Shadow Prey

sitting in front of a battered Royal typewriter, pecking at a press release on the Oklahoma killing. Shadow Love was in the bathroom. When the knock came, Aaron went to the door and spoke through it.
    “Who is that?”
    “Billy.”
    Billy. Aaron fumbled at the lock, pulled the door open. Billy Hood stood in the hallway, bowlegged in his cowboy boots, a battered, water-stained Stetson perched on his head. His square face was drawn and pale. He took a step forward and Aaron wrapped his arms around him and picked him up off his feet.
    “God damn, Billy,” he said. He could feel the stone knife dangling beneath Billy’s shirt.
    “I feel bad, man,” Billy said when Aaron released him. “Man, I’ve been fucked up all the way back. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
    “Because you’re a spiritual man.”
    “I don’t feel so fuckin’ spiritual. I cut that dude,” Billysaid as he walked farther into the room. Aaron glanced once into the hallway and pushed the door shut.
    “A white man,” said Aaron.
    “A man,” Shadow Love said from the bathroom. He stood squarely in the doorway, arms slightly away from his sides, like a gunslinger. His cheeks were hollow. His white eyes hooked up at the corners, like a starving wolf’s. “Don’t make it sound small.”
    “I don’t mean that it’s small,” said Aaron. “I mean that it’s different. Billy killed the enemy in a war.”
    “A man is a man,” Shadow Love insisted. “It’s all the same.”
    “And an Indian man is an Indian man, and that’s different, to be one of the people,” Sam retorted. “One reason Aaron won’t use you is that you don’t understand the difference between war and murder.”
    The two Crows were squared off against their son. Hood broke it.
    “Everybody’s looking for me,” he said. Billy looked scared, like a rabbit that’s been chased until there’s no more room to run. “Me and Leo. Christ, I heard about Leo and the judge. He took him off, man. Have you heard from him?”
    “No. We’re getting worried. They haven’t got him, but we haven’t heard a thing.”
    “Unless they’ve got him but they aren’t saying, so they can squeeze him,” said Shadow Love.
    “I don’t think so. This is too big to hide something like that,” Sam Crow said.
    Billy took off his hat, tossed it on a chair and wiped his hair back with his hand. “We’ve been on the radio every hour. In all the newspapers all the way from New York. Every town I come to.”
    “They don’t know your names,” Sam said.
    “They connected us with Tony Bluebird. They’ll be looking for us here in the Cities.”
    “That won’t help them if they don’t know who you are, Billy,” said Aaron, trying to reassure him. “There are twenty thousand Indians in the Cities. How will they knowwhich one? And we knew they’d connect you to Bluebird; that was the whole point.”
    “They’ll find out who you are,” Shadow Love said. His voice was gravelly, cold. He looked at the Crows. “It’s time for you guys to go to the safe house, get out of this place. If you want to live.”
    “Too early,” said Sam. “When we feel some pressure, we go to the safe house. Not before. If we go in too early and there’s nothing happening, we’ll get careless. We’ll fuck around and somebody will see us.”
    “And they still don’t have any names, nothing that will identify Billy or Leo,” Aaron said again.
    Shadow Love stepped out into the room and put a hand on Billy Hood’s shoulder, ignoring his fathers. “I’ll tell you now: They’ll find your name. And they’ll find Leo’s. Eventually, they’ll get the rest of us. They’ve got some movies from a camera in the building where you killed Andretti, so they’ve got your face. The cops’ll take the pictures and go around and squeeze and squeeze, and somebody will tell them. And there was a witness who saw Leo. They’ll have her looking at mug shots right now.”
    “You’re a big authority?” Aaron asked sarcastically. “You know all the rules?”
    “I know enough,” Shadow Love said. His eyes were white and opaque, like marble chips from a tombstone. “I’ve been on the street since I was seven. I know how the cops work. They pick-pick-pick, talk-talk-talk. They’ll find out.”
    “You don’t know that . . . .”
    “Don’t be an old woman, Father,” Shadow Love snapped. “It’s dangerous.” He held the older man’s eyes for a moment, then turned back to Billy. “Somebody