Shadow Prey

quick, barking laugh. “If we go down . . . it’d make the point. Everybody knows Sitting Bull, because he died. Everybody knows Crazy Horse, because he died. Who knows about Inkpaduta? He was maybe the greatest of them all, but he went to Canada and got old and died. Not many remember him now. We’re going to . . . war  . . . to wake up the people. If we just sneak off, I don’t think that’ll be the same.”
    Sam shook his head but said nothing. He found another flat rock and sidearmed it at the water. It sank instantly. “Asshole,” he called after the rock.
    Aaron looked down at the sandbar at his cousin, sighed and said, “I’m going back to town with you. I hear too many voices tonight. I can’t handle it.”
    “You shouldn’t come here so often. Even I can feel them, groaning under the sand.” He made a brushing motion that took in the sandbar, the river and the hillside. The land around the island had once been a concentration camp. Hundreds of Sioux died in it, most of them women and children.
    “Come on,” Aaron said. “Let’s load the truck and get our ass out of here.”
     
    Billy Hood lay on the Jersey motel bed and stared at the ceiling. He’d made a preliminary reconnaissance, across the river into Manhattan, and concluded that he could do it. He could kill the man. The stone knife weighed on his chest.
    To cut a man’s throat . . . Hood’s own throat tightened. Last year, hunting out of Mille Lacs in central Minnesota, he’d taken a deer. He’d spotted it walking through a grove of birches, a tan wraith floating through the white-on-white of trees and snow. It had been a doe, but a big one. The .30- .30 had knocked it down and it hadn’t gotten up again. It hadn’t died, either. It had lain there on its side in the shallow snow, its feet making feeble running motions, its visible eye blinking up at him and his brother-in-law Roger.
    “Better cut her throat, brother,” Roger had said. Roger was smiling. Turned on? Feeling the power? “Put her out of her misery.”
    Hood had taken his hunting knife from its sheath, a knife he’d honed to a razor sharpness. He’d grabbed the doe by an ear and lifted its head and cut its throat with a quick, heavy slash. Blood had spurted out on the snow and the doe had kicked a few times, its eye still blinking up at him. Then the death film crossed it and the doe went.
    “It’s the only place you ever see red blood, you know?” Roger had said. “In the snow. You see blood out in the woods in the fall, or in the summer, it always looks black. Boy, in this snow, it sure does look red, don’t it?”
    Andretti’s blood would look black on the beige carpet of his office. That’s how far Hood had gotten on his recon run. Andretti was famous for his long hours. The hall all around his office was closing down, but his “team” stayed on the job. Andretti called it a team. A photograph on an employee bulletin board outside his office showed Andretti and his staff gathered around a cake, wearing basketball jerseys. Andretti, of course, wore number 1.
    “Mother,” Hood said, closing his eyes to dream and maybe to pray. The stone pressed on his chest. Andretti’sblood would be black on the carpet. He would do it tomorrow, just after the hall closed.
    The night was dark and filled with visions, even in the suffocating motel room. Hood woke at one o’clock, and three, four and five. At six, he got up, weary but unable to sleep. He shaved, cleaned up, put on his best suit, feeling the stone weight around his neck, the small pistol in his pocket.
    He walked to the train station, caught a ride across the river, walked to Central Park. Checked the zoo and the Metropolitan Museum. Cruised the van Goghs and the Degas, lingered with the Renoirs and Monets. He liked the outdoor lushness of the Impressionists. His own country, out along the Missouri in South Dakota, was all brown and tan for most of the year. But there were times, in the spring, when you’d find small mudflats overflowing with wildflowers, where side creeks ran down to the river. He could peer at the Monets and smell the hot prairie spice of the black-eyed Susans . . . .
    It took forever for the time to come. When it did, he rode downtown on the subway, pinching out his emotions, one by one. Thinking back to his hours on Bear Butte, the arid, stoic beauty of the countryside. The distant scream of the Black Hills, raped by the whites who promoted each natural mystery