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radio.
    “I’m backing everybody off,” said the tac commander. As Lucas leaned on the roof to watch, the tac commander sent a patrolman scrambling along the row of cars, to warn the ERUs and the uniformed officers that people werecoming out of the house. A moment later, a white towel waved at the door and a woman stepped out, holding a baby. She was dragging another kid, maybe three years old, by one arm.
    “Come on, come on, you’re okay,” the detective called out. She looked back once, then walked quickly, head down, on the sidewalk through the line of cars.
    Lucas and the tac commander moved over to intercept her.
    “Who are you?” the tac commander asked.
    “Lila Bluebird.”
    “Is that your husband in there?”
    “Yes.”
    “Has he got anybody with him?”
    “He’s all alone,” the woman said. Tears streamed down her face. She was wearing a man’s cowboy shirt and shorts made of stretchy black material spotted with lint fuzzies. The baby clung to her shirt, as though he knew what was going on; the other kid hung on her hand. “He said to tell you he’ll be out in a minute.”
    “He drunk? Crack? Crank? Anything like that?”
    “No. No alcohol or drugs in our house. But he’s not right.”
    “What’s that? You mean he’s crazy? What . . .”
    The question was never finished. The door of the Bluebird house burst open and Tony Bluebird hurdled onto the lawn, running hard. He was bare-chested, the long obsidian blade dangling from his neck on a rawhide thong. Two eagle feathers were pinned to his headdress and he had pistols in both hands. Ten feet off the porch, he brought them up and opened fire on the nearest squad, closing on the cops behind it. The cops shot him to pieces. The gunfire stood him up and knocked him down.
    After a second of stunned silence, Lila Bluebird began to wail and the older kid, confused, clutched at her leg and began screaming. The radio man called for paramedics. Three cops moved up to Bluebird, their pistols still pointed at his body, and nudged his weapons out of reach.
    The tac commander looked at Lucas, his mouth working for a moment before the words came out. “Jesus Christ,” he blurted. “What the fuck was that all about?”

CHAPTER
3
    Wild grapes covered the willow trees, dangling forty and fifty feet down to the waterline. In the weak light from the Mendota Bridge, the island looked like a three-masted schooner with black sails, cruising through the mouth of the Minnesota River into the Mississippi.
    Two men walked onto a sand spit at the tip of the island. They’d had a fire earlier in the evening, roasting wieners on sharp sticks and heating cans of SpaghettiOs. The fire had guttered down to coals, but the smell of the burning pine still hung in the cool air. A hundred feet back from the water’s edge, a sweat lodge squatted under the willows.
    “We ought to go up north. It’d be nice now, out on the lakes,” said the taller one.
    “It’s been too warm. Too many mosquitoes.”
    The tall man laughed. ‘Bullshit, mosquitoes. We’re Indians, dickhead.”
    “Them fuckin’ Chippewa would take our hair,” the short one objected, the humor floating through his voice.
    “Not us. Kill their men, screw their women. Drink their beer.”
    “I ain’t drinkin’ no Grain Belt,” said the short one. There was a moment’s comfortable silence between them. Theshort one took a breath, let it out in an audible sigh and said, “Too much to do. Can’t fuck around up north.”
    The short man’s face had sobered. The tall man couldn’t see it, but sensed it. “I wish I could go pray over Bluebird,” the tall man said. After a moment, he added, “I hoped he would go longer.”
    “He wasn’t smart.”
    “He was spiritual.”
    “Yep.”
    The men were Mdewakanton Sioux, cousins, born the same day on the banks of the Minnesota River. One had been named Aaron Sunders and the other Samuel Close, but only the bureaucrats called them that. To everyone else