Reagan's Ashes

by Jim Heskett

  The man wasn’t Tyson, but might as well have been. Same build, same leather jacket, same facial hair even. The only thing missing was the banana-shaped scar under his eye.

  Spoon took a few steps toward the ute, and the man started it up, but didn’t leave. He lifted a mobile to his ear and said a few words, then hung up the call. Spoon wondered if he took a couple more steps in that direction if the car would tear down the street.

  He got the distinct impression that this man knew Tyson. Why he felt this, he could not say, but the more he stared at the bloke now looking away from him, the more he felt sure that this man was there to watch the house.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  10:45 am

  As his socks dried on the rock next to him, Dalton stared out over Haynach Lake and thought that it didn’t seem much like a lake. In the shape of a swimming pool designed by one of those weird French artists he had to read about back in high school, the water stretched barely two-fifty feet by four hundred feet. Didn’t look all that deep, either.

  The peaks around it were impressive, though. Big, jagged rocky things with crumbles of boulder at their bases. He saw mountains all the time from Denver, but there was something different about being right up next to them, with no Starbucks or McDonalds to obscure the view. It almost made him feel peaceful, except for the birds in the trees that wouldn’t shut up.

  Yesterday, any time he stopped hiking, ants instantly swarmed his feet, but there were none around here. Fewer mosquitoes, too.

  His little brother Charlie was sprawled next to him on the same spacious rock, eyes closed, soaking up the sun. Charlie’s big fat belly rose and fell with each asthmatic breath.

  Dalton pulled his pack close and readjusted the cinch Reagan had made to keep the innards from tumbling out. He had thought it impressive at the time, but it kept slipping while they hiked, and he had to check the ground behind him every few minutes to make sure his crap wasn’t leaking out on the trail. At least he kept his weed in a waterproof container in his pocket. If that became ruined, he’d be in for a shitty trip.

  But his backpack, his weed, or his wet socks weren’t what concerned him so much as his brother napping on the broad rock hanging over Haynach Lake. He needed a commitment from Charlie that when the shit went down, he was going to man up and do what needed to be done.

  And then there was that piece of paper she’d hidden from him when he came back from pissing a little while ago. Maybe directions to the money stash. Entirely possible.

  Dalton scanned the shoreline for Reagan, and she was a few hundred feet away, kneeling in front of the water. She had one hand below the surface, occasionally bringing a handful of water up and then letting it slip through her fingers. As if she was going to drink it, but changing her mind each time. Also, she was crying. Dalton understood her when she was crying. Her dad just died. But when she turned into the determined, bossy, hurry hurry hurry the storms are coming hiker-bitch, she was like a different person. He wanted to say, just relax, cuz. Enjoy all this nature and stop worrying so much about every little thing. And tell me where the damn money is so I don’t have to go back to Tyson with nothing.

  Maybe not the last part.

  Regardless, she was out of earshot, so Dalton nudged Charlie. “Hey, fatty.”

  Charlie murmured and turned on his side.

  Dalton nudged him again, and Charlie opened his eyes. “Oh, wow,” Charlie said. “My lower back hurts. Does your back hurt?”

  “A lot of things hurt. If your back hurts, probably means you put too much heavy stuff at the bottom of your pack.”

  Charlie sat up. “How did you know that?”

  “Boy scouts.” Dalton took a tube of lotion from his pocket and squirted some on the days-old tattoo on his forearm, then spread the shiny substance over the inked flesh. “Look, Charlie, we need to talk about what’s going to happen. What I said to you this morning, about what we have to do out here…”

  Charlie turned his head and looked at Reagan. “I don’t know about all that.”

  “What’s not to know?”

  “Look at her,” Charlie said. “She’s so sad. She’s trying to keep it together, but I heard her crying in her tent last night. You know, I understand what he wants, and I understand why it has to be done, but can’t it wait a few weeks? Can’t we let her have this, and then let him deal with it once we’re all back?”

