Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [10]
Charles had already dropped most of the chips in his left hand. What he had in his right hand, he threw into Bobby Young Elk’s face.
He was on his way to the rear entrance with a good lead,.
He made the parking lot. He would have made the car, might have even made the ferry, had a sherbet’s chance in hell of making the mainland, no chance in hell of living happily ever after.
He dropped his last few chips into the shirt pocket of the valet parking attendant and waited to be put in handcuffs.
Odd and I ate up there all the while, listening to the story, and then we went off to pick up Houser.
5.
The Tribal Police Headquarters was a double-wide trailer behind a B.P. station, closed for the night. It was two a.m. by the time we found it. We had already burned the hour the lieutenant had allotted us for the pick-up. I knew that would happen, but what’s another hour on a detail like this?
The young Indian behind the desk had the dull embarrassed patina of the lowest dangling link on the chain of command.
I gave him the paperwork the lieutenant had given us. “We’re here to get Charles Houser.”
He studied the paperwork earnestly. He was about eighteen.
“I have to call the chief,” he said.
“The Indian chief?”
“The chief of police,” he said. I knew that with the best intentions, and I’m not claiming those were the kind I always had, I was helpless to keep from making offensive remarks. I was actually surprised it had taken so long.
The kid picked up the phone, dialed and said, “There’s cops from Spokane here.” He listened for a beat, then handed the phone to me. “He wants to talk to you.”
“Quinn speaking.”
“They sent a woman?”
“The name is Officer Quinn. Good morning.”
“Seth Shining Pony. I’m head of the police here. I called Spokane, but unfortunately you had already left.”
“I don’t like the sound of this, Chief. This is sounding like a problem.”
“A small problem, yes.”
“Let me have it.”
“You won’t be able to take the man back with you, at least not tonight.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll be right down. Tell Robert to make you coffee.”
He hung up before I could say anything more. I gave the phone back to Robert and turned to Odd. “There’s a problem.”
“Sure there is. There always is.”
“He’s on his way to fill us in. Hey, Robert, you wouldn’t happen to know, would you? What the problem is?”
Robert was like every nurse in every hospital I’ve ever been in. She knows the whole scoop, but the doctor will have to talk to you about that.
I sat on a tattered easy chair they had there. This place was unlike any police headquarters I had ever seen. Nothing to read, nothing to do, so I just sat there, much like Odd suggested a sensible adult ought to do, watching one’s impulses until they faded away. In my case, I wouldn’t mind some kind of impulse falling upon me so that I could let it take me wherever the hell it was going. Impulses can be good things too.
Odd was going over the bulletin board, your basic notices of what’s happening in the jurisdiction and who’s on the arfy-darfy.
A corner of a faded photograph, a five-by-seven, showed beneath a sheet of thermal fax paper. Odd lifted the paper to see the photo in its entirety, then like he owned the place he reposted the fax somewhere else on the board, letting the light shine on a photo of a couple, a teen-age couple, whose names were printed below the photo, but from where I sat I couldn’t read them, if I cared, which I didn’t.
Odd, though, couldn’t take his eyes off the thing.
“Who are those people?” I asked. And when Odd didn’t answer, I said, “Robert?”
“Huh?”
“That picture, who are those people?”
Robert looked up from his Street Rods magazine and over at the object of Odd’s fascination. “That’s Jimmy Coyote and his girlfriend, Jeannie Olson.”
“They’re dead,” said Odd, sadly, which I suppose was not a great feat of detection, considering where we were, and the picture was so old.
“Yeah, long time past,” said Robert. “Shotgunned,