Astride a Pink Horse

by Robert Greer

  The results of that polling had so infuriated Freddy Dames that, red-faced and with arms flailing, he’d just knocked over the can of Coke he’d been drinking to flood the top of the 150-year-old, walnut-inlaid French partner’s desk that had belonged to his Union Army captain and Indian-fighting great-grandfather.

  “Idiots!” he screamed so loudly that the word seemed to echo off every shelf in the library of his Cherry Hills, Colorado, home. Grabbing a handful of tissues from a box on the desktop, he looked across the room at Cozy and Bernadette and began mopping up the spill. “Full-fledged cuckoos,” he muttered, tossing the sopping-wet tissues into a nearby trash can and nudging a linen-covered piece of artwork lying on the desktop out of harm’s way.

  “You can’t control people’s thinking, Freddy,” Cozy said, shaking his head.

  “I know that. But you’d think that our own goddamn citizens would’ve wanted to see the crazy-assed bastard shot at sunrise. Especially with Howard Colbain out there now yapping like a scalded dog about how he and four other lunatics, including a loose cannon bent on detonating a dirty nuclear weapon, plotted to each have their own special kind of revenge on poor old Thurmond Giles. Hell, I’m willing to bet the four of them knew what Rikia was up to from the start.”

  “Maybe not,” said Bernadette. “Things aren’t always what they seem.”

  “Yeah. Maybe you should go reread Alice in Wonderland, Freddy,” said Cozy.

  “And discover that the Mad Hatter wasn’t crazy after all? No way. It might make me start to believe Colbain, Rivers, and Kimiko when they say they didn’t know what Rikia was up to.”

  “They may be telling the truth,” said Cozy. “I’ve spent the last two and a half months tracking Silas Breen’s every move from the time he left Ottawa until Rikia killed him in Amarillo, and I haven’t found anything that ties Colbain, Kimiko, or Rivers to Rikia’s bomb plot. I’m thinking they each wanted a different kind of revenge from the kind Rikia was looking for, and that along with Sarah Goldbeck, when Rikia conveniently served them up the lecherous former sergeant in the flesh, they each simply got in their licks.”

  “Rikia purportedly killed Breen,” Bernadette interjected.

  “Okay, purportedly,” said Cozy.

  “Purportedly, allegedly, supposedly. What the shit are we having here, a fool’s debate for frickin’ lawyers? Rikia killed Silas Breen. No ifs, ands, or buts. Just turns out we’ve got two levels of revenge at work here. We’ve got Kimiko’s, Colbain’s, Rivers’s, and Sarah’s, revenge aimed at a single person, and then we’ve got Rikia’s retribution—which, it turns out, was simply aimed a little higher.”

  “No question there,” said Cozy.

  “It’s still hard for me to believe that Kimiko wouldn’t have known what the hell Rikia was up to, though,” said Freddy.

  “I’m with Cozy,” said Bernadette. “I don’t think she did. I think she was simply looking to get back at Giles.”

  “For soiling her? Bernadette, come on. That’s so old-school Victorian—straight out of the 1890s.”

  “Like I said, things aren’t necessarily always what they seem, and soiling her would certainly help to explain Giles’s genital mutilation.”

  “You could make the same case for Sarah Goldbeck or for the cuckolded Howard Colbain,” said Freddy.

  “I could,” said Bernadette. “But I still believe that the essence of Kimiko’s revenge is that of a woman scorned. And I’ve done some homework to back it up.”

  “Uh-oh,” Freddy said, looking at Cozy. “I think we may have created ourselves an investigative-reporter monster here.”

  Ignoring him, Bernadette said, “I’ve dug up dozens of photos from thirty to thirty-five years ago that show Kimiko and Sergeant Giles holding hands and playing kissy-face with one another at antinuclear protests at missile-silo sites in four different states, including one of them arm in arm at Tango-11. Kimiko’s even quoted in a Yankton, South Dakota, newspaper article from 1979 as saying that her NukeWatch organization had people on the inside, air force people she was terribly fond of, who were helping her in her efforts to get nuclear missiles removed from the heartland.”

  “So! Giles was stringing her along and feeding her inside information for sex. Hell, politicians and Hollywood directors do the same damn thing every day without ever getting murdered, and never thirty years after the fact. So whatta you think, Cozy?” Freddy asked, rising from his chair and walking over to the window to look out on the season’s first snowfall.

  “I think Bernadette’s right.”

  “Okay. Let’s say she’s right. Kimiko still may have simply been along for the ride when it came to actually murdering Giles. Maybe all she did was whack off his johnson after he was dead. What I want to know is which one of the five of them delivered the fatal stab wound.”

