Winter Counts(77)

Nope. He wasn’t going to get his gun.

I leaped over the counter and pushed him away from the drawer. He stumbled, then straightened up and threw a roundhouse punch at my face, connecting solidly. He still had some power left, I was surprised to find out. I feinted with a left jab, then threw a right hook that hit him in the temple. He went down with a thud. I put my knee on his lower back and grabbed his right arm, twisting it behind him.

“You’re lucky I don’t have time to take out your goddamn kneecaps. You’d roll around in a wheelchair, then you could really pretend to be a soldier. Merchant Marine, my ass. My grandpa stormed Normandy Beach, you heard of that?”

He didn’t say anything, so I put more pressure on his arm until he shouted “Yes!”

“And let me tell you one more thing, shitbag. More Indians serve in the military than any other group. Defending the country that broke every promise. So keep your goddamn mouth shut, or I’ll knock out any teeth you got left. Agreed?”

More pressure to the arm. He gave a muffled grunt.

“All right, answer me and you get to walk away. Is there a group staying here, bunch of Latino guys, maybe one Indian man with long hair, and an Indian boy? Tell me now.”

He said something, but I couldn’t make it out, so I twisted some more.

“They left! A few days ago! But no kid! Let me go!”

I let go of his arm and removed my knee from his back. He rolled over and started moving the arm back and forth, trying to determine if it still worked. I took a look out the window. No police yet. Likely the couple had run off, too scared to get involved. Still, it was smart for me to get out of there.

I looked down at the piece of shit, now laying on his side and softly whimpering. I thought about what he’d said—prairie nigger—and I reared back and kicked him full in the face with my boot.

“Thank you for your service,” I said, and walked out.

I WENT OUT TO THE CAR, the adrenaline still flooding my body and making it difficult to stand still. My right hand hurt like a son of a bitch from the punch I’d landed. I drove off quickly, as fast as my shitty car could go, my hands trembling and my body shaking, looking for a spot to pull over and get myself together.

There was a dirt road off the main street, so I turned onto that and shut off the car, the engine ticking like a homemade explosive device. After I calmed down, I thought about what the clerk had said: the gang had been at the motel, but left. None of this made sense: Why had they switched from the Pay-E-Zee, and why did they leave Cropper Cabin? Perhaps it was like Dennis had said—the gang moved around a lot to avoid detection. But why now? And where had they gone?

My phone rang as I was thinking all this over. It was Dennis.

“Got some news,” he said. “About the search.”

“I’m listening.”

“I think you know, we issued a multi-state BOLO for the vehicle. Well, we found it. The Dodge Charger.”

“Is Nathan okay?”

“The car was abandoned. No one in it. Located it off I-90 near Murdo.”

“Murdo! I thought they were heading south.”

“So did we. Looks like they ditched the Charger and switched cars.”

“But you’re still tracking Nathan’s cell phone, right? So you’ll be able to find out where they are.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the bad news,” he said.

There was good news?

“We found Nathan’s phone. It was on the ground next to the vehicle. Crushed. Appears they left it there and took off. It’s not good.”

MY BRAIN WAS a mass of white noise, and I couldn’t focus on anything except the road in front of me. I drove mindlessly, on autopilot, as I sorted through what Dennis had told me. The gang had abducted Nathan, switched cars, and smashed his cell phone. That could only mean they’d discovered he was an informant. I understood what this meant, but didn’t even want to think it, because voicing it would give it form and shape. Everyone knew what happened to snitches.

Dennis had tried to put a hopeful spin on things, but I was no idiot. The feds didn’t even know what type of car to look for, or where they might be going. They’d issued another BOLO for four male suspects, but without a vehicle description attached, the odds were shit they’d be found. I told him about Cropper Cabin and what I’d learned there, and he said that his people would look into it immediately. He tried to tell me that they knew everything about the gang and where they usually gathered, but I knew that time was critical. Marie’s friend had said the first day was the most important, and that made sense. The longer they had Nathan, the greater chance I’d never see him again. I used evasive maneuvers in my head to avoid what Dennis had told me about Loco, the resident torturer of the cartel, and the tactics he used.

Before I realized it, I was back at the cemetery. I pulled over into the little lot off the dirt road and walked over to Sybil’s grave. I tried to speak, explain to her what had gone wrong, what I’d tried to do, but no words would come. I knelt down with my head in my hands, the wind blowing, a cold scythe on my face and body.

I sat there, and the wind stopped. The sun set, but I remained. I didn’t want to get up and face what I’d almost certainly lost. What I’d lost and still had yet to lose. The country of the living was gone to me, and I knew that I’d entered a different space, one that offered no solace but only the wind and the cold and the frost. Winter counts. This was the winter of my sorrow, one I had tried to elude but which had come for me with a terrible cruelty.