“Well, I have something else. I don’t know if you know; don’t even know if you care, but the sniper hit again last night. A sixty-two-year-old man driving a gorgeous ’62 Chevy pickup. See the symmetry in that? It’s some kind of message, I tell you. He was an African-American man. A church-goin’ man. His hair was the color of an old nickel and he kept it in a gorgeous ol’ ’fro I swear was the size of a basketball. Now he’s dead. Bullet damn near blew the back of his skull off. The pickup he was driving? It just rolled to a stop on the shoulder as it was heading up that hill to El Rancho. Like it was running out of gas, you know? Nice and gentle? Other than the broken glass—just a neat little hole in the driver’s window—there’s not a scratch on it. That’s what they said on the news.”
“God help us,” I said.
“If you’re coming down by car, you be careful.”
“El Rancho?” I said. I added an inflection between the two words to turn the repetition into a query, but I wasn’t really asking her anything. El Rancho was the exit on Interstate 70 at the top of the hill where I’d seen the third of the three men with cell phones just before my run-in with the flatbed truck full of barrels.
I was wondering if I still believed in coincidence.
I wondered if the sixty-two-year-old church-going black man with the silver afro had been murdered to send me a message.
Like Dmitri.
“That’s what I said. El Rancho. Bad wreck up there yesterday, too. Dozen cars or something. People died.”
“I haven’t seen the news. I didn’t know about the sniper … that he’d hit again last night,” I said. I didn’t tell LaBelle that I’d avoided the news because I didn’t want to learn what the final casualty toll had been from the clumsy, shotgun-blast attempt on my life the previous day on the interstate by the barrel-dropping flatbed truck.
LaBelle was still talking. “Mm hmm hmmm. Imagine not knowing what the hell is going on. Imagine something like that. Mm hmm hmmm.”
SIXTY-ONE
The phone from Lizzie’s panty drawer started ringing when I was less than an hour from Ridgway driving across the expansive land of the high-country plateau that yields the always-worth-celebrating annual bounty of Olathe Sweet.
I could almost taste the buttery, savory sweetness of the legendary local corn. I shed a tear knowing that “almost” was as close as my lips would ever get to tasting it again.
My associations skipped from Olathe Sweet to butter to lips and then on to Thea and the girls. From the road to the horizon, I saw nothing but a sky full of lips I’d never kiss again.
But I ignored the phone.
The panty-drawer phone disturbed the quiet again a while later as I was cutting through Grand Junction to catch I-70 eastbound over the Rockies.
And I ignored it again.
Just outside the small town of Rifle, the phone began to chirp at me every minute or so. I considered turning it off. Instead, I answered it. Why? Maybe boredom. The stretch of I-70 between Grand Junction and Rifle is not exactly Colorado’s most scenic chunk of road. But mostly I answered because of the tantalizing possibility that Lizzie had indeed found Adam.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Where are you?” Lizzie asked in an enthusiastic voice, as though she thought I’d been waiting all day to talk with her.
“Rifle,” I said.
She recognized the irony and laughed. Her laugh made me smile. My smile was as involuntary as her laugh.
“Are you on your way to Connecticut?”
“Why should I tell you that? Why should I trust you?” I said.
“Because I found your son. I know where he is.”
“I would have found him on my own.”
“Maybe.”
“They tried to kill me.”
“Don’t be so surprised. You hired them to kill you.”
“A lot of people died.”
“It’s not an ideal result. But to them, it’s sometimes necessary. I guarantee that they consider the carnage your fault.”
“My fault?”
“You are being … difficult. From their point of view, you’re interfering. You could have chosen to overreact when that first barrel came your way. That cliff was right there, waiting for you to fly over it. Would have killed you for sure. Who knows, maybe no one else would have died.”
I wanted to scream at her. I told myself it wouldn’t help. The urge passed, like a swallowed belch.
A word she’d used was bothering me. “You said ‘them.’ ”
“Us,” she said. She said “us” reluctantly, I thought. For a transient moment I was tempted to grant her the benefit of the doubt that was linked to that reluctance.
