staring at them with the most intense of his ominous courtroom expressions.

"Be patient! And silent!"

Since Scapella's death, Munoz' contact was Judge Crowley himself. The judge did not much like the idea of being so directly involved with the sordid underworld Munoz inhabited, but this was a situation that called for extreme measures. There was no one to replace Scapella. Not without a time consuming careful vetting. Time which he did not have. It was a singular exception to his hard set rule of distancing himself from the distasteful realities sometimes unavoidably necessary to maintain the integrity of the social framework and the stability of society. An integrity and stability that, Judge Crowley fervently believed, benefited everyone from the high to the low. It was the implicit mandate that the elite accepted in their role as the stewards of modern civilization. It didn't just benefit them, it benefited everyone. Break the social compact and what resulted? The guillotines of the French Revolution, the firing squads of the Russian Revolution, the mass murders of the Chinese Revolution. Cures that were worse than the disease. They could not, would not, let that happen to modern America.

Or so they believed.

The press coverage didn't subside after the initial splash of publicity over Scapella*s spectacular murder. On the contrary, it sent a determined few journalistic bloodhounds hard on the trail of Michael Johnson. They continued to reveal more facts almost daily in the media. Nothing definitive. Pieces in a obscure puzzle. Crowley found this maddeningly grating. He detested the press. He considered them to be irresponsible troublemakers who had no real insight into how and why things worked. Only those in the highest circles of publishing and newscasting understood these things, and they were now largely out of control of the flow of events. The best they could do was try to effect at least some degree of damage control.

One fact after another was revealed about the Indian Head killer. He was found to probably be a man named Michael Johnson who had changed his family name to Two Bulls, after his biological father, a Sioux Indian. A New York Times reporter who happened to be an Iroquois Indian had managed to dig that up in his investigations on the Sioux reservations. He also made the distinct point that Sioux was an exonym and that the so-called Sioux in fact referred to themselves as Dakota, Lakota, Nakota or Hohe. In Michael Johnson/Two Bulls' case, a Lakota.

Another journalist searched out Michael Johnson's half-brother to try to learn what had happened to turn an ordinary citizen into a killer. Though no one had yet discovered the impact that Lee Two Bulls had had on his grandson, the allegations of Johnson's brother about the highhanded way Michael had been treated by the system did find its way into print. One of the headlines was this:

What Drove the Indian Head Killer to Seek Bloody Revenge?

This made Judge Crowley absolutely livid, skyrocketing his blood pressure, with an obvious display of fist clenching anger rare for the carefully controlled man. Things were clearly getting way out of hand. There were only two courses left for him to follow, both very defensive and problematical in their effectiveness. The unity of silence must be maintained. And Johnson had to be found and killed. If he were captured and able to speak to the media, or have the forum of an open trial, the results could be absolute disaster. The usually lethargic and diffident common people Crowley privately loathed would incandesce into hordes of Patrick Henry wannabes. The public outrage would be incalculable. The entire power structure could be in jeopardy. There might possibly even be criminal indictments against some of them, something almost unheard of in a nation that traditionally had one standard of justice for the average person and quite another for the elite. Johnson had to be found and permanently silenced before anyone could talk to him.

And goddamn soon!

Something began to happen that Judge Crowley had secretly feared from the beginning. Rather than arouse public indignation and disgust, the Indian Head killer began to shade towards being something of a folk hero. Crowley blamed the media for this, and it was true that a few cynical and/or agenda driven journalists consciously pursued that angle. But for the most part it was genuine. All of the little people, the average people, the ordinary people of the United States who had felt at the mercy of the shadowy forces beyond them began to see Michael Two Bulls as a man who had the courage to fight back against the forces that exploited all of them.

And what was most intriguing about it to them was that Two Bulls was a clever, furtive figure who slipped through the fabric of society like wind through a screen. Almost a replay of the days of the folk hero bandits of the past, the post Civil War James Brothers and the bank robber icons of the Great Depression like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. It secretly delighted a very great many people that the marshaled power of the country could not find this single defiant man. This infuriated Judge Miles Crowley all the more. He detested the common people even more than he had before. And that was already a great deal.

No one knew where Michael Two Bulls had gone. Angie Two Bulls had also vanished. And since the only person who had seen Ben Thompson with the Two Bulls was Amos King, the police did not learn of Thompson's involvement. In all of this, especially with Scapella dead, no one even thought of Ben Thompson. Not even his old friend, ex-sergeant Ed Davis, Lieutenant and now soon to be Captain Ed Davis. And it was Ben Thompson who bought all the groceries and other household goods they needed, and the newspapers, for the four people hiding in the old farmstead Ben had rented outside of Farmington in New Mexico.

It never occurred to the police around Farmington that a white man would be involved with the Indian Head killer. The people the police were looking for, the authorities now believed there were three of them, two men and a woman, were all Sioux Indians from Dakota. Ben came and went from the town with friendly waves at the local police. He always brought back several newspapers and news magazines, which were read with avid interest by the fugitives.

Ben was changed from his days as a police officer. Both the man inside and the exterior he presented to the world. He let his hair and beard grow, wore more informal clothing unconcerned with style and even walked with a freer, less deliberate gait. An old friend would have had to look twice to recognize him.

Still, there was a nationwide intense police search for the Two Bulls and there was always the possibility of some chance encounter leading to exposure. It made Ben edgy and extremely cautious. He didn't have the equanimity of the Two Bulls. He felt his gut churn with tension whenever he left the old farmstead to go to town. And that wasn't the only thing that made him nervous. Michael continued to appear and disappear like some spectral wraith, always responding to questions about it with a noncommittal shrug. Michael Two Bulls, Thompson was more and more inclined to think, even beyond his grisly lethality, was a downright ethereal otherworldly presence. Like one of the bizarre characters in the offbeat books by science fiction writers with overactive imaginations. He frequently paused to ponder on his series of bizarre dreams and even at times wonder if he were really still inside one very long and turbulent dream. He repeatedly revisited his decision to stay with the Two Bulls. But not enough to change it. Not yet. There was, still, Angie.

Luis Munoz was enchanted with the manner of Chief Vincent Scapella's death. This Johnson or Two Bulls or whatever the hell his name was had somehow learned who had hired Munoz and taken his idea of justice directly to the man responsible. Munoz felt neither fear nor anger at Scapella's death. He was delighted. Finally Luis Munoz, the Ghost, had found an adversary worthy of him. The thought actually caused him to--almost--chuckle. This Johnson/Two Bulls character? He was like...like--

Another Ghost.

The dark, heavy woods of Judge Crowley's study complimented his mood. Crowley sat late into the night before a roaring oak fire, fueled by logs of hybrid black oak he had cut himself at his forested lakeside retreat, gloomily sipping brandy. His thoughts dwelled on Two Bulls. Crowley could not abide the public sympathy that was building towards the Indian Head killer. How could the common people admire such a man? It was an intolerable thought. Something had to be done.

Crowley's dark mood spawned a malevolent idea that came slowly to him, like a budding flower. An evil flower, came the wry thought to his grazing mind, as he remembered the book, _Les Fleurs du mal--_ The Flowers of Evil--by the French poet Baudelaire that he read in French back in his undergraduate college days at American University in D.C. Crowley might be a less than stellar ethical character, but he was by no means unlettered. He was fluent in French and Russian and had picked up a street knowledge of Serbo-Croatian during a tour with the U.S. State Department in Sarajevo. A place where, not so coincidentally, an assassin's bullets once started a bloody war. A malicious expression spread across Crowley's face as he mulled the permutations of his own flower of evil thought. Yes, that would do it! The next morning he contacted Munoz and gave him his instructions.

The wiry smallish man didn't look like the other reporters George Johnson had talked to. Nor were his questions quite the same as those of the stream of journalists who had come to ask Johnson about his brother, Michael. This man had something different about him, though Johnson couldn't quite put his finger on it. Was he really a reporter? Luis Munoz knew that he hadn't convinced George Johnson he was a journalist. But neither had he alerted him to his real purpose. Munoz' pleasant, unthreatening appearance had disarmed Johnson and kept him from becoming alarmed or even suspicious.

"Like I told that woman reporter who was here, Melissa what's her name, and that cop who fucked up the investigation and was canned, my brother is no killer. That's pure bullshit. He's a victim." Munoz honed in on George Johnson.

"Cop, you said. What was his name?"

"Something ending in son, like our name. Can't remember the full name. Every third person around here has a name ending in son. Anderson, Swenson, Larson, Johnson...."

"And Thompson?" Munoz said. George Johnson nodded.

"Yep. That was the guy's name. Thompson. Lieutenant Thompson." Munoz tucked that piece of information in his mental filing cabinet.. Might be a lead of some kind. Then, after asking the last of his questions.

"Would you mind if I used your rest room?"

"First door to the right," George Johnson said, pointing at a corridor behind them.

The tall blond man patiently waited while Munoz went to the rest room.

Munoz returned with the knife hidden in a hand behind his back. Johnson glanced at him, then away and Munoz seized the chance to pounce on the unsuspecting man, clamping one hand over his mouth and deftly slicing his razor sharp knife across his throat. George Johnson died in a few seconds, his cries muffled by Munoz' hand over his mouth.

It had to be a bloody, brutal scene. Munoz knew what to do. He cut the dead man's tongue out of his mouth, then removed the scalp, and nailed both of them to a door. Next he glued an Indian Head nickel below the bloody trophies. A few minutes later he phoned up several television stations and newspapers from a phone booth, telling them that they would find another Indian Head murder at George Johnson's address. He did not phone the police.

The eager television reporters fully lived up to Crowley's and Munoz' expectations. They were on the scene quickly, filming the ghastly scene before any police arrived. One television station had the sensationalistic gall to show a video of Johnson's bloody scalp and tongue along with the Indian Head nickel that Munoz had left fixed to the door. And the note tacked below it.

My brother was a Judas!

It horrified the viewing public and had just the effect that Crowley had hoped for. How could the general public sympathize with a man who could murder his own half-brother so brutally? Irate editorials, some of them directed by a newspaper publisher with ties to the Lords of Power, appeared condemning the Indian Head killer and demanding his immediate apprehension. Not all journalists swallowed this ploy, however, and one female television commentator expressed skepticism about Johnson's death being another of the Indian Head killing. But the majority, and the public, embraced Crowley's Flowers of Evil scheme just as he had hoped they would. Judge Miles Crowley congratulated himself on the effects of his plot. Attention had been effectively diverted away from the Lords of Power.

There was another person who had deep doubts about Crowley's plot. Luis Munoz. He had no qualms about killing George Johnson. That wasn't it. What he didn't like was the idea that Two Bulls might retaliate against Munoz' own family. There was his aged father, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces. Startling as it might seem for a cold blooded assassin, Munoz loved his family. His life, outside of his gruesome profession, revolved around them, disjointed as it might sound, in ordinary, normal ways. The birthdays. The celebrations. Quinceañeras and baptisms and graduations and family barbeques What if Two Bulls was aware of Munoz' identity and decided to repay like with like?

This thought disturbed Luis Munoz on a gut-churning level greatly intensified by his own gory involvement in just such a blood feud retaliation a few years earlier.

Munoz might have suspected something else, too. Crowley hadn't told him everything about his evil plan. The unspoken part was that Crowley was hoping that Two Bulls would do just what Munoz feared. Deflect his vendetta away from the Lords of Power towards Luis Munoz. Judge Crowley thought of himself as the human equivalent of a big cat, a tiger or lion, an alpha predator, to whom a man like Luis Munoz--as well as his family--was eminently expendable no matter how useful he might have been. He was, in the end, no more than prey for the alpha predator, Chief Judge Miles Crowley.

Two Bulls was very much aware of Munoz' identity. Scapella had told him everything before his death. At any time Two Bulls could have struck at Munoz on his home ground. But he elected not to, for his fight was with the string pullers, not their paid assassins. To go after Munoz would only deflect him from his purpose. Then came the news of George Johnson's brutal killing. Even in his grief and anger, Michael Two Bulls understood the implications of his brother's death. He would not retaliate against the innocent people of Munoz' family. Nor would he retaliate against the innocent people in the families of the Lords of Power, Crowley's family included.

But he would retaliate in his own way.

Melissa Hunt was as naturally blessed as most other photogenic television journalists. As Seamus O'Toole put it in his inimitable fashion, "most of those TV station babes could make the finals of the Miss America Contest or do a Playboy centerfold." Melissa was no exception. She was a strikingly beautiful young woman with an affable personality. But there she parted company with many of her colleagues. She was also a damn good journalist. Melissa Hunt would probably rise high up in the networks, even if she was somewhat handicapped by coming from a struggling working class family out of the rough world of the hard muscled loggers of the North Woods. Hunt was the only television journalist to express doubt about the authenticity of the latest Indian Head killing.

Her televised skepticism made her Two Bulls' choice. He called her, saying only that he had a very important scoop and that she should come with a single cameraman to a motel room on the outskirts of town. He would call her with the exact motel location and room number when she reached the intersection of two well known major feeder roads, Highways 12 and 100, on the western outskirts of Minneapolis. He would be watching for her marked news vehicle. Any sign of the police and he would disappear. Hunt, as requested, came in a marked TV news van with a single cameraman. No cops. Michael called her with the exact location and she and the cameraman were there within five minutes.

There she found him in a darkened room. In a corner sat Two Bulls on a straight backed chair, his face and upper body covered with a black hood. Even before he began talking, Melissa Hunt knew this would be the premier story of her already promising journalistic career. It was on the news that night. The hooded man in a motel room, proclaiming to a fascinated viewing public that he was the Indian Head killer. Two Bulls went on to say that he had not killed his half brother and that his enemies had killed George Johnson in order to destroy public sympathy for him.

"I do not kill innocent people," Two Bulls said. "Only the guilty. My enemies know who they are. And to them I will say this. I will not retaliate against innocent members of your family as you have against mine." He paused a moment, then said his last words before the camera was shut off.

"Only the guilty need fear for their lives."

It was the lead story on the news that night. A bombshell. A bombshell that exploded in police headquarters, immediately outraging them that they had not been informed of Two Bulls' presence. Within minutes criminal charges were being prepared against both Hunt and the photographer who had accompanied her. The next day a hotshot CLU--Civil Liberties Union--attorney joined the TV station's lawyers in a vicious legal joust that would go on for weeks before charges were finally dropped.

