by Thomas Zigal
“Bert, where have you been?” he asked.
“No, Kurt, it’s Nathan Carr.”
Nathan was a husky fellow with a trimmed beard and round rimless glasses. He had a kind smile. Kurt reached out and squeezed his hand.
“This is my uncle,” Hunter said, leaning against the man’s leg. “He knew my mom.”
“I wanted to come by and say hello,” Nathan said. “I’ll be here for a couple of weeks, straightening out Pop’s affairs. We’ll talk when you’re feeling better.”
“Nate,” Kurt said, refusing to release his hand until he understood everything clearly. “He wears a size one shoe. He doesn’t like milk on his cereal.”
When Kurt opened his eyes again, the room was dark and silent. He wondered if he’d dreamed Nathan’s appearance. A volunteer wheeled in the dinner cart, and there was a note from Miles under a coffee cup: The shitbirds have come home to roost. But it ain’t over till it’s over.
The same day, or maybe the next, Kurt woke from a nap to find Sheriff Dan the Man Davenport sitting in a chair across the room. “I figured this was the only way I could git you to tell me about that Dumpster,” he said with a grin. “And I brung you a card signed by my boys in Garfield County.”
Kurt was touched by everyone’s sincerity. He didn’t know what he’d done to receive so much attention. So much kindness.
Meredith arrived bearing magazines and chocolates, and the only good news he’d heard since this whole nightmare began. “Lee fired VIProtex as his security consultants,” she told him. “It’s got to be an incredible loss of revenue for them. We were using their services in three states. When the home office crunches those numbers, Neal Staggs may have to look for another job.”
As he was dozing off one evening, the telephone rang on his bedside table. “Hello, little brother,” the speaker said, the connection so poor he could’ve been calling from Borneo.
“Jake?” Kurt didn’t believe he was hearing this man’s voice again.
“Tell me what happened.” Calm, businesslike.
“I’m a fool,” he said in a sleepy mumble. “I didn’t know they were following me and I led them straight to her.”
Jake Pfeil sighed into the line, his helplessness audible from a million miles away. “You aren’t a very good cop, little brother. Maybe you ought to go back to selling camping gear.”
Kurt wasn’t certain if this was real or another fever dream. He ran his hand over the condensation on a water pitcher and wet his face. “Your sister was a wonderful woman,” he said. “I should have married her twenty years ago.”
Listening to the connection was like dialing the bands on a shortwave radio, a warp of high-pitched frequencies and galactic wind and faint otherworldly voices.
“When she was just a little thing, three or four, I used to put her on my shoulders and hike up the mountain. She loved to pick serviceberries and bring them home to make pies with Mother. You and me and Bert, we showed her how to fly-fish in the creek.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“You were there, little brother. You saw it all go down. How come you didn’t help her?”
Every waking minute in this hospital bed Kurt had been asking himself the same question. “I tried, Jake,” he said. “She didn’t want my help.”
The line crackled, a catch in Jake’s breath. “Who were they?” he asked. “Same people that hurt her in Oregon?”
“Same profile,” Kurt said. “She must’ve been very good at what she did. They didn’t want her back in the game.”
“I’m acquainted with VIProtex. Some of my associates use their bodyguards,” he said. “Is there a name in their organization I should direct my attention to?”
“An old friend of yours. Neal Staggs.”
When Staggs was in the Denver bureau, he had conducted a decade-long investigation of Jake Pfeil’s illegal drug activities. Because of Neal Staggs, Jake was living in a foreign country, a fugitive from justice, his American assets frozen, several million dollars in real estate and other investments.
“After the Feds put him out to pasture he went to work for VIProtex. Colorado region. He was at the Sahara for the convention.”
“So that’s what this is all about,” Jake said. “Neal Staggs sticking another knife in my back. I should have killed that prick when I had the chance.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Jake. Your sister’s death is a lot bigger than your feud with Staggs.”
