War Party (A John Tall Wolf Novel Book 2) Read online

  War Party

  A John Tall Wolf Novel

  Joseph Flynn

  Stray Dog Press, Inc.

  Springfield, IL

  2013

  Praise for Joseph Flynn’s novels

  “Flynn is an excellent storyteller.” — Booklist

  “Flynn keeps the pages turning.” — Houston Chronicle

  “Flynn propels his plot with potent but flexible force.” — Publishers Weekly

  Digger

  “A mystery cloaked as cleverly as (and perhaps better than) any John Grisham work.”

  — Denver Post

  “Surefooted, suspenseful and in its breathless final moments unexpectedly heartbreaking.”

  — Booklist

  “An exciting, gritty, emotional page-turner.” — Robert K. Tannenbaum, New York Times Bestselling Author of True Justice

  The Next President

  “The Next President bears favorable comparison to such classics as The Best Man, Advise and Consent and The Manchurian Candidate.” — Booklist

  “A thriller fast enough to read in one sitting.” — Rocky Mountain News

  The President’s Henchman

  “Marvelously entertaining.” — ForeWord Magazine

  Also by Joseph Flynn

  The Concrete Inquisition

  Digger

  The Next President

  Hot Type

  Farewell Performance

  Gasoline, Texas

  The President’s Henchman, A Jim McGill Novel [#1]

  The Hangman’s Companion, A Jim McGill Novel [#2]

  The K Street Killer, A Jim McGill Novel [#3]

  Part 1: The Last Ballot Cast, A Jim McGill Novel [#4 Part 1]

  Part 2: The Last Ballot Cast, A Jim McGill Novel [#4 Part 2]

  The Devil on the Doorstep, A Jim McGill Novel [#5]

  McGill’s Short Cases 1-3, Three Jim McGill Short Stories

  Round Robin

  Nailed, A Ron Ketchum Mystery

  Defiled, A Ron Ketchum Mystery

  Tall Man in Ray-Bans, A John Tall Wolf Novel

  One False Step

  Blood Street Punx

  Still Coming

  Still Coming Expanded Edition

  Hangman, A Western Novella

  Copyright

  War Party

  A John Tall Wolf Novel

  Joseph Flynn

  Published by Stray Dog Press, Inc.

  Springfield, IL 62704, U.S.A.

  © kandrom, inc., 2013

  All rights reserved

  Author website: www.josephflynn.com

  Flynn, Joseph

  War Party / Joseph Flynn

  68,169 words eBook

  ISBN 978-0-9887868-7-5

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously; any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photo © 2013, Catherine C. Flynn

  eBook design by Aha! Designs

  Dedication

  To the psychology professor at Loyola University who persuaded me to follow my passion rather than become a lawyer.

  Acknowledgements

  For Catherine, Caitie and Anne for helping me to limit the number of glitches in this book and keep my overhead low. Otherwise, I’d have to charge a whole lot more for these books. Any errors that remain are strictly my responsibility.

  Author’s Notes

  This is a work of fiction. Neither the characters nor the Native American reservations named in the story are real. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, of course, exists within the United States Department of the Interior, and within the BIA its Office of Justice Services is “responsible for the overall management of the Bureau’s law enforcement program,” but my research turned up no one who has the job description I gave to John Tall Wolf. This mixture of fact and fiction falls under the heading of literary license. If you’re a purist who demands complete realism, I recommend you stick to nonfiction, and good luck finding an author in that field who doesn’t make mistakes or omissions.

  As to a white male writing about Native American characters, that involves a bit of license, too. From my point of view, that license is rooted in our common humanity. If writers were to focus only on characters who shared their own backgrounds, we would establish a regime of literary apartheid.

  — Chapter 1 —

  New Orleans, Monday, August 19th

  In the midst of a steamy hot start to the work week and the tail end sludge of the morning rush hour, all the traffic lights in New Orleans turned green. Every driver who was in a hurry to get somewhere, and that was pretty much all of them, suddenly had the right of way, and was aghast to find the sonsabitches on the cross streets apparently thought the same thing. It would later be said, with only slight exaggeration, that the screech of braking tires and clang of colliding cars could be heard all the way to Baton Rouge.

  In short order, the howling and whining of ambulances and police patrol cars added to the ruckus. The various emergency service vehicles were not only foiled in reaching their destinations, they thickened the overheating stew of gridlock. Worsened tempers, too, with their added hubbub.

  In the spirit of the moment, every driver in the city seemed to lean on his horn.

  The cops, many of whom were now out of their cars, might have begun to direct traffic manually, if they hadn’t had their hands full breaking up fistfights between motorists who were as overheated as their cars. Blood flowed at several intersections. For just a moment, many combatants held their punches as a number of gunshots sounded above the general din.