  “Because, genius, once she finds the money, she and that limey boyfriend of hers are going to up and skip town, and then Tyson doesn’t get paid back for what Uncle Mitch stole, and we look like idiots for letting them get away with it. How can I make it any more clear to you?”

  Reagan stood up and started walking toward them, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. She’d be close enough to hear their conversation in thirty seconds.

  Dalton grabbed his brother by the arm. “I need to know now if you’re in or not. We can spend days arguing about when it would be the most convenient for everyone, but we’re running out of time with this shit.”

  Charlie shook his head. “This isn’t right. I’ve done a lot of things for you before, but I don’t know if I can go along with you on this one. She’s our cousin and that should mean something.”

  “Damn it, Charlie, I’m your brother. That means more, and you’re going to do what I’m asking because of that. Don’t make me give some long, drawn-out speech here.”

  Reagan was close enough that Dalton could see the redness of her eyes. He kept his eyes low, trying not to attract attention.

  Charlie blew a sigh through his nose. “You lied to me about why we came. I’m still trying to decide if I’ve forgiven you for that.”

  Reagan cleared her throat, not looking at them. She probably hadn’t heard what they were saying, or at least she didn’t give any indication of anything weird.

  She spoke as if she’d been gargling gravel. “We should get going.”

  Dalton nodded and pulled on his socks, which were still wet enough that he had to yank on them to get them past his ankle. He glared at his brother, who pretended not to notice the eyes on him.

  Charlie was going to do the right thing. He had to.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  9:15 am

  Spoon couldn’t help but gawk at the heavyset bloke in the blue Chevy Tahoe parked across the street. He tried to pretend he didn't think this man was there to watch the house. Or something worse than that.

  Now he had to have a think about what to do: confront him, go back inside the house and do nothing, or ignore him and investigate the lawnmower shop as planned.

  Spoon walked to the car parked in the neighbor’s driveway and got in. Black Lexus, late model. This year’s or last year’s, he wasn’t sure. He ran his hands over the clean dashboard, appreciating the neighbor’s excellent taste and attention to detail.

  The Lexus purred like a cat as he turned the key. Spoon adjusted the rearview mirror so he could see the blue ute and the man inside, who was sneaking glances at Spoon over the top of his sunglasses.

  Spoon eased the car out of the driveway, wincing at how the slight bend in his knee caused him a significant amount of pain. The ibuprofen wasn’t getting the job done today.

  He straightened the car on the street and readjusted the rearview so he could see behind him, then drove through the neighborhood toward the main street. He kept checking the mirror for the blue truck to start up, but it didn’t.

  As the Lexus glided past the rows of identical suburban American houses, he wondered what the hell he was doing. Going to the lawnmower shop, yes, but was he going to rock up to Tyson and demand answers? Probably not, but he at least had to see the place for himself. Get a better idea of whom he was dealing with.

  When he reached the main street, he turned on his blinker and pulled out into traffic, barely catching the blue ute pulling away from the curb out of the edge of his vision.

  “Okay. Okay. Let’s just see what happens here.”

  Spoon tried to keep his hands
loose on the steering wheel. He had no proof of anything yet, so best to wait until there was more information. He drove straight for two minutes before fumbling his mobile out of his pocket so he could open the Maps app and find out where he was going. It’s not as if he knew his way around Denver and its suburbs. He looked back and forth between the road and his mobile as he tried to type “A1 Lawnmower” into the search bar with his thumb.

  Then he caught the Chevy Tahoe in his rearview.

  Several cars back, but the ute was there. Navy-colored, with extra-wide sideview mirrors and lots of chrome on the front grille. No mistaking it.

  He dropped the mobile on the passenger seat and put two hands on the wheel.

  “Alright, Spoon, no need to get nervous. Plenty of reasons why some hefty American Hell’s Angel bikie behind the wheel of a gas guzzler would have been parked outside the house you’re staying at and then decide to leave at exactly the same time and drive down the exact same street.”

