“But you’re not going to stop.”
Shannon swallowed, shook his head. “How can I?” he asked, lowering his gaze. Then looking up until his eyes met hers, he asked, “You wouldn’t want me to stop, would you?”
She stood motionless for a long moment before shaking her head. Then she bit her lip as she gave him a brave smile. “We’ll have fun spending a few nights at the Boulderado,” she said. “And if we have to, we’ll find a new apartment. Or leave Boulder.”
“That’s not going to happen,” he insisted with as much bravado as he could muster. But the thought was still out there—if these Russians were willing to beat him up as a first warning, what would they be willing to do for a second? Susan turned to Emily and the two women hugged, with Emily briskly rubbing Susan’s back. “You take care of my girl,” she warned Shannon. He nodded that he would, then got Susan’s bags, and brought them down to his car. When he went back for her bike, Emily sidled up next to him.
“You know who you look like now?” she asked. “Mickey Rourke from ‘Sin City’.”
“Thanks.”
She walked behind him, adding, “Don’t worry about nothing. I’ll keep an eye on your place.”
“If you hear anything, call the police. Call me also. But don’t get involved.”
“Maybe, or maybe I’ll go in and knock some sense into them myself.”
He stopped and gave her a hard look until she agreed to simply call him and the police. She was a character, from Oklahoma originally, and as tough as she talked, all five foot six and a hundred and thirty-five pounds of her, Shannon would probably choose taking on one of the Russians again than a fired up Emily. He lifted the bike to his shoulder and started down the steps. Emily followed, telling him how she passed by the Vishna Yoga Studio every day when she went to work and had at one time thought of signing up for classes. The last part came out more as a question. He turned to her, gave her a wary eye. “Don’t,” he said.
When he joined Susan in the car, she gave him a pensive smile. “You think something happened to that girl?”
He nodded. “I think so. Otherwise they would’ve let me talk to her instead of going through all the trouble they did.”
They drove in silence after that. When they got to the Boulderado Hotel’s parking lot, Susan took hold of his bandaged hand and brought it to her lips. He looked over, felt a hollowness deep inside as he caught her somewhere between smiling and sobbing. Tears started to run down both her cheeks and he wiped them away with his thumb.
“Look at us,” she said, sniffing, trying to hold back more tears. “We’re both a couple of messes. Do you think they’ll let us check in?”
“Darling, the way you look right now there’s not a person alive who could turn you down for anything.”
She put both hands behind his head and brought him to her, kissing him hard. When he winced, she pulled back, alarm in her eyes. “Oh God, I’m sorry,” she said. “I hurt you!”
“I’m just a little banged up, that’s all.” He took hold of her chin with his thumb and forefinger and kissed her gently, tasting the saltiness of the tears that had made their way to her lips. The last thing he wanted to do was pull away, but after a minute or so he forced himself to. “I guess we should check in,” he said.
“I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time earlier,” she said.
“What? You had every right–”
She put a finger against his lips, cutting him off. “No I didn’t,” she said. “I blamed you for this. Which is crazy because if you were the type of person who’d be willing to abandon that poor woman and her daughter, I probably wouldn’t love you as deeply as I do. I guess after what happened with Charlie Winters, and our time here in Boulder being as peaceful as it’s been, this hit me pretty hard.” She paused, her voice softer as she added, “Memories from that day started flooding back.”
Shannon removed her finger from his lips and kissed her long and hard, ignoring the throbbing that radiated from his jaw and cheek. “Darling, we’ll get back to what we had, and I swear I’m not letting any of this stuff get close to you.”
“I know you won’t. I also know if you could handle Winters, these Russians will be a piece of cake.”
Shannon nodded, but in his gut he knew she was wrong. Winters had been insane, a murderous madman, but these two Russians were detached cold-blooded killers. Shannon knew that the moment he saw them. As cunning as Winters was, he was driven by bloodlust and made mistakes because of it. These two Russians were no less ruthless but were driven solely by expediency and need, which made them far more dangerous.
Forcing a laugh, he mentioned how pissed off Emily had looked. “For a minute I thought she was going to mop the floor with me,” he added.
Susan joined in with a sad laugh. “For a minute, I thought so too,” she said.
When they checked in, the desk clerk appeared flustered as he glanced uneasily at Shannon, but in the end took his credit card and gave them the keys for their suite. After their divorce Susan had gone back to using her maiden name, Kerry, and they used that when registering in case anyone tried calling hotels looking for Shannon. The clerk took Susan’s bike and stored it in a back room for her.
The Boulderado, a Victorian-style turn-of-the-century hotel that in the eighties had been restored to its full grandeur, anchored the downtown mall area. They’d eaten at the hotel’s restaurant a few times on special occasions and Susan would always comment then about how fun it would be to stay there for a night or two. As she stood in the lobby taking in the spectacular stained glass ceiling and the Victorian-style furnishings, her mood brightened. By the time they got to their suite, she was almost her old self again, lively, excited, like a kid in a candy store as she took inventory of the antique cast iron bed, the Victorian furniture, the white lace bedspread and the old Western-style paintings of open prairies. She stopped briefly to run her fingers along the surface of an antique walnut table that had an inlaid chess board carved into it. As Shannon watched her he breathed easier, grateful for her change of mood.
