Astride a Pink Horse

by Robert Greer

  “Sometimes bad things happen to people,” Rikia said, smiling.

  “And sooner or later the authorities will want to talk to us, Rikia. We both know that.”

  “So we talk to them.” “Them” came out closer to “tem,” but Kimiko was used to the garbled sounds of Rikia’s speech.

  “Yes, we will. Just be prepared.”

  “I’m always prepared.” Rikia stepped over to his tiny, gray-haired cousin and draped a supportive arm over the shoulders of a woman who’d survived Wyoming’s infamous Heart Mountain Relocation Center for Japanese Americans during World War II. Smiling as he stared down at the dozens of tiny moles dotting her forehead, he said reassuringly, “I have to be. Look who taught me.”

  Aware that his office conference room wouldn’t be large enough to accommodate all the media types, voyeurs, gossipmongers, and just plain nosy folks who’d show up, Sheriff Bosack had scheduled his seven p.m. news briefing at a courtroom in the Platte County courthouse.

  The courtroom, which lacked a balcony, otherwise resembled the room made famous during the Scopes monkey trial, right down to its massive support columns, echoey wood-plank floors, and dank mustiness.

  His stomach groaning, the sheriff started up the courthouse steps a little before seven. In the eight hours since Thurmond Giles’s body had been discovered at the Tango-11 site, Sheriff Bosack, who’d skipped breakfast so that he and Sam Reed could get in a few minutes of North Platte River fly fishing that had never materialized, hadn’t had a bite to eat. Thinking with each new step, This too shall pass, he’d barely reached the top when Freddy Dames startled him by slipping out from behind a twenty-foot-tall concrete pillar. “What do you think, Sheriff? Have you got a hate crime on your hands, or do you think we’re looking at some kind of Back to the Future killing linked to the antinuclear movement?”

  Freddy was the final straw in the sheriff’s hunger-panged, media-sniping, military-accommodating, politician-pleasing day. With barely a second of hesitation, he shoved Freddy backward into a surprised Cozy Coseia. Recognizing Cozy, the sheriff shook his head, muttered, “I should’ve known,” and continued into the courthouse.

  “Told you to wait,” Cozy said, brushing himself off. Freddy’s ambush hadn’t paid off, but others like it had in the past, and Cozy knew that his stocky, chestnut-haired, risk-taking best friend wouldn’t change his MO anytime soon.

  “Wait, my ass!” Freddy adjusted his sport coat. “We’ve got the story of the decade staring us in the face, man. Might as well take a shot at priming the pump. Let’s get inside.”

  Freddy pushed his way through a set of double doors and headed down a hallway toward the courtroom with Cozy at his heels, to find standing room only in the courtroom. They carved out a space for themselves between a Denver-based freelance news photographer whom Freddy knew and a group of four ponytailed spectators. The ponytails, two men and two women, appeared to Cozy to be in their early fifties and looked as if they’d been shot from some 1970s antinuclear-demonstration cannon. When one of the women appeared to wave, Cozy cocked a suspicious eyebrow at Freddy, then scanned the rest of the room. A half-dozen agitated-looking teenagers, all of them black, occupied a front courtroom bench. A balding, overweight man sitting at the end of the bench seemed to be in charge of them.

  Prosecuting and defense attorneys’ tables sat to the right and left of a lectern at the front of the courtroom. As many cameras and lights and microphones as Cozy had ever seen at a news conference streamed or beamed down on the lectern and tables. Behind the tables in a TV-equipment-free buffer zone, the sheriff stood talking to a tall, fit-looking air force officer with shiny silver colonel’s eagles on his shoulder epaulets. The only other person Cozy recognized among four other people standing behind the tables was the air force major he had seen at Tango-11.

  No longer dressed in fatigues, the major now wore air force dress blues. Her skirt was figure-flattering, and she looked provocatively striking in a military-advertising-poster kind of way. As she turned toward him, Cozy noticed pilot wings pinned just above the edge of the welt pocket of her uniform and found himself wondering why on earth a pilot would be assigned to an OSI unit.