  “Can’t answer that,” said Cozy.

  “Bernadette?”

  “Me, either,” Bernadette said with a shrug. “But at least, according to Colbain, we do know one thing after all these months. All five of them stabbed Giles, including Kimiko, the demented spiritualist, and Sarah Goldbeck, the self-avowed pacifist. Which means the three who are still standing are pretty much equally guilty in the eyes of the law.”

  “Colbain—what a joke,” Freddy said, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t put a dime’s worth of faith in what he says. Singing like a canary in order to save his own butt. That’s what he’s doing. Hell, his comments are worthless.”

  “Doesn’t really matter,” said Cozy. “Like Bernadette said, it won’t make much difference in the end. Colbain, Kimiko, and Rivers are going to end up rowing the same life-sentence boat downstream. Who knows, since any three of Giles’s five stab wounds could have killed him, maybe they all got in a fatal lick.”

  “Not if it were up to me,” said Freddy. “I’d fry every one of their asses.”

  “Yeah, we know,” said Cozy, “and that’s why you’re not the one meting out the justice here, my man.”

  Freddy flashed his best friend a confident, all-knowing smile. It was the smile of someone who knew that, all else aside, and in most ways that mattered, he would always have the upper hand. “But I am still at the helm of Digital Registry News, and I’ll be the one in charge at High Plains Insight three weeks from now when it debuts. That is, if a couple of employees of mine whom I care about and respect dearly ever deliver the magazine’s centerpiece story to me.”

  “We’ll have the story to you,” Bernadette said, smiling at Freddy reassuringly.

  “Yeah,” said Cozy. “Get off your worry stick, would you? I’m just hoping this new venture of yours keeps us all in a job. Regional news and entertainment magazines have been tried before, and believe it or not, Freddy, they’ve always folded. Remember what they say about millionaire cattle barons.”

  Freddy laughed. “Yeah, that they all started off as billionaire cattle barons. But then again, that’s pretty much what folks said when Dick Durrell and Matthew Maynard launched People magazine back in 1974. And no matter what anyone thinks, I’m betting there’s still room out there for a slick, in-your-face, tell-everything-to-everybody, people-oriented regional magazine. Something specific to the Rocky Mountain West that characterizes the people here who cause the news, defines those who’ve been caught up in or dragged into it, or shines a spotlight on folks who try their best to tiptoe their way around or away from it.”

  Offering himself a single, self-congratulatory nod, Freddy said, “So that’s what my little regional tabloid’s going to do—spotlight those people and their stories. Like my daddy’s always said, screw the folks on either coast and give me the good, proud folks in the muddled middle.” Grinning, Freddy asked, “Wanna see the first cover?”

  “Sure do,” Bernadette said, locking hands with Cozy and walking over to Freddy’s desk to have a peek at the inaugural cover of High Plains Insight.

  “Voilà,” said Freddy, slipping a linen cloth from over the seventeen-by-twenty-two-inch proof sheet that featured
a two-column-wide color photograph of a motorcycle carrying two riders. Their faces could barely be seen, but they were clearly intended to be Cozy and Bernadette, disappearing into a white mushroom-shaped fog as, overhead, the nose of an A-10 Warthog pierced the fog’s leading edge. A third column was a horizontal half split. The top panel featured a grainy-looking black-and-white photo of a map of Wyoming peppered with red dots depicting the locations of the state’s once active seventy-six nuclear-missile sites. The much more sharply focused bottom panel showed a close-up photo of a cyclone fence surrounding a missile site. A small black-and-white sign reading, “Warning, Tango-11, Restricted Area—Deadly Force Authorized,” was attached at eye level to the fence. In the background, the partially raised hatch of a silo personnel-access tube was clearly visible.

  After giving Cozy and Bernadette time to study the cover, Freddy expectantly asked, “So, whatta you think?”

  After a brief silence, Bernadette said, “There was never an A-10 involved at Los Alamos.”

  “Creative license, Bernadette. Creative license. You’ll learn all about it if you stick around this business long enough.”

  Realizing that Cozy still hadn’t looked up from the cover and that his eyes remained locked on the motorcycle and the fog, Freddy said, “I haven’t decided on the cover copy yet, but it’ll be easy enough to drop in. Right now I’m thinking ‘Doomsday Disarmed.’ ” Aware of what Cozy must be thinking, Freddy draped an arm over his best friend’s shoulders. “But, what the hell, I’m open to suggestions. Que sera, sera.”