  Spoon had never had a tail before. He didn’t know the protocol.

  He’d make a few turns and see how his tail would react. Through the first turn, he figured he’d lost the ute behind him, then it reappeared. The big blue monstrosity started to look like a shark back there, looming closer, the teeth of its grille ready to bite him once it got close enough.

  Another turn, then a minute later, a flash of blue rejoined him.

  Spoon needed a plan. Why the ute was behind him was a question he could only answer if he could ask the bloke inside it. And that wasn’t likely to happen.

  So how was he going to find out what was going on?

  He ticked the boxes on what he knew so far: some big guy named Tyson had berated Anne yesterday morning. Anne hadn’t wanted to talk about it, she’d shrugged it off as nothing, but her words were lies. Tyson thought she was hiding something. Money, most likely, or property, or something else that had belonged to Reagan’s dad that Tyson was looking for. But that still didn’t explain why they would bother to follow a gimp-kneed Australian around town. What could that possibly gain?

  Unless, they figured Anne had told him something. Maybe they were waiting for him to leave so they could tail him and find the location of the… whatever they wanted. Too many unanswered questions.

  He slowed to see how close the blue ute would get, but it maintained a distance of at least a couple cars at all times. According to the movies Spoon had seen, this meant the guy knew what he was doing.

  Spoon had to get tricky. Driving up and down wide, easily-navigated main streets wasn’t going to improve the distance from the car behind him. He turned onto a narrower residential street, which he assumed would give him some breathing room. If this guy was as good as Spoon thought he was, he wasn’t going to tail him closely on a street with hardly any other cars. Way too obvious.

  For a full thirty seconds, the truck hadn’t turned. Spoon looked back and the truck had stopped in the street, blinker on, waiting to turn.

  Then came his salvation.

  The street was wide, with two lanes and a grassy divider separating them. Every few hundred meters, the median broke to allow cars to turn. Spoon slowed at one of these turns and yanked the wheel left to cut it as quickly as possible.

  Once he’d turned, he executed the second half of his getaway. Before him was a three-story house with an open two-car garage and no cars inside. He eased into the garage and turned the key to kill the engine. The Lexus went from running to off like flicking a switch. He reclined his seat so his head was less visible, grimacing from the pain even slight movement caused his knee.

  He waited, checked the mirror. Then it occurred to him that if the garage door was open, someone was home. He had just driven a car whose owner he didn’t know into someone else’s private garage. Grand theft auto as well as trespassing.

  A child’s bicycle hung on hooks along the back wall. On the right side of the garage was a door, presumably into the house. Spoon had a vision of some crotchety yank with a shotgun racing through that door, blasting the windshield of the Lexus into a million pieces.

  He gripped the keys in the ignition and checked the rearview again. Still no Chevy Tahoe.

  “Shit, Spoon, what are you doing?”

  Check the door. Check the rearview. Something had to move. His pulse throbbed against his neck, making it difficult for him to swallow.

  Just then, the ute drove past on the street, and Spoon knew he’d worn out his welcome in the stranger’s garage. He started the car, and despite the urge to chuck it in reverse and peel out on to the street to get the hell away, he kept his movements calm and easy as he backed the car out.

  The blue ute slowed at the end of the residential street, about to turn onto the next main street.

  Spoon first kept the Lexus at a crawl, then a little faster as his former pursuer turned and escaped his sight. He arrived at the main street and pulled out, now several cars behind.

  Spoon laughed as the tension bled out of him. Must be what James Bond felt like.

  He told himself to stay two cars back and out of direct sight. Now behind the ute, with the advantage on his side, this was a much easier proposition.

  Spoon followed the ute for fifteen minutes, and as far as he knew, the fat American bikie piloting the truck remained oblivious. They drove through a business district then onto a highway, finally exiting through a loop to a side street. The Maps app told him they were now in the Broomfield suburb, so Spoon had a good idea where they were going.