Jake seemed to be evaluating the rebuke. “She was the last family I had in this world,” he said finally. “They’re all gone now. You know how it feels when you lose someone close. I’ve got a hole in my heart, little brother. When does that go away?”
“It never goes away, Jake. You learn to breathe different.”
The phone static sounded like electron waves crashing over a dark metallic shore. “Who is this guy Arnold Metcalf?” Jake asked. “Did he have a problem with my sister?”
Kurt wasn’t surprised to hear Jake say the man’s name. “I don’t know for certain.”
“We both want the same thing here. Let me help.”
“I’m not going to finger Metcalf for you, Jake. I don’t know how involved he was. He’s a rotten bastard, but I have no evidence that he was after Kat.”
“I’m offering my services, little brother. I can accomplish in a few days what it will take your department two years to pull together.”
“It may take two years, it may take three. We’ll get it done. Don’t become a player, Jake. I’ll sleep better if you stay out.”
“It’s too late for that now. My sister’s dead and I’ve got this hole in my heart. Something’s got to make it go away.”
“Don’t, Jake.” Kurt didn’t know how many enemies Jake Pfeil had disposed of in his life.
“Are they taking good care of you, Kurt? Let them spoil you a little. You and me, we’re the only ones left from the old days. We deserve attention.”
Kurt had every reason to hate this man for the mess he’d made of Bert’s life. And Meg’s. But in that moment he felt only pity and sorrow and emptiness.
“Good night, little brother. Treat yourself right. You’re not getting any younger.”
Kurt lay awake for hours replaying the conversation in his mind. When he did finally drift off, numbed by Percodan, he dreamed the old dream of black corridors and creaking doors. He had found Kat alive in a dark room, standing in her pajamas near a window, the cold night wind blowing gauzy drapes around her slender body. It will come to you, she said, swaying her hands to catch the aspen leaves fluttering about the room. The answer is always in the leaves. He woke in a hot sweat and buzzed for the night nurse, begging for another painkiller.
The day before he was released from the hospital, the Las Vegas homicide investigator who had interviewed him in the emergency room flew to Aspen to question him again. Kurt requested that Muffin Brown and Corky Marcus sit in on the discussion. Detective Nick DiMeo was clearly dubious about the larger implications of Kat’s death and insisted on treating the case as a fatal confrontation between a security guard and a deranged Green Briar sniper.
“You’re my only witness and you’re telling me you can’t id a single perp because all you saw was their striped pants,” the detective said. He was a career man with a Jersey accent, a cheap suit, and a chipped front tooth. Kurt didn’t want to know where he’d received his training. “Am I correct about the pants, Sheriff Muller?”
“It was dark.”
“And so is this investigation,” DiMeo said, closing his notepad.
“I can id James Joseph Chilcutt of Grand Junction, Colorado, and swear in court that he intended to kill us both.”
DiMeo raised a skeptical eyebrow. “The VIProtex people say this Chilcutt was checking out a report about a possible sniper in the parking garage. They say you were in the convention hall earlier, causing trouble yourself. What were you doing in Vegas, Sheriff Muller? Why were you in the garage? Are you some kind of militant like th
e deceased Miss Pfeil?”
“I don’t like the direction this conversation is taking,” Corky said. “Is my client under investigation here?”
The homicide detective smiled caustically and slipped the notepad into his suit jacket. “Let me give your client some free advice,” he said. “Next time he’s in somebody else’s jurisdiction, it’s common courtesy to inform law enforcement what he’s doing on their stoop. Otherwise things can get real hinky. I see a man packing a piece in a shoulder holster, I’m going to pull my own. Do I make myself clear, people?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t check in, Detective,” Kurt said. “There was no time.”
“Next time, make time. Good day, folks. Got a plane to catch.” He dropped a business card on Kurt’s sheeted legs. “You remember anything else about these assailants in the striped pants, give me a call.”
After he left, Muffin stood up and kicked a chair. “That asshole is going to deep-six this whole case in his dead file.”
