Dirty White Boys (36 page)

He reached his destination, which bore the designation C
OMANCHE TRIBAL POLICE
, and slipped into what could have been any small-town cop shop, a dingy, government-green holding room with a sergeant behind a desk and two or three patrolmen lounging at their desks. All of them wore jeans and baseball hats and carried SIG-Sauers in shoulder holsters. They were lean, tough young men, none too friendly.

“Howdy,” he said to the sergeant. “Name’s Pewtie, Oklahoma highway patrol.” He showed the badge. “I’m looking for a lieutenant called Jack Antelope Runs. He around?”

“Oh, you state boys, you always come by when you got a crime to solve and you can’t solve it. Gotta be an Indian, don’t it?” said the sergeant.

“As a matter of fact, it don’t,” said Bud. “It’s gotta be a piece of white trash mankiller that makes the average brave look like your Minnie Mouse. But I got a matter Jack might be able to help me on.”

“That’s all right, Sarge,” said Antelope Runs from an office, “don’t you give Bud no hard time. For a dirty white boy, he’s not as bad as some I could name. Howdy, Bud.”

“Jack, ain’t you looking swell these days?”

Jack Antelope Runs had a cascade of raven black hair running fiercely free and was wearing a little bolo tie that made the thickness of his neck and the boldness of his face seem even more exaggerated. He was a huge man, approximately 240 pounds, and his eyes beamed black fire.

“Come on in, Bud. Glad you still walking among the palefaces, brother, and not with the wind spirits.”

“Well, old goddamned Lamar Pye tried to show me the way to the wind, I’ll tell you.”

Bud walked in and sat down.

“So what’s it all about, Bud? Is this a Lamar thang?”

“Yes it is.”

“I figured a Gary Cooper boy like you’d take it personal.”

“Now, Jack, it isn’t that way, no sir. I just had an idea I wanted to talk to you about.”

“So, talk, brother, talk.”

“I seem to remember a circular some months back. Isn’t there a big Indian gang making a move to take over narco from the bikers? Seems I been bulletinized on that item a few times in the past few months.”

“They call themselves N-D-N-Z,” said Jack. “Mean and nasty boys, yes sir. Started up in prison. You put our brothers in white prisons and sure enough they going to start up their own gang, to stand against the niggers and the Mexicans and the white boys.”

“It’s another thing we’re guilty of, yes it is,” said Bud.

“It ain’t strictly a Comanche thing, though some of our young men have done the dying. But it’s run mainly by Cherokees. You might talk to Larry Eagletalon at the Cherokee tribal complex. He’s—”

“Now, actually, I ain’t interested in the gang.”

“Except you think maybe Lamar might be profiting from native American hospitality in some jerky tribal backwater?”

“No, it’s not even that. One of the hallmarks of N-D-N-Z, as I recall, is a really and truly fine ceremonial tattoo around the left biceps? No? Yes?”

“Why, yes it is.”

“Now, sir, I got me a funny feeling whoever’s doing that work is a real fine tattoo boy. Maybe the best in these parts.”

“The N-D-N-Z braves wouldn’t have any less. That’s what cocaine money buys these days. Fast cars, white women, bold tattoos.”

“Yes sir. Now, suppose Lamar wanted such a fine tattoo. Where’d he go? To those goddamned scum joints on Fort Sill Boulevard? Catch hepatitis B in them places.”

“It don’t sound like a Lamar, but you never can tell.”

“But he wants
the best
. And isn’t the boy doing this work
the best?”

“So it’s said.”

“Where’d such a boy be found?”

“Hmmm,” said Jack Antelope Runs.

“I just want to check it out. See if Lamar’s been around. Maybe that’s another step. Maybe we stake out. Lamar shows up, our SWAT boys are there, and Lamar goes into the body bag. No one has to know any information came from the Comanche Tribal Police.”

“Bud, for a white boy, maybe you ain’t so dumb.”

“I’m just a working cop.”

Antelope Runs thought a minute, and then finally said, “You know what happens to me if I start giving up Indian secrets to white men? The N-D-N-Z boys leave me in a ditch and nobody comes to my funeral and nobody takes care of my widow and my seven little kids.”

“I hear what you’re saying.”

“I’ll ask around, but that’s all I can give you. Understand?”

“I guess I do, Jack. I just hope Lamar doesn’t decide to stick up your high stakes bingo game next. He could send a lot of boys to wander among the wind spirits.”

