When the scandal hit the FBI—kickbacks in an insider-trading investigation—the administration knew where to go. The boy from Phoenix had a rep. He’d cleaned up the Phoenix force, and he’d clean up the FBI. But he wouldn’t try too hard.

At forty-two, Lawrence Duberville Clay was named the youngest FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover. He became the administration’s point man for the war on crime. He took the FBI to the people, and to the press. During a dope raid in Chicago, an AP photographer shot a portrait of a weary Lawrence Duberville Clay, his sleeves rolled above his elbows, a hollow look on his face. A huge Desert Eagle semiautomatic pistol rode in a shoulder rig under his arm. The picture made him a celebrity.

Not many people remembered his early days in Phoenix, the nights spent hunting drunk Indian chicks.

During those Phoenix nights, Larry Clay developed a taste for the young ones. Very young ones. And some of them maybe weren’t so drunk. And some of them weren’t so interested in backseat tag team. But who was going to believe an Indian chick, in Phoenix, in the mid-sixties? Civil rights were for blacks in the South, not for Indians or Chicanos in the Southwest. Date-rape wasn’t even a concept, and feminism had barely come over the horizon.

But the girl in the alley . . . she was twelve and she was a little drunk, but not so drunk that she couldn’t say no, or remember who put her in the car. She told her mother. Her mother stewed about it for a couple of days, then told two men she’d met at the res.

The two men caught Larry Clay outside his apartment and beat the shit out of him with a genuine Louisville Slugger. Broke one of his legs and both arms and a whole bunch of ribs. Broke his nose and some teeth.

It wasn’t dope dealers who beat Larry Clay. It was a couple of Indians, on a comeback from a rape.

Lawrence Duberville Clay never knew who they were, but he never forgot what they did to him. He had a lot of shots at Indians over the years, as a prosecutor, a state senator, a police chief, an assistant U.S. attorney general.

He took them all.

And he didn’t forget them when he became director of the FBI, the iron fist on every Indian reservation in the nation.

But there were Indians with long memories too.

Like the men who took him in Phoenix.

The Crows.

CHAPTER

1

Ray Cuervo sat in his office and counted his money. He counted his money every Friday afternoon between five and six o’clock. He made no secret of it.

Cuervo owned six apartment buildings scattered around Indian Country south of the Minneapolis Loop. The cheapest apartment rented for thirty-nine dollars a week. The most expensive was seventy-five. When he collected his rent, Cuervo took neither checks nor excuses. If you didn’t have the cash by two o’clock Friday, you slept on the sidewalk. Bidness, as Ray Cuervo told any number of broken-ass indigents, was bidness.

Dangerous business, sometimes. Cuervo carried a chrome-plated Charter Arms .38 Special tucked in his pants while he collected his money. The gun was old. The barrel was pitted and the butt was unfashionably small. But it worked and the shells were always fresh. You could see the shiny brass winking out at the edge of the cylinder. Not a flash gun, his renters said. It was a shooter. When Cuervo counted the week’s take, he kept the pistol on the desktop near his right hand.

Cuervo’s office was a cubicle at the top of three flights of stairs. The furnishings were sparse and cheap: a black dial telephone, a metal desk, a wooden file cabinet and an oak swivel chair on casters. A four-year-old Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar hung on the left-hand wall. Cuervo never changed it past April, the month where you could see the broad’s brown nipples through the wet T-shirt. Opposite the calendar was a corkboard. A dozen business cards were tacked to the corkboard along with two fading bumper stickers. One said SHIT HAPPENS and the other said HOW’S MY DRIVING? DIAL 1-800-EAT-SHIT. Cuervo’s wife, a Kentucky sharecropper girl with a mouth like barbed wire, called the office a shithole. Ray Cuervo paid no attention. He was a slumlord, after all.

Cuervo counted the cash out in neat piles, ones, fives and tens. The odd twenty he put in his pocket. Coins he counted, noted and dumped into a Maxwell House coffee can. Cuervo was a fat man with small black eyes. When he lifted his heavy chin, three rolls of suet popped out on the back of his red neck. When he leaned forward, three more rolls popped out on his side, under his armpits. And when he farted, which was often, he unconsciously eased one obese cheek off the chair to reduce the compression. He didn’t think the movement either impolite or impolitic. If a woman was in the room, he said “Oops.” If the company was all male, he said nothing. Farting was something men did.

A few minutes after five o’clock on October 5, an unseasonably warm day, the door slammed at the bottom of the stairs and a man started up. Cuervo put his fingertips on the Charter Arms .38 and half stood so he could see the visitor. The man on the stairs turned his face up and Cuervo relaxed.

Leo Clark. An old customer. Like most of the Indians who rented Cuervo’s apartments, Leo was always back and forth from the reservations. He was a hard man, Leo was, with a face like a cinder block, but Cuervo never had trouble with him.

Leo paused at the second landing, catching his breath, then came up the last flight. He was a Sioux, in his forties, a loner, dark from the summer sun. Long black braids trailed down his back and a piece of Navaho silver flashed from his belt. He came from the West somewhere: Rosebud, Standing Rock, someplace like that.

“Leo, how are you?” Cuervo said without looking up. He had money in both hands, counting. “Need a place?”

“Put your hands in your lap, Ray,” Leo said. Cuervo looked up. Leo was pointing a pistol at him.

“Aw, man, don’t do this,” Cuervo groaned, straightening up. He didn’t look at his pistol, but he was thinking about it. “If you need a few bucks, I’ll loan it to you.”

“Sure you will,” Leo said. “Two for one.” Cuervo did a little loansharking on the side. Bidness was bidness.

“Come on, Leo.” Cuervo casually dropped the stack of bills on the desktop, freeing his gun hand. “You wanna spend your old age in the joint?”

“If you move again, I’ll shoot holes in your head. I mean it, Ray,” Leo said. Cuervo checked the other man’s face. It was as cold and dark as a Mayan statue’s. Cuervo stopped moving.

Leo edged around the desk. No more than three feet separated them, but the hole at the end of Leo’s pistol pointed unwaveringly at Ray Cuervo’s nose.

“Just sit still. Take it easy,” Leo said. When he was behind the chair, he said, “I’m going to put a pair of handcuffs on you, Ray. I want you to put your hands behind the chair.”

Cuervo followed instructions, turning his head to see what Leo was doing.

“Look straight ahead,” Leo said, tapping him behind the ear with the gun barrel. Cuervo looked straight ahead. Leo stepped back, pushed the pistol into the waistband of his slacks and took an obsidian knife from his front pants pocket. The knife was seven inches of beautifully crafted black volcanic glass, taken from a cliff at Yellowstone National Park. Its edge was fluted and it was as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel.

“Hey, Ray?” Leo said, stepping up closer to the slumlord. Cuervo farted, in either fear or exasperation, and the fetid smell filled the room. He didn’t bother to say “Oops.”

“Yeah?” Cuervo looked straight ahead. Calculating. His legs were in the kneehole under the desk: it’d be hard to move in a hurry. Let it ride, he thought, just a couple more minutes. When Leo was putting on the cuffs, maybe the right move . . . The gun glittered on the desk a foot and a half from his eyes.