by Thomas Zigal
“It was his birthday, for Chrissake. I hope I’m still shooting rockets off a roof when I’m seventy years old.”
An older deputy named Bill Gillespie walked over to give them a report. “It’s going to take a good while longer,” he said, detaching the respirator from his neck. He was a tall, lanky man with sharp features and graying temples. “Must’ve been a dozen sticks in that charge. I don’t know why the old man was working with so much pop. A whole section collapsed back in there about two hundred feet.” Soot grimed the parts of his face that hadn’t been covered by goggles and the mouthpiece. He looked as if he might lose his breakfast. “The EMS boys are still picking up spare parts.”
“Go back in there and tell those guys to leave the detonator where they find it,” Kurt said. “We need to get somebody here from Denver to take a look at the situation and tell us how it happened.”
Gillespie lit a cigarette and squinted at Kurt. “The detonator,” he said with annoyance, “is probably ten inches up Ned Carr’s rectum. The question is, where do we find an asshole.” He glanced at Muffin, blew smoke. “But that shouldn’t be too hard to come by around here.”
Kurt had never liked Gillespie. He was a retired career cop from Albuquerque who pined for a quaint snowcapped world without gangs or crack. Kurt shouldn’t have hired him in the first place. Dick-swinging career cops never worked out in Aspen.
“You heard the man,” Muffin said to the deputy. She was in no better mood to take shit than Kurt was. “We might have a crime scene here. Go tell the guys to watch their step.”
Gillespie took another drag from his cigarette and flicked it away. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I guess I’m just having a little trouble figuring out who my boss is today.”
The deputy walked back up the hill and Kurt filled a paper cup at an igloo cooler, washed out his mouth, and spit. He could still taste the oily grit. “There’s a cop with the Denver PD,” he said. “Lorenzo Banks, best demo man in the state. He was with my brother in Nam. See if you can get him up here. He’ll be able to tell us if the charge was rigged.”
“My, my,” Muffin said. “You’re starting to sound like a cop again, Kurt. Better be careful. You might get your old job back.”
Six more weeks to make up his mind, then the leave of absence was officially over. No more paychecks from the county. Fish or cut bait.
“How’s your chest?” she asked.
“Sore,” he said, touching the spot, coughing.
“Let me see.”
He looked at her, flung the cup away.
“Let me see,” she repeated, unbuttoning his bloody shirt. There was a purple bruise the size of a baseball on his sternum. “Ouch,” she said, touching his skin gently with her index finger. “That must’ve hurt.”
He clenched his jaw and tried not to think about the way she had touched him one night, three years ago, in the darkness of her trailer.
“There’s not much we can do here till the boys get finished with their jigsaw,” she said, watching two paramedics haul out a dripping zipper bag. “Why don’t you let me run you to the hospital for a quick scan?”
“I’m okay,” Kurt said, buttoning his shirt. “I want to check out a few things this morning before I pick up Lennon and Hunter.”
Her face lost its outdoor color. Hunter. An only child whose guardian grandpa they were scraping off the walls of a mine shaft. The first question that had shaken Kurt when he’d dropped the charred foot, the first real thing that had scared him: What’s going to happen to the boy?
“Hunter can stay with Lennon and me till we get everything straightened out,” he said. “Those two are real tight. He spends a lot of time at our house anyway.”
Muffin was clearly disturbed. Until this moment the loss had been negligible: a cranky old man who had long ago outlived his welcome in the valley, the careless victim of a mining accident. But now there was a child to consider. Flesh and bone, orphaned and homeless at six years old.
“It’s good you guys are there for him,” she said.
Kurt stretched his neck. “I’ll ask Dr. Hales to handle this one.” The school shrink had worked with Lennon for seven months, helping him get over his fear of losing his father after Kurt was beaten and kidnapped by hired thugs last summer. “Let’s go check that trailer where Ned keeps his dynamite.”
The sleek Airstream hadn’t passed a white stripe in the road since Ike was president. Forty winters on this exposed slope had worn off the silver sheen, leaving the old rig the dull gray color of sheet metal. The windows were boarded up with cheap plywood. A heavy combination lock hung loose through the rusty hasp above the doorknob. “It’s open,” Kurt said.
