The Lords Of Power

The Lords of Power

by

James Whitesell

Copyright@2015 by JamesWhitesell

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Lila Mannering

Chapter 2 The Lootenant

Chapter 3 Jehosaphat!

Chapter 4 Scapella

Chapter 5 David Saul

Chapter 6 The Last of O’Toole

Chapter 7 Two Bulls

Chapter 8 The Southwest

Chapter 9 Mexico

Chapter 10 The Ghost

Chapter 11 The Author and Sample Chapter

The Lords of Power

Chapter 1

Lila Mannering

Air Force One had long ago lifted off from its last trip to his California home. The Pres was gone but sure as hell not forgotten. President Ronald Reagan, before the onset of his sad, slow slide into the oblivion of Alzheimer’s, continued to rattle and/or entertain the American public with his quick wit. Fred Redbird was still chuckling at the way the whimsical Reagan verbally blindsided a pushy reporter on the late news that night before Redbird came in for the graveyard shift. Fred Redbird came from a whole different cultural universe from most of those who voted Reagan into office, but that didn’t bother Fred any. He had little interest in politics or politicians, but he did like a good joke and a ready wit. And that made him a fan of Ronald Reagan. The only other person who’d made Fred laugh more was that crazy black guy, the comedian Richard Pryor, who Fred considered to be hands down the country’s funniest comedian. Period. Talking about it earlier that day, when his buddy Charlie Cooper was coming in for his day job and Fred coming off graveyard at the condos where they both worked, Charlie took issue with Fred’s casual comment about Richard Pryor being the funniest comedian. An issue, however, delivered with twinkling mischievous jerk-your-buddy’s-chain eyes.

Mark Twain, Fred, Charlie insisted. He’s the best. Always was. Always will be.

"I’m talking about living comedians, Fred retorted, feigning indignation. Dead guys don’t tell jokes." To which Charlie had nothing further to say, though he did wink that mischievous eye at Fred. But they did agree on one thing. Ronald Reagan, completely aside from any questions of effectiveness or legacy, was without a doubt the funniest President in American history since the troubled days of Mark Twain’s contemporary, President Abraham Lincoln. Who, despite the huge weight on his wartime shoulders, still managed to crank out the one liners and break up--and/or (like Reagan) deflate--his listeners. The same Abraham Lincoln who had the soul crushing task to decide which among the over 300 convicted and condemned Dakota Indians from the 1862 Minnesota Sioux uprising to hang. Fred Redbird was an Ojibwe, a people who in the old days were inveterate mortal enemies of the Minnesota Sioux. Still, enemies or not, the thought of nearly forty Sioux Indians hanged at once rattled Fred’s Native American bones at the historical ethnic one-sidedness of American justice. A subject Richard Pryor was sure as hell not afraid to tackle.

How, Fred thought to himself, could Lincoln, in the middle of that horrific civil war, still have a sense of humor after condemning nearly 40 Dakota to hang in what would be America’s largest mass hanging? But then he remembered that the bitter and furious surviving settlers in Minnesota, hundreds of their fellows, mostly German and Scandinavian, murdered by the Sioux in the uprising, wanted, even demanded, that Lincoln hang all, over three hundred, of the condemned Indians. Lincoln, humane even as he waged a sanguine fratricide with the South, tempered necessary justice with mercy.

But Fred still thought Ronald Reagan was funnier.

After his retirement from twenty-three years in the U.S. Army, and after a few attempts at other jobs he soon found disagreeable, mostly because of jackass bosses, Redbird was in his third year as the senior security guard at the exclusive Lakeside Villa condominiums. The pay wasn't the greatest but the work was OK. Low key. Not much stress, even though the management wanted his combat veteran’s wary presence on the graveyard shift where serious crime was somewhat more likely to happen. He had plenty of stress in the Army and goddamn well didn’t need any more. He had his military pension and benefits to supplement his salary and it all added up to a comfortable living. Having his military pension and benefits to fall back on also meant he didn’t have to take bullshit from some pufferbelly supervisor. One guy had tried. Fred set him straight right way. He’d survived Viet Nam. Twice. No way some goddamn walking donut with a bloated ego was gonna fuck with him.

The guy never tried to mess with Fred again.

