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  ‘I did,’ Mike said. ‘I missed them.’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  Mike could see Graham’s guilt quickening into anger, and he felt a powerful urge to lift the .357 from the arm of the chair and shoot him through the teeth. Instead he said, ‘Tell me where they’re buried.’

  Graham turned back the sheet, his hand disappearing beneath the fold. ‘I won’t tell you,’ he said, ‘but I’ll show you.’

  ‘Okay, then.’ Mike rose.

  Graham swung his legs sluggishly off the mattress, but then at once his arms blurred, hands clamping together, that stray bullet seating in the wheel of the .38 with a clink. The revolver was up and aimed at Mike’s face before Mike could snatch the .357 from the chair’s arm.

  Graham gestured for Mike to step away from the chair, and Mike complied. Graham said, ‘I’m doing you a favor. If William and Dodge caught up to you . . .’ He shook his head, gave a dying whistle. ‘And they will. That team of them . . . well, sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Those boys do something magical to each other. But I’m willing to settle this here. Leave Katherine wherever the hell she is. So what do you say? Is that a fair trade?’ His thumb rose to the hammer.

  Mike said, ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

  Graham cocked the revolver.

  A roar.

  The blast of light from the balcony illuminated Shep’s emotionless face behind the barrel of his gun, safely back out of the security camera’s range. Before Mike could blink, the space beyond the open door had vanished into darkness again, taking Shep with it.

  The side of Graham’s neck went to red and white, a tailed dollop of blood rising like syrup, then falling with his body to land in a slash across his cheek and chest. The gun flash had seared into Mike’s retinas, and he stood there a moment, breathing cordite, his eardrums on tinny vibration. Staring down at the bone and exposed flesh, he felt nothing. He recalled a dinner not so long before with some parents of Kat’s friends, roast chicken and Chilean Shiraz, how they’d all chatted and chewed and wiped their lips, resting happily in their assumption that they were decent, civilized folks.

  What his father had gone through to protect him. The fear coming off him in waves that morning in the station wagon. The torn-open grief of losing a wife and leaving a son.

  Just John. Just John.

  Mike blinked himself back to life, returned to Graham’s study, and downloaded the security footage from the bedroom onto a flash drive. He replayed the digital recording, double-checking that it had copied. Graham’s face, clear as day: With the money McAvoy had invested, he couldn’t leave a loose end like your mother out there.

  Then Mike wiped the security files from the hard drive. As he was turning to go, he noticed a business card in the otherwise empty metal tray at the desk’s edge. Brian McAvoy, CEO. On the backside he’d written new cell and a phone number with a Sacramento area code.

  Mike stared at that number for a good long time, then withdrew his disposable phone and dialed, his gloved hand tightening around the receiver as it rang and rang.

  A sleep-muffled ‘Hnuh?’

  Mike said, ‘I got you dead to rights.’

  ‘How’d you get this number?’

  ‘That’s the least of your concerns.’

  ‘Who . . . who is this?’

  ‘The guy who owns your casino. I have footage that will destroy you.’

  ‘Footage?’ A moist swallow, and then a breath blew across the receiver. ‘How much do you want?’

  ‘There is no sum.’

  ‘Then why. . . ?’

  ‘You’re going to back off my family or I will bury you. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Your family?’ A whistle of breath. ‘You sure you know who you’re calling, son?’

  Now that Mike considered it, the voice sounded a bit gruffer than he’d anticipated. ‘Brian McAvoy,’ Mike said.

  ‘McAvoy?’ A booming laugh, rich with age and tobacco. ‘From the sound of you, you’re probably the only person who hates that son of a bitch more than I do.’ The man chuckled a bit more, fading out into a dead-serious silence. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Is this . . . is this Michael Trainor?’

  A long pause. A ceiling vent blew dry and steady on the back of Mike’s neck.

  ‘Sue Windbird’s great-grandson?’ The voice filled with relief. ‘I can’t believe you’re alive.’

  Mike’s fingers were cramping around the phone. He bent over, squeezed his forehead. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘I’m Chief Andrew Two-Hawks of the Shasta Springs Band of Miwok. I’m the CEO of a casino, but not the one you’re gunning for. You and I sit need to sit down, son.’

