“Okay, that’s fine,” Lily said. “We’ll see about Harold tonight. We’ll call on the telephone.”

“Please,” Louise Liss said, snatching at Lily’s coat sleeve, “help him. Please?”

“The Crows? He said the Crows?” Larry Hart was astonished.

“You know them?” asked Daniel. Lucas was in a phone booth. Daniel, Anderson, Sloan and Hart were in Daniel’s office, using a speaker phone.

“I know about them.” There was a long pause, as Hart thought it over. “God damn. I might even have seen them once. They’re famous. Two old men, they travel around the country and up in Canada, organizing the Indian nations. They’ve been on the road all their lives. Aaron is powerful medicine. Sam is supposed to be brilliant . . . . Jesus, you know, it all fits. They’d be right.”

“What was that on their names? Aaron?” Anderson asked.

“Aaron and Sam. They supposedly come through the Cities a lot. It’s like their home base. They have a son here, you see him from time to time. I went to school with him, years ago. Shit, you might even see the Crows from time to time, but I wouldn’t know them . . . .”

“What about the son?” asked Sloan.

“The son is a freak. He has visions. He doesn’t know which one of the Crows is his father. They were both sleeping with his mother that winter . . . . That’s how he got his name, Shadow Love, love-in-the-shadows . . . it’s like an Indian joke, based on his mother’s last name. He’s supposed to have some of the power of Aaron . . . .”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Lucas said. “Shadow Love?”

“Yeah. Skinny guy . . .”

“With tattoos. God damn.” Lucas slapped his forehead. He took the phone away from his mouth and spoke to Lily. “We got them. These are the right motherfuckers.” He went back to the phone. “Shadow Love’s the guy I saw with Yellow Hand, before Yellow Hand was killed. Sonofabitch. Shadow Love. And two guys named Crow?”

“Yeah.” Hart sounded distant, almost pensive.

“All right, listen,” Lucas said. He hesitated a moment, trying to remember each step of his brief encounter with Shadow Love. “All right: Shadow Love’s got a South Dakota driver’s license and it’s in his own name. I looked at it and that’s how I remember the name, because it was so strange. And I don’t know why, I can’t remember, but something he said made me think he’d done time in prison. Harmon, can you run that down? Check with the NCIC or whatever?”

“I got it,” said Anderson.

“We’ll get some guys on the way to that address, check it out,” Daniel said. “We ought to know something in an hour.”

“Call us,” Lucas said. He gave them his room number. “We’ll get something to eat, then I’ll be in my room.”

“Soon as we know,” Daniel promised. “This is fuckin’ great, you two. This is what we needed. We got those motherfuckers.”

CHAPTER

16

Anderson got the location of the Crows’ apartment and a bonus—a phone number—from the 911 center, and ran them down to Daniel’s office.

“I’ll start pulling guys,” Anderson said. “I can get Del and a couple of his Narcotics people down there in ten minutes. They can check the place out while we get the entry team together. We’ll stage at the Mobil station on Thirty-sixth.”

“Don’t tell anyone but Del what we’re doing. Not until the last minute, when we have the place nailed down,” Daniel said. “I don’t want the feebs moving in.”

“All the local feebs are out in Brookings,” Sloan said with an edge of sarcasm. “That fuckin’ Clay came in like the President of the Universe. Eight hundred guys running around with microphones in their ears . . .”

“Okay, but still keep it under your hat,” Daniel said.

Anderson hurried away to his office. “You guys stick around,” Daniel said to Hart and Sloan. “If this works out, you’ll want to be in on the kill.”

Sloan nodded and glanced at Larry. “Want to walk down to the machines and get a bite? Could be our last chance for a while . . .”

“I’ll catch you down there,” Larry said. “I gotta take a leak.”

The Crows had mailed the press release on the Linstad killing earlier in the day, and Sam was rereading it as he tried to get comfortable on the battered couch. “I hope John sticks to it, the Indian Nation stuff,” he said. “Hope he doesn’t fall apart.”

“He’s got Meadows covering him,” Aaron said. “Meadows is pretty good . . . .”

“Fuckin’ wannabee,” Sam grunted.

“John’s got his reasons to hold out. He ever tell you his hot-dog story?”

Aaron was sitting at the kitchen table and Sam had to crank his head around to see him. “ ‘Hot dog’?”

John Liss had been twelve, a weedy kid in an army shirt and jeans. His father had been gone for weeks, his mother for two days with a man he didn’t know. Her car was still out front, with maybe two gallons of gas. Neither John nor his nine-year-old sister had eaten since noon the day before—a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup.

“I’m so hungry,” Donna cried. “I’m so hungry.”

John made up his mind. “Get in the car,” he said.

“You can’t drive.”

“Sure I can. Get in the car. We’ll find something to eat.”

“Where? We don’t got no money,” she said skeptically. But she was pulling on her jacket. She wore flip-flops for shoes.

“In town.”

Friday night. The lights at the football field on the edge of town were the brightest things for miles.

“Must be about done,” John Liss said. He could barely see over the steering wheel on the old Ford Fairlane. They bumped off the road and across a dirt parking lot. The temperature was in the forties. As long as the car was running, the heater would work, but he worried about running out of gas. If they were careful, they could make it back home.

“Watch the hot-dog stand,” John told his sister. The year before, he had gone to a game and afterward had watched the woman who ran the concession stand peel a half-dozen wieners off the spits of an automatic broiler and toss them into a garbage can. A partial bag of buns had gone with them. The stand was in the same place, and a garbage can still stood next to it. Even the woman was the same.

The game ended twenty minutes later. The hometown fans spilled out of the stands, pushing and shoving in celebration of the victory. A tall blond kid stopped at the hot-dog stand, bought a dog and a Coke, and started walking away with friends. After a few steps, he spotted a girl in the crowd and yelled, “Hey, Carol.”

“What do you want, Jimmy?” she asked teasingly. They were both wearing red wool letter jackets with white leather sleeves and yellow letters. John and his sister watched as they sidled toward each other, grinning, friends backing up each of them.

“This remind you of anything?” Jimmy asked, sliding the wiener out of his bun.

Her friends feigned shock while his slapped themselves on their foreheads, but Carol was ready: “Well,” she said, “I suppose it might look a teensy bit like your dick, only the weenie’s a lot bigger.”

“Oh, right,” he said, and flipped the wiener at her. She ducked and laughed and charged him, and they wrestled through the parking lot. Two minutes later, they were all gone.

“Go get it,” Donna whispered.

“Did you see where it went?”

“Right under the stands . . .”

John slipped out of the car and found the wiener in the dirt. He wiped it on his shirt, brought it back and offered it to his sister. “It’s still hot,” she said. “God, it’s perfect.”

Her eyes were shining. John looked at her and the anger that washed over him almost snapped his spine. This was his sister: his fuckin’ little sister. He wanted to kill someone, but he didn’t know whom, or how. Not then. Later, when he met the Crows, he learned whom and how.

• • •