Day of the Delphi

by Jon Land

  “Here we are,” the old man said and closed the door behind them.

  The municipal offices were laid out in neat, precise fashion. There was a door marked COURT. Separate walled-off counters with desks behind them were labeled respectively TAX PAYMENTS, ASSESSOR’S OFFICE, and AUTOMOTIVE REGISTRY. Two were not labeled at all. Not that it mattered: not a single person was on duty behind any of them. There was no label for sheriff, but Kristen did notice a nameplate that read SHERIFF DUNCAN FARLOWE atop a desk in the room’s front left corner.

  The old man moved down the center’s aisle toward an open doorway, taking his broom with him. “I’ll get the sheriff for you,” he called back to Kristen.

  She had barely begun to assess the municipal office’s furnishings when he reemerged. The broom was gone. A dull silver badge was pinned to the lapel of his jacket.

  “Sheriff Duncan Farlowe, miss,” he said, extending a hand. “What can I do for you?”

  He twisted rubber bands about his fingers as she spoke, hardly looking at her. He took notes, although Kristen couldn’t tell whether he was really listening as she told her story.

  “You don’t have this tape,” Farlowe said at the end, still toying with the rubber bands.

  “No.”

  “Too bad. We coulda used it.” Farlowe’s eyes darted up from his fingers. One of the rubber bands flew across the room. “You sure your FBI friend said Grand Mesa?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Because there’s maybe a hundred towns in Colorado called something Mesa. Maybe you got the wrong something.”

  “No, I’m sure he said Grand Mesa.”

  “Your brother, he sounded pretty spooked on this tape?”

  “Very.”

  Farlowe nodded at that. Another of the rubber bands jumped off his fingers. “Not much here been known to spook folks. He probably came from somewhere else, just passing through.”

  “I’ve thought of that, yes.”

  “But he wouldn’t have been driving long. Way you tell it, he woulda wanted to call ya from the first phone he saw.”

  Kristen nodded.

  “That time of night, only thing open woulda been the motel, if Harley didn’t leave the TV on when he dropped off to sleep and couldn’t hear the buzzer.” The sheriff opened the bottom drawer of his desk and reached a hand inside. “What d’ya say you and me go over and have a talk with him?”

  Duncan Farlowe rose with an old-fashioned leather holster in his hand and wrapped it around his waist. He drew a long-barreled black pistol that looked even older and spun the cylinder.

  “Colt Peacemaker,” Farlowe said proudly. “Been in the family for generations.”

  “You really think you’ll need it?”

  Farlowe shrugged. “Reminds folks they got a sheriff.”

  “Yeah, I remember him,” said Harley Epps, owner of the Grand Mesa Motel, as he looked up from the most recent picture Kristen had of David. “Checked in either two or three nights back. I’m almost certain it was two.”

  “That’d be Thursday,” Farlowe prodded.

  “Yeah,” Epps nodded. “Thursday. Paid in advance and was gone come morning.”

  “Make any phone calls?”

  Epps checked the log for that day. “Not that I got record of, but he could’ve used a credit card or called collect. I wouldn’t know about it then.”

  Farlowe looked Kristen’s way.

  “I’m not sure,” she told him. “The FBI agent didn’t tell me how my brother placed the call.”

  “What room he stay in?” Farlowe asked the clerk.

  “Seven.”

  “Any other guests here that night?”

  “I was just packin’ ’em in, as usual.”

  “Yes or no, Harley?”

  “Yeah, two, as I recall. Business has been slow lately, like about the last dozen years.”

  Duncan Farlowe turned slightly toward Kristen. “Right about the time the silver veins went dry.” He looked back at Epps. “Might want to talk to those other two, Harley.”

  “They checked in late, too. I didn’t ask for their addresses.”

  “Tough to send ’em Christmas cards that way.”

  “Cash in hand does fine by me.”

  Farlowe extended his hand across the counter. “Give me the key, Harley.”

  Room seven was dark for daytime. Farlowe flipped on the light switch by the door and then opened the blinds and drapes. Kristen followed him in tentatively, perhaps afraid of what the room might yield. All it gave up, though, was a musty, stale scent of disuse and a distant odor of disinfectant.