  ‘Why would we do that?’

  ‘Because our interests align.’

  Chapter 49

  Andrew Two-Hawks had a jelly gut and a fish mouth, a goatee hiding the weak chin. He met Mike at a rear door behind his casino, his smile as broad as his handshake was firm. A leather vest overlaid a patterned button-up, the open collar looking lonely without a bolo tie to string the whole getup together. At Two-Hawks’s side stood a guy nearly as wide as the doorway, a no-foolin’-around Indian with weathered skin and a crisply pressed black suit, his shaved head shaped like a blob of shaving cream swirled onto a palm. He began patting Mike down, and Mike shoved him away before his groping hands reached the .357 tucked into the back of his jeans.

  Two-Hawks tugged at his face, the wrinkles pulling smooth, then nodded a dismissal at his bodyguard. ‘Mike here’s on our team.’

  The bodyguard scowled and withdrew, keeping a junkyarddog glare trained on Mike.

  ‘Forgive Blackie there,’ Two-Hawks said. ‘The boy’s so dumb he could fall into a tub of tits and come out sucking his thumb.’ He gestured. ‘Walk with me.’

  The good-ol’-boy demeanor and his appearance, that of a Texas oilman who had enough money to dress better than he bothered to, caught Mike by surprise. What had he been expecting? A chieftain bearing tom-toms? They moved down a carpeted hall, the whirl and clang of the casino visible but muted by a wall of tinted soundproof windows. The place, a bit rundown, was considerably smaller than Deer Creek Casino.

  Mike found himself sneaking glances over at the man.

  ‘What?’ Two-Hawks said.

  Mike said, ‘Nothing. You look . . .’

  Two-Hawks grinned. ‘As white as you?’

  Over the phone Mike had conveyed the basics of his plight – the splintering of his family, the stakes for his wife and daughter – and Two-Hawks had listened patiently, issuing empathetic rumbles from somewhere deep in his throat.

  ‘First thing you need to know,’ Two-Hawks said now, ushering Mike around a turn, ‘is that Deer Creek Tribal Enterprises, Inc., has staked a fraudulent claim to our historical tribal land.’ He pointed down at the carpet. ‘This land.’

  ‘They can do that?’

  ‘No. But they are. And through the techniques perfected by Brian McAvoy’ – a curl of upper lip at the name – ‘they are in the process of turning that claim into law.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Every tribe, you see, has gotta be formally recognized by the federal government to enjoy certain basic rights and protections. A couple of well-positioned politicians – backed, of course, by McAvoy – are claiming that our status was illegitimately shoved through under Jimmy Carter’s appointees when the procedures were more ad hoc. They’ve put our tribal recognition under review, official arguments to begin early next year. If we lose, guess who’s in primo position to take over our land?’

  ‘And if McAvoy gets your land, he gets your casino.’

  ‘Bingo.’

  ‘That’s why you’ve been looking for me. If another heir to Deer Creek was alive, you could use him to outflank McAvoy.’

  ‘With you we have a chance to cut the man off at the knees.’ A flicker of disgust crossed the shiny dark eyes. ‘He and I are mortal enemies. I have quite a few these days. Does that make you nervous?’
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br />   Mike said, ‘I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t have enemies.’

  A smile rippled that close-shaved goatee. ‘Then you’ll love me.’

  They stepped into a well-appointed office, Two-Hawks gesturing to a broad leather sofa behind a glass coffee table. ‘Sit down. Put your feet up. You can’t break the shit, and if you do, they make more of it.’

  But Mike remained standing, crossing his arms as if bracing against the cold. A few sad relics adorned the walls – a frayed granary basket, a feather dance skirt, and a pair of tiny moccasins. Mike couldn’t help but wonder if he was taking in the entire preserved history of the Shasta Springs Band of Miwok with a sweep of the eyes. Quite a contrast to the theme-park tribal shrine that Deer Creek had polished to a high gloss.

  Two-Hawks set a cell phone on his desk blotter and stared down at it as if it were a half-crushed insect he wanted to put out of its misery. ‘Brand-new phone, brand-new number. I got it after I found out that their lapdog, Rick Graham, was monitoring my old cell. I’ve given this number out to no one. And yet this is the number you called me on. Where did you get it?’