“I hear you, yes I do. But it’s a white-red thing. I can’t change that. You can’t change that.”

“Okay, I see I been wasting your time.”

“Here Bud. Give you a card. Let me write my home phone in case something comes up and you have to get in touch.”

“It ain’t—”

But Jack Antelope Runs scrawled something and handed it over to Bud, who took it and sullenly walked out.

He felt the laughter of the boys in the squad room as he left. Another white boy bites the dust.

In the parking lot he heard, “N-2. N-2. Last call, N-2.”

He got into his car, feeling old. Another wasted trip.

Then he looked on the card, and at Jack Antelope Run’s writing.

It said: Jimmy Ky. Rt. 62, Indiahoma.

It looked deserted. The neon was out, but if you pulled up you could see that, if lit, the sign would have read—under three or four Chinese letters—
TATTOO KEY
. You’d have to know where to look, though. The parking lot was deserted and the place was way out on Route 62, near Indiahoma. It was a clapboard shack by the roadside, across from a deserted gas station.

“Nobody’s home,” said Richard. “We’ll have to come back.”

“I think tonight’s the night. Come on, Richard. Y’all wait here while we take us a lookiesee.”

Lamar got out, and bent to check his .45. Richard heard mysterious clickings. Then Lamar walked up to the door and knocked hard.

Time passed. The wind whistled through the high grass out back. Above, the stars seemed to fizzle and pop like silent fireworks—the sky was the record of a huge explosion.
Violence was everywhere, or at least the hint of it. There wasn’t a sound to be heard anywhere in the universe except for the persistence of the wind.

Eventually definite shuckings and shiftings were heard, and deep inside the house a light came on. The door opened a crack.

“Go away,” somebody whispered. “We closed.”

The door slammed shut, but Lamar caught it perfectly with the flat of his foot, his full force behind it, and knocked it back open. In reddish light there stood a scrawny Asian, about sixty. He looked mottled, as if suffering from some skin disease.

“You Jimmy Ky?” Lamar demanded.

“Jimmy Ky no here no more. He go away. Go far away. I Jimmy Ky’s father.”

“My ass,” said Lamar. “You’re Jimmy Ky. Got a goddamn proposition for you.”

Lamar stepped inside and Richard followed.

“I heard you the best,” said Lamar. “Well, I want the best.”

The Asian looked at him, betraying no fear. Richard now saw that the mottling on his face was tattooing, but of a sort he’d never imagined: It was lustrous, dark, vivid, incredibly detailed, and ominous. The old man was dark blue and red, his face gone in a kaleidoscope.

“You do that yourself?”

“My master Horimono.”

“Well it’s pretty goddamned good. You that good?”

Lamar’s aggression filled the air; he was like the lion confronting a goat. But the goat was strangely unafraid; the old man just looked at Lamar without much emotional investment.

“I his apprentice still,” he finally said.

“Show him, Richard.”

Richard gave him the drawing of the lion. Jimmy Ky looked at it for a long moment.

“It’s shit,” he said. “Why you want this trash? Go town. Lots of people in town do this trash.”

“No, no,” said Richard, “that’s just from your Asian perspective. This is done from the
Western
perspective, and it’s stylized in a different method. It has to look
Western
, it can’t have that exotic—”

“I can do. Best! Make it roar. But it trash,” said Jimmy Ky, bluntly.

“It ain’t trash,” said Lamar. “Look at the way he got the fire and the pride of that lion. Look at that bull neck. That’s a goddamned piece of art. We got money.”

“How much?”

“How much you need?”

“Ah, for that, forty-five hundred dollars. You wan, you pay.”

“Four thousand bucks! Ain’t no tattoo worth that kind of money.”

Jimmy Ky looked at him shrewdly.

“How bad you want it, mister? You no want it, you go away now. I go back to sleep.”

“Goddamn,” said Lamar. “Seems like a robbery.”

“Gotta pay for the best,” said the old man.

“Shit,” said Lamar. “How long?”

“Maybe twelve hours. Start now, be done tomorrow afternoon. Then you go lie down for about a week. Get drunk. Infection set in, lots of pain. You got want it. For every color, you suffer. Fever, sweats, lots of agony. No fun at all. How bad you want it?”

“Shit,” said Lamar. “I can get through any goddamned thing.”

He turned to Richard. “You and Ruta Beth, you park across the street at that gas station, out of sight. You stay
there as backup. You tell Odell to come on in. He’s working shotgun. Got that?”