  Then the destination came into view. A1 Lawnmower Repair, a building the size of a one-room house, with a dodgy shingled roof that looked one rainstorm away from collapsing and a chain-link fence surrounding three sides of the exterior. A graveyard of lawnmowers littered the fenced-in area. The windows of the shop were dark, and a flickering neon sign in one of them read Open.

  He kept on driving as the Tahoe parked in one of the three available spaces in front of the shop. Spoon turned into a lot across the street, a tiny place that seemed to be a combination tattoo parlor and coffee shop named The Slinky Grape. Odd name, even odder combination of business ideas, but Spoon wasn’t bothered enough to give it much more thought.

  The Slinky Grape had parking on three sides of the shop, so Spoon drove behind it and then back around, parking under the shade of an awning, but with a clear view of the lawnmower shop.

  The fat man stepped out of the blue ute and meandered across the lot to another man hunched over a lawnmower. That man stood up. Tyson. Their hefty bellies pointed at each other like dogs baring teeth.

  The man who had been following Spoon lowered his head and spoke.

  Tyson flexed a hand, then slapped the other man. He actually slapped him, hard across the jaw. The follower took a step back, put a hand to his jaw, but did nothing in retaliation.

  Spoon sat shocked for a few seconds, then got his bearings. The dynamic started to make sense. Tyson was the boss. And, if Spoon had interpreted the situation correctly, he’d punished his employee for losing the guy he was supposed to tail.

  Maybe this was more serious that Spoon had thought. He’d been silly not to consider the possibility of violence, especially if money was involved. If this was how Tyson treated people who seemingly worked for him, how would he treat Anne? Or anyone else?

  Now, the problem was: what to do about it? He’d come here and seen what he wanted to see, but he was no better off than he was this morning. He still had more questions than answers, and confronting Tyson didn’t seem like a smart move. A man who would slap another man in public may be willing to do a lot more inside the privacy of his shop. Spoon’s secondary school boxing club days were long gone, and a bum knee didn’t lend itself to much movement.

  He waited until they had both gone and then searched the Maps app for Reagan’s house. As he drove back, a million thoughts raced through his mind. What kind of trouble was Anne into? She’d shoved the will into Tyson’s chest, trying to get him to look at it. She’d said the will was a record of
“the nothing” Reagan’s dad had left them. Tyson seemed to think that was a lie, and Anne knew something she wasn’t telling. Maybe she did. Maybe Spoon needed to redouble his efforts and encourage her to have a chat to him about it.

  When he got back to the house, he parked on the street and went inside. His adrenaline had subsided and his knee ached, so what he most wanted was to lie down and come up with a new plan.

  Anne wasn’t home, but fortunately, she’d left the front door unlocked for him.

  Once inside, he lumbered upstairs and entered Reagan’s room. He opened the nightstand so he could toss the car key into the drawer, but as soon as he pulled it open, three little bottles rattled around inside. Reagan’s pills.

  He picked up one of the bottles, turning it in his hands and reading the label. The realization dawned on him that if these pills were here, then Reagan might be without her medication.

  Maybe these were spare bottles. If that was the case, no big deal. But if they weren’t, and she was in the park without her meds…

  He instinctively reached for his mobile, phoned Reagan, and received no answer.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  11:45 am

  Reagan and her two companions hustled from Haynach to the main Tonahutu trail as the sun pelted them from above. The vast difference between the near-freezing temperatures of night and the sweltering heat of the summer midday sun shocked Reagan, despite having hiked and camped in Rocky Mountain National Park dozens of times over the last decade.

  But, as with every day, patches of clouds threatened to gather and become vicious storms. She moved as fast as her legs would carry her, hoping her cousins would do the same. The rain was just an annoyance at lower elevations, but storms above treeline might hold real danger if they weren’t down the other side in time.