Shadow Prey

the department’s history. He quit five years later to take an appointment as an assistant U.S. attorney general in Washington.
    A step backward, his brothers said. Just watch him, said the old man. And the old man was there to help: the right people, the right clubs. Money, when it was needed.
    When the scandal hit the FBI—kickbacks in an insider-trading investigation—the administration knew where to go. The boy from Phoenix had a rep. He’d cleaned up the Phoenix force, and he’d clean up the FBI. But he wouldn’t try too hard.
    At forty-two, Lawrence Duberville Clay was named the youngest FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover. He became the administration’s point man for the war on crime. He took the FBI to the people, and to the press. During a dope raid in Chicago, an AP photographer shot a portrait of a weary Lawrence Duberville Clay, his sleeves rolled above his elbows, a hollow look on his face. A huge Desert Eagle semiautomatic pistol rode in a shoulder rig under his arm. The picture made him a celebrity.
    Not many people remembered his early days in Phoenix, the nights spent hunting drunk Indian chicks.
    During those Phoenix nights, Larry Clay developed a taste for the young ones. Very young ones. And some of them maybe weren’t so drunk. And some of them weren’t so interested in backseat tag team. But who was going to believe an Indian chick, in Phoenix, in the mid-sixties? Civil rights were for blacks in the South, not for Indians or Chicanos in the Southwest. Date-rape wasn’t even a concept, and feminism had barely come over the horizon.
    But the girl in the alley . . . she was twelve and she was a little drunk, but not so drunk that she couldn’t say no, or remember who put her in the car. She told her mother. Her mother stewed about it for a couple of days, then told two men she’d met at the res.
    The two men caught Larry Clay outside his apartment and beat the shit out of him with a genuine Louisville Slugger. Broke one of his legs and both arms and a whole bunch of ribs. Broke his nose and some teeth.
    It wasn’t dope dealers who beat Larry Clay. It was a couple of Indians, on a comeback from a rape.
    Lawrence Duberville Clay never knew who they were, but he never forgot what they did to him. He had a lot of shots at Indians over the years, as a prosecutor, a state senator, a police chief, an assistant U.S. attorney general.
    He took them all.
    And he didn’t forget them when he became director of the FBI, the iron fist on every Indian reservation in the nation.
    But there were Indians with long memories too.
    Like the men who took him in Phoenix.
    The Crows.

CHAPTER
1
    Ray Cuervo sat in his office and counted his money. He counted his money every Friday afternoon between five and six o’clock. He made no secret of it.
    Cuervo owned six apartment buildings scattered around Indian Country south of the Minneapolis Loop. The cheapest apartment rented for thirty-nine dollars a week. The most expensive was seventy-five. When he collected his rent, Cuervo took neither checks nor excuses. If you didn’t have the cash by two o’clock Friday, you slept on the sidewalk. Bidness, as Ray Cuervo told any number of broken-ass indigents, was bidness.
    Dangerous business, sometimes. Cuervo carried a chrome-plated Charter Arms .38 Special tucked in his pants while he collected his money. The gun was old. The barrel was pitted and the butt was unfashionably small. But it worked and the shells were always fresh. You could see the shiny brass winking out at the edge of the cylinder. Not a flash gun, his renters said. It was a shooter. When Cuervo counted the week’s take, he kept the pistol on the desktop near his right hand.
    Cuervo’s office was a cubicle at the top of three flights of stairs. The furnishings were sparse and cheap: a black dial telephone, a metal desk, a wooden file cabinet and an oakswivel chair on casters. A four-year-old Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar hung on the left-hand wall. Cuervo never changed it past April, the month where you could see the broad’s brown nipples through the wet T-shirt. Opposite the calendar was a corkboard. A dozen business cards were tacked to the corkboard along with two fading bumper stickers. One said SHIT HAPPENS and the other said HOW ’ S MY DRIVING ? DIAL 1-800- EAT-SHIT. Cuervo’s wife, a Kentucky sharecropper girl with a mouth like barbed wire, called the office a shithole. Ray Cuervo paid no attention. He was a slumlord, after