  When Bernadette Cameron caught him staring at her, she averted her eyes, took a seat, and began talking to the man seated next to her. Turning to Freddy, Cozy was about to point her out, but for some reason he decided, momentarily at least, to keep the major to himself.

  Watching Freddy nod, then smile at the four ponytails surrounding them, Cozy had the sense that Freddy was doing everything he could to communicate silently with them. He was about to ask Freddy if he knew them when Sheriff Bosack stepped up to the battery of microphones, thumped the center mike, and said, “Glad to see everyone here tonight.”

  As Freddy mouthed, Sure, the sheriff was off and running. Indicating to the assemblage that after his remarks and those of Colonel Joel DeWitt from Warren Air Force Base there would be a short Q and A, the sheriff detailed the day’s events. For most of the people in the room, his dry summation was no more than a rehash of what they already knew. Confirming that the murdered man found at Tango-11 was retired Master Sergeant Thurmond Giles, whose identity had been conclusively proven via a dental records review, and that a joint Platte County Sheriff’s Office and U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations inquiry was under way, Bosack ended his surprisingly brief remarks by thanking the air force, Colonel DeWitt, and the people of Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, home of the 90th Missile Wing, for their assistance. Then he sat down.

  The word blowhard coursed through Cozy’s mind within seconds of Colonel Joel DeWitt stepping up to the microphone to paternalistically announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, let me assure you first and foremost that today’s break in and breach of security at the decommissioned Tango-11 site in no way represents a risk to our nation’s security.”

  With an I’m in charge look plastered on his face, DeWitt then delivered several minutes of uninformative platitudes, thanking seemingly every elected and law enforcement official in the state of Wyoming, from the beaming Deputy Sykes, who stood just a few feet from Cozy, to the governor. When Freddy nudged Cozy and whispered, “You’ve got to be kidding,” Cozy, who was busy watching Major Cameron’s attempt to keep from rolling her eyes, ignored him. Shrugging, Freddy slipped a small spiral-bound notebook out of the inside pocket of his sport coat and began jotting notes.

  Cozy was startled. He couldn’t remember his techno-savvy best friend taking handwritten notes about anything since college, aside from the occasional summation of his stock market trades for the week or the quarterly earnings for the Silver Streak Oil Corporation, which his father owned.

  Surprised that Freddy seemed to be taking the briefing so seriously, Cozy shrugged and turned his attention back to Colonel DeWitt, who was busy recounting the supportive phone call he’d received earlier that day from Wyoming’s governor. Only when the colonel mentioned that the air force’s investigation into the Tango-11 break-in would be in the capable hands of Major Bernadette Cameron did Cozy’s ears perk up.

  “Major Cameron, also from Warren OSI, is well schooled in handling situations such as this,” DeWitt announced. The words had barely left his mouth when the two ponytailed men standing next to Cozy rushed the podium, yelling, “No more nukes! No more nukes!” Their two women companions immediately dropped to the floor, took handcuffs from their purses, and handcuffed themselves to one of the claw-footed legs of the nearest bench just as the teenagers in the front row began shouting, “Racist dogs!” in sync with “No more nukes!”

  Freddy Dames dropped to one knee, slipped a handheld tape recorder out of his sport coat pocket, and shoved it into the faces of the two female protesters, who continued to scream, “No more nukes!”

  Cozy moved out of the way of Deputy Sykes’s delayed bull rush to the podium. Surprised by Freddy’s uncanny readiness, Cozy looked toward the front of the room to see Major Cameron drop one portly, lunging male protester like a rock w
ith a knee to the groin. The sheriff had the second man down on the floor, with both arms behind his back and handcuffed, before most people in the courtroom had a chance to do much more than ooh or aah in amazement.

  With digital cameras clicking everywhere and television cameras rolling, Cozy watched the ponytailed, redheaded man whom the major had taken out roll around on the floor, groaning in agony, as chants of “No more nukes!” and “Racist dogs!” continued to echo through the courtroom. Staring around at what seemed to him to have been a very well-orchestrated eruption, Cozy caught Freddy smiling, tape recorder in hand, asking questions of spectators while his photographer friend from Denver snapped photo after photo. Noting the photographer’s steadiness in the midst of the chaos, he realized suddenly that Freddy was in fact directing the photographer’s every move. Much of what he was witnessing could only have been planned in advance. Cozy lowered his head, shook it in disbelief, and mumbled, “No, Freddy; you didn’t.”

