Astride a Pink Horse

by Robert Greer

  “Hmm. So in effect, the late Sergeant Giles was what you might call an atomic-bomb maintenance expert?”

  “Nuclear-missile warheads are not atomic bombs, Mr. Coseia.”

  “Nope, but a rose by any other name,” Cozy said, shaking his head. “So let me see if I can’t sort this all out. We’ve got a highlevel security breach at a mothballed missile-silo site and a murdered man on our hands. And as it turns out, the dead man isn’t just your friendly neighborhood air-conditioning and refrigerator repairman but your local atom-bomb maintenance jockey.”

  “Your sarcasm is not very funny, Mr. Coseia.”

  “Perhaps not. So what about the racial angle? Anything there?”

  “It will be looked into thoroughly. We’ve already been in contact with the local NAACP.”

  “I see,” Cozy said, sitting back in his chair. “Has the air force had any past problems at Tango-11?”

  “None.”

  “What about problems at other deactivated missile-silo sites?”

  “Nothing more than what you’d expect. Minor vandalism, rare instances of trespassing; that’s about it. People around this part of the country know what abandoned missile-silo sites look like, and they generally stay away from them.”

  “Well, they didn’t this time.”

  “And we’ll ultimately find out why. Now, is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “Not that I can think of at the moment,” said Cozy, sensing that he was about to be shown the door. “But I’m sure that sooner or later something’ll pop up. I’d appreciate having your business card if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.” Bernadette slipped a business card from a holder on her desk and handed it to him. “Hope I’ve been helpful,” she said, standing and extending her right hand across the desk to the still seated Cozy.

  Recognizing as he rose and Bernadette broke their handshake that in heels the statuesque major stood nearly as tall as he, Cozy asked, “Why’d you stop flying?”

  Bernadette’s answer came slowly. “I developed severe hay fever.”

  “Hay fever? The air force grounded you for that?”

  “Fighter pilots can’t have hay fever, Mr. Coseia. It’s a nonnegotiable rule.”

  “Been there with the rules game a time or two myself, Major. Sorry.”

  The sincerity in the casually dressed, ruggedly handsome reporter’s tone caused Bernadette to glance self-consciously around her office as if she were in search of an answer to a problem she hadn’t been able to solve.

  “Thanks for the info, Major,” Cozy said, heading for the door.

  “You’re welcome.” Watching Cozy limp across the room, she asked, “Catch a cramp?”

  “Nope. Just my own special kind of hay fever,” he said, leaving Bernadette standing behind her desk looking puzzled by the strange answer.

  During the twenty minutes that he’d been talking with Sheriff Bosack in the sheriff’s spartan office, Freddy Dames hadn’t been able to get one ounce of information that he considered to be worth writing about.

  He had a potential blockbuster of a news story, the first salvo of which he’d been able to serve up on the web ahead of every regional news outlet in the Rockies and the Southwest. But he couldn’t keep the story coming if he couldn’t continue to prime the pump, and it looked as if the man he’d initially pegged as a country bumpkin, a man he now knew had once been a professional rodeo star, wasn’t the rube he’d believed him to be.

  The frustrated look on Freddy’s face told Bosack that he was leading for the moment in what he unfortunately expected to be an ongoing race. Glancing up at the school clock on the wall behind Freddy, he said, “We’ve been sittin’ here talkin’ since close to noon, Mr. Dames, and to tell you the truth, I’m winded.” Bosack rose from the leather captain’s chair his staff had given him for his birthday the previous year, stepped from behind his desk, and walked over to the only window in the room to adjust the blinds.

  Hoping to drag something newsworthy out of Bosack, Freddy said, “So throw me a bone, Sheriff, and I’ll skedaddle.”

  “I’ve told you as much as I’m gonna, sir. You were there last night for all the shenanigans, and you’re holdin’ my official press release in your hands. I’m thinkin’ that should about do it.”

  “Yeah,” Freddy said, slapping the rolled-up press release down into his palm. “Who, what, when, and where, but what my readers want to know, Sheriff Bosack, is why. Why was Sergeant Giles murdered? It remains the most important of the five Ws of journalism, you know.”