Crowley didn't see the news that evening. He didn't need to. Word of it swept his world as quickly as a wildfire in the parched western mountains. His phone was ringing before the newscast had ended. When the late news came on that night with an update on the story, the judge was watching with angry cold eyes. After it was over he shut himself inside his study and cursed bitterly into glass after glass of high dollar brandy. The evil flower had wilted.

His plan had failed.

Luis Munoz had made elaborate security precautions for his family, much of it unbeknownst to the people involved, even before he killed George Johnson. It wasn't enough to make him feel confident. Two Bulls was clever enough to slip by any security system Munoz might devise. His worst fears were realized three days after George Johnson's death. Munoz returned home to Miami to check on his family's security. There was no sign of his aged father when he went past his prized bougainvillea bushes in their yard and into the their comfortable canal side home. Apprehensive, Munoz went to his father's room. The door was closed. As he came up to it Munoz saw that a shiny object had been attached to the door. A few more steps and he saw what it was what he already knew it had to be.

An Indian Head nickel.

Munoz threw open the door in a panic and rushed inside. His father was lying motionlessly on the bed. There was no blood or gore, but Munoz knew well enough that there were many ways to kill bloodlessly. He ran to his father's side, his eyes wide with fear. Munoz grabbed the old man and shook him violently.

The elder Munoz' eyes snapped open.

"Hijo," he said in Spanish. "What are you doing!" Munoz slumped at the side of the bed, his chest heaving with the passing fear. Then he rose and slowly walked to the door to look more closely at the object fixed to the door. His apprehension had not tricked him. It was an Indian Head nickel. Two Bulls had been there. The nickel was a warning. Munoz turned away thoughtfully. This man knew who he was and where he lived. The cloak of anonymity that covered his professional life could easily be ripped off to show the world who he really was. He instantly grasped a series of overriding realities. He had to kill Judge Crowley. Both to keep Munoz' identity secret and also to eliminate Crowley before what he was certain the Machiavellian Judge would soon do. Arrange for Munoz' own assassination. Crowley was not the alpha predator he thought he was and Munoz would soon deliver that message, personally and lethally. But, above all, Munoz had to find and kill this Two Bulls before he could reveal Munoz' identity to the public. This game was not a cat and mouse game after all. This game was between two cats. Big cats.

Both of them very deadly.

Among the bits of information on Michael Two Bulls that Luis Munoz accumulated were a few particulars Scapella had given him on Ben Thompson, as well as what he'd learned about Thompson's interest from George Johnson. This man Thompson seemed to have intentionally vanished after having refused the bribe Scapella sent him through one of his murky underworld contacts. Munoz had an instinct for such things and believed that Thompson either was with the Two Bulls or, more likely, was tracking them independently. Whichever was true, one fact about Thompson, coupled with the origin of the Navaho girl, Haseya Begay, drew Munoz' interest. The Southwest. Begay was from the Southwest, Thompson was intrigued by it. Coincidence? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Munoz's hunter's instinct kicked in and told him he might well find the fugitives somewhere in the Southwest.

Munoz didn't linger. Within a day he set up a temporary headquarters in Albuquerque in a motel, tactically close to the intersections of Interstates 40 and 25 giving him rapid access to much of the Southwest. The unlimited funds Judge Crowley placed at his disposal were soon put to use in hiring several detective agencies to trace down Ben Thompson, Haseya Begay and the three missing Sioux. Information soon came back to him on Haseya Begay. She had returned to her family's home near the Canyon De Chelly National Monument on the huge Navaho reservation in Arizona. She was at the family home near the little town of Salina Springs. Munoz had a man keep watch on the Begay house to see if anyone looking like any of the fugitives or Ben Thompson went there. Haseya was not nearly as vulnerable as Munoz might have thought. She was not alone. Her two brothers and father were at her side continually. All three were armed with rifles. They knew how to use them.

Like back in the old days.

Michael had been gone for nearly forty eight hours. Though it was typical of his ephemeral nature to mysteriously disappear and reappear, it always made Ben Thompson edgy. Angie and the old man seemed to Thompson to uncritically accept it and showed no visible signs of worry. They had no TV but did show avid interest in whatever information they could glean from the radio and the newspapers and news magazines Ben brought them from Farmington. There were photos of Michael when he was Michael Johnson, but none of the reborn Michael Two Bulls who looked so different as to be unrecognizable to those who had known the old Michael. It did not surprise the Two Bulls at all that Michael Two Bulls was becoming a national folk hero. It did surprise Ben Thompson. The cop part of him, anyhow, which was always there lurking beneath the surface despite what he tried to tell himself. He continued to feel, if not overwhelmed, at the very least bewildered by the absolutely goddamn bizarre turn of events in his life. He continued to occasionally wonder. Was this real? Was he in a dream? At times he wasn't sure. At other times he hoped, almost prayed, it was just another of his unsettling strange dreams. He often felt as though he was a very peculiar kind of prisoner. In a prison in which he was both the prisoner and the jailer.

The old man was a peculiar sort. He would go off into a sheltered place on the farmstead in a grove of cottonwood trees that managed to survive and even thrive on the same vein of groundwater that supplied the farmhouse's well. He'd sit there for hours, almost motionless, chanting softly to himself. It didn't seem to phase him that there were rattlesnakes on the farmstead. Oddly, the snakes seemed never to threaten the old man. Ben sometimes saw them or heard the spine chilling warning to stay away. Ben heard them loud and clear. He stayed away.

Angie was different now. Close, yet distant. Something inside her kept Ben emotionally distant. The possibility of sexual relations no longer existed between them. She seemed transported into some other dimension. She quietly went about the business of the household acting as though she were enchanted by something. She was not mean or curt with Ben in any sense. Just....just...distant. Immersed in whatever reality it was that possessed her. Ben found her sudden homey ways strange as hell, especially for a woman who was not the domestic type at all. She was consumed by a vision and given completely over to it, but Ben had not enough understanding of what was going on to comprehend that. He continued to be profoundly puzzled by the behavior of these three bizarre Lakota.

Thompson was unlike the others in that he was not consumed by a vision. The pressure of accompanying a man the police considered to be a serial killer, with the possibility of exposure at any time, lay heavy upon him. He could not calmly sit under the cottonwoods and chant or go about the tasks of the household like the others were. As an outlet for his nervous energy, besides splitting chunks of oak into wood stove size, Ben began to clear away the accumulated neglect of many years on the old farm. He repaired fences, cleared the weeds and deadwood out of the orchard and began to fix up the exterior of the house.

Ben's incessant activity was noticed by neighbors and completely misinterpreted, causing a fair amount of comment about the hard working stranger fixing up the old Benton place. This guy had to be solid. Which was helpful since it made people more accepting of Ben's presence among them and therefore less suspicious. But it was also nearly disastrous because one of Munoz' hired detective agencies' far flung web of listeners and watchers heard about it and noted it, passing the information up the surveillance chain to Munoz along with the other hints and tidbits of gossip that might prove to be potential leads. Munoz at first only casually looked at this information, but, unlike Thompson and his reluctance to give up paper, Munoz typed the information into an index card database program in the state of the art laptop computer he always brought on surveillance missions. Munoz was what the techies called an 'early adopter.' Which greatly helped him to locate and 'finalize' the subjects of his contracts.

Then the added information came in that this man called himself a writer, had some kind of independent income and had a deep interest in the Anasazi, the old ones, of the Southwest. Munoz pulled up the file on the bearded stranger near Farmington and studied it with renewed interest. It looked very much as though he might have found Ben Thompson. In a news magazine carrying a lengthy article on the entire Michael Johnson/Two Bulls story was a photo of Ben Thompson when he was still a police lieutenant. Munoz cut out the photo and kept it. He might have found Ben Thompson. But were the others with him? Was Thompson, like Munoz, also searching for them? Was he just pursuing his long held passion for the ancient world of the Anasazi? Or, and this was the first question to answer, was it even actually Ben Thompson in that old farmhouse in northern New Mexico?

Munoz went to the town of Farmington himself and visited the cafes and coffee shops, listening to the local gossip. People were friendly and did not find a Spanish speaking man unusual in a population with many bilingual Mexican-Americans and Indians in it. The amiable Munoz was able to guide the conversations into the directions he wanted without arousing suspicion. When he learned that the bearded stranger with the interest in the Anasazi had been seen a number of times with a very pretty Indian woman who sounded like the description he had of Angie Two Bulls, Munoz was almost certain that he had found the fugitives.

The next afternoon he confirmed it when he watched the farmstead from a nearby hill through a pair of pricey high power Zeiss binoculars. First he saw Thompson and compared him with the magazine photo. He couldn't be certain, not at that distance and with Thompson bearded, but it certainly could be him. Then he saw Angie, and, finally, the last piece of the puzzle. The old man who had to be Two Bulls' grandfather. But he did not see Michael Two Bulls. Munoz retreated from his observation hide and returned to Farmington. He would be moving his command post there. He had located the fox's den. Now he had only to wait for the fox to return.

Michael Two Bulls was as wily as Munoz' iconic fox. Even more so. With the identity of Michael Villela, a Mexican-American, he often slipped in to Farmington and chatted with people there, casually learning if there was any particular interest in the farmstead where the four fugitives were secreted. He learned soon after Munoz had discovered them that a man had been asking questions. When he heard the man described, Michael knew at once who it was. This did not frighten him at all. He had a score to settle with Munoz over Haseya Begay and his half-brother, George Johnson. A score that could only end in Munoz' violent death. An end that he knew would come soon.

But not quite yet.

### Chapter 9

### Mexico

Two Bulls, always acutely wary and cautious, had made preparations for just such an eventuality. He felt leery about the hiding place that Thompson had provided them from the beginning. It was not quite secluded enough for him. One of the places he had slipped off to, much to Thompson's disquiet, had been far to the south, down Interstate 25, then west on Interstate 10 across the border into the southeastern corner of Arizona and from there into Old Mexico. The arrangements had been made. It was only a matter of when.

The when had arrived. It was now time to move. Michael gathered everyone up, together with what few belongings they wanted to take with them, and they left that evening in his camper and Ben's. Angie's VW was left hidden in the barn. On the way out Ben stopped off in town at the local sheriff's substation and let it be known that he was going to take a trip to visit a few of the Anasazi ruins and would be gone for a week or two. He asked the deputy womaning the desk at the substation to have the patrolling squads keep an eye on his place. They left Farmington with none of the population having to wonder what had happened to the bearded stranger at the old Benton farmstead--except for a certain Cuban-American who would be very angry when he learned about it.

Munoz brought in four other Cubans from the Miami underworld, all of them descended as he was from members of the dictator Batista's secret police, men he hired whenever the situation demanded extra manpower. They were professionals who knew their business. Munoz could depend upon the men to perform whatever missions he assigned them. They had proved themselves in the past. All four Marielitos. Criminals in the eyes of the Castro regime shipped off to America under the guise of refugees in one of Castro's premier hoodwinking moves, this time at the expense of the well meaning but naïve American President Carter.

They began surveillance on the farmstead just three hours after the fugitives had left. It soon became apparent by the total lack of movement that something was wrong. Munoz moved his men in much more quickly than he normally would have. He already had a dark premonition of what had happened. The five armed Cubans descended on the farmstead from five different directions and found what Munoz suspected. Nothing. The quarry had eluded them again. Munoz would have lost his temper had not other men been watching him. The excitement of the chase was slowly giving way to a festering irritation. Munoz was growing impatient to get this job done with once and for all.

An hour earlier the owner of the old farmstead, Wilbur Benton, was sitting at Mandy's Place cafe in Farmington. The gossipy waitress refilled his coffee cup and leaned her top heavy chest in the old man's direction.

"Haven't seen much of you in a good while, Wilbur. Glad to see you're back." Wilbur tried not to notice the waitress's protruding bosom and forcibly diverted his gaze to her face.

"Got a renter out on the old place. No need to keep such a close eye on it."

"You might want to rethink that," said a voice two stools down at the cafe's counter. The voice belonged to a sheriff's deputy taking his break. "Your renter came into town a while ago and asked us to keep an eye on the place. Said he was gonna be gone a week or two." Wilbur Benton frowned. Something about this just didn't seem right.

"I gotta go," he said, dropping a five dollar bill on the counter as he hurried to leave. "Keep the change." Fifteen minutes later Wilbur Benton arrived at his old home place at the absolute worst time he could have ever imagined. Five armed men, foreigners by the look of them, surrounded his pickup as he pulled into the yard.

The same sheriff's deputy found Wilbur's body early that evening.

It took the fugitives the better part of two days to reach the isolated hacienda Michael had arranged for them just inside Mexico in the border province of Sonora. They slipped across the unfenced border from the southeastern corner of Arizona on one of the back country dirt tracks the smugglers used and followed the same back roads to a humble hacienda on an equally humble stream a few miles south of the border near the worn out little humble town of Naco, a forlorn place that rounded out the humble triad.

It was a dry country, what some climate scientists called desert grasslands, literally sandwiched between two actual deserts. Chihuahua and Sonora. Even the arid country around Farmington seemed verdant compared to the rain starved and drought ravaged barren landscape around the tumble down hacienda. A dried out parched landscape, that with the arrival of the summer rainy season, what the locals called the monsoons, would almost miraculously morph in a fecund grassland. If, and when, the rains came. Which was not now. It was a land of sun and dust and little hope.

A Mexican family was waiting for them. Michael had paid them well and they would take care of all the needs of his grandfather and sister and Ben Thompson. Michael felt far more comfortable with them here than at the farmstead in New Mexico. Here a man with money could buy almost anything. Michael knew how to arrange those things. He felt more comfortable in a land where most people were poor, had some amount of Indian blood and were not directly under the power of the North American elite. The elite would find little sympathy among the peasants of Mexico. They already knew about elites. They had their own. An elite just as controlling--and possibly worse--as the power brokers to the north.

Everyone slept more soundly that night than they had in a good while. Michael lay in bed musing over how Luis Munoz must have raged when he missed them yet again. He was still toying with his cat and mouse game with the man who had brutalized Haseya Begay and murdered his half-brother. But the game could only go on so long. The end was drawing near. Very near. Perhaps only a sunrise away. Or two. But certainly no more than three. He knew this, deep down, in a way he understood but could not explain.

