Winter Counts(6)

“I need you to find him and set him straight. Bastard is the one bringing that crap around here. Strong stuff from Mexico.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “Haven’t heard anything about that. Weed, yeah. But not heroin.”

Something didn’t make sense. Rick Crow was a booze bootlegger, not a smack dealer. He’d buy cases of Bud Light down in Nebraska and then sell them by the bottle to the local drunks. Every so often, he’d drive down to Denver and pick up some pot, then unload that. But he never fooled around with anything stronger, as far as I knew.

“It’s just starting up,” Ben said. “That’s why we need to shut this down right away.”

“Why don’t you go to tribal police?”

“You know why. Even if they catch him, tribal court can’t hand out any sentence over a year. No point.”

This was true. “Why not go to the feds?”

He sneered. “They won’t take any case short of murder. Besides, there’s no hard evidence linking him to the drugs.”

“Then how do you know he’s bringing it in?”

“I’ve got my sources.” He finished his beer and waved his arm for another.

“Even if this is true,” I said, “why do you care? Plenty of other drugs floating around here if you want to start some sort of crackdown. You can buy weed on every corner.”

He frowned. “You know, some of us give a damn about this place. And that dead kid. Big difference between pot and heroin. Not to mention, my constituents won’t be happy if hard drugs keep spreading here.”

The upcoming tribal election. Now I understood why Ben wanted to clean out the smack dealers. But I still didn’t get one thing.

“If you want credit for getting rid of those guys, why hire me? If I make him stop, no one knows you were responsible.”

Ben signaled again for a drink, without success. “I just want that stuff gone, don’t care who does it.” Then he held up his hand and snapped his fingers. “I’ll be honest. More kids start overdosing, I’m out of a job. But the main thing is keeping our people safe.”

The bartender was nowhere to be seen, so Ben reached across the bar down into the well, lifted a couple of beer bottles, and set one in front of me. It was some fancy brew, St. Pauli Girl, the type of beer that cost six bucks a pop. I left it unopened.

“I don’t drink anymore.”

He ignored me. “There’s five thousand dollars in it for you if you can find him and get him to stop smuggling that shit here,” he said. “Do what you have to do. Any means necessary.”

Five grand. More money than I made in a year.

“I hear he’s down in Denver now, that’s where he gets it,” he said. “Don’t know exactly where in Denver, that’s your deal. I’ll advance you a thousand for expenses if you leave right away.”

I studied the St. Pauli Girl label. There was a drawing of some blond wasicu girl holding six foaming beer steins. She was smiling, but there was something cruel in her eyes. She reminded me of the teachers that used to smack the hell out of me when I was little because I didn’t act right.

“No thanks,” I said. “Not my type of job.”

Ben looked like a dog that’s heard a strange noise. He even turned his head a little to the side like some damn poodle.

“What, you want more money? That what this is about?”

“It’s not the money. This has a bad smell.”

“That asshole is selling heroin here, killed a kid. Don’t you want to shut that down?”

“Not my problem.”

“Same old Virgil,” he said. “Doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. You change your mind, let me know. But it’s got to be soon.”

I gave the St. Pauli Girl a final glare and walked off.

HEROIN. IT STILL DIDN’T make sense to me. I’d thrashed around in bed all night thinking about it, but I still couldn’t figure out the deal. There were plenty of pills around the rez, strong opioids that popped up years ago, no shortage of those. Weed was always easy to get, and there was meth available too, but usually just bathtub crank, small quantities. The local cooks would get some smurfs to buy boxes of Sudafed at all the drugstores in a hundred-mile radius, then pay them off in product.

But I hadn’t heard anything about smack. And Rick Crow was a low-level hustler—he wasn’t the type to mess around with serious narcotics. He was too lazy to get any big deals together. Still, I’d heard he spent a lot of time in Denver, so I supposed it was possible. Maybe Ben’s information about Rick was accurate, but it seemed doubtful. How would Ben know anything about heroin? He moved in a different world than the hustlers and scammers around here.

I needed to find out more, and then I could decide whether I should take the job—if the offer was still on the table. Yesterday, something had seemed off to me about Ben’s proposal. My gut said to decline this deal, but it had been wrong before. And I couldn’t deny that five thousand dollars was tempting. Normally I pocketed only a few hundred from a job. I decided to take a look inside Rick’s trailer, see what was in there. Get more information, find out what he was really doing.

I took my bike straight out on the highway, focused only on the road and my machine. I took a left, then another, going past the Little White River near Crow Dog’s camp. The vast sky opened in front of me as I traveled through the rolling grasslands and small canyons, the grace of the land lifting my spirits. Then I circled into town, back among the people, and I passed by the little houses, usually no more than six hundred square feet inside, but crawling with families and children. Some of the homes were in disarray, trash and old cars strewn across the yards. Others were neatly maintained, with little plots of grass and small lawn decorations. A few were boarded up, condemned because some asshole had cooked meth inside. I saw little kids playing in the streets, their parents sitting on plastic chairs keeping a watchful eye, teenagers striding in groups, a handful of elders slowly walking on the side of the road.