But the girl in the alley… she was twelve and she was a little drunk, but not so drunk that she couldn V say no, or remember who put her in the car. She told her mother. Her mother stewed about it for a couple of days, then told two men she'd met at the res.

The two men caught Larry Clay outside his apartment and beat the shit out of him with a genuine Louisville Slugger. Broke one of his legs and both arms and a whole bunch of ribs. Broke his nose and some teeth.

It wasn 't dope dealers who beat Larry Clay. It was a couple of Indians, on a comeback from a rape.

Lawrence Duberville Clay never knew who they were, but he never forgot what they did to him. He had a lot of shots at Indians over the years, as a prosecutor, a state senator, a police chief, an assistant U.S. attorney general.

He took them all.

And he didn't forget them when he became director of the FBI, the iron fist on every Indian reservation in the nation.

But there were Indians with long memories too.

Like the men who took him in Phoenix.

The Crows.

CHAPTER 1

Ray Cuervo sat in his office and counted his money. He counted his money every Friday afternoon between five and six o'clock. He made no secret of it.

Cuervo owned six apartment buildings scattered around Indian Country south of the Minneapolis Loop. The cheapest apartment rented for thirty-nine dollars a week. The most expensive was seventy-five. When he collected his rent, Cuervo took neither checks nor excuses. If you didn't have the cash by two o'clock Friday, you slept on the sidewalk. Bidness, as Ray Cuervo told any number of broken-ass indi-gents, was bidness.