Page 50 of It Takes a Thief

My free hand shoved him, and he easily collapsed on his back like a broken umbrella. Planting one boot on either side of his hips, I asked one more time. “Are. You. Working. For Noodlum.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

Completely relieved this nonsense was over with, I shot him through the forehead and holstered my piece.

It wasn’t a dramatic burial, not by a long shot. The guy’s head just jumped a little, and the bullet was lodged in the earth below him.

Behind me, Maddy let out a whoosh of breath. She was immediately upon me, clinging to my back like a baby monkey.

“Thank God, Ford, thank God, thank God, thank you, oh I love you, thank you for coming.”

Smiling, I tried to pry her off while turning toward her. We were still standing over a stiff, after all. With her arms locked around my neck, I managed to walk a few steps away from Empire. She peppered my face and neck with kisses.

“You did the right thing,” she said in between kisses. “That dipstick was going to kill more native girls.”

“Where are the eyeballs?” I asked, curious.

Galileo heard me. He was soon standing next to us like a reporter. “Up by the trailer steps. I’ve only seen a person killed once before. I used to be afraid of murderers until I saw one in my bedroom late at night at the group home. Then I realized well, I couldn’t change the fact that he was going to kill me. Because he kept, you know, telling me that.”

Maddy and I looked sideways at Galileo. “Can you get the eyeballs?” I asked him. “Let’s take a look inside this van.”

“No thank you,” said Maddy, taking a few steps away from it. “It’s been in the sun. I can see flies buzzing inside the windows.”

To no one’s surprise, the van was locked. But I fished through the corpse’s pockets and soon found a set of keys. One of them worked. “I wonder who owns this van,” I mused. I knew Noodlum would be way too smart, at least as far as this went, to be the registered owner of a van his stooge used to transport kidnapped women.

While my wife stood by, casting occasional glances at the loathsome van, I sat in the driver’s seat. Of course, the first thing I did was rummage through the glove box and look behind the sun visors. No one who’d drive a rape van would keep their registration handy. Nothing. The ashtray, surprisingly, was full of cigarette butts. I remembered that Noodlum smoked. When Galileo brought me the eyeballs, I asked him if Empire smoked.

“Not that I ever saw. There aren’t any cigarettes in his trailer. I would’ve asked him to smoke outside if he did.”

That was funny. A guy who owned a ramshackle, piss- and meth-smelling trailer didn’t want anyone smoking inside it.

Yup, the Tupperware was full of human eyeballs. And from the size of the pupil diameter, I could conclude they were all women’s. I put them on the console between the two front seats. I was wearing leather riding gloves and Galileo had what looked like surgical gloves on, so I wasn’t worried about prints.

“Galileo, can you help me look through this heap?”

“Sure,” he said cheerily, sliding back the rear door. The van rocked only slightly when the reedy guy got into it. “Well, right off the bat, here’s a bra.”

Turns out, we found all kinds of women’s underthings back there. I instructed Galileo to put them in a heap where they’d be visible. We wanted this murder, and maybe more, solved by the Rez police. We’d hand them every clue we could.

“What’s up with the sexy cartoons?” Galileo asked me. I had to give him credit. He was trying to understand the inexplicable world around him.

“Beats the fuck out of me. People like to imagine all sorts of crap to get off.”

“Kids have imaginary friends sometimes. I used to pretend I was friends with Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman.”

I frowned. “Whatever the fuck for?”

“He was an escape artist, wasn’t he? I used to pretend we were plotting our big escape.”

“From the group home.” I sighed.

“From the group home.”

I had to hand it to Maddy, too. She’d gotten this poor shepherd out of a clusterfuck of almost Biblical proportions. She’d told me that Rez mortality rate was more than 31% higher than the average US rate. The leading cause of death was accidental injury. In other words, being run over by a drunk driver while you yourself are drunkenly trying to cross the highway. Galileo didn’t drink.

“Yáadilá t’a’iiyahii,” he breathed.

I thought that meant something like “Holy shit, what a butthead” in Diné. I half-crawled toward the back of the van where he was crouched.