Ben lazed that day. He slept late and spent the morning hours reading the armful of newspapers the Rodriguez woman brought him. Mrs. Rodriguez, a thin, plain-looking woman who spoke English with great difficulty, seemed to have taken a liking to him. She took a special interest in waiting on him, hovering over him like a nurse over a sick patient. It didn't take Ben long to realize that Mrs. Rodriguez was a widow. The man he had taken to be her husband was actually her father. Consuela Rodriguez had been without a man for a long time. Her designs on Ben Thompson were obvious.

This fact caused Lee Two Bulls no end of hilarity. It was a face of the old man that Ben had not seen before and he was astounded to find that the stoic Lee Two Bulls had a sense of humor. When both were passing through the courtyard, Lee Two Bulls stopped, looked at Thompson with a straight face and spoke very somberly to him.

"This Consuela is a good woman, Thompson. Sturdy, dependable, hard-working. A man could do far worse than to take her as his woman." Thompson was completely taken aback. "That the woman," Two Bulls continued, "has a face like a horse is only a small matter." Then the old man broke into a mad cackle that left Thompson absolutely helpless about how to react.

"Some men have a natural way with the women," Two Bulls added, patting Ben on the shoulder. "It is a true gift." Then the old man broke out into his cackling laughter again and walked away, slapping his sides as he went.

Ben Thompson was struck silent. He'd come a long way in a few months, from being a homicide police lieutenant to getting heckled by a crazy old Sioux mystic. What was there to say? There wasn't even a starting point to saying something. He first looked around to see if anyone was looking, then pinched himself hard too see if he was dreaming. Damn. He felt the pinch.

But he still wasn't sure whether he was in the real world, the dream world or some other world between or even beyond them.

Michael Two Bulls was at ease among the Mexicans. He acted differently than he did among the Americans, even different than he did among the Lakota. There was no pressure with the Mexicans. No expectations. He was more carefree, smiling often, even laughing at the flirtatious Consuela as she teased him. Perhaps it was his last time for just being a man. It was one more facet to this strange man whose life had become so entangled with Thompson's.

Consuela's father Manuel disappeared in the afternoon and did not return until the early evening. He handed a small parcel to the old man, who took it with great interest and care to show to Michael and Angie. Ben walked over to where the three were looking at the objects in the old man's hands.

"What's that?" He asked. The old man answered.

"Peyote," Lee Two Bulls said with a sly smile.

"Oh....." Ben mumbled, eyes darting nervously. "How many of them do you have?" The old man raised his eyes to Ben and seemed to look right into his soul.

"Enough," he said in a low voice, "for _all_ of us."

"I was afraid of that," Ben muttered. Angie moved over to his side.

"It'll be all right, Ben. Don't be afraid."

"I wouldn't exactly say I'm afraid," Ben answered. A slight smile touched his lips. "Its more like I'm absolutely terrified." He was joking, but only partly. Ben Thompson had faced external demons. Men with guns in Viet Nam, and with a handful of dangerously violent criminals. But to face his internal demons? That thought was churning his guts.

They built a fire outside in the warm night. The Mexican family was nowhere to be seen. At first it was just the four fugitives from the north. They sat around calmly for a few minutes and talked softly to one another. Then the old man passed around a small straw basket with the pieces of peyote buttons inside. Each, in turn, took some. The basket came last to Ben. Angie was at his side.

"Take several. Chew them well. You need not swallow it if you chew the button for a long time. The effect will be the same." She closed her hand around his arm and squeezed.

"You will be sick for a time. Do not fight it. Let it happen. After that things will be better." She reached over and kissed his cheek, whispering into his ear. "Do not be afraid, Ben. Do not give into the fear. You will find there is really nothing to fear. Do you think that we are braver than you, to take this when you are afraid? It is just that we know there is nothing to fear." A few short weeks ago Ben would have insisted he stood at one of life's major crossroads. A Viet Nam veteran who eschewed all the drugs floating around him during those crazy days, a veteran policeman who had never abused alcohol. A man whose world view was set in stone by his father's Greatest American Generation. Taking peyote was way outside the parameters of his world. Light years way outside. That was then. Just a few weeks ago. But this was not then. This was now. Several monumental crossroads were already behind him. The tight reins of his old world were already loose. He shrugged, sighed, cleared his throat.....

And took the peyote.

He chewed the peyote for a long time. He was often tempted to spit it out, but he didn't. He had no choice but to take the chunks of the peyote buttons, to chew them, to let happen what would happen. He could not truly be one of this peculiar group until he joined in this arcane ritual of theirs. Not that he was sure he wanted to be part of whatever it was this strange, even mystical, group of Lakota relatives represented. But, more important, he could not even begin to understand them if he didn't take it. The knowledge that he had to take the peyote didn't make it any easier. He was buffeted with all kinds of doubts and anxieties right up to the moment he took it and continuing on for he knew not how long. Then things began to change.

After a while it seemed as though the only reality was the fire itself. He did not hear the others get sick, did not notice them leave the circle for a few moments. But then he became sick and he just let himself flow along with the sickness. It was as Angie had said. Before long it was over and he felt all right.

All right? Perhaps all right would not be the way to describe it, Ben thought. He didn't feel nauseous any more. But he did feel very, very...well... _odd_. His mind seemed to be flowing, his senses mixing. It seemed--was it more than just seeming?--he could smell colors and see sounds. He wasn't in a dream. He _was_ the dream. The fire became a thing alive. It danced and it sang and it talked to him of many things, some of them very personal. He saw the face of his buddy Max Helder, who died in that Viet Cong ambush in the Mekong Delta a generation ago. His mother came to him, speechlessly, but with a radiant beatific smile. And his father, grinning from another of his inside jokes. Thoughts came to him like bolts of lightning or riding languorously on unicorns and dolphins. Ben had never had such an experience in all his life. Not even close. He was not certain whether he liked it. But there was sure as hell no doubt that it was a universe apart from anything he ever experienced before.

The dream world and the ordinary world melted together. All is one. Everything. All....Part of the whole. A whole far beyond his capacity to comprehend, much less try to paint word labels on it. It was....just.....just..... Here. There.

Everywhere.

Everything changed. The eyes that looked out on the world were different eyes that saw different things. He could see himself as a narrow product of a narrow environment, almost pathetic in the constrictions society and he himself had put around the boundaries of his life. It was as though he had taken all the firmament and put just a tiny circle in it somewhere and then tried to pretend that this circle was all that there was.

The fire danced and flared as the old man kept it going. Ben looked over to Lee Two Bulls and wondered over him. He looked like something very ancient, something far beyond his four-score years. For the first time Ben understood what they meant when they called him a holy man who talked to the ancestors. It was true. He was a mystic who reached beyond his own time to those who had gone before. Perhaps he also reached out into the future, too.

These were all things that Ben now realized, even perhaps somewhat understood, but he never could have begun to explain or even describe them. They were internal, in the marrow of his perceptive bones, not at all verbal. Words were but fleeting shooting stars, bits of cosmic dust, streaking across the dark sky. He felt a new respect for the old man. Lee Two Bulls was a patriot who was trying to revive a broken people. Perhaps hundreds of years into the future they would speak of him as an ancient prophet, a Moses of the various Sioux peoples. Who knew? Who could tell what among the present would endure and grow greater into the future?

Ben moved his gaze to Michael. He seemed to be a figure bathed in light, a source of power and strength. Michael Two Bulls was a warrior in the old style, there could be no doubt of that. Maybe one day he would take his place with Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, Rain In The Face, Little Crow, all the other stalwarts in the Sioux pantheon. The power was there in him to behold for anyone who cared to really look. But would the present stop in its frenetic blind rush towards an unknown future to take stock of such seemingly mundane matters? This was another question that lay beyond Ben's vision. Yet he did know that this Michael Two Bulls was a man of power, a patriot as well, a man who commanded fire at his fingertips.

And Angie. In the flickering, spirit-filled firelight she was far more than a keenly intelligent and beautiful woman. He could see her aura. It was a burnished gold, iridescent in the glow of the firelight. A woman of purpose. A woman with a mission. Into Ben's mind jumped the image of the Vestal Virgins of ancient Rome and the priestesses of classical Greece. Sex was irrelevant. She was chaste. Dedicated. Even venerated. A crazy thought jarred him. Mary Magdalene! A secular Lakota Mary Magdalene! If he had said something like that to his religious minded mother, she would have thrown every kitchen utensil in the house at him as he ran for the door. And Ben also knew something else beyond all doubt. This woman Angie.

She could never be his.

Then he noticed that the two Mexicans had joined them by the fire. Manuel and Consuela looked very different from before to Ben. They were an ancient people, rooted to the earth and the spirits that fill all spaces in a way that the moderns of North America and the other so-called modern places could never understand. There was a wisdom, an earthiness, a dignity about them that made Ben feel comfortable to have them there. He could tell that they had been invited by the old man.

It did not surprise him that he had not noticed these things before the peyote light.

Ben's attention moved around the circle and now came back to himself. His mind seemed as preternaturally clear as one of those spring fed pellucid Canadian lakes he loved to fish. Ben Thompson, ex-cop, on the run from God knew what, tied up with a group of Lakota mystics that included one man waging a holy war against the power of the United States. This was an absolutely absurd and incredible seismic detour in the path of his life. Yet it all seemed perfectly natural to him now. This was the way his life had gone. It had gone that way because it was meant to. For the first time Ben felt a great spiritual presence around him. For the first time in his entire life, despite the rigors of parochial religious training, he felt that this spiritual presence was conscious. And to his sudden astonishment, he saw clearly that this entity had been guiding his own life in ways that he had never noticed before.

When this awareness came over Ben Thompson he slapped the sides of his temples with the tips of his fingers and yelled out a shrill shriek. It was all meant to be!

The old man looked over at him and smiled.

After this Ben understood why he found himself where he was, in this strange place, with these strange people. His role was to observe, to see what happened and then to tell of what he had seen. His role was one of seeking understanding. He began to watch very closely.

He wanted to remember everything.

Michael Two Bulls glanced over at the bearded white man who had helped show him the way. Did Thompson even realize it? Did the man who was once his enemy comprehend that he had become a part of the narrative saga of Michael Two Bulls? Not a disciple, certainly. A chronicler. Michael's glance at Thompson on the other side of the fire told him that such things were at that moment going through his mind. The white man was slowly beginning to understand. How odd that a white man, a symbol of everything that Michael opposed, should help him to understand what his path was. Thompson's knowledge of the machinations in the white man's world had helped Two Bulls to make the metamorphosis. He had gone from a vendetta to a crusade, a holy war. From being an old-fashioned bloody-minded warrior to a symbol of the present and a hope for the future. Truth? Fantasy? No matter. This was the way that he saw things.

And that was all that mattered.

These things played on his mind as the peyote began to take hold. This time he did not dance and chant as before. He sat cross-legged before the fire as the old man was doing. His hair had the first tinges of grey. The days of the warrior were passing. The spiritual council fires of the ancients lay just ahead. It was a time for endings. An owl hooted off in the dark somewhere and something large flew overhead. A wind caressed his face gently. Voices began to chant from the fire pit. He suddenly became violently ill, rose to wretch beyond the edge of the firelight and returned to sit cross-legged before the fire. The fire began to radiate a rainbow of colors. The peyote had him.

Then a man appeared in the fire. He was of middle years, very muscular, and wore his long black hair flowing free. The hawk-faced man was dressed in simple buckskins, sparsely decorated and with neither paint nor feathers. He had the look of a powerful chief of the elder days.

"I was a warrior once," he said in the same old-fashioned Lakota that Lee Two Bulls used. "It was a time of great change, when we called ourselves Dakotas and the Yanktonais had not yet split. Then we were driven from the woodlands onto the prairies. It was not a life we understood, those endless grassy places. There was much fear among the people."

"And there is now," Michael replied. "I am alone in my fight. There are no more warriors." He continued sitting cross-legged before the fire, stoic and immobile before the spectral figure.

"If you are striking warrior's blows, then how can you say that there are no more warriors? You are a warrior."

"One warrior? Of what value is a single warrior?" The specter spoke patiently.

"Where one is born, so may more than one also be born. Everything begins with one. From zero to one is the great leap. After one there are but small steps. One is enough to offer hope and a sense that the history of the people has not yet come to an end. Can you not see that?" Two Bulls grunted agreement.

"Then what am I to do?" The specter gradually began to fade.

"You will know what to do when the time comes. The end is near. You must see to it that it comes in a way that all will remember. You must die like a bright star, leaving your traces on the heavens for all to see." Michael nodded without speaking.

"The council fires of your ancestors await you. Remember that the white man has always known but one way to defeat the Lakota warrior." Michael looked up to see the specter fade away. Only the voice remained. "And that is to attack the warrior's family."

And the voice, too, was gone.

Sometime during the night Ben returned to his bed. He did not remember when, but it was of no matter. Things were different now. They would never be the same. His life had made the great leap from one directed by conscious effort and force of will to that of a man caught up in the flow of the spiritual power of the universe. How could things be anything but different? Not that he understood, at least in the sense of being able to put words to it. It was....was...just... _was._

He found this change very much to his liking. Everything seemed to bud and flower before his eyes and take on new dimensions and meanings. He saw beauty and wonder where he had not seen or ignored it before. He also saw the base, the corrupt, the ugly, more clearly than ever, yet not always in a negative light. He rediscovered a thousand little things that he had taken for granted since the curious glow of childhood. Michael vanished again that day, but Ben was not disconcerted by it any longer. He knew he would be back.

Michael slipped back across the border and went to the isolated cave he used as a hiding place in the northern mountains of the Four Corners. There he removed what he needed from the munitions he'd cached and moved off to the east, driving the pickup he had recently purchased under yet another assumed identity. Something he heard on the radio had caused him to make a last minute change in his plans. The opportunity he had been waiting for unexpectedly presented itself. A certain U.S. Congressman had a speaking engagement in Denver. It was the man who had tried to completely break up the reservation system and deprive the Indians of their lands once and for all.

Two Bulls and many other people knew Congressman Leo Hames for what he was. A self-serving cynic who played to the large white majority in his congressional district, a white majority which openly coveted the huge Indian reservation and its wealth of natural resources that lay within the congressman's huge western district. Many a Native American all over the country detested Hames for his hostile speeches against the reservation system in the House of Representatives. The rise of casinos on Native American reservations, the congressman claimed, was at the root of his hostility. He maintained that the casinos were covertly run by organized crime and were a magnet for all kinds of criminal activity and the reservations were like islands of foreign corruption in the corpus of the great United States. And the fact was that there was more than a little genuine fire beneath Hames' anti-casino smoke. Crime, organized and otherwise, was in fact there. Enough, at least, for a pretext.