  With Kristen hovering in back of him, Farlowe checked all the drawers. He made a quick inspection of the bathroom and then felt about the bed. His last stop was the small desk where the telephone was perched. He leaned over and sniffed the receiver.

  “Been cleaned recently?” Kristen raised.

  “No, little lady—replaced. This phone’s brand spanking new.”

  “New?”

  “According to the way you described that tape, it sounds to me like your brother was attacked in this room. Maybe he tried to use the old phone as a weapon. Maybe it just broke when he dropped it. Either way it would need replacing.”

  “That means someone had to come back to replace it after they got David out.”

  Sheriff Farlowe crouched down. The long barrel of his Peacemaker dropped beneath his leg and scraped against the carpet. “That’s not all they came back for. Check out this rug. See how the nap’s all going in one direction.”

  “No. Wait a minute, yes, I think so.”

  “Well, Harley Epps ain’t vacuumed since you were still in diapers, and even if he did, it wouldn’t straighten the nap this much. Nope, I’d say somebody washed this carpet, real recent, too.”

  Kristen felt the hollowness building in her gut. “My brother was here.”

  “Seems that way.”

  “But there’s nothing to tell us where they took him, where he is now.”

  “No, little lady, but I got me a notion on how he got to Grand Mesa in the first place.”

  “He drive a jeep, one of those little Jap jobs?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Figured as much.”

  Farlowe hadn’t elaborated further. They climbed back into his 4 × 4 and drove three blocks down to the town garage and filling station. Inside a cluttered repair bay, a mountain of a man with red hair and a matching beard wearing blue denim overalls had his head beneath the hood of an old Ford.

  “Jimbo,” Farlowe said to him.

  “I’m a little busy, Sheriff.”

  Farlowe turned off the work light dangling from the open hood. “So am I.”

  The man mountain straightened up, towering over Farlowe, who stood back with this thumbs cocked in his pants pockets. Kristen noticed the butt of the Peacemaker was poised outside his jacket.

  “Need to talk to ya about that jeep you found.”

  “It was parked on my property. Nobody claims it, it’s mine.”

  “Strange how it had no papers inside.”

  “I figure it was stolen,” said the man mountain. “Abandoned here.”

  “Could be. Mind if I take a look?”

  “Long as you leave it just where it is when you’re finished.”

  “In the back bay?”

  “Where it’s stayin’, Sheriff.”

  Farlowe tipped his wide-brimmed hat and led Kristen through the obstacle course of grease and oil that darkened the floor in splotches. The rear bay was accessible through a missing door, and the jeep was there waiting for them.

  “This your brother’s, little lady?”

  Kristen circled about it. “I don’t know. I never saw it. But it’s the same model, I think. I just can’t be sure.” She looked down. “The license plates are gone.”

  “Big Jimbo probably dumped ’em in the river by now. Eliminate anyone else’s claim on it, that way.”

  “I assume the glove compartment will be empty as wel
l.”

  “For sure.” Farlowe tapped the Wrangler’s hood. “Your brother was a smart boy, little lady. He musta parked his jeep out of sight so whoever was after him wouldn’t know he was in town. I mighta been the one callin’ you if Big Jimbo hadn’t’ve come upon this first. Don’t matter much really, I suppose.”

  “Why?”

  “Because what matters is figurin’ out where it was at ’fore your brother drove here. I mean, whatever got him hurt happened a ways out of town. We find out where and maybe we find out what.”

  Kristen whisked her hand across the shiny-clean fender. “Looks like your friend Jimbo wiped off whatever evidence of that there might have been.”

  “Not all of it, little lady,” countered Farlowe, kneeling by one of the front tires. “Looks like he hasn’t gotten to these yet.”

  Farlowe drew a pen from his pocket and stuck it in the tread. A layer of clay-colored dirt coated the tip when he pulled it back toward him. He brought the pen to his nose and sniffed.

  “Looks like your brother was up in silver country.”