But that impulse passed, too. I broke the connection and shut down the power on the phone. I wished I had killed it before I’d made the mistake of answering the call near Rifle.
She called me back on my own phone a couple of minutes later.
I was waiting for it.
“Don’t hang up,” she said. “You need me. You won’t find him.”
“Do I? I’ll bust down every door in New Haven if I have to. I’ll find him by myself.”
“You don’t have time to bust down every door in New Haven.”
“My luck has been holding.” I could have told her about skiing steep slopes in the woods, about my uncanny ability to keep both skis on the same side of every tree. But she probably already knew.
“Your luck isn’t the variable in question. Adam needs you.”
“Why?”
“Trust me, damn it. He needs you.”
“Is he okay? Is he sick? Hurt? What?”
“Sick” for me used to mean the flu. A cold. Strep throat. With the kids, it was ear infections, or fifth disease, which was Cal’s latest malady. On a bad day, sick meant pneumonia. Not anymore. Now, “sick” was a toxic word. Sick was a killer.
“You need to hurry.”
“Why? Tell me what’s going on?” My question was a demand. The most futile kind. The kind I couldn’t enforce.
“Adam needs you.”
“You said that. Tell me why.”
“Take me with you,” she said.
My son needed me and she wanted to bargain? My rage finally blew out from my core like magma spewing from a lava dome. I yelled, “What the fuck is wrong with my son, Lizzie?”
“I’m in Glenwood Springs. I’ll be sitting in the Wendy’s near the off-ramp. You can see it from the highway. Knowing the way you drive, you should be here in fifteen minutes.”
She hung up.
As promised, she was sitting in the fast-food restaurant with her back to the door and to the road. She was so confident I was coming to join her that she didn’t even bother to monitor my arrival through the windows that faced the highway.
All that was on the table in front of her was a bottle of water. The brand was BIOTA, an acronym that stands for blame-it-on-the-altitude. It’s a natural spring water bottled by a company in Ouray, a couple of spectacular valleys and passes away from my Ridgway home. Was there a message there? I didn’t know.
But probably.
I sat down on the plastic bench across from her. She was wearing a hat that almost, but not quite, covered her bald head.
No wig. Not a whole lot of makeup. Lizzie was officially outing herself as a chemotherapy patient.
“It’s not exactly Papaya King, is it?” she said from behind a pair of opaque sunglasses.
I didn’t have to look around to know that the Glenwood Springs Wendy’s—or any Wendy’s for that matter—bore little resemblance to the Upper East Side Papaya King where she and I first had lunch. “No,” I said. Unable to wait a second longer, I said, “Tell me about my son. What’s wrong with him?” I surprised myself with how level I was able to keep my voice.
“I want to go with you. If I tell you what I know you’ll leave me behind.”
I was grateful that she didn’t pretend that her motives were anything different. I said, “I won’t leave you behind
.”
“You’ve ditched me once already.”
“I had to say good-bye to my girls.”
A moment later, I watched a tear sneak out from below the rim of her sunglasses. She let it migrate to the corner of her mouth and caught it with her tongue. I imagined the salt she was tasting.
“I accept that. But I have to go to New Haven with you. It’s as important to me as your visit to Ridgway was to you.”
It was beginning to get dark in the mountains. Time was tight. On clear roads the drive from Glenwood over the Divide to the metro area was almost three hours, even at the speeds I planned to be motoring. I glanced at my watch, looked at Lizzie, and said, “We should go.”
“Can I get you something to eat for the road?” she asked.
“Not a good idea,” I said, imagining the inevitable nausea. And then the inevitable vomit.
Out in the parking lot, I said, “I have to climb in from your side. The driver’s door doesn’t open.”
She examined the mangled metal and scratched paint on the driver’s side of the Porsche. “I’m sorry,” she said. “About your car. You’ve had this for a long time, haven’t you?”
What, I wondered, do they not know about me?
