by Thomas Zigal
Kurt needed all of his strength to extract Miles’s fingers from his wrist. There were four deep gouge marks, the skin broken, drawing blood.
“You want to help me, you’ve got to clean up your act, Miles. I can’t use a drunk.”
Kurt heard Meredith coming down the corridor, approaching them swiftly in a monogrammed bathrobe, the housekeeper struggling to keep up with her. “Miles, I thought you went home an hour ago,” Meredith said. “We’ve been looking all over the place for you. Security noticed your Land-Rover in the lot and thought something might have happened.”
Miles blinked, sweat pouring down his face. “Got to keep an eye on Katrina,” he muttered. His eyes rolled back in his head and his upper body toppled sideways into a heap of rumpled clothing. He was down for the count.
Kurt reached into Miles’s one intact boot and freed the Beretta from an ankle holster. He didn’t want the man to blow his foot off.
Meredith spoke to Gloria in Spanish. Prepare another room.
Chapter twenty-six
It was midnight when Gloria let him out through the wrought-iron gates and he slid into the squad car waiting for him. The closed vehicle smelled like Chinese food. Resting on the backseat were a couple of dogeared paperback mysteries, a plastic clothes hamper full of dirty laundry, and a gooey container, the source of the odor. Kurt rolled down his window.
“How is the green goddess?” Muffin asked, guiding the car back down the private road toward town. “Did you tuck her in?”
“She’s hurting. She needs about twelve hours of sleep.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t stay to make sure she got it.”
He ignored her cynical smile and asked about the boys.
“They’re fine. Dotson and Florio are watching the house in Basalt. But I came very close to punching out your hysterical ex. You have remarkable taste in women, Muller.”
“Meg’s a mother.” He felt the need to defend her. “I don’t blame her one bit for being pissed about what happened.”
Muffin raked a hand through her hair, a familiar sign of her frustration. “The cabin was totaled,” she said. “The firemen had a fight on their hands keeping the blaze out of the woods. They’re still out there.”
“Any sign of the bikers? I bumped one of them into the trees.”
She shook her head. “Our guys saw lots of tire tracks in the mush, but by the time the fire trucks passed through there, the road was a mess.”
She drove him to the impound area behind the county jail. The deputies had towed Kurt’s Jeep back to town. He got out and inspected the smoky upholstery, looking for burns. The old Willys had escaped unscathed.
He reached under the driver’s seat, reassured to find the .45 still in its holster where he kept it. Muffin raised the hood and they both leaned in for a closer examination, checking hoses and belts, their heads bobbing within inches of each other. “What are you going to do now?” she asked him, tugging on a wire.
“Go home and go to bed,” he said. “Want to come?”
“What an intriguing offer.” She straightened up and wiped her oily hands on her pants. “Thanks, but I’ve got laundry to do.”
Things had been awkward between them for several months now, ever since he had taken R & R leave, so he was glad they could still tease each other with a smile on their faces. Their friendship was changing, undergoing mysterious strains he could never have imagined a year ago.
“So what have we got here, Kurt? I’m drawing blanks,” she said. “You’ve talked to Tyler and you’ve talked to Katrina Pfeil. Are they trying to kill each other? The miners against the tree humpers?”
He slid behind the wheel of the Jeep and turned the key. “It’s possible,” he said, as perplexed as she was. “Except that a man in a coma has a very hard time tossing a firebomb.”
“Maybe he’s got friends we don’t know about.”
They both knew Tyler didn’t have a friend in the world. “Yeah, go drag Tink Tarver out of bed and book him,” he said. “I’ve always suspected that little pud was a bomb-throwing anarchist.”
She slapped the side of the Jeep, a ranch girl swatting the haunches of a slow work animal, moving it along. “Gotta log some time. Reports to file,” she said, backing away. “See you at the funeral. Get some sleep.”
