White Wolf McLeod Page 2

  “Cry ‘uncle’, you wimp!” they yelled at him again and again, but White Wolf would not give in. He withstood his licking until the boys were physically tired. Finally, they left him lying on the ground and took his bicycle as their victory trophy.

  “Thanks for the bike, loser!” they taunted.

  White Wolf picked himself up off the ground and spat out a mixture of blood and grass. He felt bruised all over, but everything seemed to work all right. He walked slowly home, willing away the pain in his muscles and bones. He had only one thought in mind: he might have lost a battle, but the war was far from over. His enemies had made one mistake, a typical White Man’s error: they had not killed him. He went to the back of the house looking for the weapon that would even out the odds and found it in the shed. Then carrying a two-by-four that was about as long as his arm, he sought out his attackers.

  The boys were sitting on the lawn in front of a house that belonged to one of them, laughing at how easy it had been to beat up the scrawny Indian kid down the block. White Wolf’s bicycle lay carelessly and haphazardly on the sidewalk in front of them where they casually kicked it or threw stones at it. They looked up and saw White Wolf approaching and began to taunt him again. The stick of lumber was hidden behind his back.

  “Hey, what’s the matter, runt? Didn’t get enough the first time?”

  When White Wolf had decided that the war had decidedly been won in his favor, he had left quite a toll in his wake. He never felt anger as he wielded the two-by-four as a club. It was not an Indian tradition to unnecessarily kill another warrior, although death was often a fitting punishment for stealing another tribe’s horse, if caught. After all these boys had stolen his bicycle, which amounted to the same as a horse to White Wolf. Normally, in combat, just to touch another warrior and walk away was considered a fitting victory, for it left the opponent humiliated in the eyes of his peers and village. And touch these boys he did. When White Wolf retrieved his bicycle and rode back home, he had left two boys lying unconscious on the sidewalk bleeding from head wounds. One had a broken arm, and the other a broken leg, and both suffered bruises all over their bodies that were visible for a long time to come.

  Naturally, the boys’ fathers came to the house and bitterly complained about White Wolf’s trouncing of their sons. Ernest heard the whole story, including White Wolf’s side of the story. Then he went into the house and retrieved a revolver from the living room cabinet. In plain view of the boys’ fathers he told White Wolf: “Next time, use this.”

  Then to the surprised and outraged fathers, Ernest wielded his invested law enforcement authority and stated, “I’ll brook no thieving by anyone in this town. Nor will I countenance any donnybrooking for the sake of fun or just being mean. You’ll be thankful that I won’t be pressing charges against either of your sons or against you!”

  THE RATTLING OF chains brought Sam McLeod out of his reverie, and he instinctively stepped back as the body was lowered to the floor. A quick investigation impressed him that the victim was a Hispanic male in his early twenties. The clothes were torn and faded, like those worn by a farmhand, but the fingertips of the refined, manicured fingers did not match in any conceivable way the hands of either a seaman or a laborer. A lack of identification on the body only deepened the mystery.

  “What d’ya think, bossman?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me that the hook wound was supposed to hide the true nature of his injury.”

  “So, who do you think he was?”

  “At this juncture, I don’t wish to speculate. These weren’t the clothes he was wearing when he was murdered. Whoever dressed him up was probably trying to reinforce a message to whoever employed him.”

  “Any ideas?” Tim pressed.

  “Yeah,” McLeod shot back. “Get him out of here. He’s beginning to stink.”

  THAT EVENING, MARY debriefed the team at the Sheraton Inn where they were all staying. “The crew all claim that the victim was a stowaway. Although there were several variations in the way they related their testimony, the gist of their story basically states that one of the night watch crewmen heard an unusual noise while they were out at sea. He alerted the officer on watch, who, in turn, woke the Captain. They investigated and supposedly surprised the victim hiding in the hold. On discovery, the victim started going crazy and making a ruckus. It took six men to supposedly subdue him, and while they were struggling, he conveniently fell on the hook. Somehow the chain started moving, and that’s how the victim was raised up off the deck. Being superstitious, no one wanted to touch him, and that’s when the captain radioed the Coast Guard for help.”

  McLeod allowed a smile to shape his mouth. His team had known him long enough to recognize the thought processes that were humming behind his intense blue-green eyes. They also knew from experience that he would not share any of his suppositions until all the facts were in, and that meant a great deal of legwork on their part.

  “What do we have from forensics?”

  “Not a whole lot,” Tim reported. “Just the preliminaries. He was stabbed through the back—something large and blunt—probably before he was put aboard the ship. The lab believes he was put on ice, literally, before being hung up to dry. The clothes weren’t his; someone dressed him after he was dead. They found something under his fingernails—a few fibers and stuff—but they need a little more time to analyze them.”

  “Call the ATF,” McLeod instructed. “Tell them that Christmas just came early. The Marta is all theirs for the taking. They’ll probably want to take it apart from stem to stern. However, we want something in return. We want them to share whatever information they discover for handing it to them on a silver platter.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  UNCLE LUIGI

  “WHEN YOU WERE born, your real mother was very sick.” Running Deer told the young boy. “The White Man’s doctors expected her to die.”