I patted the German girl on the hood. “Yeah, a long time. But it’s just stuff,” I said. “Though there was a time not too long ago when all this damage would have broken my heart.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “It is just stuff.” She kept a hand on the sheet metal as she ambled around the back of the car to the passenger side. After one last affectionate caress on the German girl’s flesh, she stepped back and allowed me to lower myself onto the passenger seat and contort myself over the gearshift to the driver’s side. She joined me and I started the car.
“Wait,” she said.
I looked over. She was pulling a small nylon pouch from her shoulder bag. “What?” I asked.
She zipped open the bag and pulled out the familiar tools of a phlebotomist. “I need to check your blood.”
I was beyond surprise. “For what?”
“Toxins. They—my colleagues—may have decided to … poison you. They’re very good at it. And you’ve gone on record as preferring drugs to bullets.”
Jesus. “How the hell do—” I stopped myself. What difference does it make? “And if you discover they did?”
“Depends what agent is involved. I may be able to administer an antidote if I can identify what they used. I know their favorites.”
“How will you get the blood analyzed?”
She pointed across my chest to a guy sitting in a white van across the parking lot. “He’s a messenger. He’s going to deliver it to the lab for me. I should have some of the results before we get to Denver.”
“No bullshit, Lizzie?” I asked. “You’re taking my blood, not injecting anything into it?”
“I don’t know how you made it so far in life not knowing whom to trust. But, no. No bullshit. If I was going to kill you—”
“I know. I’d already be dead.” I held out my arm.
“So you’ve decided to trust me?” she asked me a moment later as she tightened a tourniquet around my bicep and swabbed the crook of my elbow with an alcohol swab. Berk called that particular part of her anatomy her “elbow pit.” That little memory, and what it represented, caused a plume of vomit to rise in my throat.
I involuntarily winced in anticipation of the poke. I said, “I’ve decided to be vulnerable to you.”
She filled three rubber-stopped tubes with my blood and pulled the catheter from my vein before she turned up to face me and lowered her sunglasses so that I could see the linear patterns in her irises. “What’s the difference?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
She stuck a bandage over the tiny wound, dropped the vials into a small, preprinted envelope that she’d already marked, and honked the horn. The guy from the white van walked over. She handed him my blood. She said, “Stat” as she held out a hundred-dollar bill. He took the encouragement, but he didn’t say a word. Lizzie pulled the shoulder belt across her body and clicked it into place. She slid down on her seat and pulled her floppy hat low over her eyes.
“We can go now?” I asked.
“Sure. We have a long drive,” she said. “Plenty of time for you to tell me all about the difference between trust and vulnerability.”
My palm found the familiar orb of the gearshift. I popped the Porsche into first, eased back on the clutch, pulled out of the lot, and accelerated up the ramp onto the interstate.
The engine was thundering before I dropped the transmission into second. I said, “And then you can tell me why I didn’t find any magazines in your apartment. But that’s after you tell me what the fuck is going on with my son.”
SIXTY-TWO
The drive east from Glenwood Springs on I-70 toward the Continental Divide is, intermittently, glorious. Lizzie wouldn’t reveal anything more about Adam while we drove. Nor would she tell me how she’d made it to Glenwood from Boulder after I’d left her behind at Dr. Gregory’s office, but her fresh, wide-eyed wonder at the marvels of Glenwood Canyon and the rushing Colorado River below the highway clued me in that she had made the journey either at night on the highway or by airplane.
We were zooming past Eagle when I started to share with her all the details I could remember about Dr. Gregory and my epiphanies about intimacy and openness and vulnerability. I was still going strong as we flew below the ski areas at Arrowhead and Beaver Creek, and then Vail. We both grew quiet as she absorbed the beauty of the highest reaches of Vail Pass and the White River National Forest. It seemed to take us only minutes to slice through the ravines between Copper Mountain and Frisco in the shadows of the Tenmile Range. Seconds later we were on the bluff above Dillon Reservoir. A temporary electronic warning sign had been placed on the shoulder a half mile before the Keystone/Highway 6 exit. The sign warned, TUNNEL REPAIRS AHEAD. EASTBOUND ONE LANE ONLY. TRUCKS EXIT AT HIGHWAY 6.