  An hour after Sheriff Bosack’s tumultuous press conference, Cozy and Freddy Dames sat eating burgers and fries at the Wheatland Inn just off I-25. A passing late-evening thunderstorm laced with golf-ball-sized hail had put on a twenty-minute light show before slowly moving off to the east, leaving behind drizzle, minor flooding, and a few distant claps of thunder.

  As Freddy toyed with his burger, Cozy shook his head disgustedly, upset that Freddy had admitted to using the sheriff’s press conference to manufacture news.

  “You didn’t tweak anything, Freddy,” Cozy chastised. “You turned that press conference into the lead story on the nightly news. Damn it, you’re regressing, slipping back to your old ways. Stealing bases against the sign, trying to make something happen on the field when you shouldn’t, swinging for the fences when it’s three and oh and you’ve been told to take a ball.”

  “It helped earn us a national championship, didn’t it?”

  Cozy glanced down at his left leg, keenly aware of the dark turn the conversation could take if he continued to argue his point. “So you dredged up four over-the-hill, tie-dyed hippies to crash a press conference just so you’d have a story?”

  “They weren’t hippies, and I didn’t dredge them up. I simply knew they’d be there.”

  “What?”

  “I said I knew they’d be there. While you were up here in Wheatland stumbling around, doing things by the book, and waiting for the Tango-11 story to unfold, I took what you told me on the phone right after you first called to tell me about the dead man, and I did a little Twittering. Someone out there in cyberspace must’ve been sitting at a computer screen when I did because within minutes of my post about the body in the missile silo, I had tweets from a couple of professed antinukers saying the murder victim might be one of theirs.”

  “Shit, Freddy, the body wasn’t in the silo; it was in the silo’s personnel-access tube. And how the hell do you know those tweets you got didn’t come from the damn murderer? Don’t you care anything about facts?”

  “Parts is parts.” Freddy forced a smile.

  “Unbelievable,” Cozy countered. “How could you write any kind of a story that was halfway factual between the time I called you after leaving the murder scene and when you met me here in Wheatland at five o’clock? Hell, you were highballin’ it up I-25 for most of that time.”

  “Technology, my man, technology. Something you’d better start taking to heart, or you’re gonna earn yourself a ticket right out of the world of investigative reporting. An iPhone and a laptop slice through time, my friend, and like it or not, they’re necessary tools of our trade these days. How else do you think I could have been on top of a story like this so fast? I suggest you spend a little more time learning how to use them and a little less time worrying about facts.”

  “Like I should’ve spent more time learning how to ride a motorcycle?” Cozy said, frowning.

  Aware that for the sake of their friendship, the conversation needed to end right then, Freddy rose from his chair with a grunt, slipped his wallet out of his back pocket, fished out a fifty-dollar bill, and tossed it onto the table. “Come on, man, let’s go.”

  Cozy glanced at the grease-stained check for $14.38 and stood. Freddy was a few steps from the restaurant’s front door by the time Cozy had enough feeling in his left leg to start that way. Moving slowly toward the door, with pins and needles shooting through his calf, Cozy brushed past their waitress.

  Spotting the fifty on the tabletop, the waitress called after him, “I’ll bring you your change, sir.”

  “Keep it,” Cozy said, responding the way he knew Freddy would’ve.

  “Are you sure, mister? It’s a fifty,” the puzzled waitress asked.

  Uttering words he never would have used except in anger, Cozy said, “I know, but the guy who left it has money to burn.”

  “He must be some kind of millionaire.”

  “Times a hundred.” Cozy continued walking, leaving the startled waitress shaking her head and wondering who on earth the man who’d left the fifty was.

  The two best friends hardly said a word to one another during the short drive back to their motel. As Cozy pulled his dually into the space next to Freddy’s Bentley, Freddy broke the silence. “Those antinuke protesters are the key to our murder, Cozy. I know it.”

