The Best Revenge

by Stephen White

  “That’s right.”

  “Go on.”

  “Like I said, I was worried that they’d figure out I was following them, so when they pulled into town I was giving them some space—I was maybe a quarter mile behind. When I chugged into town the Pathfinder had vanished. I looked for them for a while, and when I couldn’t find them, I went back down the hill and waited back at his grandfather’s house in Boulder, but Clone never came back down. He may not be here anymore, but this is the last place I saw them.”

  “And the motorbike is where he left it? You actually checked that? You’re not just assuming?”

  “It’s still parked at the Mental Health Center on Iris. Right where he left it.”

  Prehost had run the plates on the green Pathfinder himself. A couple of phone calls revealed that the tags had been stolen from a new Hyundai Santa Fe that was parked nights in an apartment building lot in Arvada and days in the huge lot of the MCI service center in Glendale. Other than the fact that the owner of the truck felt he needed stolen tags, the information wasn’t helpful at all: Plate picking would have been a piece of cake in either location.

  “So we need to find somebody who can tell us who around here might have a nice green Pathfinder,” Prehost said.

  “Yep.”

  “We do it together or separate?”

  “Us? Separate. Definitely separate. We don’t want to look like cops, and we don’t want to look like queers,” said Hoppy.

  “What’s our cover?”

  “Don’t look at me.”

  Prehost scratched his chin for a moment. “What about we say we were visiting relatives in Nederland and somebody in a Cadillac—no, even better, make that a Mercedes—so somebody in a big black Mercedes hit our car—no, no, no, somebody in a big black Mercedes hit ourdog —and we think the guy in this Pathfinder saw the whole thing and may be able to be a witness for us, and somebody in Nederland said that they thought they recognized the Pathfinder and that they thought that the guy who owned it lived somewhere near Ward. How about that?”

  “I think you’re a genius, Fred. You just come up with that right now? What kind of dog?”

  “A Lab, everybody loves Labs. Or maybe a golden retriever. What do you think?”

  “Lab. Did the dog die in the accident?”

  “Hell no. You ruin the story if you have the dog die. People get morose, then they don’t want to talk to you. Our dog’s in the hospital; he needs surgery to walk again. It’s going to be expensive, some experimental thing that has to be done by specialists at the veterinary school in Fort Collins. We need to find the guy in the Pathfinder so we can make sure the guy in the Mercedes pays through the nose so our dog isn’t crippled for the rest of his life.”

  “Is it your dog or my dog?”

  “Let’s make it your dog, Hoppy. You’re better at looking miserable than me. You head that way.” Prehost pointed through the windshield. “I’ll do the other side of the street. I want to know what Clone and this guy with the stolen tags are up to. Maybe we’ll find them in a meth lab or something. That would be sweet. With the slightest bit of luck, we’ll have Clone back in jail by dinnertime.”

  Hoppy pushed his door open and began to climb out. Then he stopped. “What’s his name? My dog?”

  Prehost was already thinking about something else. He said, “What? Oh. D.P. His name is D.P.”

  “Huh? T.P.? Toilet Paper?”

  “No, D.P.—Death Penalty. The dog’s name is D.P.”

  Hoppy laughed. “Gotcha.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Fred Prehost found Hoppy standing at something vaguely resembling a counter at the Ward General Store having a cup of coffee with an earth-mother type. For a moment, Prehost thought that the woman was somebody he’d busted in Cripple Creek for tipping over slot machines, but memory told him that woman was a size-ten felon, and this one was at least a sixteen.

  “This building’s original, Fred. Did you know that? It’s been a general store just like this for over a hundred and forty years. Survived all the fires. This is Clara, by the way.”

  Prehost pretended he was tipping the hat he wasn’t wearing. “Hello, Clara. Nice to meet you.”

