Death Along the Spirit Road by C. M. Wendelboe Page B

that it?”
    Reuben nodded. “I paid a bigger price than you’ll ever know. That gated community of the state penitentiary wasn’t exactly paradise, you know. You forgot me. But I never forgot you. Or the pride I feel for what you’ve become. I may publicly denounce you because you joined the FBI, but I’m still proud of my kola .”
    Manny dropped onto the tree stump and grabbed his handkerchief from his back pocket. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and face. He didn’t want to be Reuben’s kola . He didn’t want memories of a time when he adored Reuben. He just wanted to solve his case and get away from Pine Ridge. “I didn’t come here for a social visit. Like you said, I’m here to investigate Jason Red Cloud’s murder.”
    Reuben nodded and sat back in his lawn chair. He grabbed a pipe from his back pocket. He filled the bowl from a Prince Albert can and lit the pipe with an Ohio Blue Tip and tossed the match in the fire. Stalling. Manny read Reuben’s smoke ritual as taking time to anticipate questions and have answers ready in his mind. “All right. Ask away.”
    Manny dug a small notebook from his shirt pocket, not because he needed to refer to his notes, but as a distraction while he gauged reactions to his questions. “When was the last time you spoke with Jason?”
    Reuben blew another smoke ring and shrugged. “I can’t recall.”
    “Besides the argument at Big Bat’s?”
    Reuben laughed. “You have been busy. My ears on the rez heard right after all.”
    “The argument?” Manny asked, fishing now as he often did in interviews. He thumbed through pages in his notebook as if he possessed secret information that would trip Reuben.
    “OK,” Reuben said. He tamped out his pipe bowl on the side of the chair and pocketed it. Killing time. Concocting his answer. “Jason and I argued. His resort needed retaining walls built along with pads for the showers and RVs. We haggled on the price, and he awarded my Heritage Kids the contract. A few nights before he was murdered—last Wednesday—I was in Big Bat’s when Jason came in and I confronted him.”
    “About?”
    “I heard he’d given the job to a contractor from Black Hawk, and screwed my kids out of work. He blew me off. He said he’d thought it over, that it would hurt the corporate image if he hired an ex-con. He laughed and said it was just business.”
    “And you were mad at him.”
    “Livid.”
    “Enough to kill him?”
    “Slowly. Deliciously.”
    “And did you?”
    Reuben laughed, but deep creases furrowed his forehead. “I got no intention of going back to the joint. But as a matter of record, I grabbed him and threw him against the wall by the pop dispenser. Hard enough that a picture hanging on the opposite wall crashed to the floor.”
    “Your contacts from the old days didn’t do you any good?”
    “Not one bit.”
    As Manny sat across from him, a deep sadness for Reuben overcame him that had nothing to do with Reuben’s butt sagging through missing slats in the seat of his lawn chair. It was Reuben’s choice of associating with the likes of Jason Red Cloud and AIM back in his youth. Jason had been there with Reuben at all of AIM’s major headline grabbers. But the year Reuben was sentenced for the Two Moons murder, the year Jason’s parents died in that wreck, Jason quit AIM for the easy life of college and the family business. Even now, Reuben held a grudge against Jason.
    “Why the hell didn’t you get an attorney and make him honor the contract?”
    Reuben retied his moccasins and flexed his foot for the feel. “A verbal contract with an ex-con, a murderer who lined up work for a bunch of delinquent kids? Who the hell would believe me?”
    Reuben was right. Jason’s reputation as a businessman was beyond reproach, and Reuben would have been laughed out of any courtroom.
    They looked at each other, saying nothing, for there was nothing more to say between them. They had rehashed the past. They had traded