The Crows looked at each other, and a tear ran down Aaron’s face. Sam reached out and thumbed it away.

“Why?” Aaron asked his son.

“Because he was a traitor.”

“You mean he was one of the people?” Aaron’s voice rose in fear and anguish.

“A traitor,” Shadow Love said. “He put the police on Bluebird.”

Aaron was on his feet, his hands at the sides of his head, pressing together. “No, no no no no . . .”

“Yellow Hand he was, from Fort Thompson,” Shadow Love said.

“I can hear the bones,” Aaron groaned. “Yellow Hand’s people were free warriors. They died for us and now we have killed one of theirs. They are screaming at us . . . .”

Shadow Love stood and spit into the river. “A man is a fuckin’ man and that’s all,” he said. “Just a fuckin’ piece of meat. I’m trying to keep you free and you won’t even give me that.”

Billy Hood never could get his head quite right in the borrowed sleeping bag. After a difficult night, he woke well before dawn with a crick in his neck. While the Crows and Shadow Love slept, he crawled out of the tent and lit the Coleman lantern, moved quietly into the woods, dug a cathole and used it. When he finished, he kicked dirt in the hole and started collecting wood.

A jungle of dead trees stood along the waterline. Hood gathered a dozen limbs as long and thick as his forearm and hauled them back to the campsite. Using twigs and finger-thick sticks, he built a foot-high tepee-shaped starter fire, fanned it, waited until it was going good, then stacked on the heavier wood and topped the structure with a steel grate. The Crows kept a blue enameled-steel coffeepot in their truck, with a jar of instant coffee inside. He got it, filled the pot with water from a jug, dumped in what looked like enough coffee and put it on the grate.

“God damn.” Aaron Crow, moving. “Nothing smells as good as cookout coffee.”

“Got a couple of quarts of it out here,” Billy said.

Aaron crawled out of the tent, wearing a V-necked T-shirt and green boxer shorts. “Cups in the cooler, in the back of the truck,” he said.

Billy nodded and went to get them. Aaron looked toward the east, but there was no sign of the sun. He sniffed and the air smelled like morning, redolent of dew and river mud and boiling coffee. When Billy returned, Sam and Shadow Love were stirring.

“John ought to be in Brookings by now,” Billy said.

“Yeah.” Aaron handled the coffeepot off the fire with a hot pad and poured two cups. “So what are you going to do?”

“Go home, get cleaned up, maybe catch a few more hours of sleep, then go on up to Bemidji and see Ginnie and the kid. I’ll give you a call,” Billy said.

“Did you think about Milwaukee?” Aaron asked.

“All night.” Billy took a sip of the scalding coffee, looking at Aaron over the rim of the cup. “I think I can handle it. The sweat helped.”

Aaron looked back at the sweat lodge. “Sweats always help. Sweats’d cure cancer, if they’d give them a chance.”

Billy nodded, but after a moment he said, “Don’t seem to help Shadow. No offense, Aaron, but that boy is one crazy motherfucker.”

CHAPTER

11

The phone woke Lucas a few minutes before six.

“Davenport,” he groaned.

“This is Del. Billy Hood just walked into his building.”

Lucas sat up: “You made him for sure?”

“No question, man. It’s him. He pulled up, hopped out and went inside before we could move. You better get your ass over here.”

“Did you call Lily?” Lucas put a finger behind his bedroom curtain and looked out. Still dark.

“She’s next on the list.”

“I’ll call her. You call Daniel . . . .”

“Already did. He said go with the plan, like we talked,” Del said.

“How about the feebs?”

“The guy here called his AIC.”

Lily answered on the third ring, her voice croaking like a rusty gate.

“You awake?” Lucas asked.

“What do you want, Davenport?”

“I thought I’d call and see if you were lying there naked.”

“Jesus Christ, are you nuts? What time . . . ?”

“Billy Hood just rolled into his apartment.”

“What?”

“I’ll pick you up outside your hotel in ten minutes. Ten to fifteen. Brush your teeth, take a shower, run downstairs . . . .”

“Ten minutes,” she said.

Lucas showered, brushed, pulled on jeans, a sweatshirt and a cotton jacket, and was outside five minutes after he talked to Lily. Rush hour was beginning: he punched the Porsche down Cretin Avenue, driving mostly on the wrong side of the street, jumping one red light and stretching a couple of greens. He put the car on I-94 and made it to Lily’s hotel twelve minutes after he had hung up the phone. She was walking out of the lobby doors when he pulled in.

“No question about the ID?” she snapped.

“No.” He looked at her. “You’re a little pale.”

“Too early. And I’m a little queasy. I thought about stopping in the coffee shop for a roll, but I thought I better not,” she said. Her voice was all business. She wouldn’t meet his eye.

“You had a few last night.”

“A few too many. I appreciate . . . you know.”

“You were hot,” Lucas said bluntly, but with a smile.

She blushed, furious. “Christ, Davenport, give me a break?”

“No.”

“I shouldn’t be riding with you,” she said, looking out the window.

“You wanted to roll, last night. You backed out. I can live with it. The big question is . . .”

“What?”

“Can you?”

She looked at him and her voice carried an edge of disdain. “Ah, the Great Lover speaks . . . .”

“Great Lover, bullshit,” Lucas said. “You were hungry. That didn’t develop since you met me.”

“I happen to be . . .” she started.

“ . . . very happily married,” they said in unison.

“I want you pretty bad,” Lucas said after a moment. “I feel like I’m smothering.”

“Jesus, I don’t know about this,” she said, looking away.

Lucas touched her on the forearm. “If you really . . . rule it out completely . . . we probably ought to hang out with different people . . . .”

She didn’t say she ruled anything out. She did change the subject.

“So why didn’t they take Hood when he pulled in? Was it like they thought . . .”

A half-dozen detectives and the FBI agent were waiting in the surveillance apartment when Lucas and Lily arrived. Del took them aside. He was wide-awake.

“Okay. Talked to Daniel, we all agreed. We wait until the baker leaves for his job. He leaves at seven-thirty, twenty minutes of eight, something like that.”

Lucas glanced at his watch. Six-twenty.

“The other guy, the lifter, we can’t tell when he leaves,” Del continued. “The super says that some days he’s out of there by nine, other days he sleeps ’til noon. We can’t wait that long. We figure that if Hood comes in at six, he’s probably pretty beat. Maybe driving all night. Anyway, there’s a good chance he’s asleep. So we call it this way: We go in and cut their phone, just in case somebody else in the building is with them. Then we put an entry team in the hall, four guys, and stick a microphone on the door. Listen awhile. See who’s up. Then, when the baker opens the door to come out, we grab him and boom—we’re in.”

“Jesus, if Hood’s awake and has the gun handy . . .”

“He’d hardly have time to get at it,” Del said confidently. “You know that Jack Dionosopoulos guy, that big Greek with the ERU? Used to play ball at St. Thomas?”

“Yeah.” Lucas nodded.

“He’s going in first, bare hands. If Hood’s there with a gun in his hand, we got no choice. Jack goes down and the second man takes Hood with the shotgun. If there’s no gun showing, Jack takes him down. If he can’t see him, he hits the bedroom. Just fucking jumps him, pins him. Hood’s not that big a guy . . . .”