Shadow Prey

“If they shake me down, I’ll tell them I lost my license on a DWI. When an Indian tells them that, they believe you.”
    “What about you guys?” Barbara asked the Crows.
    Sam shrugged. “We got driver’s licenses and Social Security cards under our born names. I don’t know if the cops have those figured out yet, but they will.”
    “Then you shouldn’t go out on the street. At least not during the day,” Barbara said.
    “I’ve got to talk to people, find out what’s going on,” Shadow Love said.
    “You be careful,” Barbara said.
     
    Shadow Love was in a bar on Lake Street when an Indian man came in and ordered a beer. The man glanced sideways at Shadow Love and then ignored him.
    “That Welfare guy’s down at Bell’s Apartments handing out money again,” the Indian man told the bartender.
    “Christ, half the town is drinking on him,” the bartender said. “I wonder where they’re getting all the loot?”
    “I bet it’s the CIA.”
    “Boy, if it’s the CIA, somebody’s in trouble,” the bartender said wisely. “I met some of those boys in ’Nam. You don’t want to fuck with them.”
    “Bad medicine,” the Indian man said.
    A man at the back of the bar yelled, “Nine-ball?” and the Indian man called, “Yeah, I’m coming,” took the beer and wandered back. The bartender wiped the spot he’d been leaning on with a wet rag and shook his head.
    “The CIA. Man, that’s bad business,” he said to Shadow Love.
    “That’s bullshit, is what it is,” Shadow Love said.
    He finished his beer, slid off the stool and walked outside. The sun was shining and he stopped, squinting against the bright light. He thought for a moment, then turned west and ambled down Lake Street toward the apartments.
    Bell’s Apartments were an ugly remnant of a sixtieshousing program. The architect had tried to disguise an underlying prison-camp barrenness by giving each apartment a different-colored door. Now, years later, the colored doors together looked like a set of teeth with a few punched out.
    Behind the building, an abandoned playground squatted in a rectangle of dead weeds. The hand-push merry-go-round had broken off its hub years before and had rusted into place, like a bad minimalist sculpture. The basketball court offered pitted blacktop and bare hoops. The swing sets had lost all but two swings.
    Shadow Love sat in one of the swings and watched Larry Hart working his way down to the first floor of the building. Hart would look at a piece of paper in his hand, knock on a door, talk to whoever answered, then move on. Sometimes he talked for ten seconds, sometimes for five minutes. Several times he laughed, and once he went inside and came back out a few minutes later, chewing something. Frybread.
    The problem, Shadow Love thought, was that there were too many people in on the Crows’ secret. Leo and John and Barbara, and a bunch of wives who might know or have guessed something.
    The Crows had been proselytizing for years. Though they had stayed resolutely in the background, their names were known, as was the extreme nature of their gospel. Once those names popped up on a police computer as suspects, they’d go right to the top of the hunters’ list. That normally wouldn’t be too much of a problem. The cops’ resources in the Indian community were minimal.
    Hart was something else. Shadow Love had known him in high school, but only from a distance, in the days when the boys in one grade didn’t mix with the boys in the grades above. Hart had been popular then, with both Indians and whites. He still was. He was one of the people and he had friends and he had money.
    Shadow Love watched him working down through the building, heard him laughing, and before Hart reached the bottom level, Shadow Love knew that something would have to be done.
    • • •
    Hart saw Shadow Love sitting in the swing as he walked toward the steps that would take him to the bottom floor, but he didn’t recognize him. He watched the man swinging, then dropped into a blind section of the stairwell. Five seconds later, when he came out of the stairwell, the man was gone.
    Hart shivered. The man must have simply gotten off the swing, walked around the bush at the edge of the playground and gone down the street. But that was not the effect Hart felt. The man was there when he went into the stairwell and gone a few seconds later. He had vanished, leaving behind a swing that still rocked back and forth from his