by Thomas Zigal
Metcalf glanced down at his desk, tracing his finger across an appointment calendar. “I have to be somewhere for dinner, Sheriff,” he said in a remote voice. “I’m afraid I don’t have time to give you a crash course in estate planning. Why don’t you consult an attorney,” he said, his eyes flashing across the room, “and then we’ll talk.”
Ned, you stubborn old fool, Kurt thought. Was there no one in the whole world to turn to but this thief? Did you become so desperate to hold on to the thing you loved the most, you were willing to give up part to save the whole?
“You’re one clever son of a bitch, aren’t you, Arnold old boy?”
Metcalf pressed an intercom buzzer on his desk. “Good day, Sheriff,” he said, his expression as cold as the ice in his glass. “My secretary will see you to the elevators.”
“Those ranchers down the hall,” Kurt said. “How much of their land are you going to take?”
“I’m a busy man, Sheriff. We will continue this conversation some other time.”
“We’re a long way from finished with each other,” Kurt said.
Metcalf’s response worked its way from mild annoyance to outright scorn. “You’re beginning to disappoint me, Mr. Muller.”
“If I were you, Arnold, I would start to worry.”
A VIProtex security guard appeared suddenly in the office doorway. “Is everything all right, Mr. Metcalf?” he asked, a hand resting on his weapon.
“Ken, would you and Miss Thorpe please escort my friend to the elevators. He seems to have lost his direction.”
“My pleasure, sir.”
The guard stepped back out of the door, waiting for Kurt to join him in the corridor.
“What’s that noise, Arnold?” Kurt said. “Do you hear it?”
The secretary had arrived now, breathless from the quick jog.
“It’s getting louder. Can’t you hear it?”
Metcalf stared at the security guard, raised an impatient eyebrow.
“Sounds like there’s a crack in your foundation,” Kurt said.
Chapter thirty-seven
Wing Taylor brought the plane down in a misty gray nightfall, the tires hissing through shallow rain puddles on the runway. Kurt had radioed ahead and Muffin was waiting for him outside the hangar. Darkness hovered over the eastern mountains and a frosty wind blew in their faces. “I found something in the personnel files,” she said, hunching her shoulders, her hands stuffed in a department windbreaker.
She drove them to the hospital and they marched down the corridor with an urgent stride. When the automatic doors swung open at ICU, Kurt could see Joey Florio at his post, arms locked behind his back, observing the activity in Tyler’s room. “He’s had a couple of seizures,” he told them in a cautious whisper. “It’s not looking good.”
Dr. Perry and two nurses were rushing around the bed, a somber team applying electroshock to the young man’s greased chest. A few feet away the Rutledges held each other, the mother’s face buried in her husband’s neck. The lines on the monitor blipped, flattened, blipped again, a graph of receding life force. Kurt closed his eyes and said a prayer for everyone in the room.
After a moment he looked over at Joey Florio still positioned in the doorway, his head bowed, a small man with a thick black mustache. Muffin was waiting in the corridor behind Joey, her cap resting against a knee, watching Kurt with bitter determination in her eyes. They had already discussed what had to be done.
At ten o’clock the deputy arrived to relieve Muffin at her station outside the door. Kurt could hear their voices.
“Didn’t expect to find you here. Where’s Florio?”
“He’s been having some personal problems. I had to fill in.”
“His old lady again?” The deputy laughed.
“Murphy will relieve you at two.”
“How’s our boy? Still hanging in there?”
“There was a bad scare early on. They had to zap his chest. But he seems to have stabilized.” Her voice grew clearer as she stepped into the dark room. “The monitors look good right now. The nurse just left. She’ll be back every half hour to check on him.”
Wavy orange graph lines from the two monitor screens provided the only light in the room.
“He’s one tough little fucker.”
“Yeah, he is. You need anything before I go?”
“How about a bottle of Jack and that pretty nurse named Sally.”
“Your wife must be one lucky woman.”
“Jesus, Brown, lighten up.”
“Murphy will be on at two. See you later, stud.”
