This week’s Friday Read is another one from the archives, another early story where I was still experimenting and finding myself as a writer. It was also my first attempt at something close to mystery. It leans a little toward the hard-boiled detective side of fiction as well, which is interesting.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy Four Corners!
Four Corners
Buckle dropped the newspaper on the table in front me, chewing his nicotine gum with an open mouth. “This is yours.”
He didn’t speak much, but when he did, he was so eloquent. I looked at the paper then back up to Buckle. “I don’t subscribe.”
“Not the paper, Reagan,” he said, pointing to the top article on the front page. “The job.”
I read the first few lines. Someone had chopped a person up and spread the body parts out across the four points of the Four Corners National Monument. “Jesus.”
“Harry wants you on it.” Buckle leaned in close when he said this. I heard his lips and gums and tongue mashing and moving the little white piece of gum in his mouth.
“You’d think if they’re going to make you chew a gum, they might actually add some breath freshener to it.”
Buckle stood up straight, blew into his hand, and sniffed. He shook his head then walked out of the break room, down the hall, and presumably back into the security closet that he called home. Harry may have gave him the title—Security Manager—but Buckle was the muscle. That’s it. The job was a front, something to make him look respectable to the outside world. Not a dumb move by Harry, but if the casino ever needed real security, I wasn’t sure Buckle would know what to do.
I took a minute to read the entire article. It wouldn’t be the first murder Harry had me investigate, but this was was more brutal than the others. Most everything else was a simple bullet to the head, a beating gone too far, a knife driven into just the right spot.
Those investigations stayed in house. With me. So did the thefts and people disappearing and the exploration of new business contacts and their histories. These were the things I was good at. The things I was trained for. The things I had done while I was still a cop.
This, though, this was different. And I knew why Harry wanted me on the job.
It wasn’t the type of case I’d work normally. The victim was not part of the organization. He wasn’t a business partner. He was a Native American who had lived on the reservation like I did. He did so because of his blood. I did so because they liked having me there.
The reason Harry wanted me on this was because the placement of the body and the victim involved federal law enforcement, local law enforcement from four different states, and the tribe police. All that heat converged on the main trucking route we used. Harry couldn’t deliver his customer’s products in a timely fashion without that route. And he couldn’t just send trucks loaded down with stolen goods, guns, and drugs into the open arms of cops.
I was about to stand and head out to the casino floor when Harry came into the room. “Hey, sweetheart.”
He kissed me on the top of the head and I thought about the night we had two months ago. Nights like that happened from time to time. He knew and I knew that they couldn’t happen all the time. He was twenty years older than me, he was on the police big board, and my father was still a detective with Dewpoint P.D.
“Harry, this case,” I said. “What the fuck?”
“I know, I know.” He sat down across from me.
“Where are you sending the trucks?”
He smiled. “See, there’s a reason I hired you. You catch on, girly. You catch on real quick. Right now, I’m not sending them anywhere. That’s why you’re on the job.”
“I’ll head out to the rez this afternoon, start asking about the vic.”
Harry’s hair was gray and long, but he kept it combed back. When he nodded his approval to me, I watched two or three strands fall across his forehead. I wanted to reach out and brush them away. I wanted to come across that table and kiss him. But I knew everything happened on his terms. In his time.
I winked, grabbed my John Deere trucker’s cap off the table and put it on, sliding my ponytail through the back. People on the reservation knew I had been a cop, but people around here—Native American or not—preferred the down-home, country girl. And that’s what I’d give them.
***
Dewpoint, Arizona is made up of 2,238 residents, not including the tribe. The northern point of the Hopi Indian Reservation stretched across the bottom half of Dewpoint, in the mountains of Northern Arizona. It was a short drive to Four Corners, and it was a good distribution hub.
I had called my father on the drive and got the victim’s home address. Jonathan Sakeva lived a couple miles from my trailer on the rez. Hopi Police had already been there, interviewed his wife and sister. They’d collected evidence and packaged it all up for the FBI, I assumed.
My dad, always hesitant with the information, had asked me about the job I was working. “Reagan, you know the people you work for. I shouldn’t be helping you on any of this.”
“Dad, I worked casino security and Jonathan Saveka was suspected of counting cards. My boss—”
“Harry Belmont,” my father said, interrupting. “Do you know who Harry Belmont is?”
“Yes, Dad. He’s my boss. He’s worried that someone at the casino took things personally, and they want me to check in on it. That’s all.”
My father knew I wasn’t just some private investigator working casino crimes. But he also loved me, felt bad for the way I fell out of the department. I had felt bad too, but I’d had eight years to think about it, and I was tired of apologizing for a mistake I didn’t make.
But the thoughts of the boy I shot didn’t just go away. I could see his face, his hands, the quick movements. And I still saw him on the ground, bleeding, his mother being held back behind the police tape.