I hesitated for a moment, considering whether I wanted to be in line with a thousand cars waiting to squeeze through one lane of the tunnel, or whether I wanted to be in a convoy with a few hundred big rigs trying to climb the treacherous, curvy route over the Divide on Loveland Pass. It wasn’t a tough call. I downshifted into fourth and began the final, long, determined climb that would take us up and over—well, through—the Continental Divide.
I’d chosen the tunnel approach.
As we climbed the steep hill I kept at least one eye focused on the side of the road, watching for men with cell phones, solitary scouts with binoculars, or even the glint of reflected light from a scope atop an assassin’s rifle in a sniper’s lair. Every van I passed I marked off as a potential adversary already vanquished.
Lizzie remained assured that the Death Angels would not kill us while we were together.
I didn’t share her confidence.
She’d nodded off to sleep moments after we started up the obscene grade to the twin tunnels that cut through the Divide. By then the mountain canyons below us were completely dark. I’d spotted nothing that worried me. And we were making good time.
Traffic slowed about halfway up the long climb to the tunnels, near the point where the final few trees before timberline were nothing more than stunted, pathetic versions of their downhill forest cousins. I was neither alarmed nor surprised by the slowing traffic, but I was disheartened that the construction backup might extend back this far. Although the uphill highway was blessed with a climbing lane for overburdened trucks, it wasn’t uncommon for drivers to underestimate the grade, or overestimate their vehicles—or both—and for the slowest sloggers to clog two of the three uphill lanes. When that happened, traffic could back up far in advance of the tunnels. But not as far as it was backed up that day.
I estimated we’d lose at least half an hour to the construction delay. The only alternative to waiting in the two-mile-long line to make it through the narrowed tunnel passage would have been getting in an
almost equally long queue on Highway 6, the pre-tunnel route over the Divide that led across Loveland Pass some twelve thousand feet above sea level. The pass was a twisty, panoramic, exciting two-lane roller coaster lined with sheer drops and hairpin turns. But clogged with lumbering eighteen-wheelers that had been detoured from the tunnel, it was certainly no panacea to the delays that we were facing on I-70.
I tried to be calm and tried not to look at the clock. Instead, I watched Lizzie sleep. We inched our way up to the tunnels. I fiddled with the controls on the radio in an attempt to pull in a radio station that would tell me that the sniper had been caught.
Didn’t happen.
The Porsche’s valves continued to ping in protest whenever I got careless and allowed the rpm to migrate too low for her tastes.
Some things never change.
And some things change so fast I can’t keep my eyes in focus.
It didn’t take long in that traffic—three minutes, five?—for me to start feeling like a sitting duck. My planned defenses against a Death Angel sniper rifle on the drive east to the Front Range were going to be the Porsche’s speed and maneuverability, and my willingness to exploit both. Those advantages were eliminated by the bumper-to-bumper uphill crawl. I tried to compensate by staying in the middle lane on the interminable climb to the tunnel, doing everything I could to keep the little sports car in the shadows of someone else’s oversized vehicle. I pulled in behind a small UPS van in the middle lane, and adjusted my speed to try to always keep an SUV flanking me on the right. To the left, though, was my greatest vulnerability. That’s where the cliffs were; that’s where the sniper’s best angle would be. For the first time in my life, I was thankful that so many Colorado drivers preferred big, hulking SUVs and pickups. I was taking some comfort whenever I could linger in their figurative shade.
I was wrong by half in my estimation about how long it would take to snake up to the eleven-thousand-plus-foot elevation of the tunnel entrance. It took us forty-five minutes, not thirty, to dodge and merge and inch up the hill to the final stretch of the tunnel approach.
Known locally as the Eisenhower Tunnel, the twin bores through the Continental Divide are officially named the Eisenhower/Johnson Memorial Tunnels. The original Eisenhower bore now carries only westbound traffic. The newer, two-lane eastbound passage that Lizzie and I were about to enter was the Edwin C. Johnson Bore, named after a state politician who’d long advocated mountain highways and ambitious tunnels, including this one.
Kill Me Page 31