Things hadn't always been that way. Not even close. The notion of a comfortable living, if even thought of at all, was as alien to his world as a 15th Century Ojibwe would be on the skyways in contemporary downtown Minneapolis. Redbird's early life started out in the wild country of the Leach Lake Indian Reservation in the jack pine and paper birch forests of northern Minnesota, a land dotted with azure lakes chock full of walleye and northern pike and vast stands of wild rice, a land laced by cold running streams and rivers mostly too far north to be part of the vast Mississippi River drainage. The Ojibwe called the place Gaa-zagaskwaajimekaag, a name Redbird never could pronounce, having only an imperfect grasp of the Ojibwe language. He didn't know much about his language or his heritage. He did know that the Leach Lake Reservation, with the unpronounceable name of Gaazagaskwaajimekaag, was a wonderfully beautiful natural area. That was the way casual sightseers and prosperous hunters and fishermen from the Twin Cities saw it. But the little piece of that wonderfully beautiful natural area that was Fred’s real world growing up was one of hard hungry years of long frigid winters, of poverty and abuse, and Fred got the hell out as soon as he could by managing to stay in school until he got his high school diploma and then joining the U.S. Army. It was a decision he never once regretted. Not even a little. Just about the only times he returned to the reservation were for funerals. And even then he had to force himself to make the grim trip that never failed to bring back memories he would rather stay buried in the past. Which was all the more startling, considering Fred had more than his share of horrific memories after two tours and three TDYs to Viet Nam and other places in Southeast Asia--some still shrouded in secrecy from the American public--during the war.

Fred left the guard kiosk in the dank parking lot basement, inured to the pervasive malodors of oil and car exhaust and no longer even noticing them, and walked to the brightly lit doorway leading to the stairs. He unlocked the door and swung it open, noticing that it creaked on its hinges, and making a mental note to pass on to his buddy Charlie Cooper, the condominium maintenance supervisor. A man who, ironically from Fred's veteran's viewpoint, was a conscientious objector during the Viet Nam war. Conscientious objector or not, he still ended up doing his own government ordered tour. 15 months in the Federal prison at Sandstone, but out after six months and later pardoned by President Carter, himself a former military man, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and a former commander of a nuclear sub. Charlie’s anti-war history didn't stop the pair from becoming friends, even close friends, and regular hunting buddies during the fall hunting seasons. Deer, waterfowl, pheasants and other game birds, and fishing partners, summer and winter. Lolling in Charlie's bass boat in the summers. Hunkering in Fred’s ice fishing shack in the winter. Charlie could call a wild turkey with such natural skill that Fred puckishly proclaimed him an honorary Native American.....in the Turkey Clan. Not that Fred had any idea what the hell a Turkey Clan was. Fred thought of himself as a soldier, not as a Native American He could live with the label of Native American soldier. It never occurred to him that it could have a potential double meaning.

Thinking of Charlie triggered off a string of associations in Fred’s memory ending with the memory of Charlie forgetting to load his shotgun before their final pheasant hunt in a southwestern Minnesota cornfield the previous autumn. As sure as there was water in Lake Superior the mischievous Gods of the Hunt chose that moment to scare up a bunch of rooster pheasants right in front of empty-gun Charlie. He reacted instinctively, jerking up his Remington 12 gauge and squeezing on the trigger. Click! A tiny sound that reverberated way out of proportion in his surprised ears. Shortly followed by Charlie’s emphatic excursion into, as Charlie’s English teacher wife would describe it, ‘an extensive sampling of vernacular American English expletives.’ Which instantly made him the butt of a whole bunch of jokes among their crowd of hunting friends. Fred was chucking at the thought as he began to climb briskly up to the first floor to begin his regular inspection of the condominium complex’s upper corridors and doors. That Charlie, he said, chuckling at the thought. What a character.

You just never know what to expect next.

The door had hardly closed behind him before a shadowy hooded figure in dark clothing slipped inside the underground garage’s entrance and disappeared inside the cavernous concrete depths of the garage.

Twenty minutes later Fred Redbird was almost finished with his upstairs rounds when a sleek red Ferrari pulled up from the deserted rain swept streets outside and paused at the underground garage entrance while the driver pointed a remote at the electronic eye of the vehicle barricade. The barricade, to the driver’s mildly drug-tinged eye, oddly reminiscent of a horizontal version of an old-fashioned barber pole as the red and white painted barrier arm jerked itself to the vertical. The Ferrari roared off down the garage ramp, wet tires squealing on the dry basement concrete as the driver slammed on the brakes and pulled into one of the reserved parking spaces of the exclusive condominiums above. The door swung open and the shapely tanned legs of a tall, lean woman, sensuously clad in a diaphanous light summer dress that dramatically clashed with the chill of the early spring weather. She uncoiled her long legs from the Ferrari and stepped into the dank chill of the garage. Hers was a regal presence, theatric, even if there was no one there to watch. Her filmy fuchsia skirt shimmered as she walked, reminding the hidden watcher of the iridescence of hummingbirds in dappled light. It was the only thought that was even remotely pleasant as he watched the woman from where he lay hidden a hundred feet away in the puddle of shadow thrown off by a parked Lincoln Town Car. Had he known the owner was a prominent Minneapolis defense attorney he would have been darkly amused.

