 Author · Books · Journalism · Information · Message Board | |
 The Prey Series Shadow Prey The Kidd Series Other Novels Etcetera | Shadow Prey The Prey series contains strong language and scenes
of graphic violence and sex, and it may thus be inappropriate or offensive to
some readers. The excerpt below is the complete first chapter of
Shadow Prey, and it has not been censored in any way. If you are
offended by this sort of material, or will get in trouble for reading it (e.g.
if your parents think it would be inappropriate for you), do not
continue. Thank you. SPECIAL NOTE: This is not, technically, the first section of Shadow Prey. The book opens with a prologue called In the Beginning... and it ends with an epilogue called In the End.... So while the following excerpt is labeled "Chapter One", it's really the second chapter-like division of the book. On the other hand, it's much more representative of the story than the prologue. Ray Cuervo sat in his office and counted his money. He counted
his money every Friday afternoon between five and six o'clock. He made no
secret of it. Cuervo owned six apartment buildings scattered around Indian
Country south of the Minneapolis Loop. The cheapest apartment rented for
thirty-nine dollars a week. The most expensive was seventy-five. When he
collected his rent, Cuervo took neither checks nor excuses. If you didn't have
the cash by two o'clock Friday, you slept on the sidewalk. Bidness, as Ray
Cuervo told any number of broken-ass indigents, was bidness. Dangerous business, sometimes. Cuervo carried a chrome-plated
Charter Arms .38 special tucked in his pants while he collected his money. The
gun was old. The barrel was pitted and the butt was unfashionably small. But it
worked and the shells were always fresh. You could see the shiny brass winking
out at the edge of the cylinder. Not a flash gun, his renters said. It was a
shooter. When Cuervo counted the week's take, he kept the pistol on the desktop
near his right hand. Cuervo's office was a cubicle at the top of three flights of
stairs. The furnishings were sparse and cheap: a black dial telephone, a metal
desk, a wooden file cabinet and an oak swivel chair on casters. A four-year-old
Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar hung on the left-hand wall.
Cuervo never changed it past April, the month where you could see the broad's
brown nipples through the wet T-shirt. Opposite the calendar was a corkboard. A
dozen business cards were tacked to the corkboard along with two fading bumper
stickers. One said Shit Happens and the other said How's my
driving? Dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT. Cuervo's wife, a Kentucky sharecropper girl
with a mouth like barbed wire, called the office a shithole. Ray Cuervo paid no
attention. He was a slumlord, after all. Cuervo counted the cash out in neat piles, ones, fives and
tens. The odd twenty he put in his pocket. Coins he counted, noted and dumped
into a Maxwell House coffee can. Cuervo was a fat man with small black eyes.
When he lifted his heavy chin, three rolls of suet popped out on the back of
his red neck. When he leaned forward, three more rolls popped out on his side,
under his armpits. And when he farted, which was often, he unconsciously eased
one obese cheek off the chair to reduce the compression. He didn't think the
movement either impolite or impolitic. If a woman was in the room, he said,
"Oops." If the company was all male, he said nothing. Farting was something men
did. A few minutes after five o'clock on October 5, an unseasonably
warm day, the door slammed at the bottom of the stairs and a man started up.
Cuervo put his fingertips on the Charter Arms .38 and half stood so he could
see the visitor. The man on the stairs turned his face up and Cuervo
relaxed. Leo Clark. An old customer. Like most of the
Indians who rented Cuervo's apartments, Leo was always back and forth from the
reservations. He was a hard man, Leo was, with a face like a cinder block, but
Cuervo never had trouble with him. Leo paused at the second landing, catching his breath, then
came up the last flight. He was a Sioux, in his forties, a loner, dark from the
summer sun. Long black braids trailed down his back and a piece of Navaho
silver flashed from his belt. He came from the West somewhere: Rosebud,
Standing Rock, someplace like that. "Leo, how are you?" Cuervo said without looking up. He had
money in both hands, counting. "Need a place?" "Put your hands in your lap, Ray," Leo said. Cuervo looked up.