  Clara smiled. “Coffee? Fresh a few minutes ago. We roast the beans ourselves. Best in town.” She laughed heartily and pointed to a gorgeous old roaster in the corner of the store. “Store” was a generous assessment of the establishment. A few shelves harboring a sparse collection of foodstuffs separated the part of the structure where things were sold from the part where people lived. Or hung out. To Prehost, it wasn’t at all a clear demarcation.

  “No, thank you, I’ll pass.”

  Hoppy said, “It turns out that Clara has a Lab, too, though hers is one of those golden ones, not a black one like old D.P. And she knows the car we’re looking for, even knows the guy who drives it to see him, but doesn’t know where he lives. She thinks he’s just up here occasionally, isn’t really a local, but that we should keep asking. She’s sure someone in town will know where to find him.”

  “Well, Clara, you do know what you’re talking about. The guy down at the—what is that down there a little ways? Is that a junkyard? Anyway, the guy with the hair that’s all—”

  “Lootie,” Clara supplied. “With the cornrows.”

  “Yeah, that’s his name. Lootie. Anyway, Lootie knew the vehicle right away. He gave me pretty good directions to the cabin this guy’s been fixing up, says the man’s real pleasant.”

  Clara nodded and said, “He is a pleasant man.” She snapped her stubby fingers. “Whatis his name?”

  “Oliver. Lootie said he calls himself Oliver.”

  “I’ll remember that now. Next time I see him I’ll remember to call him Oliver. Like the book,Oliver Twist. Or the movie. My memory is trouble, especially with names. I do okay with faces, but names . . .” Clara shook her head, smiled, and added, “You ask me, I think it was all the acid I took.”

  After they thanked Clara for her hospitality, Hoppy carried his coffee and a couple of muffins back to the Suburban. As he settled onto his seat, he asked, “So where are we going?”

  “That way,” Prehost responded. He pointed up the hill to the west before he looked down at his little pocket notebook. “We head up something Lootie called the Brainard Lake Road. He said we should go out Morning Star to Chatham and we’ll run into the Brainard Lake Road. When we get near Left Hand Creek apparently it all gets complicated. But I got it all written down.”

  “You act like you know this place.”

  “Ward? Hardly.” He was quiet for a moment. “But I do get the feeling that being a cop here would be like shooting ducks in a pond. I bet the half of the town that’s not using right now still has adequate blood levels of illegal substances in their bodies from the sixties and seventies. Local cops would just have to line everybody up on Main Street or whatever the hell they call it and hand out urine cups. The rest would be up to the guys with the test tubes and the white coats.”

  “Clara?” Hoppy said.

  “Clara, indeed.”

  “This guy Lootie seem to have all his brain cells?”

  “Mostly. Lootie seemed all right. Actually, if you get past his looks and the smell from his rotting teeth, he’s the sort of guy you’d like to have a beer with. I think the directions he gave me will get us to Oliver’s cabin. In fact, I smell Mr. Clone already. Ten dollars says that this Oliver guy is somebody that Clone knows from inside and what they’re working up here is a meth lab or an ecstasy dump.”

  “I like my money too much to take that bet. Your instincts are good on this shit, Fred.”

  “What time you have?”

  Hoppy checked his watch. “Almost five. Do we have enough time before it gets dark?”

  Prehost said, “Sure, plenty. I like approaching at dusk anyway. Reminds me of my infantry training. Ducks in a pond,” he repeated softly.

  CHAPTER 42

  I s’ell gas,” Tom said.

  “You do? You sell gas? You
work in a gas station? I thought you’d be able to get a better job than that,” the man said absently. His words were muffled by the helmet and visor.

  “No!I don’t sell gas, I s’ell gas.” Tom was looking all around, pivoting on one foot, trying to identify the source of the odor.

  “You smell gas? Natural gas?”

  “No, no. Gasoline. I s’ell gasoline. Don’t you s’ell it? Where is it? What are you doing?”

  The man unfolded the sides of one of the canvas bags to reveal an old Coleman cooler. The cooler was dark blue with a white plastic top.

  The man stood and faced Tom. “The smell is coming from in here, Tom.”

  “What is that?”