Hames' solution was to eliminate the reservation system and either open the land up to everyone or, and this was his _public_ first choice, put them into a subset of the national park system where they would be under federal control and everyone, not just Native Americans, would have equal access to them. Which would include the large white majority in his district and made him so popular he was unbeatable in the general elections every two years.

At least that's the way things appeared. On the surface. His major contributor, although cleverly hidden from public knowledge by using a series of surrogates and PACs, was a Big Oil company covetous of the potentially huge shale oil deposits far beneath the reservation land. Among the assets open to bidding by the general public in this new subset of the national park system that Congressman Hames envisioned were the mineral rights. Hames had been very privately offered a hefty six figure executive position, and stock options, with the company after he retired from Congress. In that particular way that the human species has of looking the facts straight in the face and promptly rearranging them, Congressman Hames had convinced himself that if Big Oil made their deal with the reservation organized crime would reap the profits and use the money to further corrupt his district. He told himself that enough times that he sometimes believed it.

There were those who suspected Hames' genuine motives. No one had been able to find definitive, irrefutable proof. Some had no doubt of his motives, definitive proof or not.

One of them was Michael Two Bulls.

The radio passed on a public service announcement that Congressman Leo Hames was giving a speech in Denver to a convention of the National Parks and Recreation Association. Two Bulls slammed on the brakes and pulled his pickup over the side of the road, listening, and staring, at the pickup's radio. When he heard that his speech would be broadcast live, he knew what he had to do.

Michael Two Bulls headed his camper towards Denver.

No one had thought to provide much security for a U.S. Congressman speaking to a convention of the National Parks and Recreation Association. Two Bulls found it a simple matter to slip into the convention center dressed like a workman carrying a tool box. He calmly walked up to the podium, began working on the microphone stand there as though he were supposed to, and finished what he was doing in a few minutes. He left the convention center just as the first of the conventioneers were assembling for the evening programs. One of the topics that evening was to be the electronics revolution and its impact on improved communications within the national park system and beyond.

Michael had a range of weapons with him from his cache near the Four Corners, having initially had other targets for their use. He always brought along extras as backups. He now used one of them, a long range command detonating device purchased from sub rosa weapons dealers in Mexico. Almost any weapon or device could be had for a price in Mexico, along with the instructions to use some of the more miraculous devices the armaments and surveillance industries had devised. This particular device would detonate an explosive from a distance of as much as twenty miles using state of the art technology still considered a closely held state secret by the United States government.

Michael drove a little under ten miles out of Denver and stopped at a highway rest stop located atop a high hill with direct line of sight to the sprawling city of Denver, picturesquely butted up against the towering ramparts of the snow-capped Rockies. He switched on his radio and turned it to the station that was broadcasting from the convention center. Then he waited for Congressman Leo Hames to take his turn at the microphone. Hames was his usual self in his rhetoric, telling the crowd what it wanted to hear. In this case, the great importance the national park system had to the American people. Hames was one of the most reliable members of the U.S. Congress in matters relating to the continued health of the national parks. He'd sponsored over a dozen bills friendly to the park system. But when he came to the part of his speech where he vilified the Federal Government's coddling of a very different system, the Native American reservation system, he drew special attention from one very rapt listener.

"I tell you," Hames said, his voice rising with a possibly genuine passion. "The corruption and crime brought to the Indian reservations by the casinos has to be stopped! The system needs to be changed! The reservation system has to be dismantled and the lands transferred to the National Park System under federal control. Everyone would have access to the land equally." He paused for a very slight smattering of applause. Not many in the audience shared his views on this subject, though he was popular for his support of the National Parks, no one knowing his ulterior motives. Well, almost no one.

"It is time we stopped this cancerous corruption and put an end to the source of the cancer, the poisonous well of the reservation system, once and for all," he continued.

"To those of you misguided souls out there who would continue this corrupt system I say this. I challenge you. Show us an alternative. One that will work!" As a matter of fact, there were more than a few, right in his audience, who could think of alternatives, but Michael Two Bulls was about to offer a totally unforeseen and very different alternative. He pressed the button on his command detonator and the microphone Congressman Leo Hames was speaking into blew up into his face with the effect of a miniature claymore mine. It took out the middle part of Hames's face and killed him instantly, but no one else was wounded more than slightly. The shiny Indian Head nickel glued onto the top of the speaker's podium was untouched.

Michael switched off the radio and drove away.

Luis Munoz and Judge Miles Crowley met in a hotel room only a few blocks from the City Club. Crowley did not want to take the time to journey to Chicago or anywhere else to talk to the disarmingly--Crowley, of course, knew better and was uneasy in the man's presence--mild mannered Cuban. Nor did he trust a telephone conversation that might be overheard. A hotel room randomly chosen at the last moment would be safer and quicker for the busy, careful judge. Munoz still intended to kill Judge Crowley. But not yet. He remained useful to Munoz. As it soon turned out, very useful. Lethally useful. Crowley had changed his strategy. He managed to get an inside pipeline into the coordinated Federal manhunt that was searching for Michael Two Bulls immediately after Congressman Hames' assassination. Since the sensational murder of Congressman Hames it could only be a matter of time before they tracked Two Bulls down. The whole force of the law enforcement machinery of the United States government and the various states was now concentrated on one single man. No one could evade it for long. Not even the phantom that was Michael Two Bulls.

Judge Crowley had contacts in very high places, in fact occupied one of those high places, having served on a handful of Presidential commissions, and had up-to-the-minute information on the manhunt. This fact led him to change his tactics about Munoz' pursuit of Two Bulls. Rather than conduct a personal search, Munoz was to suspend his own activities and to await instructions from the judge. He must be ready to move instantly. Judge Crowley was going to use the Federal government to find Two Bulls. Once they had him either trapped or actually captured, Munoz was to move in and see to it that Two Bulls died. One way or another. He had to die. Crowley told Munoz to prepare everything he needed and to stand by at a central location ready to move whenever the judge passed on hard information he obtained on Two Bull's whereabouts. It was decided that a good central location would be the place where Congressman Hames met his violent death. Denver.

Less than twenty hours later Luis Munoz and his four trusted Cuban professionals were in position in a suburban Denver motel room, ready to move as soon as Crowley contacted them. One of the men was an expert long distance marksman who could regularly hit man-sized targets up to a thousand yards away. Among the weapons in the small arsenal Munoz and his men had in the motel room was a match grade European 7.62mm rifle capable of dependable accuracies at distances up to those 1000 yards. Munoz was confident he had only to get within one half mile of Michael Two Bulls to be assured of killing him. It seemed he would have to forego the pleasure of a slow, close-range killing. The main thing now was to kill Two Bulls and silence him permanently.

Alert, professional and thorough, F.B.I. agents from the Minneapolis office had grown curious about the disappearance of Ben Thompson from his backwoods cabin. Questioning of friends and neighbors of Thompson's turned up the interesting information that Thompson had always been intrigued with the southwestern part of the United States and with the ancient pueblos that dotted the countryside there. This word was passed on to the office in Albuquerque and FBI agents had tracked down Ben Thompson's rented farmstead in New Mexico by the next afternoon. Whatever they might have expected to find, what they did find was a crime scene peopled by a half dozen local and state New Mexico police and a New Mexico State team in the middle of a forensics examination. The FBI agents pulled law enforcement rank on the locals and began the search themselves. There wasn't much. But they did find some of Thompson's personal effects hidden in the barn and Angie's V.W. Within minutes they had traced the Volkwagen's registration and knew that they had found the former hideout of the fugitives.

They now knew for certain for the first time that Ben Thompson was deeply involved with the Two Bulls. They were still not sure whether he was with them voluntarily or had stumbled upon them in his own personal search and now was a captive. They leaned towards believing that Thompson was a captive. It was hard for professional law enforcement officers to believe that a fellow officer would have gone so far outside the law as to join the Two Bulls fanatics voluntarily. The word began to spread that the Two Bulls were holding a former policeman as a hostage.

They also found a street map of greater Los Angeles in the farmhouse. A red circle was drawn around East Los Angeles. The news was immediately passed on to California and the manhunt began to concentrate on East Los Angeles. The authorities thought the Two Bulls had changed their strategy and moved from an isolated rural hideout to lose themselves in the sea of people in Los Angeles. They would not be conspicuous among the huge Mexican-American population there, many of whom were as 'Indian looking' as the Two Bulls Lakotas. The manhunt was shifting to Los Angeles and news of a lead that might locate the Two Bulls filtered out from the people orchestrating the search. Within minutes Judge Miles Crowley had been informed and passed on the information to Munoz in Denver.

The wily Cuban did not jump to conclusions. He sent one of his men, the expert marksman, to Los Angeles to be near in case the lead proved accurate. The man knew how to obtain whatever weapons he might need in what Munoz sarcastically called "the city of _lost_ Angels." Munoz himself doubted the fugitives would be there. He had been on Two Bulls' trail long enough to respect the man's cunning. He would never make the foolish mistake of leaving behind a roadmap with his destination circled on it. Munoz was certain Two Bulls would show up some place quite different than Los Angeles. Munoz, the Ghost, decided to follow his instincts. He moved his headquarters from Denver to Albuquerque.

The millionaire philanthropist and businessman, Thomas Cowgill III, was one of the two or three others within Crowley's circle to boast national connections and power. Descended from an old grain milling family, Cowgill was born into great wealth. And, as so many born into wealth do, Cowgill developed a passion for philanthropy. But it would never have occurred to Thomas Cowgill III to give away so much as to threaten either his power or his lifestyle or, most directly important, his financial net worth. A net worth that was inching upwards into the tens of millions since he had acquired a pharmaceutical company and quietly raised prices just enough to further enrich himself without arousing allegations of price-gouging.

Cowgill was one of those rather complicated capitalist philanthropists who justified to himself having great wealth by giving away carefully computed fractions of it. On the surface he was a benign, private person. Behind the scenes he often manipulated things in a detached, Machiavellian way that drew the envy and admiration of such men as the late Vincent Scapella and Miles Crowley. Despite, or more accurately, in addition to, having a trophy wife and a quartet of towheaded kids Cowgill had an extra-marital relationship with a strikingly beautiful paramour. Someone he met at the University of Minnesota Law School when he was teaching a class there on NGO's. The woman? None other than Lila Mannering. Mannering wasn't the sexual manipulator some thought her to be. At least not in the direct sense. Lila didn't need to have sex with Judge Delaney, or anyone else, to get what she wanted. All she had to do was suggest the _possibility_ of sex in the near future. "It worked," she told Cowgill with a smirk, "like a fucking charm." Cowgill wanted to believe her. But, Lila Mannering was, after all, Lila Mannering, who uttered unsettling occasional phrases like "Morals are for the masses." Still, immoral or amoral or to hell with moral, Cowgill was smitten by the elegant lithe sexuality of Lila Mannering.

Cowgill had been instrumental in protecting Mannering and keeping her out of the public eye when that asshole lawyer David Saul began making waves. When she was murdered Cowgill was beside himself with rage. He went to a private firing range and burned up four boxes of ammo in his Glock 9mm firing at a target he visualized as being Mannering's murderer. An embittered Cowgill piloted the private jet Scapella used in his trips to Chicago to arrange with Munoz the elimination of Michael Two Bulls. He was fully aware of the purpose of the flights. An expert pilot, Cowgill often flew his jet himself and gave his regular pilot the day off. He liked to impress his friends among the elite with his prowess at piloting a small jet. But the flights to Chicago were far more personal that mere ego strutting. He put it to Crowley and Scapella in very plain language.

"If you don't kill that motherfucker, I'll do it _myself!_

Michael Two Bulls did not leave Denver to return to the Mexican border in Sonora. He headed the other direction. Towards the north. Towards Minnesota. Towards Chief Judge Miles Crowley and the other members of the Lords of Power. Including, it would soon turn out, the wealthy philanthropist Thomas Cowgill III.

An occurrence that is mere serendipity from one viewpoint can be utterly calamitous from another. Unfortunately for Thomas Cowgill III there was a small blurb in the Minneapolis newspaper's Sunday society page read by a curious man named Michael Two Bulls. The little scrap of gossip said that the millionaire philanthropist would be flying three members of local high society on a hunting trip to Canada in his private jet. Though the article didn't go into details, the truth was that the three passengers were the president of a bank heavily into sub-prime mortgages, the CEO of a large corporation currently diversifying its assets to overseas tax shelters and a wealthy attorney who headed a high dollar lobbying firm that specialized in manipulating public opinion. All three of these men, along with Cowgill, were among the names of the Lords of Power Scapella had been forced to give Two Bulls before his death. All were mentioned in the newspaper's gossipy society page. Four of the inner circle of the group of men and women who had tried to destroy Michael Two Bulls were together in one group.

It was a golden opportunity he could not miss.

A small, compact, wiry man with short hair walked into the Wilkins Company's private hangar. The man was wearing a FAA inspector's smock, the kind the more officious FAA men sometimes wore. He was carrying a clipboard and had the typical look of self importance that lesser governmental inspectors liked to inflict on those who were under their power. Les Peters, the Wilkins mechanic working that shift in the hangar, looked up from the troublesome Cessna engine with the sticking number three piston. _Oh, no._ Not another inspector. Not when he was busy with this damned troublesome engine. Peters took a rag and wiped the grease from his hands.

"Yeah?" He said in an irritated voice as the FAA inspector approached him. The little man, maybe a Mexican or something like that, looked at his clipboard.

"A Leer Jet owned by a Thomas Cowgill?" The little man raised his eyebrows sarcastically. "Thomas Cowgill _III_ , no less." That won acceptance from Les Peters. He was none too fond of rich white men. Few working class blacks were.

"Over there in the corner," Peters said, motioning at a Leer Jet sitting near the hangar door. "That's Cowgill's bird. What's up with it?" The Mexican-looking FAA inspector eased up on his official manner. He seemed to like Peters. That was fine with Les Peters. It never hurt to be on good terms with the inspectors. He was going to be as cooperative as he could. Or at least appear to be.