  Not the least bit surprised by Freddy’s cocksureness but reluctant to challenge him and start a conversation that might end like the last one, Cozy asked, “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because one of those tweets I mentioned came from someone who said I should be talking to a woman named Sarah Goldbeck. Whoever it was pumped Goldbeck up like she was the Second Coming. Said if I wanted to find out who killed that sergeant, I needed to be at that press conference.”

  “Second coming of what? Those worn-out protesters of yours looked like some over-the-hill gang to me, especially the redheaded guy, the one that lady air force major drop-kicked in the nuts.”

  “Hell, they’re a bunch of fricking pacifists, Cozy. What would you expect? What I’m getting at is that, pacifists or not, somebody among the four who were there at the briefing, or some tweeter out there in their extended antinuke family, is linked to that Tango-11 security breach and murder. And we need to nail them.” Cozy shrugged and shook his head. “Cop talk—and risky, Freddy.” It wouldn’t be the first time Freddy Dames had lined up to play cops and robbers. The previous summer he and Cozy had brought the hammer down on a Mexico-based car-chop ring that had ended in a 110-miles-per-hour car chase on I-70. A chase that had earned them each a ten-thousand-dollar fine, four months of community service, and a warning from a disgruntled judge that they never again become involved in vigilante activities.

  “So what’s the game plan?” Cozy asked, suspecting that Freddy was already three steps down the road toward doing precisely what that judge had warned him against.

  Looking pleased, Freddy said, “We wait for our four protesters to post bond, which I’m guessing will be sometime tomorrow morning, and go have a talk with them. There’s no way they’ll be charged with any more than disorderly conduct, or maybe interfering with an official police proceeding. I’m guessing they’ll all be home tie-dying shirts and smoking doobies by noon. And maybe one of them will turn out to be my Twitter friend.”

  “What about that redhead who charged the major? No way in hell he’ll be able to sidestep an assault charge.”

  “Maybe not, but if he ends up in jail, we’ll still have three people to talk to. Who knows, one of the women might end up being Sarah Goldbeck. Bottom line is, it’s worth sticking around this burg to see what happens.”

  “Okay. I’m game.”

  “Que sera, sera.” Freddy patted Cozy reassuringly on the shoulder before moving to get out of the dually.

  “Que sera,” said Cozy, repeating two of the three code words he and Freddy had begun exchanging before taking the baseball diamond during their freshman year at Southeastern Oklahoma State. The words would ultimately turn into part of a baseball-tossing
warm-up routine and good-luck chant, played out to the sounds of the 1950s chart hit “Whatever Will Be, Will Be” at college baseball stadiums across the West during their senior-year championship run. Suddenly Freddy was humming the tune, nudging Cozy and urging him to do the same. By the time they reached the motel’s front door, they were harmonizing perfectly.

  “Let’s say we’re back up and at it by eight,” Freddy said as they walked across the motel lobby.

  “Works for me.” Thinking, Que sera, sera, Cozy watched Freddy hurriedly take off down a hallway for his room before he limped in the opposite direction toward his.

  Cozy had as fitful a night of rest as he’d suffered through in years, and as he sat on the edge of his bed, happy to see the morning sunlight, rubbing the feeling into his left leg, and staring out the window, he had the sense that he’d been on an all-night treadmill.

  Just before three a.m., he’d sat straight up in bed to the sound of a semi’s air brakes being set just outside his window. Unable to get back to sleep, he’d paced the room for a while, read a brochure highlighting Wheatland’s quiet, friendly, country-living lifestyle, and puzzled over whether the Giles murder might have been racially motivated before plopping back down on the bed to stare at the ceiling for another half hour. He’d finally drifted off to sleep a little before four only to have the dream that had chased him for years thread its way through to his subconscious.

  The dream always started out the same, with him walking into a Harley-Davidson showroom and asking the only salesman there, a man dressed totally in black save for a pair of spit-shined white baseball spikes, if he could take a motorcycle for a test ride.

  The salesman’s emphatic No! always sent him storming out of the showroom to jump on a brand-new red Harley and speed off, and the dream always ended with him barreling helmetless on the motorcycle down California’s coastal Highway 1 to ultimately be swallowed by a foggy mist. Never, in any of his thousands of dreams, had he emerged from that fog.