The minutes crept by in the dead quiet of the room. Clothes hangers rattled at his slightest move. Through the crack between the closet doors Kurt could make out the swaddled figure hooked up to monitors and dripping plastic bags. From time to time, saliva gurgled through the tube in his mouth. Outside the dark window a light wet snow had begun to fall, softly ticking against the glass. The morning Lennon was born, a young deer had appeared out there, nibbling in the aspen glade, and Kurt had held the baby up to the window, showing the animal his newborn son. That memory comforted him now in this place where sons were all too quickly gone.
The nurse came in periodically, read the monitors, scribbled notes on a chart. She examined bags, adjusted valves, a flurry of efficient clicking sounds. He could hear the deputy making small talk with her in the corridor. More than once it occurred to Kurt that nothing was going to happen tonight. That he had misjudged intentions, miscalculated the timing and method. Throughout the long tedious wait he held on to the only thing he knew for certain: If Tyler Rutledge lived, he was a problem for the triggermen. And their employer. Sooner or later they had to make their move.
After nearly three hours, bone tired, his concentration wavering, he slumped down on the floor of the tight enclosure, his weary mind conjuring images of Kat Pfeil in his arms. He wondered where she was tonight. If she was safe. If she was thinking about him.
Footsteps entered the room, not the nurse’s quick, soft-soled pace but a man’s creaking boots. A shadow drifted past the crack, moving toward the bed. Kurt stood up quietly and nudged open the closet door an extra inch. The deputy was standing next to the safety railing, staring down at the motionless figure. Kurt slipped the .45 from his holster, a light scrape of leather, and bit his lip, waiting.
The deputy quickly scanned the room. Perhaps he had heard the sound. He glanced back toward the lighted corridor, then at the faintly glowing screens. He raised his eyes and searched the ceiling, turning full circle, making certain he hadn’t overlooked a video camera. He studied the patient for some time, touched his bare arm above the gauze wrapping. Finally, in one swift movement, he slid a rubber glove over his right hand, reached down, and turned off the oxygen flow to the respirator.
What are you going to do now? Kurt wondered. The man remained at the bedside, watching the screen’s respiration line wiggle and dip. He was practiced at his technique, confident, as if he’d done this sort of thing before. Perhaps he intended only to weaken Tyler, then turn the air back on at some critical moment, after it was too late, and let the boy sputter out on his own. When the nurse came in and found her patient dead, who would question what had happened, especially after the problems earlier this evening? The heroic med-tech systems were up and running but Tyler’s body could no longer respond.
Kurt kneed open the closet door. “You didn’t have to go to so much trouble, Gillespie,” he said, stepping out with his pistol gripped in both hands, pointed at the man. “Tyler died four hours ago.”
Startled, Gillespie banged against the monitor stand. The graphs went haywire, a buzzer sounded.
“You know the routine, Bill. Step out where I can see you. Hands on your head, kneel down real slow.”
“What are you going to do if I say, ‘Fuck you, Muller’? Shoot me?” the deputy said. “I don’t think so. You’re too smart a guy to fire a gun in an IC unit. Smart guys like you know a round might go through one of these c
heap-shit walls and hit some crip in the next room.”
He whipped the 9mm service revolver from his holster with impressive speed. “Me, I’m not so smart as you,” he said, leveling the weapon at Kurt. “I’m not so nice either. Move out of the way and let me pass, motherfucker, and everybody rides off into the sunset.”
“Where you going, Bill? Muffin and half the department are waiting for you outside.”
The deputy’s top lip glistened with sweat. His mind was working hard, turning over the possibilities.
“Put down the piece, Bill. We’ll find you a good lawyer. We’re not after you,” he said. Unless you pulled the trigger on Tyler, you son of a bitch. “You know how it works. Tell us who you’re working for, you may not do any time at all.”
“I been a cop thirty years, Muller. I ain’t going to the pen, not even for a weekend visit.” He cocked the hammer. “Now get out of my way.”
