The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Case of the Devouring Storm, Part 1 of 6

With the Office spread thin, every official is needed everywhere. When a entire farm is wiped off the face of the earth in Kansas, livestock, crops, farmers, and all, Mickey must step out of his element to crack the case. With a pair of quacky martial entomologists and a quick-draw OIA agent at his side, he must once again confront the utterly weird.

The Case of the Devouring Storm takes place a few months after The Case of an Old Dead Guy and is intended to be read afterward.

Until Only Roaches Remain is available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

Content warnings: Mild swearing, tobacco use, alcohol use, death, violence, animal violence, mention of sexual assault.

MONDAY MORNING, MAY 3, 1943
LAMASSO FAMILY PROPERTY
IOWAY RESERVATION, KANSAS

Kansas. Mickey Malloy grunted and squinted. He hated Kansas.

It was flat was what it was. Too flat. See the edge of the world flat. He’d grown up in Florida, but hell, at least Florida had the ocean. But there he was, stuck in the middle of Kansas, leaning on the stoop of an old ranch house, staring at what would have been a dirt farm if it wasn't so damn dry.

The only colors Mick could see was brown ground, brown buildings, and slightly-less-brown sky. It looked like a newspaper photo from the Dust Bowl.

The Minerva had barely slowed at the station before they’d kicked Mickey out. They had many more stops to make, and dropping off an old P.I. in Kansas was low on their list. Caleb Union was on his way to get to the bottom of a miners’ strike that had turned violent, Trivaldus Epoch was checking out a Wyoming mountainside that had been painted with weird symbols overnight, and Ifa Abebe was on his way to catalog a secret library discovered under Wrigley Field. A missing farm was barely an afterthought.

It took Mick the better part of two hours to haggle a ride out of town. He’d ended up having to pay a state trooper’s lunch and gas money out of his per diem for the one-way ride. When the trooper saw the scoured fields, it took shoving Mick’s faux federal badge under his nose to get him to leave.

The Office had sent others, of course, guys who’d read the brief. Those kind of guys were always necessary. These ones were a couple of eggheads from Zoo Base that had flown out of Tennessee and arrived about an hour earlier than him. They’d even gotten their own car to lug all their toys around. An agent with the Office of Indian Affairs had met them at the property. From what Mick understood, it was that guy’s report that had been kicked from the O.I.A. to the F.B.I. who sent it straight to the Office for being too outlandish. It was good to know that Mick was still reaping the benefits of that policy.

The Zoo Base guys were deeply engrossed over a lump of something or other. One looked like he’d’ve been too old to get drafted during the Civil War, and the other, the one kneeling in the dirt, was lanky and pimpled with a shock of brown curls stacked atop his narrow head. They both adjusted their glasses and leaned in, peering at whatever they’d found. The odd pair was ringed with crates and dollies, more equipment that Mick would've thought could fit in the dust-covered sedan they'd parked in front of the ranch house.

Another man stood further off, tending to a snorting black mustang. He was dark-skinned and wearing plaid and khaki. A Boston Braves hat covered short black hair and a matched set of knife-sharp cheekbones. He had to be the Office of Indian Affairs agent. Good at the job, too, as there wasn't a crowd gathered. The agent knew when to keep his trap shut, and he knew when to call in the big guns. Unfortunately for him, and for whatever had happened to this ranch, Mickey Malloy was the big gun that day.

Mick took a long, deep breath of heartland air. The sun cutting through his bourbon haze told him it was going to be a long day. He pulled his fedora down to his brow to block as much daylight as he could before he ambled over to the pair of officials to see what the fuss was.

They were so focused on their examination that they didn’t even notice that a cop car had come and gone, much less that it had left one passenger light. In fact, the only thing that broke them away was when Mick stepped up behind them, casting his hulking shadow across their area of interest. Before he could say anything interesting, a whiff of something absolutely rancid caught his attention.

“Holy shit,” he wheezed, nearly gagging.

“Who are you?” the older man snapped. His accent sounded like some flavor of Scandinavian.

“What is that?” Mick asked. He had to pinch his nose to keep from tearing up or keeling over.

“Some manner of synthetic semiochemical ecto-hormone, if I am not mistaken,” the old man replied, professorioral in his delivery.