The cluttered interior was dim and spooky and smelled like a marmot burrow. Animal droppings speckled the floor and the stacked, dusty cases of DuPont dynamite. Something small and ratlike was scurrying around in a dark corner behind the barrels of diesel fuel. Kurt didn’t want to wander too far into the enclosure, where Ned had no doubt set his homemade booby traps to stop intruders. Steel-clawed devices that would snap your ankle in half, trip-wire pungi sticks. Kurt took two or three cautious steps, his boot soles gritting against the filthy floor.
“My god, what a pit!” Muffin said behind him. “Whatever we’re looking for, we’re not going to find it in here.”
“Where is Tyler Rutledge this morning? He probably knows the inventory. Let’s get him up here and see if any dynamite is missing.”
Tyler Rutledge was Ned’s sole mining partner, another irascible misanthrope, barely thirty years old, whose disposition improved with the solitude under a thousand tons of mountain. Ned had often complained that if Tyler had spent as much time working their two mines as he did lying on a cot in the county lockup, they would be Fortune 500.
“Tell you what,” Muffin said, her eyes slowly panning the junk-heaped trailer. “Why don’t you be the point man on Tyler? Him and me don’t exchange many Christmas cards.”
Two years ago Tyler had punched her in the jaw during a bar-room brawl at Shooter’s. In retaliation she’d nearly crushed his wind-pipe with a choke hold outlawed by law enforcement in thirty-six states. The attorneys on both sides called it even, and all charges and countercharges were eventually dropped.
“Warn the boys not to come in here,” Kurt told her. “I don’t want anybody getting hurt. There’s enough dynamite in this place to blow up half the valley.”
She backed out of the trailer into fresh air. “Did I hear the ring of authority in that command?” she said. “Sounds like you want in on this one.”
He hadn’t thought like a cop for nearly a year and that channel of his brain felt as sluggish and rusty as a clogged rain gutter. “I don’t know, Muffin,” he said. “I still haven’t made up my mind about the job. If it wasn’t for Ned I’d be at home right now drinking coffee and tying flies.”
Ten years in office, most of them manageable years, until that business last summer. Kurt didn’t want to put his son through something like that again. For months after the kidnapping, Lennon had followed him around the house, sleeping in the same bed with Kurt, worried that strange men would break in again and drag his father away. So Kurt had spent his “recuperative leave” rebuilding the child’s confidence, taking him on camping trips, teaching him to cross-country ski, toughening him for a world full of thorns. And now their long vacation together was drawing to a close. The department’s leave extensions had been exhausted. In six weeks Kurt would have to become a workingman again. Somewhere.
“If you’re concerned about stepping on my ambitions, forget it,” Muffin said as they walked down the hill toward his Jeep. “I’m not cut out for political office. I can’t wait to get back on the beat. You neglected to tell me how much fucking paperwork was involved in this job. And how many Elks Club luncheons.”
Kurt stopped suddenly to catch his breath, a spasm gripping his chest.
“Don’t be stubborn,” she said, running her hand through the thick hair on the back o
f his head, probing the tender knot. “Go get yourself checked out. Do you want me to come with you?”
“I’ll be all right.”
He sat in the Jeep and waited for the dizziness to pass. “Get in touch with that demo guy in Denver,” he said, watching three firemen emerge from the smoky mine shaft and tear off their respirators, gasping for air. Poor Ned, he thought. Poor Hunter. “Lorenzo’s the best. It might take him a while, but he’ll tell us what happened.”
Muffin turned her attention to the paramedics loading neatly wrapped black bags into their vehicle, stacking them like freezer meat. “I’m not convinced this was anything but an old man getting careless, Kurt. But we sure as hell agree on one thing,” she said, a shiver racing through her small body. “Ned had his enemies.”
Chapter three
He stopped at Clark’s Market to buy three thick porterhouse steaks, then drove across the bridge west of town and turned off at the public schools, following the two-lane county road past the Highlands Ski Area and up the long narrow Castle Creek Valley toward the dilapidated remains of a mining settlement called Ashcroft. Miles Cunningham’s cabin was hidden among the aspen groves near the confluence of two creeks. The reclusive photographer had installed a large plastic Jack-in-the-Box drive-thru intercom head at his front gate to question intruders and turn them away. Kurt stopped the Jeep several yards before the intercom’s hose sensor, retrieved the .45 from under the seat, and stuck it in his belt. He was prepared to shoot the Dobermans if he had to. Or Miles.
