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waste anybody, that’s all.” He bent, picked up a flat rock and tried to skip it across the river. Instead of skipping, it cut into the surface like a knife and was gone. “Shit,” he said.
    “You never were any good at that,” Aaron said. “You need more of a sidearm.”
    “How many times have you told me that?” Sam asked, hunting up another rock.
    “About a million.”
    Sam flipped the second rock out at the water. It hit and sank. He shook his head, thrust his hands back into his jean pockets, stood quietly for a moment, then turned to his cousin. “Have you talked to Shadow Love?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “Are you still planning to send him to Bear Butte?”
    “Yeah. I want him out of here,” Aaron said.
    “Shadow Love is a weapon,” Sam Crow said.
    “He’s our kid.”
    “Every man comes to earth with a purpose. I’m quoting the famous Aaron Crow himself. Shadow Love is a weapon.”
    “I won’t use him,” said Aaron, walking down to the water’s edge to stand by his cousin.
    “Because he’s our kid,” Sam said. “Don’t let that fuck you up.”
    “It’s not that. The fact is, Shadow scares the shit out of me. That’s the real problem.” Aaron kicked off his battered sneakers and took a half-step so his toes were in the water. It felt cool and healing. “I fear for what we did to that boy, when we left him with Rosie. We had work to do, but . . . She wasn’t quite right, you know. She was a lovely woman, but she had some wrong things in her mind. You say we made a weapon. I think we made a crazy man.”
    “Remember, once, a Crazy Horse . . . ?”
    “Not the same. Crazy Horse loved a kind of life. A warrior life. Shadow’s not a warrior. He’s a killer. You’ve seen him; he hungers for pain and the power to create it.”
    The two men fell silent for a moment, listening to the water ripple past the sandbar. Then Aaron said, in a lighter tone, “How long before we fuck up, do you think?”
    Sam threw back his head and laughed. “Three weeks. Maybe a month.”
    “We’ll be dead, then,” Aaron said. He made it sound funny.
    “Maybe not. We could make it up to Canada. Sioux Valley. Hide out.”
    “Mmmm.”
    “What? You think we don’t have a chance? We’re just a couple of dead flatheads?” asked Sam.
    “People who do this kind of thing . . . don’t get away. They just don’t.” Aaron shrugged. “And there’s always the question, Should we try? ”
    Sam ran a hand through his hair. “Jesus,” he muttered.
    “Exactly,” Aaron said, with a quick, barking laugh. “If we go down . . . it’d make the point. Everybody knows Sitting Bull, because he died. Everybody knows Crazy Horse, because he died. Who knows about Inkpaduta? He was maybe the greatest of them all, but he went to Canada and got old and died. Not many remember him now. We’re going to . . . war  . . . to wake up the people. If we just sneak off, I don’t think that’ll be the same.”
    Sam shook his head but said nothing. He found another flat rock and sidearmed it at the water. It sank instantly. “Asshole,” he called after the rock.
    Aaron looked down at the sandbar at his cousin, sighed and said, “I’m going back to town with you. I hear too many voices tonight. I can’t handle it.”
    “You shouldn’t come here so often. Even I can feel them, groaning under the sand.” He made a brushing motion that took in the sandbar, the river and the hillside. The land around the island had once been a concentration camp. Hundreds of Sioux died in it, most of them women and children.
    “Come on,” Aaron said. “Let’s load the truck and get our ass out of here.”
     
    Billy Hood lay on the Jersey motel bed and stared at the ceiling. He’d made a preliminary reconnaissance, across the river into Manhattan, and concluded that he could do it. He could kill the man. The stone knife weighed on his chest.
    To cut a man’s throat . . . Hood’s own throat tightened. Last year,