“I am amazed this much of the compound remains after contact,” the younger cut in, eager to be heard. Mick recognized his accent as Russian. Mick figured he was an assistant because he was taking all the notes. The kid couldn't have been older than nineteen. Every word made another of his brown curls slip out of the style he’d tried to cement them into with a pound of pomade.

“I surmise that once the desired element encountered this compound in the concentration present, other, baser, instincts took hold,” the old man explained. His white hair, almost silver, was slicked back to the nape of his neck, keeping the Midwestern sun off his pale skin. Even in the heat, the old man wore a knit sweater over a yellow shirt. Underneath, he was thin as a rail. His knobby hands trembled as he pointed out whatever compound he was talking about. He squinted up at the silhouetted Malloy.

“You must be Inspector Malloy. Doctor Cypress was quite specific in his description of you,” the little old man said, squinting up at Mick through tiny glasses. The guy couldn't have been taller than five-one, five-two. “He described you as a ‘bull gator in a trench coat.’”

“That sounds like the Charlie Cypress I know,” Mick said. He nodded at the meandering man from the O.I.A., whispering: “But call me ‘agent’ when we have company.”

“Ah, of course,” the old man said with a grin, tapping his nose.

“So you got my number, let’s level the playing field. Who are you guys?”

“Torval Evenstad, and my graduate student, Artyom Kozuch,” the old man said.

“Numbers four-eight-four-one and pi, orange,” Artyom quickly. He slid between the professor and Mick like he could do something at a buck-fifty soaking wet.

“Pi?” Mick asked.

“Three-one-four-one,” Artyom snapped. He puffed up with Russan boldness. “You are to confirm the daily color and respond with your identification number and the challenge word.”

“Oh, by the book, got it,” Mick said with an eye-roll. He’d been in the Office since before there was a book. “Eighty-five-ninety-nine. Orange confirmed. ‘Scrimshaw.’”

As soon as Artyom heard the correct challenge word, he deflated and stuck his hand out. Mick sighed, took it, and found it sticky.

“Where’d Charlie find you boys?” he asked as he brushed his hand on his pants.

“The University of Oslo, entomology department,” Artyom replied. He squatted back down and resumed poking at whatever had caught their attention.

“I have been an associate of the Halistone family for many years, however,” Evanstad added. “Whenever their adventures required an explanation from my small world, they would defer to me. Héloïse Bellegarde-Halistone is a dear friend, she facilitated our worms’ extraction before the occupation.”

“Yeah, okay,” Mick said. Evenstad sounded like a kook, which made sense as to why he knew Halistones: the family collected weirdos. Mick would know, he was one of them.

“How is old Charlie Cypress, anyway?” Mick asked. He was too hungover to guess what the eggheads were up to, so he made small talk.

“Doctor Cypress so wonderful, as always. Now, please, agent, might we have our light back?”

“Sure thing, doc,” Mick grunted, suddenly brought back to grade school by the professor's disapproving tone.

“Torval, please. Only Artyom and the dean call me 'Doctor.'”

The professor stared up at Mickey until the big man stepped out of the way of their sunlight. As soon as his shadow was clear, the two went back to work:

“Artyom, take note of these vents. They appear to be an aerosol dispersal mechanism.”

Mick leaned around to get a look at what the two were examining. It was a silver cylinder, partially buried. A good two feet of it stuck out of the ground, topped with fins like an iron-sight bomb. Panels on the sides had popped open on springs, revealing canted vents covered in slimy yellow residue.

“Looks like a gas shell to me,” Mick observed. His layman analysis was met with a poisonous look from Artyom.

“Leave this to experts,” the young man hissed.

“Come now, Artyom, Inspector Malloy is indeed correct. This appears to be a specialized chemical dispersant munition designed to quickly release a liquid compound through atomization.” Evenstad looked over his glasses at Artyom. “One day you will no longer be a graduate student. A great scientist compiles and analyzes information from every available source.”

Artyom nodded and gave Mick a curt flick of the chin as an unspoken apology. He then took a quick photo of the gas bomb before scooping his notepad back up and continuing to jot observations about the shell.

“Was it poison gas?” Mick asked tentatively. Evenstad shook his head and answered without looking up from his work.

“The standard Hostile Substance Battery came up negative, as I surmised. You are safe here for the moment, inspector.”