Gillespie took a step closer to the bed and the bandaged corpse rose up and seized the pistol hand and slammed it downward with incredible force, cracking the deputy’s forearm against the bed rail. The gun dropped like a flower petal onto the sheets. Joey Florio rolled through a tangle of plastic tubing and grappled Gillespie around the neck, riding him to the tile floor. They ended up wrestling under a wreck of aluminum trays and fallen iv stands, and Kurt piled on top of them both, finding Gillespie’s wrist and handcuffing him to the leg of the bed.
“God damn, Joey,” Kurt huffed, standing up slowly, pulling the radio from his belt. “Why’d you wait so long?”
Joey Florio was on his feet now, unraveling the gauze around his head, snapping off tubing taped to his hairy body. “I couldn’t move, man. You have any idea what it’s like to lie in a bed like that for three hours? My brain went numb.” He wadded up a fist-sized ball of adhesive tape and flung it at Gillespie, smacking him in the head. “Next time I wait in the closet.”
Gill Dotson jarred open the door to the linen shelf above the closet and dangled his long legs over the side. “Hey, Florio, could we get a second take on that Hulk Hogan airplane spin?” He had videotaped everything from a drill hole in the door. “A little sloppy on the takedown.”
“Bite my ass, Dotson.”
Kurt radioed Muffin, who was waiting in the parking lot with three deputies as backup. “Come on in, partner,” he said, still panting from the scuffle. “We got his whole nightclub act live and in color.”
Chapter thirty-eight
If the cops had pooled bets on Bill Gillespie’s one phone call, Kurt would have won big money. After his brief telephone conversation, the deputy returned to the interrogation table a dispirited man. He asked for a cigarette and smoked nervously, his eyes cast on the floor.
“Staggs is in Colorado Springs at a golf tournament,” Kurt said. Gillespie’s face betrayed his surprise that Kurt was one step ahead.
“It’s going to take a while for the local VIPro office to get in touch with him,” Kurt said, “and then it’s going to take a while longer for Staggs to line up a lawyer. We’re looking at noon the earliest, Bill. That gives us about eleven hours to chat.”
A graying, angular man, the deputy appeared gaunt around the mouth, exhausted. “Don’t treat me like a punk, Muller. I been at this game a lot longer than you have,” he said. “I don’t talk without a lawyer.”
“Suit yourself, Bill. But let me give you a few things to think about while you’ve got some time on your hands.”
He told the deputy that somebody would go down for murder now that Tyler was dead. “I’ve got a witness that says there were three of you at the Lone Ute Mine,” he explained patiently. “But my guess is that all three of you didn’t pull a trigger. Who’s it going to be, Bill? You or the bad boy?”
Muffin was pacing back and forth in front of the two-way mirror. She had discovered the VIProtex connection in Gillespie’s file, a letter of recommendation from the branch chief in Albuquerque, for whom the cop had done a little moonlighting. “Don’t be stupid, man,” she said. “You’re not in that deep. Do yourself a favor. Give us a reason to go easy on you.”
Although there was an ashtray in plain sight, Gillespie dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground the burning tip into the carpet, leaving a large black smudge. “Do me a favor and go easy on my dick, sweetheart,” he said.
She lunged at him, grabbed his shirt collar. Kurt had to restrain her from smashing the man’s face against the table.
Gillespie laughed at them. “This jam session is over,” he said, straightening his shirt, “until I hear from my lawyer.”
Kurt went home to a dark house dusted with snow. A white envelope had been slipped under the front door, his name addressed in a familiar handwriting. He stepped inside the mud porch and flipped on a switch. Just got off the phone with Randy’s daughter in Portland, the letter said, which is why this note may sound so scattered and emotional. I’m sitting here at Miles’ place, drinking his bourbon and thinking about parents and children. You are a wonderful father, Kurt. Seeing you and Lennon together, feeling the love between you, made me regret I didn’t have a child with Michael.
Miles has agreed to drive me to California, where I can stay with friends until my life settles down. I realize I am a material witness to murder and arson, and I will cooperate with your department in whatever way I can. (You know as much as I do about the incident). Maybe a written deposition would be the best thing for now. You can leave messages for me on Miles’ phone recorder. After the insanity of the past 24 hours, I am not willing to hang around Aspen any longer. I’m sorry if this poses a problem for your investigation.