"I have to do a quick insurance check," the FAA man said. "It's a new procedure. I never did one before."

"Well, go for it," Peters said. "I've been over that bird from tip to tail and I'll guarantee you she's in perfect shape." The FAA man smiled.

"I'll bet she is." Then he walked over to the little jet and Peters went back to the Cessna engine with the obstinate number three piston. He was determined to find the problem before his shift was over.

The FAA man looked over the outside of the airplane, reaching in to touch various parts of the fuselage. Les Peters was back hard at work deciphering the obdurate Cessna engine and didn't notice the peculiar way the FAA man looked at the plane. Intense. Calculating. Soon he disappeared into the plane. A few minutes later he was back out again, the clipboard tucked under his arm.

"Looks fine," he said as he walked away from the jet. The mechanic glanced up and waved.

"Damn right it is," he yelled. "I do good work."

"So do I," the FAA man replied, making Peters stop and look quizzically at him. Then the FAA man turned and walked out of the hangar and vanished from sight. The mechanic watched him disappear.

"Goddamn FAA jerk," he muttered, returning to his both his opinion and his work. "All they ever do is cause me trouble."

Peters could not have even begun to realize just how prophetic his words would be in the very near future.

Cowgill and his three guests arrived a half hour later. A tall, graceful man, one of the archetypes of the American aristocrat, Cowgill waved and yelled at the mechanic from across the hangar.

"She ready to go, Les?" Peters returned the wave and hollered back at him.

"All set, Mr. Cowgill." The philanthropist and his three guests climbed into the plane.

The aircraft fired up smoothly, the flight plan already filed. It wasn't a busy day and the little jet was soon pulling up off of the south runway. They would do a turn that carried them over the expansive unoccupied swampy area of the Minnesota River bottomlands adjacent to the airport and then head north for the hunting trip to Canada. The booze was already being unpacked and poured.

A man in a camper truck was sitting on an airport approach road just south of the strip. As the little jet pulled up and soared overhead, the man waited for the jet to make its turn over the unpopulated bottomlands along the river that was routine for private aircraft. His finger was on the button of a mechanism he held in his hand. In the plane one of the passengers lit up a cigar and reached over to open up the ashtray. Inside he saw something bright and shiny. He took it out and looked curiously at it.

"What's that?" Cowgill asked.

"A nickel," the man replied. Cowgill shot a glance from the controls to the shiny coin in the man's hand.

"What _kind_ of nickel?" He asked in a sharply apprehensive voice. The other man blanched as he grasped the implications of the coin.

"Indian Head," he replied with a gasp, hurtling the coin from his hand as though it were a white hot incendiary. Cowgill immediately hit the controls on the jet and began to turn back towards the airport. At that moment Michael Two Bulls pressed the button. As the plane exploded in the air overhead, Michael put his truck into gear and drove away. He was perfectly satisfied with his record as a FAA inspector. One inspection. One crash. Four deaths. All richly deserved.

The FBI agents would later find the phony FAA inspector's clipboard on a table in the hangar where Cowgill's jet had been.

There was an Indian Head nickel glued to it.

The news reached Judge Crowley in his chambers. He adjourned the court for the day and went home. Inside the privacy of his own study, Crowley raged for hours at the man who had dared reach inside the inner circle of the elite and kill four of them with one blow. Nothing had ever shaken him so much. He drank half a fifth of brandy that afternoon, but the alcohol didn't calm him. Yet even in his drunken rage he was aware of a single dominant thought with crystal clarity. From that moment on only one thing mattered to Judge Miles Crowley. The apprehension and summary execution of Michael Two Bulls.

It had become a vendetta for him, too.

Two Bulls didn't return to Mexico after the plane crash. His task was not yet completed. He went to the City Club and told the manager of the restaurant that he wanted to apply for a job. While there he managed to engage some of the employees in conversation. One elderly black woman gave him a very interesting piece of information. It was what he was looking for. A few minutes later Two Bulls was gone and on his way to a lake seventy miles northeast of the city. He looked up an address in the local telephone book and then drove out a dirt road to a lakeshore home hidden behind sheltering lines of Norway pines and red cedars.

It was not a difficult thing to break into the cabin without a sign of his entry. He found what he was looking for in a gun cabinet and spent nearly an hour in constructing and perfecting his creation. After several dry run tests to make certain it worked, he left the lakeshore home through a window and returned down the dirt road that gave access to it. Before night fell he was already miles away.

Ben Thompson woke close to dawn. Consuela was still asleep at his side, her naked body tucked tightly under the covers from the early morning chill. Moving carefully and quietly, Ben rose and went outside. There was still some coffee left in a pot over the small tortilla burner charcoal stove and it was even passably warm. He poured himself a cup and went outside to watch the sunrise.

It came up blood red and spectacular. He sipped on the coffee, frowning a little at the slightly acidic taste, and watched the day come alive. Even in a barren place like this there was still a chorus of birdsong to the waking day. Though he would have scoffed at such thoughts before, now Ben could think of sunrise birdsong as divine in some special way. He had no explanations for the thought. He just accepted it.

As he watched the passionate brightness of the dust tinged sunrise, a gray cloud came up from the northeast and rapidly moved down over the sun. The sun was soon obscured. The colors were muted behind the cloud, spreading in pastels that diffused through the gray cloud as it moved over the eastern horizon. As he sat watching the sun disappear Ben had an overpowering feeling that things were rapidly coming to their conclusion. He finished the coffee and sat for a long time in the silence of the early morning. Then he prepared himself as best he could to watch the day unfold into what he was believed would be one hell of a seismic conclusion.

Not much later Manuel appeared and sat down next to Thompson, looking curiously at him, seeming to Ben to be reflecting on something and debating whether or not to put his thoughts to words. How old was Manuel? Like many of the poor country people, the campesinos, of Mexico, his age was hard to gauge. They lived hard lives, outdoors in the weather much of the time, and the skin of even the younger ones was already cracked and leathery. And, also like most of the field workers, he was thin and at least gave the appearance of being nimble. He could have been forty. He could have been sixty. In fact he was nearly seventy. He had lived and worked in the United States for nearly ten years, in Chicago, intending to make a new home for himself and his family in the land of the gringos. He studied English and became increasingly fluent. With a noticeable accent, but, finally, fluent. After a decade a combination, of homesickness, little hope for better pay and living conditions and--above all--Chicago's miserable winters, drove him back to the more temperate roots of home.

"Do you know much of Mexico?" He said to Thompson. Ben looked at him, curious.

"No. Not much." Manuel swept his arm in a broad arc in front of them.

"This land is where the Mexican Revolution began. Nearby, in the town of Cananea. The exploited miners of that place. They rebelled. It was our Lexington and Concord." That riveted Ben's attention. His interest in history was not confined to the Anasazi and the American Southwest.

"Oh! Really?" He said, interest plain in both his voice and on his face and a clear signal to Manuel to continue.

"Yes. There were great hopes for the Mexicans then. As was true of your American Revolution." He swept an arm in front of them once more. "This old worn out place, with its crumbling adobe buildings and fallen in corrals and dead orchards, was once a grand hacienda. A Mexican grandee, Don Carlos Valenzuela, owned a great ranch here. Thousands of hectares. Thousands of cattle. Dozens of vaqueros lived and worked here, as did their families and several families of servants. Orchards of pears and peaches and apples, pecans, walnuts, almonds. Chickens and turkeys, pigs and goats and milk cows. Gardens of tomatoes and squash and cucumbers. It was a place alive, vibrant, with dances every month when the people came on horseback, in carriages and the occasional rico in an automobile to eat and dance and celebrate life." He stopped, still obviously intensely reflective. Ben thought the leathery old Mexican looked sad. Or maybe wistful.

"That was one side of Mexican life. The small side. The much bigger side was of the great mass of the people, the campesinos, caught in a rigid class system ruled by the rich and trapped in an endless cycle of hopeless poverty. When the revolution came the rebels drove out the grandees like Don Carlos and turned the land over to groups of peasants in what are called ejidos. Those were very exciting times for the poor people of Mexico." Manuel sighed. A long, deep, sigh. "But the hopes gradually faded, the ejidos didn't prosper, and a different group of the rich and powerful took control of the country. They try to pretend otherwise, but we are not much better off than before the revolution." Another sigh, one of a very deep and profound weariness. Not just for him. For his people. His country. His nation. "And now," he continued, "with the drug lords and all the violence, we are maybe even worse off than before the revolution."

Ben looked long at Manuel, wondering. Then he spoke.

"There is a reason you are telling me this, isn't there?" Manuel smiled, a sweet sour smile touched with a bitter nostalgia.

"My family name is Valenzuela. This was my family's hacienda before the revolution. My grandfather was Don Carlos Valenzuela. We lost everything. Including Don Carlos. Even though he was sympathetic to their aims the revolutionaries put him against an adobe wall and shot him." The arm swept a wide arc before them again, slowly. His voice seemed far off. His thoughts didn't just seem far off. They were. To a different time. Another long, weary sigh. "The books say it was necessary to break the chains of the past. That is what I was taught in school. The reality tells a different story." Both of his arms suddenly flew out from his body to their full length, the fists clenched in anger.

"Desolation! It was all for nothing!" He reached over and put a hand on Ben's shoulder. "I don't know what you and your amigos, the Indios Norte Americanos, are planning." He squeezed Ben's shoulder, hard. "But I hope that it turns out better for you than it did for us." Ben stared at Manuel. He didn't know what to say.

"History is a cycle," Manuel continued after he realized Ben wasn't going to say anything. "A cycle of disasters. When the Valenzuelas built this place two hundred years ago, they had to clear away the remnants of a much older civilization. One that had failed. Not once, but twice." He waved towards the north. "They came from far to the north, refugees from drought and war, and built their pueblo here, on the little stream of water we call the San Pedro. To them, coming from years of drought, our little stream must have seemed a watery Godsend." Another sigh and shrug, weary, half hearted. "But they failed here, too. Only their bones remain." He turned to look at Ben.

"The Navajo had a name for those ancient people. The old ones they called them." Ben's face was about to take on the color of the ash in the wood stove in his north woods cabin. "The Navajo word for old ones," Manuel said, "is.....

"Anasazi."

### Chapter 10

### The Ghost

As Michael Two Bulls returned from the long journey to the north country events were beginning to close in on him. He knew none of the details of it, but that didn't matter. Such a path as he had chosen had to come to a violent conclusion soon. The mystical sense that guided him told him the same thing that Ben Thompson had sensed that same morning. The end was near.

It began with a child. Consuela's ten year old daughter accompanied her grandfather Manuel into the faded border down of Naco to get eggs and fresh vegetables from the market. While her grandfather was haggling over price with the egg seller, little Angelica slipped away to visit with her good friend Rita. Angelica was a little girl with a big tongue. She was absolutely incapable of holding a secret. The presence of these strange people from the north, the one a common gringo, but the others people of the famous Sioux, was an event that she had to proclaim with great self-importance to her friend Rita. Her loose tongue was well known to her family, so Manuel soon rounded up the errant little girl and hounded her hack to the hacienda. But not before a few moments of idle chatter had started a chain that would end in disaster.

Little Rita was the daughter of the man who was the local police chief. He was not a man to press people for too many details of their private business, nor did he tolerate for long his daughter's gossiping tongue. But the story she brought to her father was one which made him take notice. These people she spoke of sounded like the ones the gringos were so excited about finding. Officer Pepe Garcia was not at all interested in catching fugitives from the north. Nor was he interested in what passed for justice in the United States. But the presence so near to him of these people could mean something very important for a small town policeman with a pittance of a salary. Money. This information might` be worth money, a good deal of money. Pepe Garcia quickly made discreet inquiries to find if what his daughter had said was indeed true. He soon found that it was. These people really were nearby. Then he began making long distance phone calls.

The accident of geography allowed Munoz his opportunity. When the news reached the American authorities that the fugitives probably had been located in Sonora near the town of Naco, it spread with the dizzying speed of modern communications along the network of influence to include such men as Judge Miles Crowley. The judge was a bright and perceptive man, even though he was manipulative and deceptive, and immediately recognized his chance. The small time lag involved in dealing with this because an international boundary was involved might give his men a chance to slip in before the authorities. He passed on the news to Munoz, who acted immediately.

This time Munoz had no doubts. He expected to find Two Bulls in a place like this. He and the three men with him were soon flying the four hundred odd miles from Albuquerque to Tucson on a rented aircraft where they could bring their weapons unobserved. The fifth man was told to leave L.A. and fly to Tucson where they would rent a van and head south for the twin border towns of Naco. It was now a matter of only a few hours before Munoz and his men once again closed in on the Two Bulls and Thompson. Munoz' predator's instincts were jangling. This time they would finally catch them. Their prey was about to be trapped.

Michael Two Bulls returned to the hacienda from the north that evening, only a few hours ahead of the pursuers he was yet unaware of. He said nothing about what he had done in the north. Nor did anyone ask him. Two Bulls did not rest after he drove in from his long journey. He took Thompson aside and spoke to him for a half hour about all of the things that had happened, why he had done what he had done, all the events and factors that had gone into making his life take such a bizarre, violent course. Thompson listened without trying to converse. He knew that he was hearing what had to be told before it was too late for it be heard. He, too, as both Munoz and Two Bulls, knew instinctually that the end was at hand. Or, as he now began to realize...

An ending that was possibly also a beginning.

"That is about it," the wiry little man said as he rose from the squatting position he had been in on the patio floor. "I know I can trust you to tell things as they really were. There is a woman, a TV journalist in Minneapolis. Melissa Hunt. She knows about you. She has been told we are holding you against your will. When this is over, find her and tell her everything." Two Bulls looked down at Thompson, who was still squatting on the patio, and reached down to clutch his shoulders in a grip that was both firm and warm.

"You have been through much, Ben. And you have shown yourself to be a man of strength and dignity. It is good to have known you." Ben started to protest, to say that he shouldn't talk so morbidly, but he knew better than to say anything. Besides, what was there to say? He still did not really comprehend in any logical way why he was even here. He was still trapped in a hopeless conundrum--a dream that was not a dream but was a dream. He just nodded. From a distance of a few feet Angie noticed Thompson's expression at that moment. A deeply somber face. Like at a funeral.

