Blood Quantum Page 12

  Catherine smiled the way people did when addressing tiny children or the hopelessly confused small children. "You be my guest, Greg," she said. "Knock yourself out."

  14

  Rico Aguirre was driving Nick and Brass back to tribal police headquarters and checking out Calvin Tom's story on his handheld radio at the same time, when the voice from the other end said, "Hold on a minute, Richie."

  "Okay," Aguirre said. Static took over the air waves. Aguirre kept driving one-handed, holding the radio in his right hand. Nick liked the man, but if he never had to get into a vehicle with him at the wheel again, that would be just fine.

  A moment later, the voice came back over the radio. "Richie, there's been a shooting reported. Multiple shots fired, multiple victims. Can you head over to Meoqui Torres's house?"

  "Yeah, I'm not too far from there. I got these LVPD guys in the car with me -"

  "Ray mentioned that name," Nick whispered to Brass. "I think we should check this out."

  "We'll tag along," Brass said.

  "Other units are responding, too," the radio voice said. "You won't be alone for long."

  "Okay, I'm on it," Aguirre said. He handed Brass the radio. He usually wore it on his belt, but Nick supposed that, for all his terrifying driving habits, he didn't intend to try to put it back there while he was behind the wheel. Probably, he usually just dropped it onto the passenger seat. Aguirre hit the lights and siren and started driving even faster. Desert whipped past the windows, and although the wheels gripped the road, when he took corners at speed, he slid over the shoulder and spat gravel and dust into the air.

  "What's the scoop on this Torres?" Brass asked. "Our colleague Ray Langston mentioned him."

  "Meoqui is one of the most obnoxious guys in the whole tribe," Aguirre said. "Real political, always bitching about something or other."

  "Like the blood-quantum standards?" Nick asked.

  "Sure, that. Or whatever. When the new casino hotel renovation was announced, he was the guy complaining about environmental issues, demanding an impact report. When we were negotiating with an energy company about putting in a coal plant, he was the one who ended up getting it killed. Plus, he makes movies about it all, so just in case you didn't get tired of listening to him the first time around, you can watch him on DVD. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't like the guy. And he's smart as hell. It's just… you know, sometimes even someone who means well can get tiresome. You just don't want to hear about what's bad about everything all the time."

  "I know what you mean," Brass said. "Some people just aren't happy unless they're throwing dirt on someone's campfire."

  "Sometimes you've gotta have those people," Nick put in. "They can be annoying, but they can keep everybody else honest."

  "We're a better tribe with him in it than we would be without," Aguirre agreed. "He's kind of holier-than-thou – like he always knows what's best, and everybody else should just listen to him. And like I said, he just gets old. But I don't wish him any harm."

  The Jeep whipped through open desert and past more homes of various sizes but mostly small. Almost all of the people watching them race by had dark hair and dark skin, Nick noted – not surprising on the reservation, but every now and then, he was surprised to see a blond or a redhead with pale skin outside one of the houses, and the contrast always reminded him of how overwhelmingly homogeneous the population there was.

  A few minutes later, Aguirre made a screeching left turn onto a smaller paved road. The tires spat gravel for a quarter-mile, and then they reached a yellow ranch house with an open porch across the front. The windows behind it were shattered, and bullet holes pocked the walls. A young Native American man holding a rag over a bleeding wound on his left biceps released his arm when he saw the Jeep and waved the bloodstained rag over his head. He was tall, his head shaved and polished, and in spite of the warmth of the day, he had on a plaid flannel shirt, open to reveal the chest and abs of a guy who took his weight lifting seriously. The sleeve of his shirt was dark with blood.

  "This is the place," Aguirre said.

  "So it seems," Brass said.

  As they ground to a stop in the front yard, Nick saw more people, mostly men but one woman, sitting in chairs or sprawled out on the balcony floor. Blood pooled on the floorboards like spilled paint.

  Nick, Brass, and Aguirre were all out of the Jeep before the roostertail of dust they'd kicked up had settled, rushing across the din yard toward the porch.

