Death Along the Spirit Road

244 Pages·2011·0.93 MB·English

by  Wendelboe Curt

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements

CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
HELP FROM A HIGHER POWER

He tried reaching the Glock. Three steps. Closer. Reached again. Steps stopped
outside his shattered window. He lay on his arm, trapped, unable to get to the
weapon. He willed his labored breathing to stop. He told the rising and falling of
his chest to be still. He lay quiet, listening, praying to God he could pull it off.
His hand fell automatically onto his medicine bundle.
Someone shined a flashlight into Manny’s car. Through his closed eyelids,
Manny saw all this as if he were sitting in a theater watching some dark,
foreboding movie. Light played across his lids. He wanted to open them, wanted
to look at his attacker, but he didn’t. The driver squatted inches from him, close
enough that Manny felt warm puffs of breath on his neck through the window.
He struggled to remain conscious. His cop side took over, and he listened for
anything that would later identify the attacker. If he lived through this …

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
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Copyright © 2011 by C. M. Wendelboe.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wendelboe, C. M.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-47871-4
1. Dakota Indians—Fiction. 2. Indian reservations—South Dakota—Fiction. 3. Real estate developers—
Crimes against—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.E53D43 2011
813’.6—dc22
2010038253

http://us.penguingroup.com
To Milt Wendelboe,
who was a voracious reader until the day he died.

And my Lakota friends,
who kept me on my own Road.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my agent, Bill Contardi, and my editor, Tom Colgan, for
having faith to take a chance on a rookie, and Eric Boss and Mike McGroder, for
greasing the wheels and to Richard Tuschman, whose beauty with the brush
portrayed so precisely the mood and theme of the novel. I thank my mentors
Judy and Craig Johnson and my wife, Heather Wendelboe: Without their help,
you wouldn’t be reading this.
CHAPTER 1

Manny popped another CD into the player in the rental and fiddled with the
controls. The Six Fat Dutchmen pounded out the “Tick-Tock Polka.” He settled
back in his seat, tapping the oomp-ba oomp-ba tuba beat on the steering wheel.
How long had it been since he danced a polka? Must have been back in
Germany in his army days. Oomp-ba-ba. Oomp-ba. He had tried accordion
lessons back then, but he couldn’t read music any better than he could drive.
Oomp-ba. Oomp-ba. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Like the song was ticking away at his
life.
He bent forward to adjust the bass to accentuate the heavy tuba and caught
movement in his periphery. A teen, wearing a T-shirt missing one sleeve with
jeans threatening to fall down his meatless hips, stumbled between two parked
cars and started across the road. The gaunt young man looked up. Eyes wide.
Mouth open. Manny slammed on the brakes, and the tires of the Taurus bit into
the hot asphalt. Things kicked into slow motion, like his academy instructors
said happened under great stress.
The car skidded. Tires pleaded and screamed. The boy yelled, his face
bombarded with loose gravel from the road. His hands hopelessly covered his
face and he tried jumping out of the car’s path, but he was too slow. Too drunk.
The houses beside the road. Abandoned cars. Trees. All blacked out. Manny
focused in front of the car, the kid walking in slow motion on instant replay.
The car rocked to a stop. The seat belt bit into Manny’s shoulder and held him
inches away from the steering wheel. Burnt tire smoke rose up, dark and dense.
It assaulted Manny’s nose with its bitter accusation, and he rubbed his eyes. The
boy was gone.
Manny opened the door and stepped out as the boy rose from the pavement in
front of the car. Eighteen going on forty: his face red, splintery, broken
capillaries. He glared at Manny through eyes watery with wine and stinging with
indignation. Hate replaced terror. He picked up his hat and slapped it against his
ripped jeans. Dust fell off the cap as he jammed it on his head, and he jutted his
middle finger high in the air as he scowled at Manny. With that gesture their sole
conversation, the kid turned and staggered down the road.
“Screw you!” Manny said. “Watch where the hell you’re going.”
Manny’s heart pounded as forcefully as the beat of the Six Fat Dutchmen still
reverberating in the car. He took deep breaths and began to see trees and weeds
at the side of the road as his vision returned to normal. He watched the kid stop
beside an abandoned pickup by the Pronto Auto Parts store. He climbed in the
bed and lay down to start his afternoon pass-out, the top of his ball cap visible
above the tailgate.
“Damned drunk.”
Manny’s legs still shook as he sat back in the car. The arteries in his neck
pounded oomp-ba, oomp-ba, to the beat of the polka music, and his hand
trembled as reached for the player and tapped the power button. The music died,
and he closed his eyes and willed his breathing to slow. “Damned fool would
have deserved it,” he said aloud. “Walking with his head in his ass.”
Manny fingered his medicine bag, held his wopiye to the light. The blue and
black beaded deerskin turtle had become faded and tattered around the edges
from being carried so long. It was always with him. Unc said his wopiye had
powers to help him through life, though he fought hard to believe it even as a
boy. When the yuwipi man had given him his inyan, somewhere in the recesses
of his Lakota soul Manny wanted to believe that this bundle with the black spirit
stone would protect him. As it had now. As it had then.
“That could have been me.” If Unc hadn’t taken me in when the folks died,
that could have been me.
Manny drove into Pine Ridge Village. Shanties and shacks and trailer houses,
missing so many windows that they looked like schoolkids who’d been busted in
the chops once too often, were spaced erratically on both sides of the road. What
shingles remained to protect tattered tar-paper roofs gave the shanties the
illusion of a bad haircut. No one should live in them, but people did. Just as
people used the abandoned cars along the road to sleep in. Or to trade sex for
booze. Or to hide bodies long dead. All these things had not changed. Manny
had known this even as he accepted the assignment.
The buildings stood crumbling and bowed, like the broken spirit of the Lakota
people. The reservation was one hundred years of history unmarked by progress,