Michael spent much of the rest of the late evening in intense conversation with first the old man, then Angie, then the two of them together. At times he would break off and drift over to be with Thompson for a while. The tension gradually increased until a pall of anticipation, of dread, hung over everyone. Consuela and Manuel picked it up and began to grow uneasy and sullen. The little girl Angelica ran off to her room and hid inside, afraid of the strange expressions she saw on the faces of the people around her.

It was an evening of ever growing portentousness.

Munoz had a half day's start on the authorities. It had taken that much longer from when the judge had contacted him for the governments of the United States and Mexico to cut through the international red tape to make an attempt to apprehend the fugitives. By the time they had actually begun to move any forces, Munoz and his four men, in the rented van, had crossed the border and were drawing near to where the fugitives were hiding in the dusty rundown hacienda a few miles outside of the little impoverished Sonora border town of Naco.

Pepe Garcia saw the men drive into his dusty little backwater town and knew who they must be. It was with visions of wealth coming into his hands very soon that he rushed out and waved at the van, stopping it in the middle of the potholed main street.

"What do you wish here, **Señores**?" Pepe asked of the men in the van. Luis Munoz leaned out and looked closely at the Mexican policeman. He immediately understood what was on the mind of Pepe Garcia.

"We must speak privately, officer," Munoz said in Spanish.

"You speak Spanish like a native, but not like a Mexican," Garcia said, vaguely suspicious.

"I am a native," Munoz answered. Garcia looked at him skeptically.

"You are a Mexican?" Munoz shook his head negatively.

"No, a Cuban." The small town constable was confused.

"A Cuban? What do you do here?" Munoz switched to English and spoke in a low voice.

"You know what I am doing here. My government has sent us on a top secret mission. Your government is cooperating. I am told that you can lead us to the place we want to go." It was exactly what Garcia had been hoping for, but when it came out in such plain language he was stunned by it. Such things to come into his simple life!

"But why do they send Cubans?" Munoz smiled, pretended to chuckle and spoke in a conspiratorial tone to the confused Garcia.

"Deniability. They often use Cubans," he said, again speaking in Spanish. "It clouds the issues, hides the origins. Surely you have heard of such things." Garcia thought of all the gossip he had heard coming from north of the border and also from Mexico City about the CIA using Cuban agents and others to do their dirty work. It was not such a strange idea at that, he decided.

"There will be money for you," Munoz said quickly in the language everyone understood. Money. "More than enough for your trouble." Garcia's eyebrows raised in hopeful expectation. "Get in the van and show us where we must go." Munoz said it quietly, in a tone that was neither commanding nor supplicating. Garcia scrambled into the van and pointed to the west.

"There," he said. "I will show you the way."

A few minutes later a detachment of elite Federal troops landed at the airport at Cananea, hardly twenty kilometers from Naco. They were preceded by a specially cleared flight from the United States carrying a team of American agents. The two units rendezvoused and soon were on their way to Naco in Mexican Army trucks.

Munoz wasted no time in elaborate preparations. He knew that they could not be very far ahead of the authorities. He was certain they had found Two Bulls first, for Garcia knew of no other people or vehicles moving towards the rundown rural hacienda. For once, Munoz thought, luck was with him. They stopped just out of sight of the buildings of the hacienda. Munoz turned to Garcia and spoke in a hushed Spanish to the excited officer. Were there any other accesses to this place? The Mexican policeman thought for a moment.

"A trail. On the other side. Rough, but passable." Munoz took two of his men and Garcia with him in the van and left the other two on the hacienda's road.

"Wait fifteen minutes," he instructed them before he drove off. "Then move out to either side of the road and approach the hacienda to about one hundred yards. Cover the front and sides for anyone trying to escape." Garcia guided Munoz and the two other Cubans around the small group of low buildings to the far side where the other track accessing the hacienda was.

"This is it," Pepe Garcia said as the climbed out of the van.

"Good," Munoz said, as he stealthily drew his knife from its scabbard on the leather belt, the belt and knife hidden from view, covered by the Filipino style barong shirt he sometimes wore. "You did good, officer." Garcia's mind was on the money he was going to receive. Munoz' mind was on the knife in his hand. He grabbed the man's mouth with one hand and drove the knife into Garcia's heart. He died instantly. As Garcia slumped to the ground Munoz said in a scarily calm voice that almost sounded sincere.

"Your bad luck, _Señor_. We can have no witnesses." And with that Munoz and the other two Cubans began to approach the hacienda where Michael Two Bulls was hiding.

Michael suddenly stood up from his rapt conversation with the old man. He stood tense and erect, every nerve alert and every sense searching out danger. He caught the dim glimpse of headlights over a hill suddenly appearing and then going out. Someone was out there. The time had finally come. Moving with a graceful, animal quickness, Michael gathered Angie up into his arms, hugged her, then embraced the old man. Next he turned his embrace to Thompson.

"I trust you to remember all of this," he said to the ashen faced white man. There were a few hurried words in Spanish to Manuel and Consuela and then he was gone, gathering up a rifle, ammunition, a pistol and a knife from the arsenal in his room and slipping from the lighted hacienda into the darkness surrounding it.

Thompson stood watching the fluid movements of Michael Two Bulls as he vanished into the desert darkness. Suddenly he spun on his heels and yelled at the others.

"A gun! Get me a gun! I want to help. Let me try to stop this before it's too late!" Angie walked two or three steps towards him, motioning at him to calm himself with her hands.

"There are no more guns," she said softly, soothingly. "This is Michael's fight. You must let him fight it himself." The old man turned from watching his grandson's disappearance into the night. Ben saw what looked to be tears in his eyes.

"She is right, Thompson. This is the way it must he."

"But," Thompson protested. "But...."

"Let the fighters do the fighting," Lee Two Bulls insisted. "And let the rememberers do the remembering." He turned away from Ben to stare once again out into the deceptively peaceful darkness, and perhaps to hide the tears in his eyes.

"It is about to begin," the old man said in a voice that cracked just slightly.

Munoz went directly down the rutted track that had long served farm wagons avoiding the rainy season flooding of the nearby modest trickle of a stream that had the wildly misleading name of the San Pedro River. Munoz had his men move out to either side of him, so that the five of them moving in on the hacienda could cover every possible line of escape.

They went to within one hundred yards, checked with each other on the personal short range radios each was carrying, then began to creep in to half of that distance. Munoz lay down on the edge of the old wagon track and carefully sighted in his rifle. The others did the same. He spoke lowly into the radio to his men.

"Fire!" The Cuban said in a voice tense with the excitement that flooded over him at the culmination of the hunt.

The five men began pouring automatic weapons fire into the hacienda from all directions. Bullets went thudding into the thick walls, broke all of the outside windows, ricocheted from stones and metal pipes and went completely through the house in some places where the adobe walls were thin or windows lined up with the inner courtyard.

The noise inside was deafening. Even the old man lost his typical stoic poise and went diving ignominiously for cover. Angie was not far behind. As Ben dove down he saw Manuel spin to the ground from a bullet in his shoulder. Consuela ran to his side. Ben got back to his feet and ran over to the wounded man. On Consuela's face he saw the greatest terror he had ever seen in a human's countenance. It shocked him. Which, Thompson having been in a war and also seen many scenes of violence as a policeman, was doubly shocking. Then he realized why. This, like back in the war, had gotten personal. People he knew were getting hurt. Ben again wished he had a gun to fight back with, or at least try to stop this madness, even though he knew that was not what the Two Bulls wanted.

Michael had not expected them to begin firing indiscriminately into the hacienda without being sure he was in there. But that was one of Munoz' tactics. Attack the fox' family to flush out the fox. This was certain to smoke Two Bulls out if he were anywhere near. The wily Cuban stopped firing and began watching in all directions for his target. He might be inside the little trap, or he might be inside the greater trap. But if he were in either of them he would soon show himself. Munoz watched every flicker of movement in the shadows with the cold eye of the predator that he, in fact, was.

Two Bulls soon broke his cover. He lay only twenty yards from one of the Cubans who had come in with Munoz. He had watched them come in, set up, then begin to fire. The leader was a figure that Two Bulls recognized as being his pursuer, the man Munoz, the man Scapella had described to him before his death. Michael waited to see what they were going to do, to see if there were others, where they might be. He concluded that there were more of them on the other side of the house. Munoz was talking lowly to someone on the radio.

The firing surprised him. Munoz was more clever than he had thought. Michael jumped up and ran at the Cuban closest to him. The man caught the movement from his side and swung his weapon towards the dark shape hurtling at him. Michael fired once from the hip and the man twirled around and fell on his back. Without breaking stride, Michael grabbed the downed Cuban's rifle and carried it with him as he dashed for the hacienda. A rifle sighted in on him as he ran in an erratic, zigzag pattern. Munoz had been hoping for just such an opportunity for a clean shot. He smiled as he touched the trigger.

"So the fox was in the trap," he whispered to himself. "And now I have him." Munoz squeezed off a shot and Two Bulls stumbled and hurtled forward. A second and third shot missed and whistled over his head. Michael hit the ground, somersaulted and came up again on a run. He still held onto both rifles. Munoz moved his weapon to sight in on the running form again but Two Bulls was behind a wall before he could get a good shot. The bullet he fired thudded into a wall as Two Bulls dodged behind it.

"Now the fox is trapped in the little trap," he said over the radio to the others. "Move in closer. Within twenty yards. We've got him now." Munoz reached down to the bulky small sack that hung around his waist. He grasped something inside the sack and pulled it out. The cold-eyed Cuban grinned in self congratulation when he held the ominous egg-shaped piece of metal up in his hand and looked at it.

"The grenade," Munoz said with a smug chuckle into the radio, "is something our fox has not reckoned with." He glanced at his watch, then spoke again into the radio. "Let's get it over with." There was no time to waste. The authorities could very well be almost there. He switched the frequency on his radio, pulled out a long antenna and moved to a protected place so that he could hold the radio up high in the air and still be safe from rifle fire from the hacienda.

"This is Dagger. Repeat. Dagger. Send in the Eagle. Do you acknowledge?" Munoz pressed the receive button on his radio. A crackling voice came over it.

"Eagle acknowledges," the voice said. Munoz replaced the radio on his belt and began to run in a low crouch for the hacienda. In one hand he held his rifle. In the other he had a grenade.

The four men moved in on the hacienda from four different directions. Inside, Michael had checked to see how the family was. Only Manuel had been hurt, a shoulder wound that was not serious. The others were caring for him. He cautioned them to keep down and began prowling the perimeters of the hacienda for the approaching Cubans.

"They're moving in closer," he whispered as he moved from one side of the hacienda to the other. "Stay down. Stay down."

Ben Thompson saw the rifle that Michael had brought in and left by a door. He began to move towards it. No one noticed.. They were all preoccupied with caring for Manuel and watching Michael move spectrally through the dark house. All of the lanterns had been blown out when the firing started. Michael saw a figure moving in from the east. A man was crawling through the clumps of withered bunch grasses, his rifle cradled in his arms before him as he crawled. By the way he moved it was obvious he had military experience. As Michael watched the figure approach, rifle fire continued to come in at the hacienda from all directions.

Two Bulls stood back in the room and sighted through the window. His form was invisible several feet back in the dark room to the man approaching outside. The lean Lakota warrior fired only once. The crawling figure leaped into the air and fell over onto his side, lying there without a hint of movement. He looked to be dead. Without pausing a second, Michael went leaping out the window and ran out to where the dead man lay, zigzagging as he moved silently through the rocky desert soil. No one had seen him leave the hacienda.

Munoz got to within fifteen feet of the hacienda, easing his body up behind a small hummock of grass and sand. He didn't have to give a signal over the radio to the others. The explosion would be signal enough. Munoz jerked out the pin on the grenade and lobbed it into an open doorway. The lethal piece of egg-shaped metal went skidding into the room and exploded in a deafening roar, tearing apart the room and blowing in part of the wall into the inside patio where the people were hiding. The metal fragments came sailing out doorways and windows in all directions, including into the patio.

Consuela screamed and fell over Manuel's prostrate form. Ben felt something hot hit him in the shoulder and legs and he was thrown backwards against a wooden barrel. The first grenade was followed by two more, each coming from different directions. One of them tore apart a room on the other side of the house and sent more metal fragments sailing into the patio. Ben saw Angie grabbing at her ankle.

But then he saw something come flying over the roof, thump heavily against the back part of it and then fall into the patio itself. Ben instinctively dived through a doorway into an inside room. The explosion in the roofless interior patio had the curious effect of sending a mushroom cloud up out of the dirt-floored enclosure. Michael ran wildly after the first explosion towards the remaining Cubans. He found one just after he had thrown the grenade. The man died with a bullet in the back of his head even as his arm was dropping from the grenade throw.

Michael raced to the man's side, picked up the small sack of grenades he had and ran desperately towards the last two Cubans. Each of them had thrown one more grenade before Michael got close enough. He ran to a point midway between the two men, pulled out two grenades, yanked the pins and threw one first at the nearest man, then turned and threw the second at the other.

Neither of the Cubans had seen him or heard him in the noise of the explosions from the hacienda. A whole side of the house was crashing down from the last two explosions when a grenade landed just five feet from one of the Cubans. The man whirled and looked, taking just a tiny bit of time to register what the noise was. Too late he realized what had happened and started to dive for cover. The grenade exploded in the desert gravel and sent a fan of pebbles and hot metal spraying out in all directions. It caught the diving man within its killing range and filled his spine with shrapnel. He died before his body hit the ground.

The first grenade explosion warned Munoz. He spun around, saw a grenade land a few feet from him and had a little more time to dive for cover. Still, it was not enough. The fragments from the explosion caught him in the side and threw him up against a slight slope, his face pressed into the hard packed desert ground.

Inside the hacienda, Ben's body jerked in terror with each explosion as he lay with his head covered by his arms. A minute passed and there was silence. Cautiously, he raised his head. There was no one to be seen, no voices to be heard. Then he remembered the grenade falling into the patio and the people there. He jumped to his feet, staggered when he realized he had numerous shrapnel wounds, then lurched painfully out into the patio. As soon as he passed through the door and saw what was there, he froze in his tracks. Thompson screamed once, clenched his fists in rage and then fell onto his knees. He began to sob.

Everyone was dead.