  “Can’t answer that for you, I’m afraid.”

  Freddy shrugged. “So what’s the NAACP saying? Do they think the Giles killing was racially motivated?”

  Deciding to finally toss Freddy his bone in the hope that it might get him to leave, the sheriff said, “It’s sure soundin’ like they do. I had the president of the local chapter down in Cheyenne, a preacher named Wilson Jackson, puffin’ at me like a lovesick toad, right there where you’re sittin’, first thing this mornin’. Made me late deliverin’ my prisoner up north to Douglas, damn it. Maybe Jackson’s the one you should be talking to instead of me. Why so late in gettin’ to the hate-crime issue, Mr. Dames?”

  “Because nukes are a bigger story, Sheriff.”

  “But there aren’t any nuclear weapons involved here.”

  “As far as you know.”

  Wagging an index finger at Freddy, Bosack said, “You wouldn’t put somethin’ out there on the World Wide Web that’s not true just to garner headlines, would you, Mr. Dames?”

  “Nope. I wouldn’t. But I’m not so certain about my competitors. It’s a get-there-first-or-be-squeezed-out-of-existence world we live in these days, Sheriff.”

  “Well, do me a favor and try and keep all of your news-business backstabbin’ down south there in Denver, where it won’t taint my little burg up here.” The sheriff made a final adjustment to the blinds. “I’m thinkin’ we’re pretty much done for now, Mr. Dames. If I get anything worth reportin’ back to you, I’ll let you know.”

  “I won’t hold my breath,” Freddy said. “Got a final question for you. It’s about the number of stab wounds the murder victim sustained. I understand that there were five.”

  “And where’d the bird come from told you that?” Bosack said, clearly surprised.

  “Can’t reveal my sources, Sheriff. That would be unprofessional.”

  “Well, professional or not, looks like I’m gonna have to put a muzzle on Doc Reed,” the sheriff said, still fishing for Freddy’s source.

  Freddy flashed the sheriff the blankest of stares, unwilling to tell him that he’d hijacked the information about the stab wounds from someone other than Dr. Reed. “So I’m guessing we can call it a day,” Freddy said, rising from his chair, shaking the sheriff’s hand, and heading briskly for the door. As he pulled the door open, he called back over his shoulder, “You’ve got my card.”

  “Right there on my desk.” The sheriff nodded toward the desktop.

  “Good.” Freddy closed the office door silently behind him, thinking as he did that Bosack might well blow a gasket if he ever found out how Freddy had learned that retired air force sergeant Thurmond Giles had died from blood loss and the irreversible shock caused by the five stab wounds in his back.

  Muttering, “Money talks and bullshit walks,” Freddy found himself thanking Wally Sykes and humming a favorite Motown tune as, grinning from ear to ear, he headed across the sheriff’s office parking lot, ready for the two-mile walk back to his motel and car. For a young newlywed like Sykes, with his first child on the way and in his first real job, two thousand dollars represented a lot of money. So confirming the number of stab wounds that a murder victim had sustained to a reporter, when in fact word was already out that the victim had been stabbed to death, wasn’t much of an ethical breach as far as Sykes was concerned. In fact, what did it matter when from what Doc Reed had told the young deputy, three of the five stab wounds would have been
fatal? And in the end, what did two thousand dollars really matter to Freddy? It was no more than what he paid his gardener each month to keep his lawn healthy and mowed and his shrubs trimmed.

  Even after a thirty-year absence, Sarah Goldbeck had no trouble finding Kimiko Takata’s russet Queen Anne cottage with its recently painted white trim and robin’s-egg-blue gutters. The cottage on Fourth Street in downtown Laramie was a place where Sarah had spent countless hours in her late teens. But she hadn’t been inside the house since her mother, a University of Nebraska physicist, and Kimiko, both prominent late ’70s and early ’80s antinuclear activists, had planned one of their final missile-silo protests in the living room. Dead for more than twelve years now, her mother had once been editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a member of the peace activist group NukeWatch, and a close friend of many of America’s leading antinuclear activists, including the leading activist of that period, Philip Berrigan.

