The team leader blocked a hallway, and the biggest man on the squad hit the plywood barrier, kicked it twice and gave up.
“We’re blocked out, we’re blocked out,” he shouted.
“Is there any way to the front?” the team leader yelled at the Mexican woman. The woman, still dazed, didn’t understand, and the team leader took his men out and rotated them down the side of the house.
They were ten seconds into the attack, still hoping to do it clean, when a woman screamed from the front of the house. Then there were a couple of shots, a window shattered, and the leader figured Bluebird had a hostage. He called the team off.
Sex was strange, the team leader thought.
He stood with his back against the crumbling white siding of the house, the shotgun still in his hand, sweat pouring down his face. The attack had been chaotic, the response—the shooting—had been the kind of thing he feared, a close-up firefight with a nut, where you might have a pistol right up your nose. With all that, the image of the Mexican woman’s thin breast stayed in his mind’s eye and in his throat, and he could barely concentrate on the life-and-death confrontation he was supposed to be directing . . . .
When Lucas arrived, two marked squads were posted in front of Bluebird’s house, across the street, and ERUs waited on the porches of the houses on either side of Bluebird’s. A blocking team was out back. Drum music leaked from the house.
“Are we talking to him?” Lucas asked the tac commander.
“We called him on the phone, but we lost the phone,” the tac commander said. “Phone company says it’s out of order. We think he pulled the line.”
“How many people are in there?”
The tac commander shrugged. “The neighbors say he’s got a wife and a couple of kids, preschool kids. Don’t know about anybody else.”
A television truck rolled up to the end of the street, where a patrolman stopped it. A StarTribune reporter appeared at the other end of the block, a photographer humping along behind. One of the TV crew stopped arguing with the patrolman long enough to point at Lucas and yell. When Lucas turned, she waved, and Lucas ambled down the block. Neighbors were being herded along the sidewalk. There’d been a birthday party going on at one house and a half-dozen kids floated helium balloons over the gathering crowd. It looked like a carnival, Lucas thought.
“What’s happening, Davenport?” the TV reporter yelled past the patrolman. The reporter was a Swede of the athletic variety, with high cheekbones, narrow hips and blood-red lipstick. A cameraman stood next to her, his camera focused on the Bluebird house.
“That killing down at the Indian Center today? We think we got the guy trapped inside.”
“He got hostages?” the reporter asked. She didn’t have a notebook.
“We don’t know.”
“Can we get any closer? Any way? We need a better angle . . . .”
Lucas glanced around the blocked-off area.
“How about if we try to get you in that alley over there, between those houses? You’ll be further away, but you’ll have a direct shot at the front . . . .”
“Something’s going down,” the cameraman said. He was looking at the Bluebird house through his camera’s telephoto setting.
“Ah, shit,” said the reporter. She tried to ease past the patrolman to stand next to Lucas, but the patrolman blocked her with a hip.
“Catch you later,” Lucas said over his shoulder as he turned and started back.
“C’mon, Davenport . . .”
Lucas shook his head and kept going. The ERU team leader on the porch of the left-hand house was yelling at Bluebird’s. He got a response, stepped back a bit and took out a handset.
“What?” asked Lucas, when he got back to the command unit.
“He said he’s sending his people out,” said a cop on a radio.
“I’m backing everybody off,” said the tac commander. As Lucas leaned on the roof to watch, the tac commander sent a patrolman scrambling along the row of cars, to warn the ERUs and the uniformed officers that people were coming out of the house. A moment later, a white towel waved at the door and a woman stepped out, holding a baby. She was dragging another kid, maybe three years old, by one arm.
“Come on, come on, you’re okay,” the detective called out. She looked back once, then walked quickly, head down, on the sidewalk through the line of cars.
Lucas and the tac commander moved over to intercept her.
“Who are you?” the tac commander asked.
“Lila Bluebird.”
“Is that your husband in there?”
“Yes.”
“Has he got anybody with him?”
“He’s all alone,” the woman said. Tears streamed down her face. She was wearing a man’s cowboy shirt and shorts made of stretchy black material spotted with lint fuzzies. The baby clung to her shirt, as though he knew what was going on; the other kid hung on her hand. “He said to tell you he’ll be out in a minute.”
“He drunk? Crack? Crank? Anything like that?”
“No. No alcohol or drugs in our house. But he’s not right.”
“What’s that? You mean he’s crazy? What . . .”
The question was never finished. The door of the Bluebird house burst open and Tony Bluebird hurdled onto the lawn, running hard. He was bare-chested, the long obsidian blade dangling from his neck on a rawhide thong. Two eagle feathers were pinned to his headdress and he had pistols in both hands. Ten feet off the porch, he brought them up and opened fire on the nearest squad, closing on the cops behind it. The cops shot him to pieces. The gunfire stood him up and knocked him down.
After a second of stunned silence, Lila Bluebird began to wail and the older kid, confused, clutched at her leg and began screaming. The radio man called for paramedics. Three cops moved up to Bluebird, their pistols still pointed at his body, and nudged his weapons out of reach.
The tac commander looked at Lucas, his mouth working for a moment before the words came out. “Jesus Christ,” he blurted. “What the fuck was that all about?”
CHAPTER
3
Wild grapes covered the willow trees, dangling forty and fifty feet down to the waterline. In the weak light from the Mendota Bridge, the island looked like a three-masted schooner with black sails, cruising through the mouth of the Minnesota River into the Mississippi.
Two men walked onto a sand spit at the tip of the island. They’d had a fire earlier in the evening, roasting wieners on sharp sticks and heating cans of SpaghettiOs. The fire had guttered down to coals, but the smell of the burning pine still hung in the cool air. A hundred feet back from the water’s edge, a sweat lodge squatted under the willows.
“We ought to go up north. It’d be nice now, out on the lakes,” said the taller one.
“It’s been too warm. Too many mosquitoes.”
The tall man laughed. ‘Bullshit, mosquitoes. We’re Indians, dickhead.”
“Them fuckin’ Chippewa would take our hair,” the short one objected, the humor floating through his voice.
“Not us. Kill their men, screw their women. Drink their beer.”
“I ain’t drinkin’ no Grain Belt,” said the short one. There was a moment’s comfortable silence between them. The short one took a breath, let it out in an audible sigh and said, “Too much to do. Can’t fuck around up north.”
The short man’s face had sobered. The tall man couldn’t see it, but sensed it. “I wish I could go pray over Bluebird,” the tall man said. After a moment, he added, “I hoped he would go longer.”
“He wasn’t smart.”
“He was spiritual.”
“Yep.”
The men were Mdewakanton Sioux, cousins, born the same day on the banks of the Minnesota River. One had been named Aaron Sunders and the other Samuel Close, but only the bureaucrats called them that. To everyone else they touched, they were the Crows, named for their mothers’ father, Dick Crow.