Outside, Michael Two Bulls checked the Cubans one by one. He thought the first one he had shot might still be alive. He was. The man was incapacitated with a broken hip, but he was still very much alive. He pulled a grenade from his bag and threw it at Michael. Two Bulls probably would have been killed except that the Cuban, in his frantic haste, had forgotten to pull the pin. Michael shot him as the wounded Cuban reached for a pistol. The others were dead. One, two, three more, then on to the last. Michael walked up to the body and saw it was Munoz. He reached down with his rifle and pulled the body over with the barrel.

The movement of his body when Michael Two Bulls turned him over was the cue and the cover for a simple movement of Munoz' fingers. As he was roughly pulled over he jerked out the pin on the grenade in his hand. It was already live when Munoz tumbled onto his back. Munoz counted just two seconds, then opened his eyes and leered sadistically up at Michael Two Bulls. He held the grenade up from his side.

"Its a draw, Crazy Horse," he snarled.

Michael's rifle shot and the grenade explosion were almost exactly simultaneous.

Ben Thompson staggered from the hacienda looking for Michael, having found him nowhere in the house. As the wounded man stumbled out into the desert scrub, he thought he heard a voice far off to the west. He turned just in time to see another grenade explosion light up the sky fifty yards away. Ben limped over to where the explosion had come from.

He found what he had feared he would.

Within the next half hour the smoking ruin of the old rundown hacienda was the scene of near chaos. A helicopter came flying overhead, circled and began to land, then abruptly rose up again and vanished into the darkness. A few minutes later a flotilla of Mexican Army trucks with Mexican soldiers in camouflage suits and American agents in flak vests and dungarees came roaring down the bumpy desert road. Not long after that the fire trucks and the ambulances came.

It all seemed like a very bad dream, by far the worst of all his strange dreams, to the sole survivor, Ben Thompson. There were so many questions. So very many questions. How could he find answers to all the questions? He was confused. Disoriented. Rambling. His body was on fire. His head was...was....

He tumbled over and lost consciousness.

Judge Miles Crowley was delighted with the final conclusion of events. So much so that he was unconsciously humming pop tunes from his youth. Not only was Michael Two Bulls eliminated once and for all, but the rest of his troublesome clan had gone with him. There was the matter of Thompson surviving, but that was still not definite. He remained on the critical list. Even if he did survive, who would believe him? Thompson would have all he could do to keep himself out of a very long prison term. Crowley would see to that.

And that evil serpent of a man, Munoz, with all of his henchmen, had died, too. No loose ends there. No one to talk. No one to blackmail. No one at all. It was ended. A satisfactory conclusion to what had been a big goddamn mess from the beginning. But now it was over and time to be on with life.

Crowley had one love that he would share with no one. His lakeshore home that he maintained an hour and a half's drive out of the city. Whenever the pressures of life became too great he would retire there for recreation, meditation, relaxation. No one else was allowed there. Not his wife, not his friends, not his children. It was his one sole possession that was his and his alone.

The judge was worn down from the tension of the past months and, even though he was deeply pleased with the final ending of it all, needed very much to he alone and draw the scattered pieces of his psyche hack together. The afternoon after he learned of what had happened at that hacienda far to the south in Mexico he quietly slipped away for a short rest at his lakeshore home.

He stopped at the same little country grocery store he always stopped at, joking with the older woman working the cash register as he bought a few sundries for a short stay, and headed for his cottage. The judge was so profoundly relaxed that he began humming an old pop tune from his youth, Leader of the Pack, and even sang the chorus and slapped time on the steering wheel, as he drove the last miles to his cozy lakeshore retreat. The sight of the austere and rigid Chief Judge Crowley singing a vapid pop tune from his teen years would have dumbfounded just about anyone who knew him. Except for those few who knew him well. They would have agreed with what he was both thinking and singing. Judge Crowley was still, always had been, always would be, the Leader of the Pack.

_Damn! It feels so good to have it all over!-_ -was forefront in his mind as he pulled up to his lakeshore retreat.

He got the keys out of his pocket, balancing the groceries on one hip. Then he put the key into the lock and turned it, feeling the door click and give way. Crowley stuffed the keys back into his pocket and gave the door a kick to swing it open while he moved the groceries back into his arms. The judge had just a fraction of a second to see it. His favorite double barreled shotgun had been tied in place on a table facing the door. A thin rope ran from the triggers to the door, engineered in such a way that the opening of the door pulled the rope tight onto the triggers.

The triggers pulled back, the hammers fell and Judge Crowley dropped the groceries and jumped in terror to the side. The imported 12 gauge double barrel fired both loads of number 2 birdshot harmlessly into the empty space occupied by Judge Crowley only moments earlier.

Crowley leaned against the house, gasping for air, as his heart raced in both fear and exultation at having survived the assassination attempt. He had escaped death by only the narrowest of margins. It had to be that goddamn Two Bulls. The bastard still coming after him even from the grave. After a few moments he got control of himself again, straightened and gingerly went into the house. Stunned, he inspected the trap meant to kill him and found the Indian Head nickel Two Bulls had glued to the top of the shotgun.

After a few more moments Crowley's tension left him. He grew smug, arrogant, with the knowledge that in the end he had finally won out over Two Bulls. The man's last histrionic attempt had failed. Crowley, and all that he represented, had triumphed. The elite, the Lords of Power, continued to prevail despite their recent losses. Losses which could be quickly replaced from the numerous acolytes. He began to chuckle to himself, went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a drink. Then he returned to the trap that had failed and gloated over his survival, sipping, smugly, at the pricey brandy that was his favorite.

At that moment Ed Jercek picked up his phone and dialed Crowley's phone number. Jercek was a widower, a long time local retired from his county public works job, and had little to do besides watch the occasional comings and goings of his wealthy, vacation home neighbors. The stranger had been most insistent and almost forced the hundred dollar bill on him. When Crowley arrived at his hideaway, Jercek was to call the judge and tell him an extremely important message had been left under his doormat.

The phone rang. Once. Twice. A third time. Crowley reluctantly broke himself away from his gloating reverie to go to the phone. It was a moment he wanted to savor and he very nearly ignored the ringing phone. But then he changed his mind at the fourth ring and walked over to the table the phone sat on. He reached down and picked up the receiver, a look of irritation on his face.

"Judge Crowley?" Jercek said. There was no time for more words. The device Michael Two Bulls had installed in the earpiece of the telephone detonated when the phone line was engaged. It caved in the left side of Crowley's skull and killed him instantly. There had been just a tiny sliver of a second for him to see the shiny objects Two Bulls had glued to the body of the phone under the receiver. The cryptogram. Three nickels again, arranged in a pyramid. An Indian head at the top and two buffalos below. Two buffalo bulls.

Two Bulls.

That same day the strikingly good looking and--very atypically--suggestively dressed investigative reporter Melissa Hunt, ably aided by a calculated barrage of sexual innuendo that had Police Captain Ed Davis almost visibly panting, was able to get his permission to interview Ben Thompson in his heavily guarded hospital room. Thompson was awake. Thompson was remembering. Thompson was talking. Hunt was listening. Between them was the low hum of a high dollar piece of modern technology Michael Two Bulls had mailed to her the day before he died. One that already preserved Vincent Scapella's final words on planet Earth. A small, superbly engineered, hand held Olympus voice recorder. ]

A small recorder that would soon have a very large public impact.

### Epilogue

Several months after Michael Two Bull's death his son was born. The boy was sired at Santee by Michael Two Bulls the day after the nighttime peyote fire communing with the ancients. The mother, Valerie Two Bulls, was the young Lakota woman who was also at the peyote fire and went with Angie to where Michael sat in seclusion the next day. She was Michael's and Angie's first cousin and understood what had to be done. The boy was raised in the old-fashioned way by others among the old-fashioned Two Bulls clan.

The years have passed.

He is now a man.

They say he looks--and acts--much like his father.

His name is Akecheta

Warrior.

****

### Chapter 11
### About the Author

Author Jim Whitesell was born and raised in Minnesota where he spent the winter months learning just how long an icicle can get before spring comes. This had the unsurprising result of Whitesell eventually hotfooting it for the Land of No Icicles. Southern Arizona. Here Señor Whitesell began a new career with Customs and Border Protection, raised his kids and managed to (mostly) avoid unpleasant encounters with dyspeptic rattlesnakes and the ubiquitous sneaky assassin of the desert--cactus.

Whitesell is non-fluent in a several languages, plays a number of musical instructions to distraction and irritates the hell out of his family with constantly sticking his Nikon D5100 DSLR in their unamused faces.

Plus he likes to write books.

### Sample Chapter

Below is a sample chapter from a mystery suspense novel, The Storm, set in the mountains of southeastern Arizona during the 1983 Storm of the Century.

### The Storm

### Anno Domini MCMLXXXIII

"It's a crime against humanity!"

So thundered a fire eyed President Ronald Reagan from his imperial seat in the American Century White House. President Reagan was damn well serious about it. And also dead-on right in the eyes of much of the world. Most were calling it an unjustified and brutal Soviet shoot down. And not without good reason. The Soviet action was flat out coldly brutal. And a gloomy adumbration for what was to be a month full of brutality and violence. The month. September. The year.

1983.

### A Matrix

It began in the nascent baby steps of the month. The Soviets provoked the world into a eyeball-to-eyeball international crisis when they shot down a civilian airliner, Korean Air 007, killing 269 people. Bad enough in itself. But among the dead was a rabidly anti-communist U.S. congressman from Georgia named Lawrence McDonald who was a cousin of the famous WWII General George Patton. President Ronald Reagan's political blood pressure skyrocketed and the always shaky cold war international nerves got even shakier. Later that month, though very few people knew about it, things got really scary when the Soviet satellite missile defense early warning system malfunctioned and falsely gave a pair of incoming missile warnings. A quick thinking Soviet officer named Petrov recognized the error and alerted his bosses before they hit the buttons to launch their by-the-book mandated nuclear retaliation. The earth was saved from blundering into a nuclear war. It was a close one. Way too close--even though the world remained ignorant that it came within a nuclear whisker of being incinerated.

But the world did know what happened when another international incident that bloody month of September exploded. Literally exploded. Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal's bloody thugs turned on their own to extort protection money when they set off a bomb in Arab owned Gulf Air 771, killing all 112 on board. The bastards got their money. And in the same month the obdurate Catholic rebels of Northern Ireland caught the Brits with their punitive pants down when they pulled off the biggest prison escape in British history. Thirty nine hardcore IRA prisoners broke out of Britain's maximum security Maze Prison and were gone like Druids' smoke into the murky world of the Irish resistance. It was one hell of a turbulent month, September of 1983. And not just human caused turbulence. Tropical Storm Octave hit the arid state of Arizona with a biblical deluge that created utter chaos the length and breadth of U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater's home turf. The whole state had an environmental nervous breakdown. It was, as one meteorologist put it...

"....one hell of a muddy mess."

The heavens were in churning cyclonic tumult. The cause was a meteorological shotgun wedding of a pair of colliding weather events. A Pacific weather system slid down the rugged California coast from the north and began moving inland into Arizona. To the south a tropical storm named Octave petered out off Mexico's Baja coast. Octave might have been out of steam but he sure wasn't out of water. There was moisture aplenty left in this old man of the sea. The California storm front sucked that moisture up like God's own vacuum cleaner and pumped it east into Arizona with such force that Arizona experienced the costliest natural disaster in the state's history. The rain continued for days on end. Fourteen people died as a direct result of the storm, the Prescott railroad was permanently washed out, the Gila River bridge at Yuma was left high and dry when the flooding river cut a new channel, and Interstate 19 south from Tucson to the Mexican border was washed out. Severe flooding hit almost everywhere. Roads were closed, communities isolated all over Arizona and the paranoid bibliophiles were dusting off their ark building blueprints. It wasn't just the storm of the century. It was the Granddaddy storm of a whole bunch of centuries

And a tiny group of terrified desperate people found themselves fighting for their lives plumb in the middle of that Granddaddy Arizona storm of the centuries.

### The Ancient Matrix

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

It was somewhere in the piney Animas Mountains of Hidalgo County. What's today the 'boot heel' of the state of New Mexico, but was then briefly part of Old Mexico after the long dark centuries of foreign Spanish rule. John James Johnson, a rugged Kentucky born adventurer of the self reliant and hard bitten sort loosed on the expanding western frontier by Anglo America, was among the sprinkling of Americans living among the Native Americans and Mexicans of the Mexican southwest. In 1835 and 1837 the besieged desperate Mexican frontier states of Chihuahua and Sonora, forced to the edge of financial and cultural ruin from increasingly destructive Native American depredations, took the gruesome step of initiating a bounty system on the scalps of Apache Indians. The bounty grabbed the interest of a lot of people, including John James Johnson. He just was one among many. At first. But, unlike the many, Johnson was one of the few who made the sanguinary leap from mere interest to action.

Bloodily premeditated action.

In 1837, posing as traders with a pack train of laden mules, Johnson and a group of Missouri adventurers invited a band of Mimbreno Apaches into a trade parley. In a startling contrast to the complicated ancient blood feud with the Mexicans, Apaches had been on mostly good terms with the Americans. The Mimbrenos cautiously came in to trade. After a day or two of haggling and bartering, when the beguiled Indians were clustered together mulling over trade goods, the Americans let loose on them with rifle fire and a small hidden canon filled with scrap metal. At least twenty of the Indians died, including their chief, known by the Spanish name of Juan José Compas. Johnson scalped the dead Apaches, then quickly fled to Chihuahua City where he showed up at the doors of the State of Chihuahuas's bounty office with the blood hardly dry on his grisly trophies. The Mexicans paid John James Johnson for the Apache scalps.

One hundred pesos.

Apache retaliation was quick and brutal. A party of trappers on the nearby Gila River, led by a man named Charles Kemp, was murdered, as were a dozen men on a luckless passing wagon train. Tit for lethal tat. Was it then over? No. It wasn't the end. Only the beginning. The Apache had a long memory.

Far longer and beyond anything that even they could imagine.