Leo was pointing a pistol at him. "Aw, man, don't do this," Cuervo groaned, straightening up. He
didn't look at his pistol, but he was thinking about it. "If you need a few
bucks, I'll loan it to you." "Sure you will," Leo said. "Two for one." Cuervo did a little
loansharking on the side. Bidness was bidness. "Come on, Leo," Cuervo casually dropped the stack of bills on
the desktop, freeing his gun hand. "You wanna spend your old age in the
joint?" "If you move again, I'll shoot holes in your head. I mean it,
Ray," Leo said. Cuervo checked the other man's face. It was as cold and dark as
a Mayan statue's. Cuervo stopped moving. Leo edged around the desk. No more than three feet separated
them, but the hole at the end of Leo's pistol pointed unwaveringly at Ray
Cuervo's nose. "Just sit still. Take it easy," Leo said. When he was behind
the chair, he said, "I'm going to put a pair of handcuffs on you, Ray. I want
you to put your hands behind the chair." Cuervo followed instructions, turning his head to see what Leo
was doing. "Look straight ahead," Leo said, tapping him behind the ear
with the gun barrel. Cuervo looked straight ahead. Leo stepped back, pushed the
pistol into the waistband of his slacks and took an obsidian knife from his
front pants pocket. The knife was seven inches of beautifully crafted black
volcanic glass, taken from a cliff at Yellowstone National Park. Its edge was
fluted and it was as sharp as a surgeon's scalpel. "Hey, Ray?" Leo said, stepping up closer to the slumlord.
Cuervo farted, in either fear or exasperation, and the fetid smell filled the
room. He didn't bother to say "Oops." "Yeah?" Cuervo looked straight ahead. Calculating. His legs
were in the kneehole under the desk: it'd be hard to move in a hurry. Let it
ride, he thought, just a couple more minutes. When Leo was putting on the
cuffs, maybe the right move... The gun glittered on the desk a foot and a half
from his eyes. "I lied about the handcuffs, Ray," Leo said. He grabbed Cuervo
by the hair above his forehead and jerked his head back. With a single powerful
slash, Leo cut Ray Cuervo's throat from ear to ear. Cuervo half stood and twisted free and groped helplessly at his
neck with one hand while the other crawled frantically across his desk toward
the Charter Arms .38. He knew even as he tried that he wouldn't make it. Blood
spurted from his severed carotid artery as though from a garden hose, spraying
the leaves of green dollars on the desk, the Sports Illustrated broad
with the tits, the brown linoleum floor. Ray Cuervo twisted and turned and fell, batting the Maxwell
House coffee can off the desk. Coins pitched and clattered and rolled around
the office and a few bounced down the stairs. Cuervo lay faceup on the floor,
his vision narrowing to a dim and closing hole that finally settled around Leo
Clark, whose face remained impassively centered in the growing darkness. And
then Ray Cuervo was dead. Leo turned away as Cuervo's bladder and sphincter control went.
There was $2,035 on the desktop. Leo paid it no attention. He wiped the
obsidian knife on his pants, put it back in his pocket, and pulled his shirt
out to cover the gun. Then he walked down the stairs and six blocks back to his
apartment. He was splattered with Cuervo's blood, but nobody seemed to notice.
The cops got only a very slender description. An Indian male with braids. There
were five thousand Indian males with braids in Minneapolis. A large number of them were delighted to hear the news about
Ray Cuervo. Fuckin' Indians. John Lee Benton hated them. They were worse than the niggers.
You tell a nigger to show up, and if he didn't, he had an excuse. A reason.
Even if it was bullshit. Indians were different. You tell a guy to come in at two
o'clock and he doesn't show. Then he comes in at two the next day and thinks
that's good enough. He doesn't pretend to think so. He really
thinks so. The shrinks at the joint called it a cultural anomaly. John Lee
Benton called it a pain in the ass. The shrinks said the only answer was
education. John Lee Benton had developed another approach, all on his own. Benton had seven Indians on his case load. If they didn't
report on schedule, he'd spend the time normally used for an interview to write
the papers that would start them back to Stillwater. In two years, he'd sent
back nine men. Now he had a reputation. The fuckin' Indians walked wide around
him. If you're going out on parole, they told each other, you didn't want to be
on John Lee Benton's case load. That was a sure ride back inside. Benton enjoyed the rep. John Lee Benton was a small man with a strong nose and mousy
hair combed forward over watery blue eyes. He wore a straw-colored mustache,
cut square. When he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror in the morning, he
thought he looked like somebody, but he couldn't think who. Somebody famous.