  ‘It was in Graham’s possession. McAvoy had written it down for him.’

  Two-Hawks lifted a heavy brass lamp and, without anger, smashed the cell phone. He set the lamp back down and used the edge of his hand to brush the bits into a wastebasket. ‘Let’s have a look-see at this damning footage you told me about.’

  Mike had taken a laptop and some CDs from Graham’s house. Parked on a dark street, he and Shep had copied onto a disc the most legally damning section of the recorded conversation with Graham. They’d stashed the flash drive containing the entire episode with their remaining cash in the motel room’s heating vent, leaving Snowball II to guard over it.

  Now Mike withdrew the disc from his back pocket and handed it to Two-Hawks, who slotted it into his desktop computer. The black-and-white footage came to life on the monitor, Two-Hawks giving a growl of an exhale when he saw Mike sitting in the chair across from Graham’s bed, gun resting on his knee. Together they watched Graham spill the bloody history of his association with Deer Creek. The footage ended well before Graham’s lunge and the gunshot that ended his life.

  When it cut to black, Two-Hawks leaned back in his chair and eyed the blank monitor. ‘A credible start,’ he said.

  ‘Start?’ Mike said.

  ‘This is just talk. Not hard evidence.’

  ‘You’re telling me this isn’t enough to threaten McAvoy?’ Mike said. ‘A confession to multiple murders committed on behalf of a corporation?’

  ‘Delivered by a man with a gun to his head during a home invasion,’ Two-Hawks said. ‘A man under duress, who would’ve said anything to save his life. Plus, if you want McAvoy, this is all just hearsay. He’s got plausible deniability—’

  ‘So I use this as a springboard.’ Mike’s tone was clipped, frustrated. ‘I can get to someone in law enforcement who’s clean. They could subpoena records, transactions that show payments to his goons—’

  ‘Deer Creek Tribal Enterprises, Inc.’ – again with the full corporate title – ‘is a sovereign nation, just like ours. You can’t subpoena shit from them. There is no agency in this nation or any other that can get them to release records. They run their business however they want because there is no oversight. And they’ve got judges and cops and DAs from your nation who are favorably inclined to their cause.’

  Disgust welled in Mike’s chest. ‘They just plug into the government and use it like it’s theirs.’

  ‘That’s what you don’t understand,’ Two-Hawks said. ‘It is theirs. There was a pair of brothers who wouldn’t sell land near a Deer Creek development site. They disappeared, couldn’t pay the note on their property. There was some evidence at the site, but whoops, it up and vanished from the police locker. Everyone knows that McAvoy had them whacked, but how can you prove something when you can’t dig into any records and when there are no bodies? I’ll tell you how.’ Two-Hawks leaned forward in his chair. ‘With irrefutable evidence against them’ – one meaty finger thumped his palm – ‘in hand.’

  ‘I don’t have it,’ Mike said.

  ‘Yes,’ Two-Hawks said. ‘But we do.’

  Mike had the sensation of being left out of an inside joke, smiling dumbly while everyone else laughed. His lips parted with disbelief. ‘Then what do you need me for?’

  Two-Hawks’s chair creaked as he rose, rocking behind him. He set his knuckles on the blotter. ‘Because Deer Creek, in turn, has something we need.’

  Mike’s jaw shifted; he felt it crack at the hinge. ‘Mutually assured destruction,’ he said. ‘If you burn them with what you’ve got on them, they can burn you back.’

  ‘A version of that, I suppose.’

  ‘So you have information that I could use to save my daughter, but you won’t give it to me because you want something else?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I truly am.’

  Mike stared at him a long time, the gunmetal cool against the small of his back. Two-Hawks stiffened a bit, his eyes jerking nervously to the door.

  Mike said, ‘Maybe you should elaborate.’

  ‘The information that we’ve acquired is our only ammunition against a corporation that is seeking to disenfranchise my people. If we had anything less on the line, I’d give you everything right now to protect your family.’

  Mike leaned back. ‘So what do you propose?’

  ‘You have a legal claim on Deer Creek. Use your leverage to get us what we need. Then we can be free to give you what we have on them.’

  Mike weighed this for a moment. ‘Let me call my associate.’