In spite of the hour, he had no intention of going home. He drove downvalley along the dark two-lane highway toward Basalt, dodging bloody roadkills, the nighttime as dense and unyielding as the bottom of a lagoon, the pastures and river trees and shale walls of the valley lost in a murky black liquid without depth or dimension. A cold wind whipped through the roofless Jeep, pinching him awake. His body sagged against the backrest, tired and leaden, but his thoughts raced in frantic circles, fueled by adrenaline and a father’s apprehensions.
The old two-story farmhouse was hidden in a willow glade beside a strip of crumbling road that had been the main highway thirty years ago, before the new bypass. The turnoff was easy to miss at night, especially with only one headlight, but Kurt slowed down and crept over a bumpy cattle guard, making his way past the mailboxes toward the Pitco unit blocking further entrance. The cruiser’s spotlight flashed on and lasered into his eyes, blinding him. He stopped abruptly and raised his head above the windshield, blocking his face with a hand. “It’s Muller!” he called out, waving. “Turn that damn thing off!”
“Come ahead, Kurt,” the deputy said, killing the light.
Kurt got out and joined Gill Dotson in the cruiser. Gill was a large friendly farmboy from Minnesota, well liked in the department, a superb backcountry skier and the leader of their special rescue squad. They sat in the dark vehicle waiting for the other deputy, Joey Florio, to return from his rounds of the quiet house and the garden out back. A soft light glowed within the bottom floor, but upstairs was black and silent. Kurt wondered where the boys were sleeping. He wondered why Lennon had not told him about Meg’s friend, the man on whose shoulder he had so readily dozed. He wondered, too, if Lennon understood that his mother had found someone else to love and that life would be different now.
“Why are we watching the kids, Kurt?” Gill asked, sipping from a milk carton.
“Just a precaution.”
“Who would want to hurt a child?”
“Whoever threw that Molotov didn’t give a shit who they hurt.”
A flashlight beam danced across the yard, Joey Florio circling back from the rear of the house. He stopped and shone the light on a wood-slat swing creaking from a rusty chain between two willows. His long white ray scanned the fence line and a small orchard of pear trees.
“What’s your impression of the guy with Meg?” Kurt asked the deputy. He had hired Gill eight or nine years ago, provided what little training he required, trusted him like a favorite nephew. If somebody wearing a Pitkin County uniform was dirty in all of this, it wasn’t Gill Dotson. Or Joey Florio, whom Kurt had known since junior high.
“Is he the new love interest?”
“Looks that way,” Kurt said.
“He seems all right. One of those New Age feely-touchy types, but harmless. You want me to do a background check on him?”
“You’re reading my mind again.”
“When we change shifts,” Gill shrugged, “I’ll let the air out of his tires.”
“Let’s cut him some slack, Gill. He’s a man who travels a loftier path.”
“You’re a wonderful human being. I mean that.”
“These are two souls struggling to achieve a higher level of Tantric fulfillment.”
“Is that like holding off until she gets hers first?”
“This is my ex-wife we’re talking about, Gill.”
“Okay, what are we giving them, six months?”
“Two months, max. If they’re still together we’ll slice off his valve stems.”
“I’m glad you’re being grown up about this.”
Joey Florio opened the back door, tossed his flashlight onto the seat, and slid in. “Hey th
ere, Kurt,” he said. “Everything’s tight as a tick. The boys are asleep.”
Kurt watched the dark windows on the upper floor. As he told the deputies about the firebomb exploding into the Pfeil cabin, his voice began to quaver slightly and he struggled to control his anger, remembering that first frenzied moment of fear and helplessness. Lennon’s words still echoed through his head. Daddy, don’t leave me.
“A fucking firebomb,” Joey said. “Things are a lot stranger around here than when we were kids, Kurt.”
“Who’s got the Oreos?” Gill asked.
Kurt handed him the bag. “An eyewitness says that one of the perps in the Tyler Rutledge shooting was wearing our colors,” he told them. “You guys have any idea if that could be so?”
“Not possible,” Joey said.
“Who’s the witness?” Gill asked.
“Somebody watching through binoculars. Keep this to yourselves. We may have a roach in our popcorn.”
“Come on,” Joey scoffed. “That’s bullshit, Kurt. Our posse squeaks when they walk.”
