“Okay. Your money, your skin.”
“Who’s the best? The very best. It's worth twenty bucks for the time it'll save me.”
He pushed the bill across the counter.
“Well,” said Rufe, "truth is, the big action's dried up and left Lawton. It's mostly a West Coast thing. But—well, there's one guy left around here. He don't work much. But, I have to say, he's a goddamn genius. Done it his whole life.”
“What's his name?”
“Jimmy Ky. He's a good fella. Born in Saigon. Started in the Orient, where it's an art. See the spider on my face, Had that done in sixty-five in Tokyo by the great Horimono.” He leaned forward.
“See how much lighter it is; them boys got the touch, I must admit.
Jimmy Ky studied under Horimono. He's got the touch himself. If he'll work on you.”
- "Oh, he'll work on this guy. Where's his place?”
It was Bingo Night.
high stakes bingo! the sign said, lighting up the night sky. The Bingo Palace was the largest and most vivid building in the Comanche Tribal Complex off Highway 65, where an obliging U . government had constructed a quartet of sleek structures for people who cared very little for such things.
The parking lot was jammed, and in the windows of the Palace, Bud could see a full house of farmers and city folks bending over their cards while gaudily costumed "squaws” and "braves” walked among them, selling new cards, Cokes, bags of peanuts, and the like.
“Okay, folks,” came a voice booming over the PA that even Bud could hear out in the dark, "we have an I-6? 16, everybody! And remember: You win on two cards, you win four times the jackpot!”
But Bud turned from that spectacle and instead walked through the dark to a lower building a hundred yards away.
He tried not to notice the high, unkempt grass or the beer cans and coke bottles that lay in it, and he tried not to notice the graffiti defacing the nice new buildings.
Comanches. Once dog soldiers, the most feared of the Plains Indians, a magnificent people, ride a week on pemmican, fight and win a major cavalry engagement against numerically superior and better-equipped foes, then ride another week on pemmican. Now they tended their gambling franchise and watched their customs crumble as their young people were lured away to the cities. Bud shook his head.
He reached his destination, which bore the designation comanche 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 man killer 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 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.