“Good to know, doc.” Mick replied. He peered over Artyom's shoulder but couldn't make hide nor hair of what the odd pair were doing. “I'm not one for this science stuff. What do you need me for?”

“The aircraft, and it must have been dropped from an aircraft to achieve this level of surface penetration, would have been in flight near one this morning, Inspector Malloy,” Evenstad said over his stooped shoulder. “That is where you and Agent Lewison might start your portion of the investigation. Artyom and I will gather more information about this incident and report the relevant details to you.”

“Sure thing, doc,” Mick said, but the two researchers had already turned their full attention back to the bomb. They didn't hear a word.

Mick shifted his belt around his girth and walked over to the Indian and his horse. Mic hadn't seen a horse in person in twenty-five years, not since Europe, and he'd never seen one before that either. He was raised in the city, and the thought of a half-ton creature with hammers on its feet pressed up against his crotch always gave him the willies. Not that he'd let some backwater joker see him sweat. Mick steeled himself and walked up to Lewison like the Ioway man wasn't standing next to a wild beast that stared through Mickey's ragged soul with black eyes.

“Agent Lewison, I'm Agent Malloy.” Mick said, He had to remember he was a Department of the Interior agent this time. He'd been run all up and down the country under so many jurisdictions that the bottom drawer of his desk was packed with so many fake badges that that it looked like a pirate’s chest. The young man took Mick's gnarled mitt in his own leather-gloved hand. “Washington sent me to take a look.”

“Thanks for coming, never seen anything like this mess before,” Lewison said.

Mick was taken aback. He'd had never met an Indian before and was surprised when there wasn't any warpaint or accent. He chuckled after a moment. That's what he got for going to the movies instead of school.

“What's funny?” Lewison asked. He took a step back and placed a hand on his demon steed.

“Nothing, it's just that...” Mickey started. He was never one for speaking delicately.

“Never met an Injun named Lewison?” he asked in an obscene redneck accent.

“Never met an ‘Injun’ before,” Mick answered.

“Then let's get something straight, pale face. I live in a Airstream, eat beef, and shoot folks with bullets. Don't give me any bullshit, and you'll get the same deference.” Lewison crossed his arms and stared Mick down. The look in his dark eyes told Mick that he wasn't a man known to take shit from anyone, much less a white outsider and a fed.

“Let me ask one question, then all bullshit aside,” Mick said. The Indian wasn't near as tall or wide as Mick, but there was no doubt that the coiled muscles twisting under Lewison's plaid shirt would put them at even money if it came down to a scrap. He knew from experience what question was coming and answered it before Mick could ask.

“On my badge, my name is James Lewison. Here, with my clan, I am Wakándaiñe, Little Thunder,” he said.

“Why Little Thunder?” Mick asked. Lewison simply pointed a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the Browning Auto5 shotgun in his saddle holster. Mickey smirked and said: “Ah. Good name.”

Mick rocked back on his heels and looked around, studying the farm itself for the first time. Flat. Brown. Quiet. The only other farms Mick had ever been on were in France and they'd had trenches cut through them, but even they had more of the noises and colors of life than this place. This place was dead. Scoured.

“What happened here? Where is everyone?” No plants, no animals, no farmers. Was it even still considered a farm at that point?

“I can show you.” Lewison started off for the barn with Mick in tow. Mick noticed the wooden slats of the old structure first. The raw wood had been stripped bare, without a speck of paint left. He turned around. The ranch house, the outhouse, the wood shed, the smoker. Every inch of wood on the ranch was bare, like it had been sanded down to the grain.

The barn doors gaped open. It took Mick's bleary eyes a second to adjust to the sudden shade. The entire barn was empty. No animals, no feed, nothing even in the hay loft high above. It was a naked as the dusty fields around them. It barely even smelled. Even the shit was gone.

“This is Alan Lamasso,” Lewison said, stopping suddenly. Mick, half-blind, nearly bowled into the agent. He found himself standing over two complete skeletons, one human and one horse.

The bones were as clean as the wooden surfaces around them. They looked like they belonged in a museum rather than tangled up in one another on the dirt floor of a barn. The ground wasn't even stained with blood. Whatever had done this to Alan hadn't missed a drop. Buttons, buckles, and rivets were scattered between bones, all metal. Nothing soft remained.