  “Here, see for yourself.”

  The man flipped off the lid of the cooler, reached inside, and removed an orb about the size of a softball. Small tubes stuck off the sides. The man raised the device and held it up so that Tom could see it.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a latex glove, Tom. Filled with my own little recipe for napalm. You know napalm, Tom?”

  “What?” Tom was incredulous. His mouth hung open and his eyes grew wide. “Na’al’? Why?” he cried. But he knew why.

  “Fear, Tom. Remember, it’s all about fear. You afraid of fire?”

  Tom’s voice cracked as he whined, “Every’ody is a’raid o’ ’ire. Don’t ’urn ’e. ’lease!”

  The man underhanded the orb over the fence. The latex ball hit the dirt about ten feet from Tom and imploded upon impact. A green transparent jell splashed up and out from the wrist hole, which had blown open as soon as the glove hit the ground. “Watch,” the man said.

  The man lit an entire book of matches and placed it in a small metal basket at the end of a telescoping aluminum pole that Tom recognized as a device for retrieving golf balls from water hazards. Once he pushed the basket through the fence, the man extended the pole until the basket hovered two feet above the splash of napalm.

  “No!” Tom wailed. He turned, ran to the far corner of the enclosure, crouched, and raised his hands to his face.

  The man tipped the basket over and the book of flaming matches fluttered toward the stained soil. A hugewhoosh of flames jumped from the ground and engulfed the matchbook before gravity could help it complete its descent toward the fuel.

  Tom yelped.

  The fire settled. The blue-yellow flames licked across the ground like slithering insects.

  The man reached into the cooler and grabbed two more puffy surgical gloves. One by one he tossed them over the fence. Each imploded upon impact. Each was closer to Tom than the first.

  Tom called out, “Let’s talk a’out girls and ’ear.”

  The man was retracting the aluminum pole. “You want to talk about girls and fear? Now? Because you’re afraid of fire?”

  Tom nodded dramatically.

  The man paused and faced Tom.

  “Fear kills, doesn’t it, Tom?”

  Desperate, Tom tried frantically to guess what it was that the man wanted to hear. “I guess it can. Yes, ’ear can kill. Are you going to kill ’e?”

  The man didn’t answer. He shook his head. Tom couldn’t tell whether it was an expression of disdain or denial.

  Finally, the man said, “Did it kill any girls, Tom? Or did you?”

  “What?” Tom said.

  “Well?” the man’s voice taunted.

  “What?”

  “After you killed Ivy, Tom, was another girl next?”

  “What?”

  The man readied another book of matches. Before he set it afire, he paused and retrieved two more little napalm bombs and tossed them toward Tom. One bomblet hit six feet from him, splashing gel onto his feet.

  The man returned his attention to the flaming matches in the basket of the telescoping pole.

  “I didn’t kill I’y. I’ innocent. The DNA! The DNA! You ’ust ha’e heard a’out the DNA.”

  The man stopped what he was doing. His voice flattened as he said, “Heard about it? Have I heard about it? You know whose blood was on that knife, Tom? The one that the FBI agent found?”

  “No. Who?”

  The man lit the matches. He placed the little ball of fire in the basket at the end of the pole.

  The sun completed its drop behind the Continental Divide, and thunder exploded in the western sky.

  A few fat drops of rain plopped and cratered on the dust inside the enclosure.

  The man raised his hands and looked up toward the sky. “So are you a lucky man, Tom? Are the monsoons coming today? No reason to be afraid of fire in a thunderstorm, is there?”

  More thunder clapped; lightning snapped a bolt of fire a second or two later. For an instant, the lightning was so bright that it muted the brilliance of the flames from the napalm.

  Tom squirmed and said, “ ’e? Lucky?”

  The man inserted the basket through the fence. He lit the puddle of napalm closest to Tom. A breeze picked up the flames and immediately blew them to the other pool of fuel.

  Tom hurried to brush dirt into the jell on his feet as he watched black-brown smoke snake upward.