Always theatric in her movements, like a fashion model strutting on a runway with a lithe, saucy loose-jointed erectness, the woman strode with self confident sensual athleticism for the elevator, typed an access code into the control module, then pushed a button and waited for the door to open. She stood impatiently under the harsh light, drumming her fingers on the elevator door. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, but the beauty was a cold and hard one under the judgmental harsh light of the dingy basement garage.

A single drop of hopelessly impotent sperm fell from the inside of her thigh just when she noticed the odd little shiny object on the wall next to the elevator button. The long, graceful fingers of her right hand inched over to probe and lightly caress the shiny object. At the exact moment she touched it the flat crack of a silenced rifle rang out dully in the cavernous underground garage. A small red hole instantly appeared almost in the very center of her forehead.

All the human flavorings that were Lila Mannering, along with the momentary puzzlement over the shiny thing on the wall, fled as the life left her face. She pitched over backwards and came to a final supine rest obscenely spread eagled on the cold garage floor. Even in death she had a cold, striking beauty.

Fred Redbird found her body less than five minutes later. The first of the police arrived in another five minutes. More continued to come. Then came the media. Less than twenty-four hours later Fred Redbird would be out of a job. He was a convenient scapegoat. The first.

But not the last.

Two old men sat cross-legged before the pungent smoke of a ponderosa pine campfire. Their skins were baked a deep bronze from long years under the glare of the shortgrass prairie sun. The age-wrinkled pair spoke in low, murmuring tones in an ancient language very unlike English. Off somewhere in the rolling prairie undulations cascading off the Black Hills a family of coyotes caterwauled into the star-filled night. Wood smoke rose lazily in the still night, hazing over the thin sliver of a waning moon. One of the old men, in the intense fervor of his conversation, was eerily reminiscent of the crazy-eyed prophets from the distant days of the Old Testament. He kept pointing towards the east.

Towards where the morning sun would rise.

Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Thompson, Ben to those who knew him, stood in the locker room staring at his bare chest in a mirror. He flexed his muscles and smiled approvingly. Even deep into his forties he still had the powerful body of a linebacker. Not big enough for the pros, maybe, but certainly enough to tear the hell out of a backfield of cocky college running backs. And also enough to knock the cover off a softball and send it sailing out of sight. He put on his uniform shirt and went out into the stadium where the department’s softball team was playing. A teammate beckoned at him to take his turn at the plate. Thompson grabbed the heavy hard maple bat he favored and strode for the plate, pulling his cap down to protect his eyes from the dazzling light of the sun.

He looked over at the scoreboard and saw his team was down by one run, and that there were already two out in the last inning. Then he squinted towards second base and saw the lanky, awkward form of Sergeant Ed Davis standing on the sack. It’d have to be at least a double. Davis would never make it otherwise. Thompson swung his hips, adjusted his hands on the shaft of the bat and bent his powerful body to receive the pitch with all the power the symbiotic Thompson/hard maple bat construct could muster and send the ball rocketing over the fence.

The dark-uniformed pitcher of the opposing team, silhouetted in the dazzling sun, wound up and sent the pitch whistling at him. Thompson coiled, ready to swing. Then he recognized the aquiline profile of the opposing pitcher. It was Scapella, the police chief. He was so surprised that the pitch sailed by him before he could react.

Strike one! Yelled the umpire. Thompson turned to scowl at the official. He was surprised again when he saw that the umpire was one of Scapella’s aides, a man Thompson considered to be a fawning toady. As he stared at the form of the umpire a second pitch came in past him.

Strike two! Yelled the umpire. Thompson immediately jerked towards the pitcher, just in time to see the dark form silhouetted against the sun hurl another pitch at him. He coiled once more, cocked his bat and felt something grab it. He wheeled to find that the catcher had hold of his bat with both hands. Behind the catcher’s mask was the face of another of Scapella’s police toadies, Captain Thornton. Thompson roughly pushed him away, whirled towards the onrushing ball and swung to meet it. He knew when the bat struck the ball that it was gone.