  "The shooters still around?" Aguirre asked urgently. He went into the back of the Jeep and brought out a battered first-aid kit.

  "Gone," the guy with the rag said. "Bastards didn't stay long."

  "There's an ambulance coming," Aguirre told him.

  "It better hurry."

  This was the worst-case scenario for a crime-scene investigator, Nick knew. People had been shot. They were bleeding, possibly dying. Finding out who had shot them might depend on keeping the crime scene clear and uncompromised. But saving lives definitely depended on getting to them as quickly as possible, offering first aid, and making sure the wounded were transported to someplace they could get real medical care. Preserving the scene had to give way to the other priorities, Nick understood, even when it made the CSI in him cringe.

  "START triage!" Brass called.

  "Right," Nick said. He was already sprinting toward the porch. He had a crime-scene kit with him, but he wished he had brought the first-aid kit from his vehicle as well. He beat Brass to the porch by a couple of steps. Aguirre, slowed by having to go for his first-aid kit, brought up the rear.

  START meant Simple Triage And Rapid Treatment and had been developed for just this sort of event, when people without a lot of emergency medical training arrived at a disaster before those who did have the training and proper equipment. Nick ignored the guy who had waved them in, since he was upright and, although wounded, not critically so, and went to the closest one on his left, who was down on the ground. Brass went right.

  The man Nick reached first was lying facedown, blood spreading from beneath him. Nick put a hand on his back, to let him know he was there and comfort him but also to find out if he was breathing. "You okay, buddy?"

  But he didn't feel any motion beneath his hand. He moved it up to the guy's neck, feeling for a pulse. Nothing. He turned back to Aguirre, kneeling beside another victim. "You got any tape, Richie? To mark these guys?"

  Aguirre fished around inside the first-aid kit and found four rolls of tape: red, black, yellow, and green. He tossed them to Nick, who tore off a long strip of black and adhered it to the dead man. Black didn't necessarily mean the person was dead, but he wasn't expected to live long enough to reach medical care, so he should be skipped over until the more urgent cases were dealt with. The highest-priority victims would be tagged with red, then yellow, and finally, those whose needs were least urgent got green.

  In this way, Nick worked from victim to victim, while Brass and Aguirre did the same. Most of those he came across were alive, with wounds of varying degrees of seriousness. One had been hit in the scalp, the bullet digging a furrow just beneath the skin from forehead to crown. Another had taken two rounds to the abdomen and was bleeding like mad. He was told to put pressure on the wound and got a red tag. Another had a through-and-through that had been hit in his popliteal artery. He got a wide-cuffed tourniquet and a yellow tag.

  The eleven victims were all Native Americans, most in their twenties or early thirties, Nick judged, although a couple were significantly older. They wore jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers or cowboy boots. For the most part, they wore their hair long and loose. From the glimpses Nick had of the house's interior, it was a combination home and studio – he saw a lot of lighting equipment, a good-quality video camera on a tripod, and gear boxes in what would ordinarily be a living room with bare floors and plain white walls.

  "What happened here?" Brass asked as he wrapped his own belt around a man's leg as a tourniquet.

  The
guy with the bloody rag was the most coherent one. He dropped down into a wicker chair, its cushion already sopping with blood, not that he seemed to care at that point. "We were just sitting out here, you know, slinging the shit. These dudes pull up in a truck, slow down, and then all of a sudden they got guns out and they're blasting away at us. Couple of us were strapped, we shot back, and they rolled out."

  "Can you identify them?" Brass asked.

  "Never saw them before."

  "What about anybody else?" Brass asked loudly. Nick recognized the commanding tone Brass could take when he wanted cooperation, and in a hurry. "Anyone able to ID the shooters?"

  No one answered in the affirmative. Nick didn't believe that no one had recognized the shooters, but, as in the city, there were occasions where no one wanted to identify their assailants, preferring to mete out their own brand of justice.

  "Hey," Aguirre said, "where's Meoqui?"