He got out of the Jeep with the package of steaks under his arm and trotted down the barbed-wire fence line toward the shishing stream. The dogs spotted Kurt quickly and sprinted after him, barking, flaring their ears, baring yellow teeth. They looked lean and hungry, neglected, perhaps hung over from lapping bourbon out of the broken Wild Turkey bottles that littered Miles’s yard. Surly drunks, protein deficient, ignored by their master. Who could blame them for being in a nasty mood?
He ripped open the butcher paper and flung the three hefty steaks far into the brush, one for each dog. Lowering their sleek bony backs, the animals slowed down and growled at him through the fence, caught scent of the meat, and raced off to fight over it. Kurt heaved a sigh of relief and walked back to the aluminum ranch gate. He knew it was locked electronically, controlled from within the cabin, so he hoisted himself over the top and strode across the minefield of shattered glass to see if Miles was conscious this time of the morning. His surveillance cameras were no doubt tracking Kurt’s every step.
When no one answered the loud knocks, he circled around to the back of the cabin and saw that Miles had finally completed his cinder-block bunker down near the creek, a project he’d begun during the Nixon years. In the early ’80s, when they were on better terms, Kurt had helped him backhoe through six feet of soil to lay a cement foundation for this structure, which now resembled one of those stark concrete radio stations off a lonely prairie highway. As he approached the squat gray cube, the tangible manifestation of Miles’s long slippery descent, cubit by cubit, into clinical paranoia, Kurt noticed that the reinforced steel door was open slightly, a light on inside.
“Miles!” he said, forcing back the meat-locker door. “You in here?”
A shing of metal, and a sudden whish of blade parted the air in a cold whisper near his ear. He yanked the gun from his belt, cocked the hammer.
“Jesus, Muller!” Miles said, the long gleaming blade of a Japanese sword drawn back over his shoulder. “You could’ve lost a fucking ear, man. What’re you doing on my property?”
“Was in the neighborhood,” Kurt said, trying to control the tremble in his hand. “Dropped by to say hello.”
He wouldn’t put down his weapon until Miles lowered his.
“How did you get past security?”
Kurt shrugged. “Red meat.”
Miles glanced up at a TV monitor suspended in a corner of the room. The view from the Jack-in-the-Box head showed the grille of the Jeep visible on the edge of the screen.
“Spineless brutes,” Miles mumbled, the sword resting on his shoulder. “Training them on a low-fat diet to steel their nerves. Heighten their senses. First lame temptation, they go soft on me. Tomorrow morning it’s back to forced marches at 0500 hours.”
The cinder walls of the bunker were lined with gun-metal-gray file cabinets, Miles’s extensive photo morgue. A drawer was pulled open next to a buzzing light-table on which a dozen sheets of color slides were spread. The air was so thick from cigarette smoke that Kurt wondered if Miles had forgotten to install a ventilation system.
“Before I gut you from trachea to spleen,” Miles said, “tell me why you’re trespassing on sacred ground, hombre.”
They were five feet apart, within swift range of the long Japanese sword. Miles wasn’t backing down.
“Ned Carr is dead,” Kurt said. “Blown into confetti a couple of hours ago in the Ajax shaft. I don’t think it was an accident.”
Sweat glistened on Miles’s high forehead, speckled his top lip, ringed the underarms of his khaki shirt. His small predatory eyes darted to the tumbler of Wild Turkey resting on top of a cabinet. The man needed a drink.
“Can’t say as I’m surprised,” he said, reaching his free hand for the whiskey tumbler. “The old bastard was long overdue.”