Joey was probably right. Kat could have been mistaken about the uniform. There had been no serious incidents of department misconduct in Kurt’s ten years as sheriff.
“I hope you’re right, Joey. But I want you guys to keep your eyes open. You see anything unusual, get in touch with me.”
There was a short, unsettling silence. “What kind of things are we talking about, Kurt?”
Kurt had been working this over in his mind ever since Kat’s remark. “Did anybody show up on duty today wearing a bandage? Maybe an arm or leg taped up?”
The two men mumbled, shook their heads. They hadn’t noticed anything like that. Kurt explained that one of Tyler’s assailants had been wounded.
“Does Muffin know about this eyewitness?” Gill asked.
“Yeah, but she doesn’t believe the make either.”
Joey rustled the Oreos bag. “So why do you believe it, Kurt?”
“I’m covering all the bases. I don’t want it to be true any more than you do.”
Eliminating these two men and Muffin, that left a dozen deputies in the department. Kurt had hired them, sent them through the training program in Glenwood Springs, nurtured their careers. They were a family. If there was a bad mutt in the litter, Kurt felt responsible. He hadn’t spent enough time with his deputies in the past couple of years and didn’t know them anymore.
“I’m not starting a witch hunt here,” he said. “I don’t care if somebody’s wasting Xerox paper. But if you notice one of our compadres going through some funny changes, give me a call.”
Joey snickered in the backseat. “Jeez. Cops going through funny changes. What are you, Kurt?” he said with a mouthful of cookie. “Hard up for phone calls?”
Chapter twenty-seven
By the time he arrived at the Black Diamond Saloon it was nearly two in the morning. Sunday night, closing time, the slowest hour of the week. There were no dirt bikes out front, only two Harleys and a couple of pickups. He parked in the dark lot across the street and watched the stragglers weave out to their vehicles, a skinny-necked cowboy with a drunk woman hanging on him, slurring her laughter, and a few minutes later, half a dozen Mexican migrants piling into the other truck bed and howling off into the night. Soon a Garfield County patrol unit cruised by, the deputy slowing down to look for DUIs, and Kurt sank behind the wheel, in no mood to get hauled down to the sheriff’s office to discuss those twisted sheets of metal stacked up across the road, the remnants of what used to be a Dumpster.
After the deputy had rolled out of sight, two Bandidos swaggered through the doors to rev up their Harleys and roar away, and the lights began to dim inside. A battered old Studebaker was parked near the rear of the saloon, the last car in the lot. Kurt suspected that junker was Skank’s ride home and sped across the road with his headbeams off.
He tried the back door but it was locked, so he stepped around the corner of the building into deeper darkness and waited. In a few moments the door opened and a tall stooped figure emerged, mumbling to himself, rattling a ring of keys.
“Hello, Skank,” Kurt said. The bartender was startled and whirled around to face him. “How about one for the road?”
Kurt never saw the knife. There was a swish across his forearm, a quick stinging slice of skin. Kicking out hard, he caught Skank in the crotch and slammed him against the brick wall, and the knife clattered to the ground. He dragged the bartender to his feet, twisted his arm behind his back, and smashed his face against the wall. “Is that any way to treat an old friend?” he said, booting away the six-inch switchblade lying near his feet.
“Who the fuck are you, man? What do you want?”
“I’m looking for a name and I think you can supply it, Skank. Let’s go back inside, shall we? We don’t want to wake the neighbors.”
There was a single light on inside, a buzzing fluorescent tube hanging twelve feet above the row of liquor bottles. His arm pinned behind his back, Skank marched obediently ahead, offering little resistance to the big man behind him. Kurt drew him to a halt at the bar sink, a deep basin filled with murky gray water, a scum of suds.
“I know who you are, dude,” Skank said. “You’re the motherfucker who blew up that Dumpster out back.”
“Wrong,” Kurt said. “Your buddy the dirt-biker blew up the Dumpster.”
“It was your stick, man. You fucking lit it.”