  Those caught in the automotive pandemonium who had any sense retreated to their cars, locked themselves in and ducked below window level. This pragmatic approach to survival only guaranteed that a resolution to the citywide impasse wouldn’t happen anytime soon.

  Almost none of the people in their stiflingly hot metal cocoons noticed that aside from the traffic signals there wasn’t another light on in town. Ninety-odd percent of the city’s power grid had been taken down. An absence of electrical power in a modern city, of course, was always seen by some as a license to commit mayhem. Conditions grew worse.

  Beau Duplessis, a security guard at the Thibodeaux State Bank on Rampart Street, had only to look at the mess outside the main door to know something bad was happening. Cars all jammed up, people going crazy. A retired NOPD patrol officer, he had first-hand knowledge that criminal behavior was more communicable than the Ebola virus and was often just as deadly. When the shit started to fly, the first thing you had to do was set your defenses and be ready to —

  Wonder what the hell else might happen.

  Like having a bunch of guys on black motorcycles wearing black helmets that covered their faces roar up to the front of the bank.

  Pull itty-bitty machine guns out from under their black jackets.

  Whip off their helmets and, good Lord, they were Indians. Faces covered with war paint. Long hair tied back. Some of them wearing eagle feathers. Beau almost soiled his britches then and there. But his training and a sense of duty kicked in.

  Not that he had any intention of going for his gun. No, sir. If he started swapping shots with those guys
, they’d put more holes in him than Katrina had put in the levees. He lunged at the front door. If he could lock them out, that might be all that was needed. The bank’s doors and windows were made of a polycarbonate resin. Ought to stop the slugs from small grease guns.

  Beau hit the door a heartbeat before the first bad guy did. He pressed the button to shoot the bolt but it didn’t respond. He did lose a little something in his underpants right then, but he tried to throw the lock by hand. An Indian pushed back on the door, and he was bigger than Beau.

  By now, the thirty-seven people in the bank, clients and staff, had caught notice of the struggle going on at the front door. Shrieks rose from several women and more than a few men. The other security guard on duty, Harold Murtree, might have rushed to Beau’s side, lent his weight to a push that would have allowed the door to be locked, and changed the whole course of the day’s events.

  Only Harold was too busy pulling off his uniform cap and shirt and disposing of them in a waste paper receptacle. With only a slight hesitation, he put his gunbelt and sidearm in the bin, too. Now he was just another guy in a pair of slacks and Doctor John T-shirt. The maneuver might have been a clever ruse, have the robbers think he was just another civilian; he could go for his gun at an opportune moment.

  But Harold raised his hands in an attitude of surrender. Sweat beaded on his brow. He whispered the first prayer that came to his mind.

  The only other person acting in a peculiar fashion was a man in his mid-twenties. He had a gleam in his eye and looked as if he was watching the coolest TV show that had ever aired, not a crime that might take his life. He reached a hand into a pocket of his jeans and came out with something he held close against his right leg.

  By then, Beau’s resistance was overcome by a second Indian pushing on the other side of the door. The robbers poured into the bank, leaving two of their number outside to guard against a threat from the street and to protect their motorcycles.

  One of the robbers rewarded Beau’s attempt at heroism with a blow to the jaw from the butt of his weapon. The former cop went down in a heap. Several people moaned, anticipating that the guard would be killed for his resistance.

  That didn’t happen.

  One of the robbers held up a sign printed in large block letters.

  It said: EVERYBODY GET DOWN.

  Everyone did just that.

  One member of the Indians’ war party kept watch over the people now lying on the floor. Made sure they stayed put. Several of the bank customers were sobbing softly, trying to keep the volume down so they didn’t call attention to themselves. Others murmured prayers, but these were muted, too. Men in warpaint with automatic weapons inspired the urge to become invisible.

  After his first visual sweep, the robber tasked with watching the bank’s cowering customers relaxed and turned his attention to the other members of his tribe to see how they were doing. He didn’t notice the young man who aimed his mobile phone at him and got busy shooting a video of the robbery.

  Four Indians were cleaning out the tellers’ cages. The war party’s chief directed their movements with hand signals. The young guy with the phone captured that and the deft choreography of the men grabbing the cash. Taking chances that made him shiver, the young guy made sure he got head shots of every Indian in the bank.

  Seeing the one that was supposed to be watching him start to turn his head back to where the biggest knot of customers lay, the young man pulled his phone down under his chest and lay still with his eyes squeezed shut. He started to pray, too, that he wouldn’t be shot. And neither would anyone else.

  He didn’t need a bloodbath to make his movie a hit.

  A moment later, his prayer for salvation seemed to be answered in the affirmative. He heard several motorcycles roar away. He opened his eyes. The robbers were gone. Everybody else was still on the floor. The young man looked at the time signature on his phone.

  His video was less than two minutes long.

  The robbers had done their work that quickly.

  Came, stole and took off. Without saying a word.