  “What?”

  “This part of Colorado used to be known for its silver mines. People came on through to stake their claim,” Farlowe explained. “Plenty got rich. Plenty didn’t. Town did fine either way.”

  “You think my brother was looking for silver?”

  “Be damn stupid if he was, little lady. See, there hasn’t been any silver in these parts for a good dozen years now, like I said before. That’s why Grand Mesa’s little more than a ghost town these days. Anyway, all I’m saying is his jeep was up in the hills off Old Canyon Road where the mines used to be. Pretty dangerous territory. Man could fall in one of the abandoned shafts if he took his eyes off the ground for a second.”

  “What else is out there?”

  “Not much. Miravo Air Force Base, but that was shut down a couple years back. With SAC gone, they mothballed it. Killed whatever was left of Grand Mesa’s economy. Nobody even uses that old road anymore. We’ll drive out that way. See if anything strikes our fancy.”

  They moved from the rear bay back into the front section of the garage where Big Jimbo was coolly working under the hood of the Ford.

  “You find what you were looking for, Sheriff?” he asked, without poking his head out.

  “Funny thing, Jimbo,” Farlowe told him. “Glove compartment got itself emptied.”

  Farlowe stopped just to Big Jimbo’s right. As Kristen looked on, the old man reached up and brought the hood down hard on Jimbo’s head and shoulders. The man mountain screeched in pain. Farlowe let the hood bounce back up and grabbed a fistful of red hair. Before Big Jimbo could respond, the sheriff’s Colt Peacemaker was cocked dead center against his forehead.

  “That jeep back there belongs to this here lady’s brother, Jimbo,” he said quite calmly. “Now there’s two things you’re gonna do. First, you’re gonna give me everything you took out of the glove compartment, since something important mighta been in there. And second, you’re gonna park the jeep right outside my office sometime in the next ten minutes. Have I made myself understood?”

  Big Jimbo nodded.

  “I think I wanna hear you say it.”

  “Yes, Sheriff.”

  Farlowe let the Peacemaker’s hammer release and pulled the gun back from the red-haired man’s forehead. “Much obliged.”

  They waited near the garage’s entrance for Big Jimbo to retrieve the contents of David’s glove compartment. After Big Jimbo had handed them over, Farlowe led Kristen outside, keeping his eyes on the man mountain until they were halfway to his truck.

  “Now, little lady,” he started, only then returning his trusty Peacemaker to its holster, “let’s see if we can figure out what your brother was trying to tell you he found.”

  Farlowe gave Kristen the contents of the glove compartment and watched her quickly thumb through them. She got halfway into the pile and stopped. The wind ruffled the papers in her hand. She looked up from them at Farlowe.

  “I think I’ve got something, Sheriff.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “This is a receipt for a camcorder my brother bought three days before he disappeared,” Kristen explained, handing it to Farlowe.

  “You thinking maybe he taped whatever it was he was trying to tell you he saw?”

  She nodded. “And maybe he hid the tape somewhere. Maybe Big Jimbo still has it.”

  Farlowe smiled slightly. “Nope. I don’t think he’d be thinking ’bout adding it to his video collection, under the circumstances.”

  “Would you have shot him back there?” Kristen wondered.

  “Big Jimbo talks a tough game, little lady, but he never woulda made me.”

  “But would you have shot him?”

  “My great-uncle on my mama’s side would have, I can tell you. Man by the name of Wyatt Earp.”

  Kristen looked at Farlowe in surprise. “Wyatt Earp was your great-uncle?”

  “Not what you’d call a close relation, but my mama always told me I had the same blood he did in my veins. She gave me that Peacemaker when I was all of sixteen and told me Wyatt had fired it himself on occasion. Thinking back, I guess that’s what made me want to become a lawman. I grew up down in the Panhandle in the last of the boon times. Spent my formative years as a Texas Ranger. Man, I could tell ya some stories … Later, maybe. Right now we’d best head out to where I’m pretty sure your brother may have used that camera he bought.”

