by Thomas Zigal
Hardrock Stiff
Books by Thomas Zigal
Into Thin Air
Pariah
The White League
Thomas Zigal
HARDROCK STIFF
A KURT MULLER MYSTERY
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright ©1996 Thomas Zigal
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN: 978-1-61218-757-0
To Annette and Danny
This is a work of fiction. I have taken occasional liberties with the history of Aspen and the geography of the Maroon Bells–Snowmass Wilderness. All characters and incidents are a product of my imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, or to persons living or dead, is coincidental.
Contents
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
Chapter thirty-one
Chapter thirty-two
Chapter thirty-three
Chapter thirty-four
Chapter thirty-five
Chapter thirty-six
Chapter thirty-seven
Chapter thirty-eight
Chapter thirty-nine
Chapter forty
Chapter forty-one
Chapter forty-two
Chapter forty-three
Chapter forty-four
Chapter forty-five
Chapter forty-six
Chapter forty-seven
Chapter forty-eight
Chapter forty-nine
Chapter fifty
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter one
The early morning chill carried a memory of winter. The air was crisp in his lungs and against his bare cheeks as he downshifted the ’63 Willys, forcing the open Jeep up Summer Road, the dirt-packed service route that curled in lazy switchbacks to the summit of Aspen Mountain. Snow lingered in mottled brown patches beneath the fir groves high up the slope. The sky was icy blue, clear, flawless. On a day this tranquil it was hard to imagine how anyone, even Ned Carr, could wake up looking for trouble. But the old miner had telephoned Kurt in the middle of the night with trouble on his mind.
“Stepped knee deep in it this time, son. Cut a deal with the devil but the dirty bastard double-crossed me.”
“Ned,” he’d mumbled, “is that you?”
“My pride got the best of me and I tried to burn ’em at their own game. Now they’re coming after me.”
His speech was slurred. Kurt wondered if Ned had fallen off the wagon after all these years.
“Who, Ned?”
“I need to talk to you, son, but this ain’t the time or place. Likely there’s a bug on my line. Come see me first thing after you drop your boy at school.”
“Are you all right? Is Hunter okay?”
“If anything happens to me I want you to look after that little pistol.”
Ned Carr’s six-year-old grandson, Hunter, had lived with the old man for the past four years, ever since Ned’s daughter was buried under an avalanche while cross-country skiing up Pearl Pass. Hunter was Lennon Muller’s best friend.
“Ned, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“Hunter’s sleeping over at the Marcus boy’s tonight. He’ll be all right,” Ned had said, coughing into the line, a phlegmy hack, fifty years of rolling his own smokes and breathing lead dust in abandoned shafts. “You come on by the Ajax first thing. Still wearing that badge, ain’t you?”
“I’m on official leave. Six more weeks.”
“I don’t want to talk to anybody else. Just you, son.”
Kurt wheeled the Jeep onto a rocky, tire-rut access road posted PRIVATE PROPERTY, DO NOT ENTER and drove another hundred yards up to the Ajax, the only mine still in operation in the ski area. In the 1880s, at the height of the silver boom, there were a half-dozen mines and their ramshackle headframes, a thousand promising claims, on this north slope. Sixty miles of shafts, forty levels deep, tunneling seven hundred feet below the town itself. When Kurt was a boy he had heard tall tales about the hardrock miners, their prodigious work lost to history, and he wondered if Aspen Mountain was now hollow inside, if someday it might collapse upon itself in a thunderous earthquake.
He parked next to Ned’s flatbed truck, got out, and gazed down at the charming gingerbread and chimney-brick village his father had helped resuscitate after the long postmining depression. The view from here was so luminous he could see downvalley past Red Butte to the private planes rowed at the airport. The clarity of light created the illusion that he could reach out over the basin and touch his home on Red Mountain.
“Ned!” he called, walking up the hill to the shabby mine office that looked as if one good kick could dislodge the rickety platform legs and send a junkpile of rotting lumber clattering down the mountainside. Nearby, a weathered silver Airstream squatted on cinder blocks, the trailer where Ned stored his tools and dynamite.
“Hey, Ned, you home?”
He plodded up the sagging wood steps and knocked on the office door. When no one answered, he opened the door and poked his head inside. The place was empty, a white mug of coffee steaming on the scarred rolltop desk where Ned’s ledgers were haphazardly stacked, his loose invoices heaped in messy mounds. Cedar branches crackled in the woodstove and the room held the aroma of coffee and a comforting warmth. Kurt sometimes brought Hunter up here to meet his grandpa after soccer practice. The office was small and rustic, the log walls as bare as a farmer’s smokehouse. Scratched-up hard hats hung from the rafters by their straps. On makeshift board-shelves Ned had collected artifacts he’d discovered in the mine—rusted lanterns, pickax heads, broken shovel handles, battered boots, coins from another era.