“Yes, Lamar.”

“Okay, old man. Let’s get to work. You make me a lion, okay.”

“Hokay, Joe. Can do.”

The old man actually seemed happy.

Bud missed it the first time. There were no lights on. It was just a deserted clapboard shack on the way to Indiahoma on a bleak stretch of highway. But when he’d gone on into Indiahoma, he realized he’d gone too far. He turned around and headed back. He seemed to course through inky darkness. The roast beef in his stomach hadn’t settled yet. He was half a minute from pulling that goddamned .380 out from under his belt buckle where it had grown into a massive problem. What on earth did he need
three
guns for? Two was enough for any man.

But then he saw it, standing stark against the bleak prairie under some runty trees. He pulled halfway into the parking lot, gave it a once over. It seemed completely quiet and abandoned. There were no cars in the parking lot, and he could see a neon sign that wasn’t on. But up near the edge of one window, he could make out just a sliver of light.

What the hell
, he thought, feeling ridiculous.
I’ve come this far, I may as well go all the way so the evening won’t be a total loss
.

Richard looked at Ruta Beth in the low light. He could hear her breathe, see the darkness in her eyes. He actually felt pity move through him. Imagine, a child like that coming upon the murder of her parents.

“How are you doing, Ruta Beth?” he asked.

She fixed him with a narrow glare.

“What the hell do you care?”

He felt her pain. “Ruta Beth, I know how hard life can be sometimes. I was thinking how if you ever needed anyone to
talk
to, why, I’d be ready and will—”

She recoiled.

“You ain’t got no romance in mind?”

“Ah, Ruta Beth, why—”

She drew back her little fist, knotted into a clot.

“You put your hands on me, Richard, and I swear, you will be sucking teeth for a
month
. And that before Lamar gits done with you!”

“Ruta Beth, I only meant—”

“Shut up,” she hissed. A truck pulled into the parking lot across the way.

A man in it waited for a second, then got out and just stood there.

“Can you see?”

“Big guy, cowboy hat, that’s all.”

“A cop?”

“I don’t know. Not in uniform. Do they have plainclothes detectives way the hell out here?”

“I don’t know,” said Richard, who had no idea.

“I doubt it,” said Ruta Beth, to herself mainly, since she expected no sensible answer from Richard. “Maybe if he come from the city. But he come from the other direction, from Indiahoma. He’s probably some big goddamn brave, in a big truck the government bought for him, just out for a cruise. A chief or some such shit.”

“Why would he stop here?”

“Maybe he knows Jimmy Ky.”

“He ain’t a cop,” said Ruta Beth. “How could a cop have found this place. Coincidences like this don’t happen in the universe. Not no how.”

They watched as the big man went up toward the house.

*  *  *

It wasn’t the pain. Pain didn’t frighten Lamar; it was the helplessness and the pain. He lay flat on his back, under a big light. His chest had been shaved and scrubbed with astringent until it stung. Now what he saw was so weird: In the back room, he saw a one-eyed giant. That’s what it looked like, at any rate. Really, it was only the old slope, bent over him with the needle, his eye swollen huge and bloodshot by the lens it wore. It was an operation, for now the surgeon’s latex gloves were slippery with blood.

“You gotta lotta blood in you,” the doctor laughed. It connected with something somewhere in Lamar’s previous life, but he couldn’t say what or when.

The only reality was the needle. It hummed and tapped as Jimmy Ky leaned over and worked it. Not a big pain, like the thrust of a blade or the channeling of a bullet, but a sharp, brief flash of explosion on his body, enough to make him jump or leap each time.

“No move, goddamn. Make you look like kitty cat, not lion.”

Lamar tried to ride it. Eleven more hours of this shit?

And this wasn’t even the bad stuff. This was the easy part: doing the base colors, the larger shapes. The hard work would come later, when the little man got down to details and moved in with the tiniest of needles for the little drips of color that gave the piece life. And he was a careful craftsman, unmoved by the pain he caused his subject. He never looked hard at Lamar, but only at the design.

Lamar was afraid to breathe. He took strength from one thing and one thing alone: his cousin Odell, Baby Odell, sitting with the implacable patience and loyalty of the retarded, watching and waiting and playing sentry at the door to the back room.

*  *  *

It was so goddamn dark! Ruta Beth couldn’t see a thing. The truck was just a truck, the man just a man, standing there, as if deciding. When he finally moved, he walked toward the door and there was something familiar in the gait. Where did she recognize it from?