The softball hurtled six feet off the ground at the pitcher, ricocheted off his head and knocked him down, then began to gain altitude. The outfielders didn’t even bother to give chase. The ball was high in the air and sailing far over the fence. Thompson watched the ball as he began to lope around the bases. Just as he rounded second he saw a dark shape come out of the sun and descend towards the soaring softball. As Thompson watched in amazement a huge eagle dropped from the sun, pounced on the softball, took the ball in its talons and began to fly away with it. Sergeant Ed Davis was scoring and Ben was rounding third base when he heard the phone start to ring. Ben walked the rest of the way to home plate, then over to the pitcher’s mound where he shoved aside the prostrate form of the pitcher and reached down to pick up the phone underneath him.

His eyes snapped open. There was Betty’s sleeping form reassuringly beside him. The twilight of sleep tattered as he recognized all the familiar things of his bedroom and he shook his head slowly in a dazed confusing goulash of dreams and consciousness as he listened to the voice talking over the phone.

It was the night police dispatcher with the news of Lila Mannering’s death.

Sergeant Ed Davis, along with half of the uniforms on the dog shift that night, was waiting for him in the dank underground garage where Mannering’s corpse lay bloody and still under the harsh light. Davis was kneeling by the body, pretending to be a detective, but Thompson knew he was more likely giving the dead woman’s body a lecherous appraisal. The woman’s skirt rode high up her thighs when she pitched over backwards and didn’t leave much to the imagination as she lay spread eagled on her back. At least not to Sergeant Ed Davis’ testosterone-fueled imagination. Damnit, Ed! Ben thought to himself, is there ever a time when you don’t have your brains in your dick?

The lieutenant winced. Getting out of bed in the middle of the night to see the milling throng of a police circus that always happened with violent crimes, and Davis panting over a corpse, only reconfirmed his growing desire to get out of police work after he hit retirement age in another eighteen months. He was growing increasingly weary of it and his job was weighing him down, in spirit if not in body. Davis glanced up at him.

Can you imagine this? Who would want to take out a babe like her? Thompson grunted grumpily at the lanky redhead without saying anything. He looked over at the flashing lights of the squads with their crackling radios, at the milling crowd of police officers looking for some excitement in the boredom of the dog shift, at Davis staring up the dead woman’s dress. Suddenly he thought of the peculiar dream he’d had that night and he had a fleeting feeling that he was dreaming again. He clamped his eyes shut, opened them again slowly and shook his head, but the mad chaos was still there. And so was the bloody corpse of Lila Mannering. Her dead eyes stared back at him and he had the peculiar thought that even in death she was an intimidating woman.

What a waste, Davis mumbled to himself as he knelt over the body. What a goddamn shameful waste.

That it is, Ed, Thompson replied softly. And he wasn’t just thinking about the dead woman.

Lieutenant Thompson finished his minute hands-off examination of the woman’s body and the immediate surroundings, taking care not to upset the newly reorganized forensics team’s procedures when they sleepily arrived a few minutes later, then rose to go towards the elevator. He’d seen something glinting there under the light. As he approached it he saw what it was, hunched over the object and scrutinized it carefully without touching it. Davis detached himself from his morbid sexual fantasies and walked to Thompson’s side.

What ya got here, Ben?

Odd, Thompson replied in a thoughtful voice. It’s a nickel. Seems to be fixed to the wall somehow. Old-fashioned kind of nickel, too. Indian Head. He straightened up out of his awkward hunched posture. Have the crime scene folks check it out, Ed. Might be something important.

Thompson then began a meticulously scrupulous examination of the underground garage for some shred of evidence. He might have been growing weary of his job, but he remained a dedicated and competent professional. He was as solid as the granite mountains in the homeland of his Norwegian ancestors and even dutifully went off to fight in a war he never had believed in on the other side of the Earth in Southeast Asia. He bent to his minute investigation with the studied fastidiousness of a Jesuit scholar.

The red dawn came and was long gone before he was finished.

The man came with the red dawn. He was a small man, short, compact. His face was narrow and angular, his body lean, taut, wiry. His movements were beyond the merely quick. They were explosively sudden, and his arms seemed to jump from place to place without passing through the spaces between. A shabby transient who was sleeping in the bushes of an isolated corner of the city park woke to nearby movement and secretly, thinking himself hidden, watched as the quick little man went through a series of martial arts exercises. He was in a secluded patch of meadow surrounded by the maze of bushes the Minneapolis Park Department intentionally left alone to provide a vestigial fragment of animal habitant in the human jungle. The homeless man’s watching began as curiosity, changed to amazement and then became something of an altogether different order of magnitude.

Fear.

