“I lied about the handcuffs, Ray,” Leo said. He grabbed Cuervo by the hair above his forehead and jerked his head back. With a single powerful slash, Leo cut Ray Cuervo’s throat from ear to ear.

Cuervo half stood and twisted free and groped helplessly at his neck with one hand while the other crawled frantically across his desk toward the Charter Arms .38. He knew even as he tried that he wouldn’t make it. Blood spurted from his severed carotid artery as though from a garden hose, spraying the leaves of green dollars on the desk, the Sports Illustrated broad with the tits, the brown linoleum floor.

Ray Cuervo twisted and turned and fell, batting the Maxwell House coffee can off the desk. Coins pitched and clattered and rolled around the office and a few bounced down the stairs. Cuervo lay faceup on the floor, his vision narrowing to a dim and closing hole that finally settled around Leo Clark, whose face remained impassively centered in the growing darkness. And then Ray Cuervo was dead.

Leo turned away as Cuervo’s bladder and sphincter control went. There was $2,035 on the desktop. Leo paid it no attention. He wiped the obsidian knife on his pants, put it back in his pocket and pulled his shirt out to cover the gun. Then he walked down the stairs and six blocks back to his apartment. He was splattered with Cuervo’s blood, but nobody seemed to notice. The cops got only a very slender description. An Indian male with braids. There were five thousand Indian males with braids in Minneapolis.

A large number of them were delighted to hear the news about Ray Cuervo.

Fuckin’ Indians.

John Lee Benton hated them. They were worse than the niggers. You tell a nigger to show up, and if he didn’t, he had an excuse. A reason. Even if it was bullshit.

Indians were different. You tell a guy to come in at two o’clock and he doesn’t show. Then he comes in at two the next day and thinks that’s good enough. He doesn’t pretend to think so. He really thinks so.

The shrinks at the joint called it a cultural anomaly. John Lee Benton called it a pain in the ass. The shrinks said the only answer was education. John Lee Benton had developed another approach, all on his own.

Benton had seven Indians on his case load. If they didn’t report on schedule, he’d spend the time normally used for an interview to write the papers that would start them back to Stillwater. In two years, he’d sent back nine men. Now he had a reputation. The fuckin’ Indians walked wide around him. If you’re going out on parole, they told each other, you didn’t want to be on John Lee Benton’s case load. That was a sure ride back inside.

Benton enjoyed the rep.

John Lee Benton was a small man with a strong nose and mousy hair combed forward over watery blue eyes. He wore a straw-colored mustache, cut square. When he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror in the morning, he thought he looked like somebody, but he couldn’t think who. Somebody famous. He’d think of it sooner or later.

John Lee Benton hated blacks, Indians, Mexicans, Jews and Asians, more or less in that order. His hate for blacks and Jews was a family heritage, passed down from his daddy as Benton grew up in a sprawling blue-collar slum in St. Louis. He’d developed his animus for Indians, Mexicans and Asians on his own.

Every Monday afternoon Benton sat in a stifling office in the back of the Indian Center off Franklin Avenue and talked to his assholes. He was supposed to call them clients, but fuck that. They were criminals and assholes, every single one.

“Mr. Benton?”

Benton looked up. Betty Sails stood in the doorway. A tentative, gray-faced Indian woman with a beehive hairdo, she was the office’s shared receptionist.

“Is he here?” John Lee spoke sharply, impatiently. He was a man who sweated hate.

“No, he’s not,” Betty Sails said. “But there’s another man to see you. Another Indian man.”

Benton frowned. “I didn’t have any more appointments today.”

“He said it was about Mr. Cloud.”

Glory be, an actual excuse. “All right. Give me a couple of minutes, then send him in,” Benton said. Betty Sails went away and Benton looked through Cloud’s file again. He didn’t need to review it but liked the idea of keeping the Indian waiting. Two minutes later, Tony Bluebird appeared at the door. Benton had never seen him before.

“Mr. Benton?” Bluebird was a stocky man with close-set eyes and short-cropped hair. He wore a gingham shirt over a rawhide thong. A black obsidian knife dangled from the thong and Bluebird could feel it ticking against the skin below his breast bone.

“Yes?” Benton let his anger leak into his tone.

Bluebird showed him a gun. “Put your hands on your lap, Mr. Benton.”

Three people saw Bluebird. Betty Sails saw him both coming and going. A kid coming out of the gym dropped a basketball, and Bluebird stopped it with a foot, picked it up and tossed it back, just as Betty Sails started screaming. On the street, Dick Yellow Hand, who was seventeen years old and desperately seeking a taste of crack, saw him walk out the door and called, “Hey, Bluebird.”

Bluebird stopped. Yellow Hand sidled over, scratching his thin beard. “You look bad, man,” Bluebird said.

Yellow Hand nodded. He was wearing a dirty T-shirt with a fading picture of Mick Jagger on the front. His jeans, three sizes too large, were cinched at the waist with a length of clothesline. His elbow joints and arms looked like cornstalks. He was missing two front teeth. “I feel bad, man. I could use a few bucks, you know?”

“Sorry, man, I got no money,” Bluebird said. He stuck his hands in his pockets and pulled them out empty.

“That’s okay, then,” Yellow Hand said, disappointed.

“I seen your mama last week,” Bluebird said. “Out at the res.”

“How’s she?”

“She’s fine. She was fishing. Walleyes.”

Sails’ hysterical screams became audible as somebody opened an outside door to the Indian Center.

“That’s real good about Mama,” said Yellow Hand.

“Well, I guess I gotta go,” Bluebird said, easing away.

“Okay, man,” said Yellow Hand. “See you.”

Bluebird walked, taking his time, his mind in another place. What was her name? It had been years ago. Anna? She was a pretty woman, with deep breasts and warm hazel eyes. She’d liked him, he thought, though they were both married, and nothing ever happened; nothing but a chemistry felt across backyard hedges, deep down in Minneapolis’ Indian Country.

Anna’s husband, a Chippewa from Nett Lake, had been put in the Hennepin County Jail. Drunk, late at night, he’d seen a Coke machine glowing red-and-white through the window of a gas station. He’d heaved a chunk of concrete through the window, crawled in after it and used the concrete to crack the machine. About a thousand quarters had run out onto the floor, somebody told Bluebird. Anna’s husband had still been picking them up, laboriously, one at a time, when the cops arrived. He’d been on parole and the break-in was a violation. He’d gotten six months on top of the remaining time from the previous conviction.

Anna and her husband had never had money. He drank up most of it and she probably helped. Food was short. Nobody had clothes. But they did have a son. He was twelve, a stocky, withdrawn child who spent his evenings watching television. One Saturday afternoon, a few weeks after his daddy was taken to jail, the boy walked down to the Lake Street bridge and jumped into the Mississippi. A lot of people saw him go and the cops had him out of the river in fifteen minutes. Dead.

Bluebird had heard, and he went down to the river. Anna was there, her arms wrapped around the body of her son, and she looked up at him with those deep pain-filled eyes, and . . . what?

It was all part of being Indian, Bluebird thought. The dying. It was something they did better than the whites. Or more frequently, anyway.