Corky ran a hand through his mop of hair. “He came here to let you know he’s doing you a big favor, one cop to another, by not coming after you, Kurt.” He shook his head. “Next time you hear from him, a couple of years from now, he’ll be calling in the debt.”
Muffin walked to the window and stared out at the green glade encircling the picnic tables. A patient wearing a terry bathrobe was eating breakfast with her family. “Let’s take this to Don,” she said. Donald Harrigan was the local DA, a good man. “We’ve got enough to make a case in Pitkin County, don’t we, Corky?”
Corky looked dispirited. “Did your demolitions expert determine that Ned’s death was the result of intentional tampering?”
“No,” Kurt said.
“Can anyone identify who shot Tyler in the Lone Ute?”
“No.”
“Can you id any of the dirt-bikers who chased you in the pickup?”
Kurt closed his eyes.
“We’ve got Gillespie on tape!” Muffin said. “Goddammit, that should count for something, Corky.”
“Can you prove that the deceased police officer was employed by either VIProtex or Arnold Metcalf?”
There was a long silence. When Kurt opened his eyes, he saw that Muffin was sitting on the floor next to the central air panel, frustration souring her handsome face.
“I’ve got to get back to school,” Corky said, rising from his chair with the legal briefcase he’d brought to impress the detective. Kurt knew it was stuffed with math tests and fourth-grade workbooks. “I’m sorry, guys. I wish I could be more optimistic. Don doesn’t have jack to work with.”
A quarter of an hour passed before Muffin said anything or budged from the floor. Kurt was depressed by his own inadequacy and extremely tired of lying in this bed. He stared out the large glass window, watching the aspen leaves quiver in the spring breeze, a magical green trembling that had never ceased to enchant him.
“Where did you get these?” Muffin asked, flipping through the environmental magazines Meredith had left behind. “Jesus, Kurt. Maybe that guy DiMeo was right about you,” she said, studying a photograph that had caught her eye. “Katrina and her friends must have rubbed off on you. Are you becoming some kind of ecomilitant tree hugger?”
She bumped the table inadvertently and the precarious stack of magazines tumbled to the floor. “Damn,” she said, kneeling down to gather the scattered pages. “Sorry I messed up your little library here.”
Kurt sat up in bed. He remembered something, the ghosts of a dream. The answer is always in the leaves. “Muffin,” he said, “I want you to go to my house—-to my father’s study—and bring me that pile of articles on the desk next to the telephone.”
Muffin stood up, her face red from exertion, and stashed the jumble of magazines on a dresser. “You don’t have enough reading material here?” she asked, straightening the assortment of glossy covers.
“It’s there somewhere,” he said. “It’s got to be.”
“What, Kurt?”
“The thing that’ll ruin his sleep.”
He was going to read every bloody word of every bloody article ever published about the Free West Rebellion—spend the rest of his life in a library if he had to—until he found a way to stop Arnold Metcalf.
Chapter forty-nine
The disclosure of Ned Carr’s final will and testament was scheduled for the first Wednesday in June, and Kurt flew to Colorado Springs with Nathan Carr, Hunter, and Corky Marcus to attend the reading. Security on the twentieth floor was even tighter than before. A VIProtex guard detained them at the entrance to the FWLC reception area and waved a metal-detector wand over the three adults, then released them into the custody of a squadron of lantern-jawed security officers who marched them like prisoners of war down the long sun-bathed corridor to Metcalf’s suite. Kurt felt like Abu Nidal entering the UN.
When Metcalf introduced himself to Nathan and Hunter, the attorney appeared unusually tense, his high forehead glistening with perspiration. His eyes darted nervously at Kurt as if he expected something sudden and inappropriate to take place. “I’m very pleased to meet you, young man,” he said, stooping to shake Hunter’s hand. “I knew your grandfather quite well and respected his tenacious spirit.”