“How long has he been here?” Mick asked.

“I bought a bale from Alan yesterday afternoon. I came back for a second this morning when I found this. Called up the chain until you three showed.”

“So this happened in one night?”

“Not just this.” Lewison walked to the rear doors of the barn and pushed them open, assaulting Mickey's senses with unrepentant sunlight again. A dust devil whirled into the barn, dying out at Mickey's feet.

“This was a four acre pasture when I saw it last.” Lewison stepped aside, and Mickey could see to the horizon. The land was completely flat, dead, and dry. Not a single blade of grass remained. Only piles of bones broke up the mirror-flat surface of ravaged dust.

“Fourteen head of steer and two nags, all gone the same way as Alan. Every living thing on this property, gone.”

“Holy hell,” Mick whispered. The wasteland around him whispered back with a gust that kicked up a brown plume. He stood silent for a moment, watching the dust settle again. “Where's the family?”

“They're in the house. All dead, too.”

“Were they... in the same condition?” Mickey didn't even know what to call what had happened to Alan and his animals. Flayed? Consumed? Dissolved?

“In the basement, dead, near as I can tell from heat stroke. They were holed up. The whole house was locked tight.”

“To keep out whatever got Alan?”

“There were in their tornado shelter, ready for a big one. Jars and lamps and the whole kit. Alan was probably trying to secure the livestock at the last minute.”

“So every living thing out here is gone, eaten or melted or goddamn evaporated, and inside they cook to death?” The facts of the case so far were insane. He shook his head, reawakening the dull pounding of a long-haul hangover. “I never heard of anything that could do all this.”

“I have. But it's just an old story, my grandmother probably made it up.”

“Kid, you got no idea how many impossible things I've put a bullet in. Let the eggheads figure out the logic part, we'll do the gut work.” Mick slipped out his flask, took a nip and offered it to Lewison who declined. The thorns pressing into Mick's frontal lobe eased up a bit with that sip. He screwed the cap back on tight, pocketed the flask, and clapped his big hands together. “So tell me a story.”

“My grandmother told me all kinds of stories, but this one stuck with me. The ra^édhe gibrú. A spirit that stalked the plains back when she was a kid, every spring. Then it stopped and was never seen again.”

“Why does this remind you of it?”

“This thing would appear on the edge of the sky and rise like a dark cloud, tinting the sky green. The wind would sound like a tornado. She said she and the other Báxoje kids had to hide from it. The parents said that anyone who didn’t hide would be eaten by the wind itself. When she got out, the ground was scoured to dust by ravenous noise and fire without flame.”

“The results sound familiar. Any truth to the tale?”

“I was just a sleepy kid when I heard this, so I really can’t say. No one old enough to know the truth in stories will talk to you. They won't trust your...” Lewison searched for the right word.

“My race?” Mick asked.

“Your face,” the agent answered.

“Fair enough,” Mick said. “I've been prettier.”

He'd been compared to a bulldog that had been in a shipwreck on his good days. He grinned. His fist-canted teeth didn't help the matters at all.

“Inspector! Agent!” Doctor Evenstad called out, giddy as an eighty-nine-year-old man could sound. “I believe we've found enough evidence to begin testing my hypothesis!”

A guy that decrepit getting that excited over anything couldn't help but put a smile on the Mick's lumpy face. The doctor hobbled to his car as fast as his silver-tipped cane could carry him, leaving Artyom behind to tow a dolly full of swabs, jars, and specimens, plus the boxed-up bombshell.

“Better follow 'em,” Mick said. “Don't want fall too far behind that little guy before he can put some science behind your ra... ed...”

“The ra^édhe gibrú.”

“Yeah, that. What does that mean?”

“It is old Báxoje ich'é. It’s close to 'the devouring storm'.”

Mickey looked at the devastation around him. Four acres of life, extinguished.

“Yeah. That sounds about right.”

SUNDAY MORNING, FEBRUARY 28, 1943
UNLISTED CABIN, EAST OF NOHARTS CREEK
IOWAY RESERVATION, KANSAS

Little Thunder Lewison tied Pouncer off to a birch branch and scratched his nose. Hot fog puffed out of the stallion's wide nostrils. The ride had been tough and desperate, but they both knew the reservation. When Emily Birdtree woke up and described where her attacker had taken her, Lewison had known the rundown hunting cabin by description alone.