She ended up by the window where she stared out at a view of the Flatirons which was even more spectacular than the one Paul Devens had from his office. “This is going to be nice,” she remarked. Shannon joined her, putting an arm lightly around her back. She leaned closer to him and rested her head against his shoulder. They stood still like that for several minutes, doing nothing more than feeling the contact of each other’s bodies while soaking in the mountain view. Sighing, Susan broke the spell, asking Shannon what his plans were.
“I promised Eli I’d stop off at the Center and prove to him I’m still alive and in one piece. I’ve got a few other loose ends I need to tie up, but I should be back in an hour. How about going out for a nice dinner then?”
Susan nodded, showed Shannon a guilty smile. “I’m meeting a patient at eight. I told her she could come to the hotel. I hope that’s okay? We should be finished by ten.”
Shannon waved it away. “Of course. Anyway, I should go back to that condo complex and talk to more of the neighbors. We’ll have dinner, go our separate ways for a few hours, then meet back here at ten.” He hesitated, then added, “I had plans to fly out to Wichita tomorrow, but I can reschedule that for another day if you want.”
“Aren’t people expecting you?”
“They don’t even know I’m coming. Ah, if I were still giving my lessons in being a private eye I believe this would be number seven: don’t give suspects a chance to coordinate their answers.”
“They’re suspects?”
Shannon arched an eyebrow as he looked at her. “Everyone’s a suspect, my dear.”
“Well, what if they’re not home tomorrow!”
“Then it will be an uneventful trip. But I’ll get a chance to see downtown Wichita.”
Susan frowned at that. “Private eye lessons or not, I think its foolish flying there without calling that family first. Don’t cancel your flight for me, though. I have appointments
scattered throughout the day. In between I’ll do some shopping and spend enough of our money to make you think twice about tangling with Russian mobsters in the future. Just try to be back by tomorrow night?”
“I’ll make sure of it. Tomorrow evening we’ll be watching the sunset together from this window. And I’ve got news for you, I think I’ve had my fill of Russian mobsters.”
They kissed, her hands wrapped lightly around his neck, his lingering on her small hips. On his way out, a collection of what looked like first edition Zane Grey westerns caught his eye. He opened one of them, told Susan that it had been published in 1908. “They must’ve bought all these new when they came out. Damn.” He opened more books and saw publishing dates of 1910, 1914, 1915. “Before we check out, I’m spending a whole day in this room,” he told Susan. “And I’m spending part of it reading these books!”
She laughed, told him he had a date.
***
He called Pauline Cousins from his car and told her that the cult had refused to let him talk to her daughter but that the Boulder Police were going to check on her and make sure she was okay.
“I’ll call you after I hear from them,” he said. “And I want you to know I’m not giving up on this.”
“Should we meet? I’d like to pay you a retainer.”
“That’s not necessary, but I’ll talk to you soon.”
At the Boulder Mind Body Center, some of the people he passed in the hallway stopped to ask whether he’d been in an accident, others averted his eye. When Eli saw him, he stared deadpan for a long ten-count, then shook his head sadly.
“I sweated off ten pounds while you were locked in that compound,” he complained.
“You’ve been telling me for months how you need to drop some weight. Just thought I’d help out.” Shannon lowered himself into a chair and swung his feet onto Eli’s desk. He froze for a moment, feeling as if someone had gripped his lungs and squeezed the air out of them. When he could breathe again, he took the bottle of aspirin from his pocket and popped several tablets into his mouth.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, just some muscles tightening up. I’ll be fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“Yeah, well, I am.”
Eli gave him a cautious look, then asked if Shannon was going to tell him what happened, a mix of worry and impatience edging into his voice. Shannon leaned back in his chair and told him all of it. As Eli listened his long face grew somber.
“I’ve got a question for you,” Shannon asked. “Dimi, is that a Russian name?”
Eli nodded briefly. “Short for Dmitry.” He nodded again, this time slower and to himself. “You’ve had a lot of violence in your life,” he said after a while.
“I guess you could say that, but I couldn’t help what happened all those years ago with Winters.”
“No, you couldn’t. But you knew when you rang that buzzer what was going to happen. You knew those two cult members were going to come out and try to push you around. Do you think at some level your motivation was to pay them back for what they did to your client?”
“I don’t think so. You’re right, I did know what was going to happen, but I was thinking more that I’d be able to use it as leverage to see Melissa. After all, they did assault me first.”
“Very Machiavellian of you.” Eli smiled thinly. “And when you let yourself get locked into that room…”
“I didn’t let myself get locked into any room–”
Shannon’s cell phone rang, interrupting him. According to the Caller ID it was Mark Daniels. Eli’s smile turned peevish, but he indicated he wouldn’t be overly offended if Shannon took the call. He then picked up a book and peered at it with heavy eyelids.
When Shannon answered the phone, Daniels broke in, stating in a defensive tone that he had talked to Melissa Cousins over an intercom. “She claims she’s there because she wants to be. She also wants you and her mother to leave her alone,” he added brusquely.