  “Mother Bird?”

  Grandfather was not accustomed to being interrupted, and his gaze spoke more than his disapproval. “No. I am your real mother’s father, and Grandmother Bird is her real mother.

  “Your real mother has since recovered, and now she is able to take care of you properly, along with your two brothers. Tomorrow, with the rising sun, your real mother and father will arrive to take you home.”

  White Wolf stood up and looked as defiant as he could seem at his Grandfather. “I will not go with anyone except you and my Indian mother,” he declared adamantly.

  “The person you believe to be your mother is your Grandmother,” his Grandfather patiently told him a second time. “The woman and the man who are coming to take you home are your real mother and father. The law of both the People and the White Man are correct in this.”

  “I refuse to go!” White Wolf declared. He had not shouted the words, the action of a disobedient child. Rather, he formed his stand as a Brave would, not insulting but sincere. He immediately left the teepee that he had called home—that was his home—and stopped a few paces away, fighting the tears that came unbidden. An Indian never cries or shows his emotion to anyone but himself, and he struggled with himself for mastery and self-control. He then contemplated the village that had raised him from his earliest memories, seeking answers to his dilemma. He thought maybe he should talk to the Medicine Man who had supervised him in the arts of the shamanistic profession. The Medicine Man had recognized in the boy that the Great Spirit had blessed him with a knowledge and awareness of the universe, and he believed that the boy would one day replace him as the spiritual leader and healer of the tribe.

  As the boy meditated on his predicament, a vision appeared to him. He saw himself in a strange White Man’s world that had severed itself from everything he had known and come to love. This other world was so devoid of the Spirit and so alien to his own spirit that he instinctively knew that to become part of the White Man’s world, even a small measure, would be akin to a living death, a hell whereby he would be cut off from nature and quite possibl
y from the Great Spirit himself.

  He was resolved that he would not willingly accept this turn of fate, that he would fight the changes that were being forced upon him without his consent or opinion on the matter. Armed only with the knife that his Grandfather had given him last year, he left the village. If he could not remain with his People who lived in harmony with the land, the only home in which he could live a full and complete life, basking in the love and blessings of the Great Spirit, then he would disappear into the woods and seek a life by himself. Never worrying about getting lost, the trees, hills, and the ground beneath his feet were a part of him. He knew that he only had to ask the living spirits that abounded in the woods and surrounded him for direction. His personal spirit guide who never left him would always guide him in the right direction, whether back to the village or further away from the world of the White Man that was reaching out like a dark specter to take him away from the Great Spirit’s bounty.

  The sun descended below the horizon, and White Wolf finally sat down with his back against a tree, pondering on what he would do next and where he could go. A stream of clear, cold water ran close by; its trickling against the rocks lying in its bed sang him a soothing lullaby, both welcoming his presence and providing comfort to his troubled spirit. Strange, he thought, he was neither hungry nor thirsty, but as the night progressed, he felt more chilly.

  “I am cold.” The thought of building a fire entered his mind, but he dismissed it. Somehow the idea of a fire in this place beneath the canopy of the tree that sheltered him struck him as a kind of desecration, something an ignorant White Man would do without first asking the permission of the woods, for fire terrified them and all other living creatures that resided here, for fire was an instrument of agonizing death.

  “I am cold,” he said a second time as a slight breeze stirred the cooling air around him. He berated himself for being so foolish as to forgetting to bring along some kind of wrap, but he had been in a hurry, he reasoned. Still, not being prepared was uncharacteristic of being one of the People, he chided himself. But then, too, a Brave would not complain; he had made his bed, and now he must lie in it.

  “I am cold,” he chattered a third time and drew up his legs and wrapped his arms around them to conserve as much body heat as he could. He began to concentrate and will the cold away, thinking only of warm thoughts, like the hearth in his Grandfather’s teepee and the smell of his Grandmother’s food simmering in the pot above it.

  At first, he was not aware that a lone wolf had noiselessly crept towards him. Then he sensed the animal standing not ten feet from him and looked up into its eyes. He read that the wolf was curious about him and was studying him. White Wolf felt no fear of the animal but, rather, reached out with his own mind and made contact with the wolf.

  “If I were blessed with a coat such as yours, I would not be so cold,” he told the animal.

  The wolf then transformed itself into a Medicine Man, and White Wolf, having only heard stories from his tribe’s own Medicine Man of the spirits inhabiting these woods often times taking on the forms of animals, recognized that this Medicine Man was a spirit who had walked the Earth many years ago.

  “You are not afraid,” the spirit said.

  “Why should I be afraid?” White Wolf answered. “I looked into your mind, and I saw no threat.”