After he gave me the address, my dad warned me that the feds were keep a tight lid on the case. They were trying to push out locals. It made sense, at least from their perspective, from their perception of the police around there. Can’t have stupid hicks from Northern Arizona fucking up a murder investigation in which someone was scattered across four states.
I stopped my El Camino in front of the squat adobe house where Saveka had once lived. Before popping the door open, I wondered how someone from the tribe could get themselves mixed up in something like this.
As soon as I climbed out of the car and stepped into the snow-packed dirt in front of Saveka’s house, I was hit with a rock.
“Go home,” a voice yelled from somewhere near the house. “You people did this to him.”
Another rock hit my car, and that’s when I got pissed. I leaned in through the driver’s side window, opened the glove box, and pulled out my revolver. When I came out of the window and leveled the gun toward the house, the rocks stopped flying. And then I saw the girl.
She was standing on the porch in a brown canvas dress with a black hoodie over top that was two sizes two big. Her eyes were wide and looking right at my .38. I lowered it then slid it into the waistband of my jeans near my back.
“Why are you throwing rocks at me?”
The girl, who couldn’t be but twelve, shook her head. “Because you did this to him.”
I walked across the lot, careful to avoid the patches of snow packed in so tight that they had turned to ice. “Who did?”
“You.” She pointed at me. “Your people. The casino.”
“He was your brother?”
She nodded. “And he is gone because of your people.”
She meant Harry. That’s who everyone meant when they talked about the casino. Harry didn’t own the casino, of course. It was on Native American land and owned by the tribe. But Harry financed it, and it financed him.
“My name is Reagan Jones, and I’m here to help figure out what happened to your brother. I want to find the person who did this to him.”
She considered this for a moment. All I really cared about was solving the case so that Harry was happy, so that business could flow again. I thought about my father in that moment. He would have cared about Saveka.
The little girl shook her head. “You can’t do anything.”
“If you help me, I can.”
“How?”
I took stepped onto the porch and sat down next to her. After a moment she as well. “Did you see anything weird before this happened to your brother?”
“Like what?”
“Anything that you normally wouldn’t see.”
“They already asked me all this. They asked if I saw any people, any cars, any anything.”
I nodded. Of course they did. “Well, maybe they forgot to ask you some questions. So, let me ask you this one. Did the police take anything from around here?”
She thought about this, tilted her head. “They looked around a lot, but the only thing they took was a piece of trash.”
“Trash? What trash?”
The girl shrugged. “I saw them pick it up, but I couldn’t tell what it was. They put it in a plastic bag and took it away.”
“Did you see which police took the trash? Was it Hopi police?”
She nodded.
Thank God, I thought. If they hadn’t sent the evidence along to the FBI, I might still be able to get a look at what they took. I’d have to call in a favor.
The mother wasn’t home and there wasn’t anything else for me to ask, so I patted the girl on the shoulder, and pulled a business card out from my back pocket.
I looked at the card. Reagan Jones, P.I. It had my email address and phone number listed. It also had the casino’s address printed at the bottom. You had to have an address to qualify for the investigator’s license, so that was mine.
The girl took the card and slapped it off her thigh. She looked up at me, her eyes a little wider. I smiled and told her I appreciated her help. Then I left before she could cry.
Hopi P.D. had a quiet station in the northern part of the reservation. It’s even quieter in the winter. When the snow falls and the ice builds up along the walks, the few officers working tend to stay home.
So when I got there by late evening, the lights were off and the doors were locked. I dialed Brandon on my cell. Time to call in that favor.
He answered after six rings. “Hey, Reagan.”
“You guys don’t work around here, or what?”
“Ain’t shit to do.”
“I got something for you to do.”
Brandon’s voice lowered, got playful. “Oh, I bet you do.”
“Shut up.”
“What do you need?”
“Heard you guys pulled some evidence from the Saveka house.”
“Yes we did, but it’s going to the feds.”
I climbed back into the El Camino and cranked the engine. I let it idle on the side of the highway next to the darkened police station. “Has it gone yet?”
“No, first thing tomorrow.”
“I need to see it before it goes.”
“Reagan, I can’t let you take the evidence.”
I pulled out onto the highway and headed for my trailer. “I don’t want to take it. I just want to see what it is.”
Brandon was quiet for a while. “Shit. Yeah, all right. Come by first thing. I’m supposed to run it up to their command post.”
“I’ll see you bright and early.” I clicked off and drove as the sun set behind me.
Part II of Four Corners comes next Friday. Hope to see you back here, but let me know what you thought about Part I.
Solid beginning. I like the morally gray protagonist. Pacing was perfect. Kept the story moving. I'm looking forward to next week's installment.