Isn’t that why you had him killed? Kurt wanted to ask. That unpredictable spirit.
Attended by efficient young clerks with unmistakable Ivy League breeding, the group settled around the conference table and Metcalf wasted no time getting the reading under way. The VIProtex guards stationed themselves close by, hands behind their backs, legs spread at parade rest, and the entire ceremony struck Kurt as ostentatious and excessively vigilant. He wondered why all the heightened security over a few harmless visitors from Aspen.
There were no surprises in the will. The FWLC draft nullified any previously existing wills, as they knew it would, naming Hunter as sole beneficiary of sixty percent of the “estate” and granting the other forty percent to the Free West Legal Coalition “for their outstanding generosity and support of my enterprise.” Allegedly written by Ned himself, the narrative praised the law foundation as the savior of the independent hardrock miner in a hostile, overregulated world. Couldn’t have survived without their expertise. Came to my defense at a crucial moment in my life. Provided more than legal assistance. Courage, moral conviction, friendship. Et cetera, et cetera. Not a word of it in Ned’s singularly recognizable voice. And the spelling was no doubt perfect.
Afterward, Arnold Metcalf sank back in his chair and whispered something to the clerk sitting beside him, and she rose to fix him a Scotch at the bar. “We’re delighted to be your new partner, young Mr. Carr,” he said to Hunter, who was occupied with the rules of a contest on the back of a Coke can and didn’t appear to be listening. “We look forward to a long and prosperous friendship. I’m sure there will be many mutually beneficial projects in our future.”
“I have a question,” Hunter said, his chin resting on the table, tired and grumpy from the early-morning plane ride. Kurt was surprised that the child was attentive enough to speak.
“Yes, certainly,” Metcalf said, peering over his reading glasses like a bemused librarian.
“Am I the boss?”
There was polite laughter around the table. “Yes, you are,” Metcalf nodded. “The controlling interest.”
“Then I don’t want anybody going into the mines anymore. They’re too dangerous. That’s how my grandpa and Tyler got killed.”
The law clerks exchanged glances. Metcalf eyed Kurt with suspicion, as if he’d coached the boy to say this. “We’ll all have to be very careful, then, won’t we?” the attorney said. “Human health and safety should be our primary concerns.”
Nathan Carr was sitting back from the table with a leg crossed over his knee. “Hunter and I have discussed this a lot,” he said. Nathan had turned out to be a patient, thoughtful man with a dry sense of humor, and Kurt had come to like him very much during the week he had stayed at the Muller home. “We’ve talked
about shutting down any active operations, such as they are, and opening up the mines for guided tour groups. We’ll need a sizable investment to make them people-ready, and insurance will be a bear, but Leighton Lamar has offered to help on our end.”
“I see,” said Metcalf, steepling his fingers.
“It’s a clean, constructive way to keep my father’s legacy alive,” Nathan said. “Folks will get a chance to see what he’s been doing for the past fifty years, and what the early miners started, without messing up the mountain and the backcountry any more than it already is.”
Metcalf sipped his Scotch. This kind of talk made him uneasy.
“Sounds like a sensible solution to me,” Kurt said, offering the attorney a dark ironic smile. “Especially since those old silver mines are flat-out worthless, Mr. Metcalf. Who could possibly be interested in working them again?”
Without recognizing Kurt’s remarks, Metcalf jotted something on a yellow pad and handed the note to his assistant. “I see we have much to discuss at our first investors’ meeting, gentlemen. Perhaps we should set a date.”
After a brief interchange about calendars and commitments, the meeting was abruptly adjourned and the law clerks began to clear the conference table like frenzied waiters. Within minutes they had dashed out of the suite with armloads of documents, leaving the guards to watch over the Aspenites. Corky Marcus remained in his chair and took his time examining the will itself. “It’s Ned’s signature,” he said to Kurt in a quiet aside. “Everything looks kosher on the face of it. I don’t find any improprieties with the way they’ve managed this.”