“You didn’t see her?”
“They preferred that I didn’t enter their premises.”
“They could’ve had any woman there pretend to be Melissa. Or even some high-pitched guy.”
“Look, I had no legitimate cause to enter their compound, and after the way you botched things up I couldn’t get a warrant now to save my life.”
Shannon didn’t believe that was true. When he was on the force, he would’ve had more than enough to get a warrant. He decided not to push it and instead asked if they wanted to file charges against him.
“No. They didn’t mention you. I also checked the local hospitals. No head injuries or concussion cases brought in today. They’re trying hard to keep a low profile.”
“So that’s it.”
“Yeah, that’s it.” Daniels sounded exasperated. “I feel the same as you. Something about that place stinks, but there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. Except keep my eyes open.”
“There is something else you could do. True Light operates Vishna Yoga Studio up on the Hill, directly on Thirteenth Street. They use it for recruiting new members. The place smells like they’re smoking pot in there.”
“If they’re distributing it...” He let the sentence die, then grumbled that he’d check into it. “That would be enough to get a warrant,” he admitted.
Shannon showed a grim look as he hung up the phone. Eli tossed his book back on the desk and commented how it sounded as if the police didn’t have any better luck.
“No, they didn’t.”
“It doesn’t sound good.”
“It doesn’t,” Shannon agreed.
“You think something happened to this girl?”
“I think so.”
“But she could be fine,” Eli said. “It could just be the cult leader’s megalomania shining through. Refusing to let anyone enter his sacred ground or talk to one of the flock. Playing God and all that.”
“Anything’s possible.”
Eli gave Shannon a long, pained look. “Jesus, talking to you now is worse than pulling teeth,” he said. “Still, I’d like to ask you to think about why you let yourself get locked in that room.”
“It’s just something that happened.”
“Nothing just happens. As what has long become a mantra of mine, at least when arguing with you, there’s no such thing as an accident.”
Shannon shrugged. “Maybe I thought they might lock me in, but the worst I was expecting was for them to call the police which would’ve given me a chance to get things hashed out with Melissa. I don’t believe at any level, subconscious or otherwise, that I expected muscle to be brought in.”
“But you knew the place wasn’t kosher.”
Shannon nodded weakly. “That’s a long stretch from expecting a couple of Russian mobsters to walk into that room.”
Eli shrugged and admitted that was true. “Still, it raises an interesting question. Why are a couple of Russian gunsels involved with a cult?”
“Gunsels,” Shannon said, repeating the word slowly. “That’s an interesting word choice for you.”
“Hey, I read the classics. Hammett, Spillane, Chandler. So how about it—why are a couple of gunsels hooked up with a cult?”
Shannon shook his head, frowning. “That’s what I have to find out.”
After leaving the Center, Shannon went back to his apartment where he tried without any luck to get fingerprints from the Russian’s driver’s license, then checked his email and found another note from Professor White. This time White tried to clarify his previous email, stating that he at no time suspected Taylor Carver was in imminent danger or at any risk of being harmed, simply that he thought his ex-student was an extraordinarily callous individual who, borrowing from the Dylan song All Along the Watchtower, acted as if life were but a joke. He apologized for not being able to give Shannon names of other students to talk to, but as far as he could tell Carver was a loner who didn’t socialize with fellow students. He ended the email by adding
that Shannon’s initial correspondence had gotten him thinking about Carver’s Masters thesis and if Shannon sent him his home address, he’d have his office make him a copy.
Shannon emailed his address, thanked him for his help and asked if he could provide examples of Carver’s callous behavior. After that he sent Kathleen Tirroza an email telling her that he was finally calling in the favor she owed him. Kathleen worked as a forensic investigator for the FBI and had spent hundreds of hours with Shannon in the aftermath of Charlie Winters. Their work ended up tying Winters to over a hundred other killings. In his email, Shannon told her he needed information about a cult leader operating in Boulder and also a Russian mobster who had tried with only partial success to rearrange his face. He told her his guess about the Russian having boxed professionally, and also described his associate who he was fairly certain was named Dmitry. He faxed her the Russian’s drivers license and Vishna’s photograph from the yoga studio’s brochure.
He was in the bedroom packing up a few items Susan had overlooked when he heard the front door open. For a moment there was dead quiet, then the creaking of someone moving across the hardwood floor of his living room. He moved silently to the dresser, took a roll of quarters from his sock drawer and made a tight fist around it. Then opening the bedroom door, he saw Emily standing in the middle of the living room as she gripped a Louisville Slugger, her knuckles almost as white as her face.
Shannon stepped into the room and asked her what the hell she was doing. The bat clattered out of her hand as she took a step back and clutched her chest.
“Goddamn it, Bill, you damn near gave me a heart attack!”
“I’ll ask you again. What the hell are you doing?”
“I was walking by and heard noises. What do you think I was doing?”
“I thought we had an agreement. That if you heard anything you’d call me and the police?”
“Well, if I had done that you probably would’ve gotten yourself shot up when the police came,” she argued, her jaw pushed out as she challenged him to say otherwise.
Bad Karma Page 12
