Shadow Prey Read Free

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