  Sarah had been in her early teens during most of her and her mother’s visits to the cottage on Fourth Street. Old enough and well schooled enough to appreciate and understand what Kimiko and her mother were involved in.

  She had marched beside the two of them back then. Walked and chanted “No more nukes” with them and scores of other antinuclear activists, including her now common-law husband, Buford, who was currently resting at their Hawk Springs, Wyoming, home, nursing his pride and testicular injuries following their morning grilling by OSI officers at Warren.

  It was hard for her to believe that thirty years earlier, Kimiko’s house had been the staging place for demonstrations that would for years wave the antinuke flag and goad air force personnel, FBI agents, and the police. A place where Kimiko and Sarah’s mother had planned how to vandalize nuclear-missile sites and where she’d learned to antagonize silo guards without being arrested and to chain herself to the entry gates of sites across the Rocky Mountain West.

  Then, in a flash, it was all over. The notoriety, the glamour, the purpose. First came two strategic arms limitation treaties, SALT I in 1972 and then SALT II in 1979, followed by the INF treaty of 1988 and the current international strategic arms reduction treaty. All of these pacts bargained away America’s intercontinental ballistic missile strength while at the same time marginalizing the antinuclear movement.

  It didn’t matter that developments in missile guidance technology now made long-range nuclear missiles all but obsolete, or that in the more than forty years since their introduction nature’s very own forces—water, erosion, and corrosion—had rendered the missile silos beneath the American heartland virtually useless. What mattered to her now was the fact that most of the people she’d grown up idealizing, even worshipping, were dead, and their cause and many of the reasons for it had come and gone.

  She’d therefore been surprised and certainly curious when, six months earlier, Rikia Takata, two years her junior and a boy she’d played with as a child in the house on Fourth Street, had called her and suggested that they meet and talk about a new battery of antinuclear strategies.

  Since then she’d met half-a-dozen times with Rikia and his now reclusive cousin, Kimiko, but never at the cottage on Fourth Street. They’d discussed ways to try once again to put the antinuclear movement on American front pages and back in the public eye.

  Their meetings, however, had usually turned out to be unproductive and almost always consisted of Rikia sitting and reading or staring off into space while Kimiko, a World War II–era Japanese internment camp survivor, reminisced about bygone nuclear protest days or pined over the loss of relatives at Hiroshima.

  Now, as Sarah continued up the sidewalk toward the front door of the house on Fourth Street, realizing as she reached the porch that it had settled so that it now sloped badly to the east, she thought about the recent events at Tango-11 and why she was really there. She found herself regretting the fact that just six months earlier she’d become a part of an antinuclear revival party that she never should have joined.

  She’d called ahead from Hawk Springs to let Kimiko know she was on her way to Laramie to talk about things they dared not discuss on the phone. As she stood on the porch steps, head turned, looking back into the sunshine and over Kimiko’s immaculately manicured front lawn, she had the sense that she had stepped back in time.

  The feeling of nostalgia passed quickly, and she found herself thinking about a man whom she, Kimiko, and Rikia had all once known: Thurmond Giles. A man they now needed to talk about openly and frankly. There could be no reminiscing about the past, and she’d make certain that today there’d be no staring off into space by Rikia, no retelling of sixty-five-year-old Japanese history by Kimiko, and no discussion of the old protest days by herself. Someone they’d all detested had been murdered, and ultimately they’d all likely be suspects. Everyone would speak his or her mind this time around. This time nothing could be left unsaid.

  Staring at Freddy Dames in disbelief as he strained to be heard over the engine rumble of the half-dozen idling eighteen-wheelers surrounding his pickup, Cozy practically yelled across the seat, “Freddy, you what?”

  “You heard me,” Freddy shot back, watching Cozy check out the pump prices at Cheyenne’s Flying J truck stop. “I paid the little snot of a deputy for the information about the stab wounds. Now we know one thing for sure. Giles could have died from any one of at least three stab wounds in the back. According to Sykes, the other two were too superficial to have killed him.” Freddy shifted his weight forward in the seat and glanced through the windshield at the darkening sky. “Looks like we’ll be heading into rain on the drive home. Hope we don’t catch any hail,” he said, looking out toward his Bentley, which sat a couple of gas pumps away, already fueled.