He slid his Browning Auto5 shotgun out of the saddle holster, made sure that Pouncer's blanket wasn't going anywhere, then stalked through the shallow copse toward Porter Cobb's hideout.

When he'd moved back to the Ioway reservation, Lewison thought he'd be dealing with land disputes and jurisdictional problems, especially with the state government still flexing their muscles after the Kansas Act. He never dreamed that four young women he'd grown up alongside would get brutalized in less than a week. The Office of Indian Affairs was more of a regulatory body than an investigative arm. Whatever he did for those women, he was doing for himself and his people. The higher-ups would either figure it out or hang him out to dry later.

Lewison pulled his baseball cap low to keep the snow out of his eyes. His ears were already numb. He flexed his fingers to keep the blood flowing, then switched his shotgun to his other hand to repeat the process.

He'd have to get Cobb into custody quickly. Lewison wasn't the only one she told about he attack, but he was the first to put it all together.

Cobb had been in White Cloud frequently, selling and repairing tires. He did good work for cheap and didn't give the tribe as much trouble as other white men. Until he did.

Emily could barely speak, but she'd said enough. What Cobb had done to her was horrible, and he'd die for it in one way or another. Lewison could only hope it was in the legal way, and not the way that made his kin and neighbors into murderers.

Lewison stomped through and icy rime and stepped out of the woods a few dozen paces from the cabin. It was an old place, ramshackle and collapsing in on itself. The inside was run through with scrawlings about teenage crushes and prowess, and there were about a thousand empty beer bottles piled out back. Every kid on the reservation had snuck in there before. It had been a secret place to be alone and have fun. It been made into something awful.

As soon as the monster was evicted, Lewison would burn it to the ground himself.

“Porter Cobb!” he shouted. His voice bounced between bare trees. The cabin remained dead and quiet. “Porter Cobb, come out with your hands raised.”

“Who in the Hell do you think you are?” Cobb shouted from inside.

“Agent Lewison, O.I.A., and I'm your only shot!”

“'Agent?' Boy, you ain't no agent!”

“If you surrender to me now, I can protect you,” Lewison said. He felt his jaw clench tight as a drum.

“You come here, gun in hand, offering me protection?” Cobb hooted. “Boy, I should shoot you where you stand.”

“You're a knife man, Cobb. Emily told me as much. Knife don't hold much water against a scatter gun.”

“Emily, huh?” Cobb wondered. “She liked to talk.”

Lewison could see Cobb's silhouette in one of the windows and it took everything he had not to send a barrel-full of buckshot through the glass.

“You leave here with me or you don't leave here at all,” Lewison said after a moment. “I promise you that.”

He let Cobb stew for a moment. The wind cut Lewison to the bone. He flexed his fingers again. He needed to be ready for anything.

The murmur of voices and the crunch of feet through ice made him take his eyes off the cabin. The whole of White Cloud was emerging from the narrow woods, armed with whatever they had at hand. He counted baseball bats, wire posts, sling blades, pistols, nooses, shotguns, and cleavers among them.

Everyone who'd been a kid on the reservation knew the place. Cobb had nowhere to hide.

“Everyone, back the Hell up!” Lewison shouted at the gathering mob. The snow hadn’t stopped them from surrounding ramshackle cabin, weapons in hand.

“Don’t you come in here!” Cobb yelled from inside the shack. “I got a heater!”

“You got eyes?” Lewison hollered. He stepped aside so that the holed-up piece of shit could have an unobstructed view the seething mob and their own arsenal. That shut him up long enough.

Lewison lifted his shotgun so everyone could see that he was packing heat. These were folks Lewison had grown up with, they knew he was a crack shot with a scatter gun. Not that he’d need to be at that range. But knowing that he was quick on the trigger would make them hesitate. He had to save a man’s life from them, second thoughts were keeping everyone breathing.

“Get out the way, Lew,” Mister Goodtrail said. He must’ve closed up the diner for this lynching. “You know what he did.”

“I do, and I know he’s going to get the chair for it,” Lewison snapped.

“Save the electricity,” Missus York said back.

“Yeah, we got rope!” Fred Brown Owl yelled, shaking said rope in Lewison’s face. Fred had been two years behind Lewison in school.