Chapter 2

The Lootenant

In the nostalgic way of the older quartiles of the modern population, Ben Thompson was old-fashioned. But not obdurately so. He had been foremost among his contemporaries in embracing the new technologies that were revolutionizing police science. Thompson pushed for the hiring of degreed police scientists, forensics and technical specialists and for the computerization and digitalization of the department. Still, among the avalanche of technical improvements of the past twenty years, Lieutenant Thompson considered the best single improvement to be a human one. Seamus O’Toole. The hulking bear of a man was, in O’Toole’s own words, ‘a bloody modern day Druid wizard with me computer lovelies,’ and arguably the finest natural investigator Thompson had ever encountered.

O’Toole was the first person he went to see when he arrived at police headquarters that morning.

Lootenant! O’Toole grinned when Thompson came in. Top o’ the mornin’ to ya. And how is me darlin’ Lootenant this morning?

You’ve never even been to Ireland, Seamus, Thompson said in an amused voice. How come you talk like that? O’Toole smirked.

It’s in the genes, Ben. The DNA. The ancestral genes of the Celtic Diaspora. On the wall of his little cubby hole of an office were an USMC plaque, two framed photos and a peculiar amateurish painting of several monks in a bowl shaped boat with a crude mast. One of the photos was of Michael Collins, an Irish Revolutionary Hero. The other was of a tough looking rugby team with a grinning Seamus O’Toole--what else would you expect?--front row center. And then there was the painting.

What is that supposed to be? Thompson asked the first time he saw the strange painting.

It’s St. Brendan the Navigator, O’Toole said matter-of-factly. The true discoverer of America.

You might get some argument about that from Native Americans, Ben replied, amused.

I will grant you that there are some alternative theories, Seamus shot back. "And I will amend my comment to make St. Brendan the first European discover of America."

That would be Leif Eriksson, Seamus, Norwegian descended Ben Thompson said in a totally serious Norwegian-American voice. He actually did discover America about a thousand years ago. Archaeologists found the site on the Canadian coast.

"I also am aware of the historical fact of Leif Eriksson’s voyage, Mister Norwegian-- American Thompson, Seamus retorted. But I point out to you that was some five hundred years, he paused to gesture at the painting of St. Brendan the Navigator, after our Irish Saint made his jaunt across the stormy deep."

Thompson shook his head slowly in friendly admiration. If there was a single memorable personality in the entire Minneapolis police force, it had to be none other than the mischievous burly presence of Seamus ‘Celtic Diaspora’ O’Toole. But….back to business.

Seamus, Thompson began in his deep, gentle voice. I have this hunch.....

There was something about the quiet intensity of the athletic little man that terrified the shaggy transient. As quietly as he could, the ragged homeless wanderer slipped away through the bushes. Years of living on the edge had taught him to recognize danger in its many forms and disguises. His instincts screamed at him to get away, and fast. Behind him, the quick little man glanced only once in the direction of the fleeing transient as he continued to work his way through his exercises. The smile that touched his face was as quick as the rest of his movements. He had not failed to notice his not so secret watcher. The man could hide his body.

But not his body odor.

Thompson didn’t often get angry, but he was growing close to it now. It was nearly noon and he had spent the first part of the morning trying to learn something about Lila Mannering’s background. Quirks, hobbies, friends, associates, hangouts, enemies, jilted lovers, anything that might give him some idea of where to start looking for her killer. His first impression was that she was very well connected--the pressuring phone calls had already begun--and also highly educated. Mannering had a Stanford doctorate in social work she earned at the age of 23 and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Minnesota earned just after her 26th birthday. In three years she rose to the position of deputy director of the Hennepin County Welfare Department. This was a woman, Ben concluded, who wasn’t just on the way to the top. She was going there on a rocket.

With a two dimensional skeleton of the shape of her life outlined, Thompson had then hiked through the underground tunnel from the venerable Minneapolis City Hall to the welfare department’s offices in the Hennepin County Government Center, hoping to get a flesh and blood three dimensional sense of who and what Lila Mannering was. And was surprised and frustrated when he ran into the peculiar reticence of Lila Mannering’s coworkers to say anything substantial about her. After a series of them his temper began to simmer towards the boiling point. Every one of them dodged his questions, couched their replies in bureaucratese and generally averted their eyes from his questioning gaze. He grew more and more impatient until, with the eighth one, hungry and tired, and very unlike his usual professional equanimity, he lost his cool for a verbal moment.

Jesus! He thundered. Isn’t there a single straight-talking person in the whole freaking welfare department? The woman he had been interviewing, a silver-haired sixty year old with the rangy, loose-jointed look of the serious bicycler that she