  THREE DAYS LATER, McLeod’s team was ready to wrap up their report. They needed only input from the ATF teams that were still scouring and tearing the Marta apart. Unfortunately, no information was forthcoming, as the Bureau did not want to share anything they had uncovered until it had been disseminated and analyzed in-house first. This bureaucratic process could take up to a year before McLeod’s team could receive any intelligence of value, and by then the information would be moot from both an investigative standpoint and any possibility of subsequent prosecution. McLeod decided he could not wait for the slow wheels of a sister Department to grind the grist to produce anything substantial, and therefore, asked his team to present him with their findings for him to send a preliminary report to their Director.

  “Forensics report that the material beneath the victim’s fingernails were positively identified as microscopic particles of cocaine,” Mary told the team. “They are of the same purity as samples seized from a few cocaine-producing countries, like Colombia.”

  She shifted her notes and continued. “The fibers are representative of a type of sacking material that is commonly used to initially package the narcotic into manageable bundles before additional wrappings are attached to facilitate concealment.”

  From another note, she added. “Autopsy reports confirmed that: the corpse was a South American male; height approximately five-ten; black hair greased down with a cream popular with Colombians; brown eyes; estimated age twenty-seven; three tattoos, one of which appeared to be associated with one of the known cartels operating within Colombia; numerous scars on the arms, legs, and torso, which indicated that the victim had lived a dangerous if not violent lifestyle; and the undigested stomach contents indicated that not only had the man eaten a cuisine representative of South America, but it also appeared to have been his lunch, thereby assisting in the determination that the deceased had met his death sometime during the afternoon hours. Because the killer or killers had placed the body in refrigeration, it is nearly impossible to determine an approximate date of when death occurred. Thus, the body could have been stored on ice, literally, for a month or more before it was brought out of storage and impaled on the hook inside the vessel’s hold.”

  “There was evidence that the crates in the cargo hold were moved during transit,” Charlie stated. “We found tell-tale marks that showed recent movement of a number of the crates. The hold was pretty dirty, and so it wasn’t hard to figure out that something was moved and probably off-loaded prior to docking in Boston. Also, we found where two crates had been recently damaged, which supports our hypothesis of a prior off-loading. Chino surmises that whatever was moved was both bulky and heavy. George hypothesizes that the crate, or crates, that contained the contraband were most likely buried under other crates that held innocuous and sundry items, thereby helping to hide them. Then, at some point in the voyage, the crates were reorganized so the crew could then gain access to the crate, or crates, to off-load the contraband to a waiting ship.”

  “We also found some ropes that had been cut and thrown in a corner,” George added.

  “What’s the significance?” McLeod queried closely.

  “Well, first, it’s pretty unusual to waste rope aboard a ship and then to casually discard the remnants, which means that whoever cut them wasn’t a sailor. Second, the ropes were not the right size and strength used to tie down or secure crates. So, we figured that whatever cargo was removed, the ropes were used to bundle something up inside. It’s our supposition that the contraband was probably hidden inside of some heavy object or objects. The crate was opened, the object or objects removed and off-loaded to another ship, and the rope fragments we found were cut away from the object or objects and thrown back down into the hold. If we’re right, the crew was in a hurry to get rid of whatever they were carrying.”

  “So, the contraband is probably already here. I want to know where that ship has been since it left South America,” McLeod demanded. “Is that possible?”

  “We’re on it, Chief,” Charlie promised.

  McLeod sent the report via facsimile from the local FBI office after promising to allow them to keep a copy. Narcotics and similar contraband always concerned the Bureau, and they constantly were on the alert for possible leads that would allow them to penetrate the tightly controlled underground trafficking network that threatened to expand their trade not only into Boston but the whole of the United States.

  He then stopped by the local police station to interrogate the obstinate longshoreman who had stuck his nose into matters that were none of his business and to confront the wrong person. As the dockhand was being transferred from his cell
to an interrogation room, he sported a large bandage over his nose and bellowed at the top of his lungs with complaints of his treatment in the lockup. However, as soon as the interrogation room door was closed, he became a changed man.

  “Jesus, Mac! Did you have to hit me so hard? This is the third time in two years I’ve had this honker of mine busted!”

  “Had to make it look real, didn’t I?” McLeod responded, emoting no sympathy for the man. “After all I have tried to teach you, you still don’t know how to fall.”

  “I thought it was bad enough as a kid to be teased for this beak. Now it feels about three times its original size.”

  “Enough chit-chat. What have you got for me?”

  “The whole dock’s dirty, Mac. Not just the union bosses managing the dock. There’s security involved, too. There is more than one person who’s being paid to look the other way.”

  “How deep does the corruption go?”

  “Not that deep. Just a few individuals who happen to be in the right place and usually at the right time. But I wouldn’t get too excited; they’re small time potatoes.”

  “Usually when you catch a rat by the tail, the rest of the rat tends to follow,” McLeod commented.

  “Not these guys. They’re more like that South American lizard that when you catch their tail, they can detach it and run away. They can always grow a new one later.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, you’ve got one pissed-off importer who’s champing at the bit waiting for his cargo.”

  McLeod pushed a pencil and a pad of yellow-lined paper towards the ATF operative. “Give me a name.”

  The longshoreman wrote down Oriental Imports, Inc. “Don’t let the name fool you. They deal exclusively in South American merchandise.”