“He’s going on trial,” Lewison insisted. “And he’s in my custody. Anybody that thinks otherwise is fixing to obstruct a federal investigation.”

“Feds don’t run this place any more!” Missus York shouted.

“You don’t have jurisdiction,” Mister Goodtrail pointed out. “Let us by.”

“You a killer now, Mister Goodtrail?” Lewison asked. “And you, Freddy? You’re going to put a rope around a man’s neck and pull?”

“You saw what he did to those girls,” Goodtrail objected.

“I did, and he’s going to fry for it,” Lewison said.

“You want him in front of a white jury?” Missus York shouted. The mob shouted their agreement around her.

“They won’t do anything to him for hurting Báxoje women!” Brown Owl yelled to another furious chorus.

“But what will the white folks do to the Báxoje when they find out we’ve been hanging their people?” Lewison objected, only to be drowned out by the crowd.

“Little Thunder doesn’t care!” someone shouted from the back. That really got them going.

“He left us!”

“He’s not Báxoje!”

“They got him on a leash!”

“He’s a máñikathi now!”

That really lit Lewison up. He’d taken loads of rotten shit at Wichita State for being Ioway, now he was getting it at home for not being Báxoje enough. He’d been hired straight into the O.I.A. after graduation, hoping he could change the system from the inside. All he’d gotten was shit.

“You know me!” he roared. He’d grown up on the same tiny patch of land as them. He spoke their language. His parents had died younger than they should have, and he’d transferred back to tend their plot. He advocated for them, got them attention and funding, scraped his way through the same dirt as them, but they never looked at him the same way again.

Engines roared, their collective rumble quaking the frozen air. The crowd looked west. A half-dozen vehicles were coming up the narrow road to Cobb’s hideout, led by two cars from the Kansas State Police. The mob watched the spinning blue lights in silence.

“Go on, get!” Cobb shouted from inside the cabin. That set everyone off again.

“Ši^e!” Lewison whispered, but the white folks didn’t turn around. Cobb was somebody’s brother-in-law, every white man was. Besides, the only way to get white men to come together was to give them an enemy, and all the better if those enemies were brown. A Báxoje lynch mob had busted out of their kennel to string up a white man, and that was all the common cause they needed.

“They’re coming to get him!” Brown Owl shouted.

“They won’t take him,” Lewison insisted. He turned around and shouted at the cabin and the rapist inside: “Porter Cobb, I am taking you in the custody of the Office of Indian Affairs.”

“You know I got eyes, boy,” Cobb hooted back. “They’re going to take me out of here.”

“You think they’ll get you?” Lewison said. He held out his arms, showing off the mob around him. “These folks want to feed you to the coyotes. You’ll die before you get ten feet outside that door. You come with me, you’ll get some time.”

“‘Some time?’” Cobb asked.

“You’ll burn for what you did, but you’ll have a trial and some time to stew. So that’s your options: fry later or get cut to strips on your doorstep.”

“You’re not taking him,” Missus York said. She grabbed Lewison’s sleeve but he ripped it out of her hand. Her jaw fell open, aghast. Until that instant, even holding off a mob with a gun and a badge, she’d still only seen him as the kid who’d broken his leg trying to jump her fence.

“If you do anything to him, those assholes will burn our homes to the ground,” Lewison yelled, pointing at the oncoming vehicles. “We kill this animal, they’ll shoot us all on the spot.”

“‘Us,’” Brown Owl hissed. “‘We.’”

“Leashed dog,” Mister Goodtrail muttered.

“My way, we get justice and no one else gets hurt,” Lewison said, ignoring the needles.

The state troopers skidded to a halt first, a hundred yards away. They pulled shotguns out of their trunks and waited for the rest of their posse to park and disembark.

“How about it, Cobb?” Lewison called out. “You want to take your chances in federal court, or get pulled to pieces right here, right now?”

“He is ours,” Missus York insisted.

“He is mine!” Lewison roared in her face. His voice shook the windows in their panes and left her wincing. She couldn't look him in the eyes. Lewison called over his shoulder: “Cobb, you have three seconds.”

Missus York gasped.