  “Damn it, Freddy! Would you stay on point?”

  “I will if you’ll try and remember this: no harm, no foul. We’ve got a news story that could earn us a Pulitzer, man.”

  “Or time behind bars.”

  “There you go again, turning all negative on me. For once would you try thinking a little more positive?”

  “Yeah, positive,” Cozy said, thinking, You passed on a major league baseball career when you had all the tools to be a star, and instead you cruised around the world for half a decade drinking champagne and screwing anything in a skirt. And now, after buying some two-bit, web-based news outlet that peddles information that’s barely a cut above gossip, you’re looking for the big score.

  Not wanting to press the issue, Freddy said, “So here’s the agenda. I want you to head over to Hawk Springs, talk to the Goldbeck woman, and get her and her swollen-balled husband’s take on the Giles murder. In the meantime, I’ll post a story or two back in Denver.”

  “Are you sure Hawk Springs is where they live?”

  “Yes. I had Lillian dig up the dirt on them, and you know what that means. The information’s rock-solid. Lillian turned over a few other rocks, too. Turns out Goldbeck’s mother was a prominent University of Nebraska physicist and a mover and shaker in the antinuke movement during the late ’70s and early ’80s. Seems Sarah went underground between the time the movement faded and when her mother died. For most of the past twenty-five years she’s been living in Hawk Springs, earning a pretty good living as a potter.”

  “Guess if Lillian’s the one who dug up the info, it’s golden,” Cozy said, aware that Lillian Griffith, Freddy’s rat terrier of an executive administrative assistant whom Freddy paid $200,000 a year, rarely made mistakes.

  Eyeing the nearly pitch-black sky, Freddy said, “I better get started for Denver. By the way, you haven’t told me what you got out of that sexy kickboxing major this morning.” Freddy cupped his testicles and smiled. “I’m thinking she could put a love hurt on you till you screamed. Wouldn’t want to piss her off, though.”

  “Not much, but I did find out that Sergeant Giles was a nuclear-warhead maintenance expert and that Major Cameron, that’s her name, has had a few calls from the local NAACP about the murder being a hate cri
me.”

  “Funny, I got the same thing from Sheriff Bosack. He said that some black preacher out of Cheyenne had been doggin’ him, saying the murder had to be a hate crime, too.”

  “The hate-crime issue sure wasn’t at the top of Major Cameron’s list of reasons for the murder,” said Cozy.

  “What was, then?”

  “Nukes. Them and somebody out there looking for a little revenge.”

  “Insightful lady. My top take, too,” said Freddy.

  “Pretty Twilight Zone crazy, if you ask me.”

  Freddy cracked a sly smile. “Yeah. Just crazy enough to keep the Digital Registry News name on people’s lips and out there on the airwaves for months. I’ve already posted one story. I’ll make sure that what I post next hypes a possible racial motive for the killing and also profiles sad little Sarah Goldbeck all grown up. By the way, I got the name of that preacher who’s been pestering Major Cameron and Sheriff Bosack. Wilson Jackson. A man with two last names.” Freddy shook his head. “Never have liked dealing with anybody with two last names. Always means there’s an overactive ego involved somewhere.”

  Smiling at Freddy’s assessment, Cozy said, “I’m less worried about egos than I am about screwing with the air force and the government.”

  “Do you know anybody who better deserves a screwing?” Freddy asked with a chuckle, just as several large raindrops splattered against the truck’s windshield. “Hey, I’m outta here.” He swung his door open, ready to sprint for his car. “Need your story on Goldbeck by tonight, and make it a good one. We need the pub,” Freddy called back over his shoulder.

  Watching Freddy try his best to outrun raindrops and thinking back to their years on the baseball diamond, Cozy smiled and whispered, “Slide, Freddy, slide.”

  Bernadette Cameron’s office was rich with the scent of freshly cut alfalfa. She’d learned to dread the sweet, pollen-rich smell that always filled the room right after a heavy rain and announced that her hay fever would quickly kick into high gear for at least the next couple of days.