  Kristen used the drive to scrutinize the contents of her brother’s glove compartment more carefully. Other than the receipt, though, they seemed utterly routine: the registration; an insurance card; a number of gas company credit card charge slips that might aid her in piecing together the route he had taken across the country. Perhaps whatever had led to his desperate phone call Thursday night had not occurred near Grand Mesa at all. Perhaps it had happened several hundred miles away, and only as he neared Grand Mesa had David realized he was in danger. If that was the case, the charge slips might come in very handy indeed.

  “Uh-oh,” she heard Farlowe mutter and looked up from the receipts to see thick clouds of chalky brown dirt swirling in the air before them, stealing visibility in blizzard-like fashion.

  “In these parts, we call this a brown-out,” the sheriff explained. “It’s like them whiteout snowstorms they have in other parts. All kinds of theories as to what causes them and why they come mostly in the spring. Me, I can smell ’em just before they hit. Come and go fast, though.”

  Farlowe slowed the truck to a crawl. The reduced engine sounds allowed the pounding wind to make its presence heard as well as felt. The truck shook from the pressure. For Kristen, the effect was akin to a New England northeaster, with dirt in place of snow or rain. A little over five minutes later it was over. The sky returned as quickly as it had disappeared. Farlowe gave the engine gas, but the 4 × 4 hesitated a bit, as if needing to shed the layers of dirt that had battered it too. He pulled over a short time later and reached behind him for a can of window cleaner and a rag.

  They started down Old Canyon Road again after the windows were clear. Farlowe drove for ten or twelve miles, keeping the pace slow enough for him to survey everything that they passed by. Suddenly he pulled over and climbed out of the 4 x 4, leaving the engine on. Kristen joined him on the road and watched the sheriff kneel down gingerly. Stray blowing dirt created a film over his glasses and speckled his beard and hair. After a few seconds he rose, his knees creaking, and proceeded further down the road, only to kneel down again.

  Kristen joined him in a crouch the third time he stopped. “What is it?”

  “Tire marks. Trucks, big ones. Looks like a whole convoy came to a sudden halt right in this area not too long back.”

  Kristen gazed about. “But there’s nothing around here.”

  “Could be something made the lead truck come to a quick stop. Maybe an animal dashed out in front of it. Caused a chain reaction. Whatever the case, there were trucks, all right, several o
f ’em. Since Old Canyon Road leads nowhere fast, I can’t tell you where they were headed.”

  She followed Farlowe back to the 4 x 4. He pulled back out onto the road and continued on at an even slower pace, looking for more signs of the convoy. The minutes and miles passed in silence. He slowed again after passing the abandoned air force base he had mentioned, then stopped altogether and climbed out.

  “That’s funny. Those trucks didn’t get this far,” he announced after careful inspection of the road. “Trail they left ends at the base.”

  Kristen fixed her gaze on the chained entrance to Miravo. “But it’s deserted. What could they have been doing there?”

  “Why don’t we go inside and have ourselves a look?”

  “Can you do this?” Kristen asked from behind Farlowe as he aimed his Peacemaker at the lock holding the chain in place over the gate.

  “I’m the law, little lady. I can do anything my little heart desires. Cover your ears now.”

  She did as she was told but the reverberation still stung them. The lock shattered. Farlowe pulled the chain off and swung open the gate.

  Before them, Miravo Air Force Base boasted all the eeriness of a ghost town. Windows of many of the buildings had been boarded up. Beyond the buildings and hangars, the runways and tarmacs were collecting dirt. Where once upwards of a thousand people had occupied this SAC base, there was no one. Wind whistled by the steel hangars and Quonset huts. The sunlight struggled to glimmer off their rusting hulks.

  Duncan Farlowe checked the soft ground just inside the base entrance, kicking dirt and then smoothing it with his feet. He moved about stiffly; crouching had obviously become too much of a chore for him.

  “The trucks came in here, all right,” he told Kristen. “And lots more than just that one convoy we found evidence of back on the road.” He managed to half bend over. “They pulled through the gate and eventually headed …” He paused to check the ground more closely and brought his hand up. “ … that way.”