“I'm here,” Cobb whispered. He was standing five paces behind Lewison, hands empty and out, ready for 'cuffs. Lewison slung his shotgun and obliged him. Cobb was a paunchy white man in his forties, scruffy, windburned, and balding. The frigid steel was knife-sharp against his pale skin. He whimpered: “Don't let them have me.”

“Unless you cooperate with this investigation, it might not be up to me,” Lewison said. “Now start walking, we're going back to town.”

“Walk?” Cobb asked. He was shivering in threadbare slacks, a light jacket, and walking shoes. He didn't have so much as a hat.

“I only got the one horse, and I sure as Hell ain't hoofing it myself,” Lewison replied. “Get moving.”

“You're not taking him,” Missus York insisted.

“Where the Hell are you going?” someone shouted across the snow. It was one of the state troopers.

“This suspect is in my custody,” Lewison called back. He ignored Missus York and pushed Cobb onward.

“Halt!” the trooper yelled. Lewison could tell in the officer's voice that he'd pulled a gun: his warble of unsurety was mixed with the timbre a white man gets while exercising authority. Lewison stopped and pulled his badge, holding it high.

“Agent James Lewison, Office of Indian Affairs,” Lewison called out. “This man is accused of crimes in the Ioway nation. He is in my jurisdiction, in my custody.”

“We have authority on the reservation,” the trooper replied. Lewison could see the haircut and freckles by then. This was a good old boy, and he'd be a cinch.

“Mister Cobb has already surrendered to the custody of the United States government,” Lewison called back. “He’s in my custody. You can get the attorney general on the horn if you want to dispute it.”

“That ain't...” the trooper started. He looked to his partner for back-up and got nothing but a shrug. “We got jurisdiction on the reservation.”

“Yes, you do. After mine,” Lewison said. He could feel the tribe's eyes on him. The little kid who couldn't jump fences, who ran away to the white college, who came back with a badge. They watched his every move like he was a coyote pacing their fence line. “I can cut him loose if you want, but I think he had unfinished business here.”

“No!” Cobb yelped. The mob tightened their grips on their weapons. They wouldn't let Cobb escaped into white hands, no matter what. What he'd done to those young women would not get swept under the rug. The troopers and their posse froze in place. They weren't ready for blood but they had their guns pulled nonetheless.

“Calm down, folks, what do you think I'm going to do, scalp him?” Lewison asked. The troopers looked at each other, trying to figure their move. The white men at their backs weren't eager to release one of their own to tribal justice, but they weren't trying to get bloody either. Usually, showing up and making demands worked for them. Refusal left them at a frustrated, unfamiliar crossroads.

Lewison let the tension build between the two groups until it was about to snap. It was the only way they'd accept him as the best alternative. He gave his best 'meet-me-in-the-middle' smirk and offered:

“Tell you what: you two boys send your friends home then meet me and Mister Cobb in White Cloud and we'll wait for the marshals together.”

The troopers looked at their shivering posse and at the seething Indians before them. If it was between scrapping with a whole town or letting a shithead rapist face the music, their choice was an easy one.

“Sounds like a deal,” they said after a moment.

“Good, see you over there,” Lewison said. The troopers went back the way they'd come, shutting down whatever arguments their own mob put up. The trucks and patrol cars pulled out and went back the way they'd come.

“You can't just take him,” Missus York hissed.

“Ma'am, you were a good friend of my mother's and you took care of me when I needed taking care of, so I'm going to do you a favor: I'm not letting you kill a man today,” Lewison told her. “Or any of you! Go home! I'll handle this.”

The mob grumbled and melted away, disappearing back through the trees the way they'd come. When the last of them was gone, Lewison felt his pounding heart finally slow.

“Get walking,” he muttered to Cobb. The rapist was shaking. His teeth were chattering and snot was freezing faster than it could stream out of his nose. He knew as well as Lewison that it was over eight miles to town.

Lewison shoved him forward, towards the stand of blanched, bare birch. The half-frozen creek waited beyond, then meandering fields rolling with snow drifts and iced-over dirt roads. He'd be lucky to make it halfway on foot, and that's if no one from the tribe tried any funny business.

“I'll freeze my toes off,” Cobb stammered as he tripped on a root.

Lewison shoved Cobb again. Even short a few digits, Cobb would still be a fine candidate for Ol' Sparky.

“Your toes, huh?” Lewison asked. “Well that would be a real shame.”

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Bruce Connors.