  "Over there," someone replied, pointing to an unconscious man, crumpled on the floor, whom Nick had bandaged as best he could and tagged with red. He had been hit in the left thigh by a large-caliber round that had exploded a big chunk of his upper leg. Apparently spinning around from that wound, he took a second shot through the right trapezius, back to front, and then fell and hit the back of his head on the windowsill. He'd been bleeding badly when Nick found him. There was still hair and tissue on the corner of the sill, which Nick had observed with professional detachment. That was the sort of thing he would ordinarily be looking for, except in this case, he was more concerned with patching and tagging. This isn't your turf, he kept reminding himself. Even if you could work the scene, you don't have the authority.

  Aguirre went down on one knee at the activist's side. "Meoqui, you okay?" he asked. The concern in his voice sounded authentic. Nick supposed the cop had been telling the truth. He ran short of patience with Torres but liked him in spite of that.

  Torres didn't answer. Nick didn't expect him to. Best case, Torres had a concussion. Nick hoped the young man hadn't suffered any permanent brain damage, but that crack in the head was a bad one. And he'd lost plenty of blood from those bullet wounds, as well as from the scalp laceration.

  His gaze ran down Torres's body. The man was short and lean, with long legs and a swimmer's build, powerful shoulders and arms revealed by his red muscle shirt. His Nikes were on the small side. Nick would have to measure to be sure, but he believed they were eight-and-a-halfs. The marks behind Domingo's house hadn't been clear enough to lift treads from, but those shoes could have made them.

  Sirens wailed down the street, vehicles skidded in the din, and suddenly, the little yard and porch were overrun with cops. Nick, Brass, and Aguirre gave up what they were doing and huddled in the yard. "No EMS yet?" Brass asked.

  "The closest real hospital is in the city," Aguirre said. "We've got some medical clinics and a couple of traditional healers. Nothing like a trauma center, though. Best thing for these guys will be to get them into town, but somehow the ambulances never seem to hurry real fast to get here."

  "That's just wrong," Nick said.

  "You don't have to tell me."

  "Who was the target here?" Brass asked. "Torres?"

  "Maybe," Aguirre replied. "Like I told you, he pisses a lot of people off. He makes these movies, documentaries. Last one was kind of a hit on the film-festival circuit, I guess. Even played on cable TV. It was about one of our tribal elders, a man who's had a lot of success steering reservation kids away from joining gangs by getting them interested in traditional Indian skills and practices. He teaches them the old ceremonies, you know, some of the old ways, and then they don't want to take drugs and get into trouble, because they have a connection to the land and their ancestors."

  "Sounds like a great guy," Nick said.

  "Yeah, he is. A real treasure. Meoqui got a lot of attention and some money because of the movie's success, and I think maybe it went to his head. The film he's working on now is about institutionalized poverty on Indian reservations. He's been traveling around, shooting on different reservations, but also shooting a lot of it here. From the stories I've heard, it's very critical of some of Chairman Domingo's policies and decisions. In return, Domingo threatened to revoke Meoqui's permission to film on the rez."

  "Which could be motive for murder," Brass said. "If the revocation is still a threat and hasn't taken effect yet -"

  "I don't think Meoqui's a killer."

  "You didn't think Calvin Tom was, either. I don't know if you have a lot of killers on this reservation, but you've got at least one whose handiwork I can see from here."

  "True. Anyway, yeah, you're right. I'm sure Meoqui was pretty upset with Chairman Domingo."

  "And if other people know how angry he was, they might reach the same conclusion you did, Jim," Nick said. "Somebody thinks Torres killed Domingo, so they came here and shot up Torres in revenge."

  "That's what I was getting at," Aguirre said. "That's what this feels like to me. A gang-style drive-by but not a random one. These guys meant to take Meoqui out."

  "While I was at Domingo's house last night, these two guys came by in a dark pickup truck," Nick said. "Black, navy blue. I reported the tag, or as much of it as I was able to catch."

  "We got the report," Aguirre confirmed. "We weren't able to get anything nailed down, though."

  "They could have been gang types." Nick described the two young men, the smaller one with long hair and his big tattooed friend who would have stood out in any crowd.