  ‘An associate.’ Two-Hawks frowned, impressed.

  Mike took out the Batphone and called Shep, who was waiting somewhere out beyond the ring of parking-lot lights. ‘It’s safe,’ Mike said.

  ‘You sure?’ Shep asked.

  ‘Mostly.’

  Shep hung up.

  Two-Hawks was on the phone himself. ‘Be right there,’ he said, and set down the receiver. He flicked two fingers at Mike. ‘Come on now.’

  They strolled down another corridor and wound up in a surveillance suite, the north-facing wall composed of maybe fifty monitors, each of which cycled through numerous perspectives. Staring vacantly at the wall of screens, three bored-looking men and one woman sat before a desk that ran the length of the room. Red Bull cans and empty Big Gulps cluttered the surfaces, and the smell of chewing tobacco hung heavy.

  The woman said, ‘Someone passed a chip cup at table nine.’

  ‘Run the software,’ Two-Hawks ordered.

  She clicked a button on a computer, and a big screen on the side wall flared to life. A facial-recognition program began to map contour lines over the heads of the casino patrons, moving table to table. Now and then a double chime sounded and the patron’s image was pulled into a subscreen and matched with a mug shot and a rap sheet. Connecting boxes listed aliases and associates.

  ‘I’m getting no one who’s worked chip cups before, but we have a couple slot-machine cheats,’ the woman announced.

  ‘Of course we do.’ Two-Hawks sidled toward Mike. ‘Manipulating a slot machine is a felony in Nevada, but it’s only a misdemeanor in California, so everyone comes here to train.’

  ‘What’s a chip cup?’ Mike asked.

  ‘A weighted hollow cylinder with a real poker chip on top,’ Two-Hawks said. ‘The sides are painted to match the chip’s edges. Since dealers don’t break down chips that come in sets of five, you can pass off a single chip as five.’ He directed his attention back to the woman. ‘Let me know ASAP if another chip cup pops up, and in the meantime keep a close eye on the slot cheats.’

  One of the men jogged a joystick, and four of the screens zoomed in tight on the suspects. Mike let his eyes blur, taking in an impression of seemingly every angle of the casino – blackjack table, vault, slots, parking lot – each screen clicking like a slot reel through different angles. ‘You’ve got every inch
of the place covered,’ Mike said.

  ‘Except the bathroom.’ Two-Hawks grinned. ‘That’s about the only place in a casino you can have an “expectation of privacy,” as the lawyers call it. If anything big goes down, of course, the first concern is—’

  All four workers intoned wearily, ‘“What’s going on at the vault.”’

  With pride Two-Hawks said, ‘We’ve got fifty-four cameras in the vault alone, covering the cage, the man trap, the count room, the fill bank where jackpots are paid out.’

  The woman’s back went rigid, and she swiveled toward a side monitor. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘We got a safecracker up on Biometrica.’

  Mike leaned around her to see who the facial-recognition software had pulled from the crowd.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘He’s with me.’

  Two-Hawks gave a hearty laugh. ‘Please page Blackie. Have’ – a glance to the on-screen data – ‘Shepherd White brought back here.’

  The woman nodded and picked up the phone. She was slender with elfish features, the bulge of tobacco in her cheek adding a fantastical flourish.

  A minute later Blackie and Shep pushed through the padded door. They both looked mildly displeased, though Mike doubted they’d exchanged so much as a word along the way.

  Two-Hawks said, ‘You’re a safecracker?’

  Shep said,

  ‘What?’ ‘A safecracker. You break into safes?’

  Shep shrugged and looked away, disinterested. He took a few steps toward the wall of monitors and gazed at them, a fox in the henhouse. His head was tilted back, his mouth slightly ajar, the light of the monitors putting a spark into his flat eyes. He seemed to be drinking in all the flickering movement.

  The workers and Blackie exchanged a round of glances. Blackie said, finally, ‘You want to answer the man?’

  Shep said, ‘The broad on blackjack three’s working a shiner prism to read the hole card. Two tables over, the black dude’s counting cards on an iPhone app. You got a guy using a monkey paw on the bank of Hurricane slots along the west wall. And either your dealer on seven paid out a wrong hand accidentally or he’s dumping the table.’