“Ned, it’s me!” he shouted up toward the shaft. “Where the hell are you?”
Nailed to the brace beam above the mine’s dark adit was a worm-eaten sign from the old days: AJAX MINE, 1881. Ned Carr’s last remaining stake on the ski side of the mountain.
Kurt could remember the first time Ned had walked into his life. A silent, snowy afternoon when Kurt was Lennon’s age, six or seven. The grown-ups had finished skiing for the day and had decided on lunch at the Red Onion, an old miners’ tavern on Cooper Street. The Mullers, the Pfeils, and Jacob Rumpf, the Chicago millionaire who had brought Otto Muller and Rudi Pfeil out to Colorado to help him transform this sleepy mining town into a modern tourist resort. The men were arguing amiably about who had won a
race that morning when the tavern door banged open and Ned Carr strode into the long narrow entrance with a Siberian husky at the end of a tattered rope leash. Ned stopped and stared at their table, nine noisy flatlanders huddled over hamburgers and ranch-house stew. He was probably thirty years old at the time but looked to Kurt like a grizzled mountain man even then, his bristly face chapped from long winters, his hands venous and hard. He was wearing a red-and-black flannel hunting jacket, grease-stained dungarees, unlaced work boots with toes scuffed into mealy leather. A short, solid man, thick legs and neck, his teeth already going bad. It was the first time Kurt had ever seen someone wearing a knit toboggan cap underneath a Stetson. The strange wild sight of Ned Carr made the children shrink down in their chairs, duck their heads, and giggle.
Ned led the huge dog over to their table. A beautiful animal with translucent blue eyes, a fluffy coat of black and gray fur, its long pink tongue dripping friendly slather. Kurt’s brother fed it a scrap of gristle from his plate.
“You that fella Rump from back East?” Ned asked.
Jacob Rumpf was a regal silver-haired gentleman who had made his fortune in plastics. He was in excellent physical condition for a man of sixty. A fine skier and fanatic fly fisherman, a trophy hunter with exotic heads in the game room of his Michigan Avenue mansion. By that time he had purchased most of the dilapidated baby Victorians on the West End of Aspen, a prominent hotel in disrepair, and an abandoned opera house. Jacob Rumpf had noble dreams for his little town.
“Mr. Carr,” nodded the millionaire, dabbing his mouth with a paper napkin, “I know who you are. Would you and your friend care to join us for lunch? I’m sure the children would be delighted.”
“Thank you kindly, Mr. Rump, but I just stopped by to show you something.” He pulled a stiff document from his hip pocket, unfolded the irregular creases, and dropped the paper on Rumpf’s smothered steak. “This here’s an official deed from the land office in the county courthouse.”
Rumpf glanced at the deed, then peered up at the man standing over him.
“You folks have stuck a ski run right straight through the middle of my mining property.”
Rumpf’s mouth parted in disbelief. He looked at his two lieutenants, Kurt’s father and Rudi Pfeil, for some plausible explanation.
“You might take and buy out every dadburn clown in this valley, Mr. Rump, but you ain’t buying out Ned Carr. Go hack yourself another ski run somewheres else, partner. I got forty acres up there with my name on ’em,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the shimmering white mountain visible through the tavern glass. “Your buddies with them silly-ass boards on their feet are trespassing on my private land.”
Kurt could still remember the incredulous look on Mr. Rumpf’s face. His staff had gone to great lengths to procure property on the mountain and establish valid leases. He retrieved a pair of spectacles from his shirt pocket, lifted the deed from the steak gravy, and read the text slowly and carefully.
“Yesterday?” The lines deepened in his face. “This indicates that the transaction took place yesterday.” He lowered the paper and stared at the miner. “Mr. Carr, you must be quite a clever businessman. I salute your enterprising spirit.” He smiled thinly and raised a cup of hot cocoa as a toast. “How is it you were able to come by that property?”
Even at six years old Kurt understood what was taking place. This rough-looking hick was trying to stop everyone from skiing on the mountain.
Ned Carr shrugged off the question. “A man would be making a sizable mistake,” he said, yanking on the husky’s leash, pulling the dog from the table, “if he took me for a fool like everybody else in this one-horse dive.”
Jacob Rumpf regarded Kurt’s father and Rudi Pfeil. “I can see you’re nobody’s fool, Mr. Carr,” he said, his steel-gray eyes narrowed and gleaming. “I guess we understand each other, then.”
Rumpf’s organization made inquiries and discovered that the man had simply gone to the county courthouse, studied a claim-stake map dating back to the late nineteenth century, and purchased lapsed claims for five dollars an acre, his right under the Mining Law of 1872. For a mere two hundred dollars he had come to own forty acres of prime real estate in the middle of a burgeoning ski resort.