  Aguirre squinted into the sky. "The smaller one could be a guy named Ruben Solis. He's kind of a punk. One of Chairman Domingo's thugs, really, the kind of guy who'll do whatever he's told without thinking too hard about the morality of it. He hangs with a big guy named Shep Moran, who's done hard time over in Jean. Shep's got tats all up his arms, across his neck and chest. And Ruben drives a dark truck."

  "Would they do something like this?"

  "I hate to think anybody would," Aguirre answered. "But I wouldn't put it past them. Solis especially. Shep's the one who's done prison time, but Solis is a mean one, with a nasty temper. Definitely the ringleader of that pair. Thing is, if word gets out that he shot Meoqui – or even a rumor that he might have – then they're in trouble, too. Meoqui has a lot of friends on the rez, and some of them are just as ruthless as Solis is."

  "So, what, you think we're going to see a domino effect of revenge shootings?" Brass asked. "Sure glad I came out here today. I could be home sleeping or pulling weeds."

  "Hey!" Aguirre called abruptly. Nick followed his gaze. Three of the less badly wounded men were carrying Meoqui Torres to a bright red pickup truck. "Where are you taking him?"

  "Tired of waiting for the ambulance," one guy said. "We're going to get him to a clinic."

  Aguirre beckoned one of the tribal police officers over, a young guy who was standing around watching other people work but not doing anything particularly useful. "Follow them over there, Wilbur," he said. "Park outside the clinic, make sure there's no trouble."

  "Will do," Wilbur said. He hurried to his car, an old Ford station wagon with a faded tribal police logo on the door, and got in. When the pickup truck pulled away with Torres and one other man in the back, Wilbur followed right on their tail.

  Aguirre called another cop, a woman with a broad, flat face and a solid build. "Canvass the neighbors, Juanita," he said. "See if anybody saw anything." Nick couldn't see any neighbors from here, but the street curved around some low hills, and there might have been houses out of sight but within earshot. "And don't let 'em tell you they didn't hear it. This many rounds, anybody within a mile or two would have heard."

  When she was walking to her vehicle, Brass approached Aguirre. "I think you and I should go find Ruben Solis and Shep Moran before someone else does."

  "Probably not a bad idea. What about Stokes?"

  "I'll stay here, if it's okay," Nick said. "We stomped all over this crime scene, but it should still be processed. I can work
it and hand over whatever I find to you for your investigation. You'll know where to find me if you need me."

  "Till the Fourth of July, from the looks of it," Brass said with a grin.

  Nick held out his car keys to Aguirre. "Richie, can you have someone bring over my Yukon? I have a kit with me, but there's more equipment in the back I could use."

  Aguirre took the keys and whistled for one of the other uniformed officers. "I'll take care of it," he said.

  Brass put a hand on Nick's shoulder and gave him a stern look. "Keep your guard up, Nick. I got a feeling this is a long way from over."

  15

  After Keith Hyatt told Ray that Meoqui Torres was a filmmaker, Ray called Archie Johnson and asked him to track down some of Torres's work. Now that he had made it back, Archie summoned Ray into the A/V lab and showed him what he had turned up on the Internet.

  "He's been posting clips online," Archie said, smoothing his crop of thick black hair. "I've pulled together a few for you. These are from a work in progress, he says. The working title is Epic Failure."

  "A nice optimistic note."

  "From what I've seen so far, optimism isn't his strong suit."

  Archie clicked a couple of keys, and a computer screen filled with a blurred image that quickly focused in on the exterior of a shack on a wind-swept desert plain. There was one plant in the shot, something that might have been classified as a tree but was stunted and bent and provided little, if any, shade for the building. If the place had ever been painted, wind and blowing sand had scoured it down to a raw gray-brown color. The camera zoomed in on a window and then through it on a man sitting inside on a folding metal chair.

  Then the shot cut to an interior, lit by the natural light flooding in the window. The man was middle-aged, Native American, with short hair going gray, a shirt open to the waist showing a lean, wrinkled torso, and a cigarette burning in one hand. Smoke wafted up into his face, forcing him to squint. A title at the bottom of the frame identified him as Herbert Acosta, Grey Rock Paiute.