“Look, take a fuckin’ hike, will you?” Lucas asked in exasperation.
“Oh. Sure. Yeah. I’ll go get a doughnut,” the uniform said, finally picking up the hint. There were rumors about Davenport . . . .
Lucas watched the cop walk away and then turned to Yellow Hand.
“Who was this guy?”
“Aw, Davenport, I don’t know this guy . . . .” Yellow Hand’s Adam’s apple bobbed earnestly.
Lucas took the glass tube out of his pocket, turned it in his fingers so the kid could see the dirty-white chunks of crack. Yellow Hand’s tongue flicked across his lips as Lucas slowly worked the plastic stopper out of the tube and tipped the five rocks into his palm.
“This is good shit,” Lucas said casually. “I took it off Elwood Stone up at the halfway house. You know Elwood? His mama cooks it up. They get it from the Cubans over on the West Side of St. Paul. Really good shit.”
“Man. Oh, man. Don’t do this.”
Lucas held one of the small rocks between a thumb and index finger. “Who was it?”
“Man, I can’t . . .” Yellow Hand was in agony, twisting his thin hands. Lucas crushed the rock, pushed the door open with his elbow, and let it trickle to the ground like sand running through an hourglass.
“Please, don’t do that.” Yellow Hand was appalled.
“Four more,” Lucas said. “All I need is a name and you can take off.”
“Oh, man . . .”
Lucas picked up another rock and held it close to Yellow Hand’s face and just started to squeeze when Yellow Hand blurted, “Wait.”
“Who?”
Yellow Hand looked out the window. It was warm now, but you could feel the chill in the night air. Winter was coming. A bad time to be an Indian on the streets.
“Bluebird,” he muttered. They came from the same reservation and he’d sold the man for four pieces of crack.
“Who?”
“Tony Bluebird. He’s got a house off Franklin.”
“What house?”
“Shit, I don’t know the number . . . .” he whined. His eyes shifted. A traitor’s eyes.
Lucas held the rock to Yellow Hand’s face again. “Going, going . . .”
“You know that house where the old guy painted the porch pillars with polka dots?” Yellow Hand spoke in haste now, eager to get it over.
“Yeah.”
“It’s two up from that. Up towards the TV store.”
“Has this guy ever been in trouble? Bluebird?”
“Oh, yeah. He did a year in Stillwater. Burglary.”
“What else?”
Yellow Hand shrugged. “He’s from Fort Thompson. He goes there in the summer and works here in the winter. I don’t know him real good, he was just back on the res, you know? Got a woman, I think. I don’t know, man. He mostly knows my family. He’s older than I am.”
“Has he got a gun?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like he’s a friend. I never heard of him getting in fights or nothing.”
“All right,” Lucas said. “Where are you staying?”
“In the Point. The top floor, with some other guys.”
“Wasn’t that one of Ray Cuervo’s places? Before he got cut?”
“Yeah.” Yellow Hand was staring at the crack on Lucas’ palm.
“Okay.” Lucas tipped the four remaining rocks back into the test tube and handed it to Yellow Hand. “Stick this in your sock and get your ass back to the Point. If I come looking, you better be there.”
“I will,” Yellow Hand said eagerly.
Lucas nodded. The back door of the squad had no handles and he had carefully avoided closing it. Now he pushed it open and stepped out, and Yellow Hand slid across and got out beside him. “This better be right. This Bluebird,” Lucas said, jabbing a finger into Yellow Hand’s thin chest.
Yellow Hand nodded. “It was him. I talked to him.”
“Okay. Beat it.”
Yellow Hand hurried away. Lucas watched him for a moment, then walked across the street to the Indian Center. He found Wentz in the director’s office.
“So how’s our witness?” the cop asked.
“On his way home.”
“Say what?”
“He’ll be around,” Lucas said. “He says the guy we want is named Tony Bluebird. Lives down on Franklin. I know the house, and he’s got a sheet. We should be able to get a photo.”
“God damn,” Wentz said. He reached for a telephone. “Let me get that downtown.”
Lucas had nothing more to do. Homicide was for Homicide cops. Lucas was Intelligence. He ran networks of street people, waitresses, bartenders, barbers, gamblers, hookers, pimps, bookies, dealers in cars and cocaine, mail carriers, a couple of burglars. The crooks were small-timers, but they had eyes and memories. Lucas was always ready with a dollar or a threat, whatever was needed to make a snitch feel wanted.
He had nothing to do with it, but after Yellow Hand produced the name, Lucas hung around to watch the cop machine work. Sometimes it was purely a pleasure. Like now: when the Homicide cop called downtown, several things happened at once.
A check with the identification division confirmed Yellow Hand’s basic information and got a photograph of Tony Bluebird started out to the Indian Center.
At the same time, the Minneapolis Emergency Response Unit began staging in a liquor store parking lot a mile from Bluebird’s suspected residence.
While the ERU got together, a further check with utility companies suggested that Bluebird lived in the house where Yellow Hand had put him. Forty minutes after Yellow Hand spoke Bluebird’s name, a tall black man in an army fatigue jacket and blue jeans ambled down the street past Bluebird’s to the house next door, went up on the porch, knocked, flashed his badge and asked himself inside. The residents didn’t know any Bluebird, but people came and went, didn’t they?
Another detective, a white guy who looked as if he’d been whipped through hell with a soot bag, stopped at the house before Bluebird’s and went through the same routine.
“Yeah, Tony Bluebird, that’s the guy’s name, all right,” said the elderly man who met him at the door. “What’s he done?”
“We’re not sure he did anything,” said the detective. “Have you seen this guy lately? I mean, today?”
“Hell, yes. Not a half an hour ago, he came up the walk and went inside.” The old man nervously gummed his lower lip. “Still in there, I guess.”
The white detective called in and confirmed Bluebird’s presence. Then he and the black detective did a careful scan of Bluebird’s house from the windows of the adjoining homes and called their information back to the ERU leader. Normally, when they had a man pinned, they’d try to make contact, usually by phone. But Bluebird, they thought, might be some kind of maniac. Maybe a danger to hostages or himself. They decided to take him. The ERUs, riding in nondescript vans, moved up to a second stage three blocks from Bluebird’s.
While all that was going on, Betty Sails picked Bluebird out of a photo spread. The basketball player confirmed the identification.
“That’s a good snitch you got there, Lucas,” Wentz said approvingly. “You coming along?”
“Might as well.”
The ERU found a blind spot around the back door of Bluebird’s house. The door had no window, and the only other window near it had the shade pulled. They could move up to the door, take it out and be inside before Bluebird had even a hint of their presence.
And it would have worked if Bluebird’s landlord hadn’t been so greedy. The landlord had illegally subdivided the house into a duplex. The division had been practical, rather than aesthetic: the doorway connecting the front of the house to the back had been covered with a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood.
When the tac commander said “Go,” one of the ERUs tossed a flash-bang grenade through Bluebird’s side window. The terrific explosion and brilliant flash would freeze anyone inside for several seconds, long enough for the ERU team to get on top of him. When the flash-bang went off, another ERU blew the back door open with an AVON round fired from his shotgun, and the team leader went through the door, followed by three of his men.
A young Mexican woman was lying half asleep on the sofa, a baby on her stomach. An older kid, a toddler, was sitting in a dilapidated playpen. The Mexican woman had been nursing the baby and her shirt was open, her breasts exposed. She struggled to sit up, reacting to the flash-bang and the AVONs, her mouth and eyes wide with fear.