Miles had been waging war against Ned Carr since the late ’60s, when National Geographic had sent the photographer on a Colorado wilderness shoot and Ned had unloaded three rounds from a pump shotgun at Miles for trespassing on Carr mining property. Miles retaliated the next day by tossing a stink grenade full of repulsive butyl mercaptan into the shaft where Ned was working. Since those days the old miner had accused Miles of monkey-wrenching him a hundred times—pulling up survey stakes, clipping his fences, jamming gate locks, slashing the tires on his vehicles, spray-painting dire warnings across the Airstream trailer. Lightweight sabotage, most of it. Misdemeanors. Even Miles was reluctant to take credit for every suspicious offense reported in the newspaper. But Kurt had experienced the mischief firsthand. At a bachelor-party camp-out on the eve of Miles’s second marriage, sometime in the mid-70s, Kurt and his brother, Bert, had smoked too much herb around the campfire and let Miles talk them into creeping up on Ned’s bulldozer and pouring sand in the gas tank. In those days half the freaks in the valley were devising dark plans to trash Ned Carr’s nature-gouging enterprise. It wasn’t something Kurt was proud of now, but he himself had monkey-wrenched the old man. An adolescent prank that had cost the miner a week’s income.
“If I was going to make a list of people most likely to celebrate Ned’s demise,” Kurt said, sliding the Smith & Wesson back in his belt, “you would be right at the top, my friend.”
Miles took a long drink of whiskey and closed his eyes in pleasure, a dying man who’d found a canteen in the desert. “Haven’t given Ned Carr a minute’s thought in godknowshowlong,” he mumbled.
“That’s not what I read in the paper,” Kurt said.
For the past year Ned and Tyler Rutledge had been stirring up controversy over a new access road they were bulldozing through national forest to service their second mine. The district court had determined that the road was legal under the Mining Law of 1872, and attorneys for the Sierra Club and the U.S. Forest Service were unable to block the miners from clear-cutting a half-mile swath through Engelmann spruce trees and Douglas firs.
A month ago the local newspaper had reported that the two miners had caught Miles Cunningham and an “unidentified female companion” approaching their road grader at midnight with an acetylene torch. Gunfire was exchanged, the newspaper stated, and the two saboteurs had fled into the night. Yet no charges were filed and both Ned and Tyler Rutledge refused to elaborate on the incident.
“You know what your problem is, Muller? You believe everything you read in the rags.”
Kurt noticed a camouflage tarp covering something in an unlit corner of the bunker. “Who was the woman?” he asked, wandering over
to inspect.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. Where are you going? Hey, you toad, you’re on delicate ground here. This is a U.S. citizen’s private property. His inner sanctum. Take another step and I’ll cleave out your liver.”
Kurt jerked back the tarp. He was not surprised by what he found. Eighteen-inch bolt cutters, various wrenches, a mallet hammer, a chainsaw, three cans of wd-40, a slew of leaking spray paints, an acetylene torch.
“This constitutes an illegal search, you fascist dog! My attorney will serve your balls on an hors d’oeuvres tray for this!”
“You don’t have an attorney anymore, Miles,” Kurt said, bending over to dig through the boxes. “You owed him too much money and then you set fire to his lawn.”
Sixty-penny helix nails, eleven-inch bridge timber spikes, number-four rebars sharpened as road spikes, military-issue caltrops for puncturing tires, three pairs of soiled work gloves, a case of DuPont dynamite. Kurt unscrewed the cap on a plastic milk jug and smelled the contents. Airplane fuel. The perfect party mixer for a Molotov cocktail.
“Miles, you’ve got enough monkey-wrenching shit here to send you away for ten years.”
When he turned around, Miles was coming toward him slowly, a deliberate measuring stalk, the sword point jabbing the concrete floor in an ominous tic tic tic. Kurt stood up, his irritation stopping Miles in his tracks.
“Not mine,” the photographer muttered, sipping his drink. “Holding it for someone,”
In spite of the corpulent belly hanging over his silver Nevada belt-buckle, Miles looked healthier than the last time they’d seen each other, nearly a year ago. His jowled face was ruddy from a fresh shave, his bushy sideburns trimmed, the gray fringe of hair barbered neatly around his huge ears, exposing the scar from a police truncheon in Santiago, 1973. He was wearing pressed slacks, a shiny new pair of snakeskin boots. This could mean only one thing, Kurt thought. There was definitely a woman somewhere in the picture.