He'd think of it sooner or later. John Lee Benton hated blacks, Indians, Mexicans, Jews and
Asians, more or less in that order. His hate for blacks and Jews was a family
heritage, passed down from his daddy as Benton grew up in a sprawling
blue-collar slum in St. Louis. He'd developed his animus for Indians, Mexicans
and Asians on his own. Every Monday afternoon Benton sat in a stifling office in the
back of the Indian Center off Franklin Avenue and talked to his assholes. He
was supposed to call them clients, but fuck that. They were criminals and
assholes, every single one. "Mr. Benton?" Benton looked up. Betty Sails stood in the doorway. A
tentative, gray-faced Indian woman with a beehive hairdo, she was the office's
shared receptionist. "Is he here?" John Lee spoke sharply, impatiently. He was a man
who sweated hate. "No, he's not," Betty Sails said. "But there's another man to
see you. Another Indian man." Benton frowned. "I didn't have any more appointments today." "He said it was about Mr. Cloud." Glory be, an actual excuse. "All right. Give me a couple of
minutes, then send him in," Benton said. Betty Sails went away and Benton
looked through Cloud's file again. He didn't need to review it but liked the
idea of keeping the Indian waiting. Two minutes later, Tony Bluebird appeared
at the door. Benton had never seen him before. "Mr. Benton?" Bluebird was a stocky man with close-set eyes and
short-cropped hair. He wore a gingham shirt over a rawhide thong. A black
obsidian knife dangled from the thong and Bluebird could feel it ticking
against the skin below his breast bone. "Yes?" Benton let his anger leak into his tone. Bluebird showed him a gun. "Put your hands on your lap, Mr.
Benton." Three people saw Bluebird. Betty Sails saw him both coming and
going. A kid coming out of the gym dropped a basketball, and Bluebird stopped
it with a foot, picked it up and tossed it back, just as Betty Sails started
screaming. On the street, Dick Yellow Hand, who was seventeen years old and
desperately seeking a taste of crack, saw him walk out the door and called,
"Hey, Bluebird." Bluebird stopped. Yellow Hand sidled over, scratching his thin
beard. "You look bad, man," Bluebird said. Yellow Hand nodded. He was wearing a dirty T-shirt with a
fading picture of Mick Jagger on the front. His jeans, three sizes too large,
were cinched at the waist with a length of clothesline. His elbow joints and
arms looked like cornstalks. He was missing two front teeth. "I feel bad, man.
I could use a few bucks, you know?" "Sorry, man, I got no money," Bluebird said. He stuck his hands
in his pockets and pulled them out empty. "That's okay, then," Yellow Hand said, disappointed. "I seen your mama last week," Bluebird said. "Out at the
res." "How's she?" "She's fine. She was fishing. Walleyes." Sails' hysterical screams became audible as somebody opened an
outside door to the Indian Center. "That's real good about Mama," said Yellow Hand. "Well, I guess I gotta go," Bluebird said, easing away. Okay, man," said Yellow Hand. "See you." Bluebird walked, taking his time, his mind in another place.
What was her name? It had been years ago. Anna? She was a pretty woman, with
deep breasts and warm hazel eyes. She'd liked him, he thought, though they were
both married, and nothing ever happened; nothing but a chemistry felt across
backyard hedges, deep down in Minneapolis' Indian Country. Anna's husband, a Chippewa from Nett Lake, had been put in the
Hennepin County Jail. Drunk, late at night, he'd seen a Coke machine glowing
red-and-white through the window of a gas station. He'd heaved a chunk of
concrete through the window, crawled in after it, and used the concrete to
crack the machine. About a thousand quarters had run out onto the floor,
somebody told Bluebird. Anna's husband had still been picking them up,
laboriously, one at a time, when the cops arrived. He'd been on parole and the
break-in was a violation. He'd gotten six months on top of the remaining time
from the previous conviction. Anna and her husband had never had money. He drank up most of
it and she probably helped. Food was short. Nobody had clothes. But they did
have a son. He was twelve, a stocky, withdrawn child who spent his evenings
watching television. One Saturday afternoon, a few weeks after his daddy was
taken to jail, the boy walked down to the Lake Street bridge and jumped into
the Mississippi. A lot of people saw him go and the cops had him out of the
river in fifteen minutes. Dead. Bluebird had heard, and he went down to the river. Anna was
there, her arms wrapped around the body of her son, and she looked up at him
with those deep pain-filled eyes, and... what? It was all part of being Indian, Bluebird thought. The dying.
It was something they did better than the whites. Or more frequently,
anyway. When Bluebird walked out of the room after slashing Benton's
throat, he'd looked down at the man's face and thought he seemed familiar. Like
a famous person. Now, on the sidewalk, as he left Yellow Hand behind, as he
thought about Anna, Benton's face floated up in his mind's eye. Hitler, he thought. John Lee Benton looked exactly like a young
Adolf Hitler. A young dead Adolf Hitler. |
13 April 2008  The Prey series, the Kidd series, The
Night Crew, Dead Watch, Dark of the Moon, The Eye and the
Heart: The Watercolors of John Stuart Ingle, and Plastic Surgery: The
Kindest Cut are copyrighted by John Sandford. All excerpts are used with
permission. All original content on the website (excluding the message
board and some other specifically disclaimed text) is copyright © 2007 by
Roswell Anthony Camp. Please do not steal anything from these pages. If you
want to borrow something, write and ask first. Help keep moofs happy. | |