### Jesús Teran

Jesús Teran could plainly see the United States from his humble sun bleached adobe cottage on the hungry side of the border in the dusty little border town of Naco. The jaggedy peaked mountains radiating off to the north were all in the U.S. But it was the San Jose Mountains just south of Naco, barely five miles in length but rising to tower three thousand feet above the town at a cool 7500 foot elevation, that drew Jesús Teran. The steep mountain slopes were home to a succession of habitat zones, each with its own home boy resident species of trees. Teran was a wood cutter who ranged the slopes to cut wood for marketing across the border to the wood hungry stoves and backyard barbeques of the Americans. On the middle slopes he cut oak and pinyon. Higher up he cut ponderosa pine. On the lower slopes he cut mesquite. Some of the mesquite he sold for fireplace wood. But most of it he burned down into charcoal to sell to the Americans for their barbecues. It was not a fat life, but a man had to do something to eat, and wood cutting was as good as most things open to a Mexican not lucky enough to be one of the few born into the privileged world of the Mexican elite. At least he, and his large family, had enough to eat. And there was no strutting patrón's butt that he had to kiss. He might be poor. But he was free.

Jesús Teran was a man of dignity and self respect.

He stood amidst a scattering of manzanita and black oaks heavily laden with ripening clusters of bitter tasting acorns. Teran and most of his compadres found them impossible to eat. Not so the gray squirrels and other critters of the mountains that dined with relish on the drooping bounty of the black oaks. And no one denied the graceful beauty of the oaks, bitter though their fruit may be. This was one of Jesús' favorite spots to linger and look and muse, a bluff a thousand feet above the browning expanse of the San Pedro valley. Below him the desert grasslands of the valley spread off into the distance to disappear over the rim of the horizon. Looking to Jesús' whimsical mind like a last minute addition by the Almighty, clumps of soaring mountains seemed like they were plunked down haphazardly all around the San Pedro Valley. And far beyond. The scientific minded used the geologic term of 'basin and range' to describe the topography of alternating broad valleys and towering sky island mountain ranges. Such words were alien to Jesús and as barren as the womb of his octogenarian grandmother. This place? Basin and range? Those were just words, hopelessly inadequate to describe what lay before his eyes. This was God's country.

Jesús did not neglect to be grateful for it.

Teran stared off to the north. There were the American towns of Bisbee and Sierra Vista, the filthy smokestacks of the copper smelter at Douglas and the little moving flashes of silver light that were automobiles on the American highways that seemed to be continually in motion. Like a mechanical ant hill. Teran shook his head slowly. So many Mexicanos, especially those poor souls from deep in the downtrodden stagnant innards of the country, were obsessed with getting to the United States. Not Jesús Teran. He'd been north and he didn't like it. Why were the stressed out Americanos always in such a hurry? Life was too fast, too complicated, the culture too foreign, the pressures on the family too fragmenting. Was America efficient? Yes. English was the language of the engineer. And, Spanish? It was the loving tongue. The flowing vibrant river of the lover and the poet and the mystic. In his days of exile in the mechanical soulless Yankee north Jesús realized the urgings of his inner self. He didn't belong there. Jesús had to live in a Spanish speaking place with ancient roots bound up in both the land and the people. He went back home. And there he stayed.

Jesús was content to eke out a living as a woodcutter in Mexico, where he could raise his children in the traditional ways and not see them turn into some kind of strange mutant--such as had happened to the children of two of his older brothers who had gone to Phoenix. He shook his head again. What was he to say to swaggering nephews who sported vulgar tattoos, flashed gang signals and spoke in a gutter patois that was neither good Spanish nor good English? It was those same nephews who tried to get Jesús to join the growing numbers of border Mexicans who supplemented their meager incomes by backpacking bundles of marijuana over the border. Teran flatly said no. He was an old fashioned man who wanted no part of drug smuggling of any kind. He considered it to be dishonorable. Jesús would remain a simple woodcutter on the slopes of the San Jose Mountains. He fed his family, there was not an ounce of fat on his body, his muscles were as hard as the ironwood he sometimes cut and he always had enough money for a cerveza or two at the cantinas in Naco or nearby Cananea. It was good enough. Yes. Good enough for a simple man of the earth like Jesús Teran.

Jesús shrugged, shouldered his axe and turned to move up the slope. He instantly froze in utter astonishment. Looming right behind him, barely three feet away, was a tall and lean weather beaten gringo. The long-haired man was holding a knife, but what really struck Jesús Teran in those last few terrible moments was the man's eyes. They were like a wild animal's. The razor-sharp knife flashed in the sun.

Jesús Teran was not quick enough with his axe.

### Tombstone

She'd been a knockout once. No doubt of that. A chesty head turner of a looker. And her aging face was still strikingly pretty. But it was reigning over a body gone waddling over the caloric hill to flab. It was a story too often told in overfed modern America. A once gorgeous woman who hadn't come to terms with the changes time had brought to her body. The doughy woman was dressed in a skimpy tank top and too tight shorts. The woman pushed her way through the crowd in the Crystal Palace, her huge breasts bouncing sloppily as she walked straight for Riley. He had a sinking feeling in his stomach when he saw her coming.

"Are you a _real_ cowboy?" The woman demanded in an eastern accent, staring at his sweat stained straw cowboy hat, faded blue jeans, western shirt and scuffed cowboy boots. "Or are you one of those Chicago transplant phonies?" Riley looked at her expressionlessly.

"Peoria, actually," he said,

"Hrumph!" The woman grunted, then disappeared back into the crowd to recommence her search for the real thing in the wannabe larded modern day tourist trap of Old Tombstone. A second man reached over and poked Riley on the shoulder.

"Peoria?" Jim Garret said, grinning. "You are quick when you need to be, you mangy dust eater." Riley grinned back at his old friend with a mischievous twinkle.

"I was in Peoria once. Couldn't stand it. People kept asking me if I was a real native or just one'a them phony Tombstone transplants." Then he threw his old friend an uneasy look. "You sure this is a good place to talk, what with all these tourists?" Garret glanced around him at the noisy hubbub in the Crystal Palace. It looked like a set out of an old western movie, but the place, tourist drenched though it was, still was the real thing, a genuine 19th Century saloon with a room-long scarred mahogany bar and high zinc ceiling deeply patinaed with age. Old West history oozed from the walls of the place. The tourists loved it. So did the locals--after the tourists left.

"Couldn't be better. There's too much commotion for anyone to notice. Besides, the ones we don't want overhearing us aren't too likely to be coming in here till the visitors thin out after dark." Just then a pair of passing tourists from Bavaria stopped to snap pictures of local color--in the person of the western dressed Riley. He ignored them. Other things were on his mind.

"All right, Jim," Riley said, his sun darkened rancher's brow lowering and a serious expression settling on his weathered face. "So just what the hell is this all about?" There was a touch of humor lingering in Nub Riley's face as Jim Garret began spinning his tale. Despite their differences, Nub was a bedrock solid friend of Jim, no little because Jim's fertile mind and crazy schemes both amused and bemused him. That's the way it had always been, ever since they were boys growing up in the grassy, mesquite studded San Pedro Valley that began just a few miles south in Old Mexico. Garret was a natural born hustler and as far back as Riley could remember he had been trying to talk Nub into joining in with his schemes. Mostly Riley had just politely said no. But as he listened to his old boyhood buddy, the amusement at Garret's wild ideas faded. Riley's brow furrowed. Nub had caught on to just what Garret was up to. His posture abruptly straightened bolt upright out of the conspiratorial semi-slump over his beer as though he'd just been hit with one of the cattle prods some of his neighbors still used. His voice was low. Close to a whisper. The kind of whisper volcanoes emit before they begin to blow.

" _What?_ You want to sneak onto federal land and steal some old Indian pots? Damn it, Jim, don't you know they've been coming down on that hard lately? They send people to prison for that nowadays!" A nearby table of tourists from the deep snow country of the upper peninsula of Michigan heard a word or two of the conversation and looked over at them curiously. Both men dropped their voices, glancing uneasily around at the tables of tourists nursing drinks and soaking in the Old West ambiance of the place.

"Mostly just probation." Garret countered lamely.

"Now, look, Jim Garret," Nub Riley sputtered heatedly. "Most of your crazy ideas are harmless enough, but when you start talking about something that's downright criminal, then you're no friend of mine. Why...." Garret leaned forward and spoke in a soft, but very clear, voice with an eloquence of specifics that stopped Nub stone cold. Twenty thousand specifics, to be exact.

"$20,000 minimum. Yours and yours alone. That'd save the ranch and that little business of yours, wouldn't it?" He leaned so close to Riley that Nub could smell the salty beer on Garret's breath. "Don't you think that your way of life is worth a small risk or two?" With a dramatic flourish Garret pulled a thick envelope from inside his shirt and shoved it at Riley over the table. "Here's the first half. Ten thousand bucks. Just for openers." He nodded at the thick envelope. "Go on. Open it." Riley hesitated. "Take it, Nub," Garret said, watching his friend's face closely. "It's yours no matter how things work out." Garret leaned back, noticing with a touch of synchronous unease that the Tombstone Marshal was just walking by on the board sidewalk outside the saloon's swinging doors. He returned his attention to Riley, but Riley was gone, in thought if not in body, his mind wandering off somewhere in the mysterious crevices of the pondering human brain struggling with making a decision.

Nub Riley was speechless. How had Garret known just how bad things were? He wasn't more than a month away from foreclosure on his excavation business, maybe two or three on the ranch. He looked up slowly at Jim Garret, then quickly shot a glimpse inside the envelope. Sweet Jesus! It was money, all right. A _lot_ of money. His eyes darted nervously around the room to see if anyone noticed what was going on. No. The swinging doors were pushed open towards Allen Street and the curious Michigan tourists were on their way out the doors and to a long snowy winter ahead. To everyone else in the Palace, busy either in rapt conversation or gawking at the historic trappings of the saloon, Nub Riley and Jim Garret weren't much more than wallpaper.

Which is exactly what they wanted.

"Well, Nub," Garret said. "What's it to be? Stay on at the old home place or lose it and move up to Tucson or Phoenix to spend the rest of your life busting your ass to make some rust belt carpetbagger get rich?" Nub Riley locked his eyes with Garret's and held on like the stubborn bulldog he could sometimes be. His fingers stayed on the thick envelope of money. A few feet away an aging barmaid with rheumy eyes and a hefty bosom threatening to momentarily break loose from a low-cut 19th Century-styled blouse was softly humming her latest favorite Rolling Stones tune, _Start Me Up_.

"Damn you, Jim Garret", he muttered. "Damn your eyes anyhow!" Garret leaned back in his chair, a smug smile spreading across his handsome rugged face. There was no doubt of it in his mind. He had him, whether Riley was ready to admit it yet or not.

Yep. He had him.

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

### Galeana

James Kirker was an Ulster Scot, the same sturdy anti-English folk who came to America early on in the ax and rifle pioneer days and volunteered in bloody eyed revanchist ardor to fight the damned English and become the iron backbone of George Washington's rebel Revolutionary Army. Kirker sought his fortune in America like many another young adventurer of the time. He wandered down to the wild and lawless southwestern frontier and got wrapped up in the crazy anything goes spirit of those nebulous times, including dabbling in illegal trading with the Apaches.

When the floundering governments of Chihuahua and Sonora resumed offering bounties for the scalps of Apaches, the promise of easy money seduced Kirker. Whatever scruples the wandering Ulsterman might have had went out the easy money window. In 1846 he lured some Apaches to a parley near a northern Chihuahua town called Galeana under the protection of a peace treaty and a flag of truce. Alcohol was one of the Apaches' few vulnerabilities, which Kirker knew full well, having himself traded with them for liquor, firearms, ammunition and whatever other officially prohibited goods he could get his entrepreneurial Scots-Irish hands on. All night long the liquor flowed freely. By morning many of the Apaches lay in a drunken stupor. Kirker and his diverse band of allies, some American, some Mexican, others non-Apache Native American, fell on the camp and bludgeoned scores of groggy Apaches to death. Men. Women. Children.

And then they scalped the dead Apaches for the bounty money.

### Silas

Silas Oakes was the prototypical Yankee of fact and fiction. Tall, lean, dour. Craggy faced, with dagger sharp blue eyes that seemed to slice right through you. His was the kind of granitic face you might see in a dramatic painting of a Civil War Yankee officer exhorting his troops on to charge the damn Confederates and 'whip their Rebel butts.' And in fact his great grandfather was an infantry captain in a Massachusetts regiment that lost half its men on the Little Round Top at Gettysburg. Great grandpa got a minie ball in the thigh but survived to become a Massachusetts state senator and the progenitor of a large tribe of descendants. He was a no nonsense sort of man and his great grandson Silas inherited the dubiety gene set full blown. If you were talking to Silas Oakes, you'd damn well better be prepared to back up your statements with hard facts.

Silas' sharp tongue and confrontational and skeptical nature did not make him a popular man among his co-workers and neighbors in his adopted home of Tucson. But the sharp mind that went along with the sharp tongue did made Silas a small fortune in real estate investments in Tucson and beyond throughout southern Arizona. Which was why he drove the seventy miles down to Cochise County in the southeastern corner of Arizona on this pleasant late September day. He was checking out investment opportunities in the little tourist trap town of Tombstone whose name was nearly synonymous with the fabled Wild West. But he was more interested in the open grassy country near the Mexican border on the eastern slopes of the Huachuca Mountains.

"That Tombstone wild west hype is all bullshit," Oakes confided with a sarcastic snicker to his assistant, Manny Arzola, after they left Tombstone and drove down close to the border. "Those days are as long gone as the horse and buggy." Silas passed the Naco turnoff on Highway 90 and headed his Cadillac Fleetwood towards the southern end of the Huachuca Mountains looming to the west. South of the highway was the border town of Naco and the truncated but towering adjacent San Jose range in Old Mexico. He reached over to tap Arzola on the shoulder. "This country might have been the wild west years ago. No more. Look at that landscape, Manny," he said. Perfect for a subdivision." Silas Oakes had a genius for spotting demographic trends and he was certain the growing small city of Sierra Vista would soon stretch out to the south along the oak sprinkled flanks of the mountains. Silas already envisioned the gated community subdivision he would build there.

He even had a name for it. And why not? A man had the right to a touch of hubris now and then. Seeing as how the place had plenty of oaks dotting the landscape, why not call the subdivision _The Oakes?_ He reached over to tap on Manny's shoulder a second time. "No more wild west here. It's as quiet and peaceful as a Sunday school church picnic." A ray of sunshine bounced off Silas' windshield and a half dozen miles away a sepulchral buckskin clad linear figure on a bluff overlooking the sprawling valley saw the glint of sun flash off the distant windshield.

At his feet lay the bloody corpse of he woodcutter Jesús Teran.

****