“Ned, are you in the main drift?” Kurt yelled, climbing the hill to the mine. A nuisance claim, that’s what his father had called it. He’ll squeeze us for a pocketful of cash and then crawl back under his rock. But forty years later the nuisance was still here, leasing out his land to the ski company for a tidy sum. Many of those winters Kurt himself had skied down Bear Paw Run, a black-diamond favorite only a stone’s throw from where he was now treading.
A heavy ore car sat on a rusted, narrow-gauge track twenty yards outside the shaft. Kurt strode up to the entrance, a dark square cored into the rock outcropping, and stopped to call out Ned’s name again. He couldn’t bring himself to go inside. When he was a boy his friend Billy Nichols had fallen to his death down an old shaft like this one. Kurt and his brother, Bert, were with Billy that day, hiking up the mountain with rucksack lunches and canteens on their backs, playing hide-and-seek along the way. Their parents had warned them never to enter an abandoned mine but Billy was showing off, trying to impress the Muller boys. The Mountain Rescue team searched the murky ore stopes for two days before finding his body at the bottom of a seventy-foot drop.
“Come on, Ned, your coffee’s getting cold!” Kurt shouted at the tunnel. “I don’t have all day. Who have you pissed off—?”
The explosion knocked him backward into the ore car. When he came to, he was jammed against the iron side of the car, blood spattered on his shirt and face. He could taste a bitter grit in his mouth. His head was throbbing and his chest hurt where something had struck him, a rock or chunk of timber beam. He blinked his eyes and looked up at the mine shaft. Oily black smoke was gushing from the hole, roiling into the clear blue sky.
“Ned,” he muttered feebly. He tried to stand but his legs were rubber. There was a goose egg on the back of his skull. He wiped at the blood on his shirt, brushed a fine layer of ash from his jeans. Whatever had hit him squarely in the chest was lying on the ground beside him, smoldering like a charcoal ember. He picked it up by a dangling string but the smell of burnt flesh made him gag and he dropped the thing in the dirt. Inside the scorched work boot was a man’s bloody foot and half a charred shinbone.
Chapter two
An hour later the smoke had cleared enough for volunteer firemen and a team of EMS paramedics to enter the mine shaft wearing respirators, hard hats, and yellow asbestos suits. Holding an ice pack to the back of his head, Kurt sat in the rear of an ambulance and watched the men bring out Ned Carr one small bag at a time. The blood on Kurt’s shirt was from the boot. Considering that the shaft had discharged like a gun barrel when the dynamite went off, he was lucky that a stone sliver hadn’t impaled him to a tree.
“Jesus, what an ugly mess,” said Muffin Brown, the young deputy who had taken over as acting sheriff during Kurt’s leave. She was standing outside the ambulance, hands in the pockets of her sleeveless down vest, a department baseball cap pulled low on her forehead. Kurt hadn’t seen her in two weeks. He was glad she was here.
“You had to figure that one day the law of averages was going to catch up with old Ned,” Muffin said. “Anybody who fools around with dynamite that much. I’m surprised he didn’t blow himself up twenty years ago.”
“I’m not so sure it was an accident,” Kurt said.
She turned and stared at him. “You all right?” she said. “That’s a pretty big knot you got back there. Maybe a doctor should look at it.”
“He called me about three this morning,” he said, tossing the ice pack on the floor. “That’s why I came up here. He said somebody was after him.”
Muffin propped a cowboy boot on the ambulance bumper and leaned forward, resting both forearms across her knee. Kurt recognized the skepticism in those deep brown eyes. “He didn’t say who?” she a
sked, raising a dark eyebrow.
Kurt shook his head.
“Well, that limits his enemies to about ten thousand people in the Roaring Fork Valley,” she said. “Maybe we should get out the phone book and run our fingers down a page.”
Kurt rose stiffly from the bench and stepped down out of the vehicle. A scarf of smoke coiled upward from the dark cavity in the mountain. Ned was just born in the wrong century, he thought. He didn’t trust the modern world, and he forced everybody around him to march to his drum.
“There’s a cup of fresh coffee sitting on his desk,” Kurt said. “You couldn’t drag Ned away from his morning coffee. He must’ve seen or heard something up at the shaft and went to check it out.”
“He was getting old, Kurt. His mind was turning to Silly Putty. Maybe he just forgot about the coffee.”
“He didn’t make mistakes with dynamite,” Kurt said. “He might’ve been a crazy son of a bitch, but he didn’t take chances in the hardrock. Fifty years crawling in and out of every hole in the ground this side of Leadville, the man never had an accident.”
Muffin toed the dirt with her boot. “I don’t know, Kurt. The old fart was acting stranger by the day,” she said. “A couple of weeks ago I had to cite him for shooting bottle rockets off the roof of that shack over there. He damn near set a spruce stand on fire.”