Please take care of yourself and the boys. You are a dear sweet man and I wish things had turned out different for us. I can understand now why the adolescent Katrina P. had such a crush on you, and why it’s lasted all these years. With love, K.
He sat on the bunk bed in Lennon’s chill room, moonlight shaping strange silhouettes out of the toys scattered across the floor, and longed to hold the child in his arms. Slumped forward, wrists dangling between his knees, he imagined himself as an old man, alone and grieving in a room that had once been his son’s, the playthings just as the boy had left them thirty years before. In that same moment he saw Tyler’s parents sitting on a bed like this one, holding each other in the empty, desolate chamber of one heart, inconsolable and lost now that their only child was gone. He began to tremble. He didn’t want to believe that something like that could ever happen to the boy who slept in this bed. He didn’t want to believe that parents sometimes outlived their children.
Laying his head on the Lion King pillow, he gathered Lennon’s stuffed friends around him, a dozen creatures that comforted the boy every night, Jerry the Monkey and Weebok and the Wild Thing and some whose names Kurt could not recall. He didn’t intend to fall asleep, but he woke just before dawn with a burning pain where Skank had cut him with the switchblade. Over the bathroom sink he rolled back his sleeve and ripped off the stained bandage. His arm was red and swollen from wrist to elbow and pus oozed from the long shallow scratch. He applied a clean dressing, taped down the gauze, and looked at himself in the mirror, wondering why he had aged ten years in the last five days. Trying to rouse himself, force life back into those stone-hard features, he splashed water in his face and smoothed back his hair, then went into the cold living room to make a fire in the woodstove.
The answering machine indicated three blinking messages. The first was from a Free West attorney representing James Joseph Chilcutt. He sounded like a mature middle-aged man, relaxed, optimistic. No rookies for J.J. Chilcutt. If he was implicated in three murders and brought to trial, revelations about VIProtex’s relationship with Free West would destroy Metcalf’s credibility and jeopardize his foundation’s legal status, as well as threaten him with criminal prosecution.
“…sorry to say when Mr. Metcalf spoke with you he wasn’t aware that James would be out of state on assignment today and for the rest of the week,” the voice informed him. James
. As if he knew the prick. “I hope it won’t be too much of an inconvenience to schedule the meeting for next week.”
The first thing Kurt was going to do when he returned to the office this morning was issue an arrest warrant, drag Chilcutt’s ass back to Pitkin County.
“Hello, Kurt. I’ve been thinking about you all day. Did you find my note?” Kat Pfeil’s lovely resonant voice. “Miles and I had a disagreement and we parted company somewhere near Moab. I wish I could see you right now. I need a friend. It’s that time of night when I get so depressed and angry. I’m feeling like there’s only one thing I can do to make things right, but I know if you were here you’d talk me out of it.”
Kat, he thought, why did I let you get away? His mind raced over the ways he could contact her. The Utah state police? If only she would call again. And where the hell was Miles?
He telephoned the photographer’s cabin and got the recorder. Kurt’s message was brief but firm, insisting that Miles call him as soon as possible. Then he phoned the department and found Linda Ríos on duty. “Linda, I want you to pull up a plate for me,” he said, giving her Miles’s name and the make of his Land-Rover. “Call me back when you have it.” He would ask the Utah troopers for assistance in tracking them down.
Dazed from lack of sleep, he went to the kitchen to brew coffee and then realized he hadn’t listened to the third message on his machine. He punched the button that rewound the recorder, and skipped to the last call. It was Hunter’s small, formal telephone voice asking for his pet snake again and his box of rocks. He missed Sneak terribly and pleaded for Kurt to bring his things to Meg’s farmhouse. “I hid the box under Lennon’s bed so nobody would find the rock my grandpa said to never let anyone have…”
Kurt sighed and rubbed his bristly face. He wanted to see the boys but he didn’t know how soon he could—
He stopped abruptly and punched the button a second time, replaying the message. Hunter’s words were unmistakable: “I hid the box under Lennon’s bed so nobody would find the rock my grandpa said to never let anyone have.”