“Well, Skank, you may have me on a technicality. Let’s call it a draw. You tell me the name of the guy who threw the stick and I won’t dunk your ugly face in this sink.”
Kurt’s jacket sleeve was slit open, the denim stained with his blood. The wound wasn’t deep but it stung like a razor cut.
“The cops are after your ass,” Skank said, nervously twisting at a long string of hair. “They’ve been in here taking notes.”
“His name, Skank. What’s the Beard’s name?”
“Some uniforms from Pitkin County were here yesterday asking the same thing. I’ll tell you what I told them. I don’t know none of those guys. They blow in on the weekends and drink their beer and shoot some pool and then they ride off into the sunset. Hiyo, Silver, kemosabe. I don’t keep their time sheets.”
Kurt grabbed him by the neck, shoved his head under the dirty water, yanked him up quickly. Skank gasped for air, a mass of long wet hair concealing his face like kelp.
“You’re going to have to do something about the way you wash glasses in this establishment, Skank. One call to the Health Department and they’ll shut you down.”
“Fucking shithead!”
Kurt shoved his head under again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you very clear. Did you mention a name?”
Skank fought back but was no match for Kurt’s strength. He came up coughing, spitting water, cursing the man who had a grip on his arm and neck.
“I guess I’m just in a bad mood tonight, Skank. Somebody tried to kill my little boy and his friend. You have any kids?”
The bartender nodded, his head dangling over the basin, dripping like a wet dog. “Little girl in Rifle,” he sputtered. “Lives with her mother.”
“Then maybe you can understand why I’m so upset. Now if you just tell me the guy’s name, I’ll walk away and we can stop all this foolishness.”
“I don’t—”
Kurt squeezed Skank’s neck, the signal he was going swimming again. “Okay, okay,” the bartender said. “His name is J.J. That’s all I know.”
“And where does this J.J. live?”
“I don’t know.”
Kurt dunked him again, holding his head down for at least ten seconds. When he dragged him up, Skank said, “Junction! That bike club in Junction!”
“Good, Skank. Now I’m going to give you a chance to catch your breath and clear your head. I want you to think very carefully. Does J.J. have a last name? This is crucial. If you can’t remember his last name, I may have to consider other forms of memory therapy.”
Skank
was breathing hard, his elbows resting on the basin. Cheese-colored foam clung to his hair. “I can’t do this anymore, man. You’ve got to stop.”
“Ask yourself this, Skank. What has this guy J.J. done for me that’s worth another twenty seconds in the nastiest water in Bonedale?”
The bartender straightened up, pushed the hair out of his face with his free hand, wiped at his wet wind-breaker. “J.J. tried to hurt your kid?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Kurt said. “I want to talk to him.”
Skank sniffed, harked up a wad of phlegm, and spit, his eyes blinking rapidly. “J.J. Chilcutt,” he said. “Works for some security outfit in Grand Junction. That’s all I know about him, man. You want to dunk me again, fuck you. I ain’t saying another word.”
Kurt released him with a shove. “You pulled a knife on an officer of the law,” he said, removing his jacket and rolling back the bloody shirtsleeve to examine the cut. “You could do time for that, asshole. Keep that in mind when I walk out of here. If I find out you’ve contacted this J.J. Chilcutt about our conversation here tonight, I’ll be back to press charges.”
Kurt found the switchblade on the ground outside the back door and tossed the knife into his glove compartment. He got behind the wheel and drove the deserted orchard road back to Highway 82, praying he would get out of Garfield County without being pulled over for a missing headlight.
Chapter twenty-eight
The jiggling sound woke her, a turning doorknob. She reached for Kurt but he wasn’t there. The bed beside her was empty. Maybe he had accidentally locked himself out. “Kurt, is that you?” she asked in a drowsy moan.
“Miss Pfeil,” said a male voice in the hallway.
She rolled out of bed quickly and searched the darkness for her clothes. “Who is it?” she asked.
“Security, ma’am. Is everything all right?” A deep growling voice. Why was he still working the doorknob?
“Everything’s fine,” she said, slipping into her jeans. “I was asleep.”