  The young man jumped to his feet. He was the next one out the door.

  Marcellus Darcy stood outside his car on Rampart Street just up the block from the bank. The heap’s air conditioner wasn’t working, but what could you expect from a government fleet vehicle? Marcellus watched his hometown go crazy. Not for the first time. Katrina was the mother of all social collapses, of course. You could hardly blame New Orleans for that. A biblical flood came along with no ark in sight, people anywhere would get excitable.

  Civil unrest in the Big Easy usually manifested on a smaller scale, though. Often on or near Mardi Gras. White off-duty cops beating up black transportation workers. Revelers of any color shooting one another. The sorts of things that while regrettable were comprehensible within the contexts of alcohol consumption and racial or personal animosity.

  What was happening that morning, though, was already way beyond street corner brawls or shootings. It looked to Darcy as if every damn car and truck in the city had been all but welded bumper to bumper and people were fighting mad. Several of them within his view were punching and kicking each other.

  Fortunately, the combatants seemed both equally matched and inept.

  No knockouts, no stompings. No mobs beating on particular individuals.

  As a U.S. postal inspector, Marcellus was a sworn federal law enforcement officer. True, his normal duties were to defend the nation’s mail system, its employees, infrastructure and customers. But he carried a badge and a gun, had the power of arrest and served federal search warrants and subpoenas. The Postal Inspection Service was the oldest federal law enforcement agency in the United States.

  So, at the moment, it was a matter of personal judgment as to how he should exercise his authority. It was only when he saw a big red-faced guy in a suit going after a kid who looked barely old enough to drive and weighed maybe a buck-twenty sopping wet that he knew he had to get involved.

  He ran over to the fight taking place next to the unintended coupling of a Ford Focus and a Mercedes SUV. Darcy saw the kid duck a roundhouse punch that would have killed him had it landed. He then kicked the big lug right on a kneecap. The guy howled and his arms shot out as he sought to balance on one foot.

  As luck would have it, one of the big guy’s hands found the kid’s mop of hair. He grabbed hold and lifted the kid off the ground. Held him at a level just right to punch his lights out. Still standing on one leg, the big man cocked his right hand. There was no chance any mercy would be shown, especially not after the kid kicked his opponent’s other leg.

  Marcellus arrived just in time to catch the big guy’s wrist.

  He was even bigger than the guy with the Mercedes.

  That was disconcerting enough to the red-faced guy.

  He goggled at Marcellus and dropped the kid. When Marcellus put a handcuff on him he said, “Hey, wait a minute.”

  Marcellus didn’t. He got both of the guy’s hands cuffed behind his back.

  The red-faced guy cried, “That little shit started it.”

  Sure enough, the kid grinned, like he was getting away with something.

  Marcellus told him, “Stay put. You ain’t goin’ anywhere neither.”

  The kid looked like he might run, and catching him in all the chaos would be a mother, if he took off. But the look on Marcellus’ face told the kid he’d find him sooner or later.

  So he didn’t flee. Just said, “That fat bastard ‘bout pulled out half my hair.”

  If Marcellus could have simply sent them both on their separate ways, he would have. But their cars were stuck together. If he turned both of them loose and they got back into it when he turned his back, any resulting misfortune would land on him.

  And he was not about to jeopardize his second pension, only five years away.

  The postal inspector was trying to decide what to do next when the first motorcycle roared past on the nearby sidewalk. Big black bi
ke and … another one looking just like the first followed right behind. That made two and … zoom, zoom, zoom, roar, roar, roar. Six more of them followed.

  All eight of the motorcycles were black. Seemed to have some kind of Indian head design on the gas tanks. All the drivers had black helmets covering their faces. Each bike had saddle bags. The last of them to pass mustn’t have had one of its bags fastened tight. It hit a bump in the sidewalk and a banded stack of cash flew out and landed on the sidewalk where Marcellus could see it.

  The big guy and kid asked the same thing, “Who the hell was that?”

  Marcellus said, “Only people in town goin’ anywhere.”

  He told the kid, “Go bring me that money.”

  The kid looked at the postal inspector and the cash, weighing his options.

  Marcellus knew what he was thinking.

  He said, “You run with that money, you’ll wish I let this guy hit you.”

  — Chapter 2 —

  Montreal, Quebec

  John Tall Wolf, a special agent with the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, strolled along the rue de la Montagne with Sergeant Rebecca Bramley of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The two of them were on vacation. The morning air was clear and bright with a hint of fall in the breeze. They had two days of leisure time left together.

  John had suggested they go to Paris.

  Rebecca had said, “Montreal is Francophone, closer, less expensive and the exchange rate for the American dollar is better, too.”

  “Irresistibly romantic,” John said. “How could I argue with that?”

  “I’m saving you fourteen hours of flying time. I bet we could find better ways to put that time to use. How’s that for romantic?”