  The flames jumped to a puddle of napalm even closer to Tom.

  The man readied a couple of more bombs to throw over the fence. He said, “If I hit you with one of these, it’s not going to be pretty. But I’m going to try.”

  All around Tom, the dirt looked as if it was covered with flaming Sterno.

  “God!”he implored.“God?”

  CHAPTER 43

  Bill,” Kelda said.

  Bill Graves stood on the sidewalk outside Dr. Gregory’s office with his hands in the pockets of his suit trousers. His thin lips were in a flat line but she thought a hint of triumph flickered in his eyes.

  “How did you find me? Are you on your Harley? Is that how I missed you?” Kelda asked.

  “No, I’m not on my bike. It wasn’t hard finding you, Kelda. I followed you all the way from downtown.” His voice was warm, almost teasing. “You’re not as clever as you think. You almost spotted me when you stopped at that house on the west side to get that crappy little car that you’re driving, but after that it’s been a breeze to stay with you.”

  “Why?”

  His eyes narrowed a little. “Because I like you, Kelda. And because I think you may be wading into something that’s a shade deeper than you thought it was.”

  Because I like you.Kelda’s mind flashed on the empty picture frame on her colleague’s desk.

  “And what I’m wading into is your business, Bill?”

  “I think it might be.”

  “Once more, why?”

  “Once more, because I like you. But also—and this is a guess—I think the situation you’re in has something to do with Clone and that knife we found. That makes it my business.”

  Above Bill’s head an immense thunderhead was crowning the peaks of the Divide. She didn’t even consider the possibility that it would blow down and cool the Front Range. This was one of those summers where the storms only taunted and teased.

  “Can we talk, Kelda?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “But whatever you’re up to is?”

  “You’re a nice guy, Bill. You don’t really want to know what’s going on. Trust me, you don’t want a piece of this.”

  “You telling me that because you like me, too?”

  She said, “Maybe.”

  “Was that Bureau work you were doing in there?” He nodded toward the building she’d just exited. “Or did you have an appointment with a shrink?”

  The pain flared in her legs. She closed her eyes for a second, then turned and walked away from her colleague. After two steps she stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “I can lose you. Don’t bother to try to follow me.”

  “Are you trying to be a hero again, Kelda? Is this—whatever the hell you’re doing—is this about that little girl?”

  She spun and faced him. “Rosa Alija? Is that the little girl y
ou’re talking about?” Her words popped from her lips and she regretted the intensity.

  “You have to move on. It’s been a long time, Kelda.”

  “Since what? Since I saved her life? Since I put three slugs into the chest of a monster? You think I want to do that again? Is that what you’re saying? Is that what you think of me?”

  “You know what people say, Kelda. In the Bureau. People talk, you know that.”

  “No. What? What do people say in the Bureau?” She knew what other agents thought and she knew what they said behind her back. But she discovered that she didn’t want to believe that Bill thought it, too.

  “It must be hard being a hero, and then . . . not . . . being a hero. You and I chase numbers. It’s not too glamorous. It has to be hard for you after—”

  Tears filled her eyes. “I don’t know what I’m doing today, Bill. But I can promise you that it has nothing to do with being a hero.”

  CHAPTER 44

  Hoppy was in charge of the arsenal.

  While Prehost drove up the Brainard Lake Road toward Oliver’s cabin, Hoppy checked both their handguns and loaded Prehost’s twelve-gauge shotgun with buckshot. Hoppy already knew that the little pistol in his ankle holster was ready to go. It always was.

  Hoppy asked, “How does this go down? If we’re going to do this on our own, we have to get him back to Park County, right?”

  “We’ll see. Depending on what we find, it may be better just to turn things over to Boulder County. If we decide to take it back home, we’ll do something with the green Pathfinder. We’ll make it look like we followed it down the Peak to Peak Highway and then back home. Then we’ll make sure that’s where everything will go down.”

  “What about this Oliver guy?”

  Prehost didn’t hesitate. “Depends what his involvement is. I doubt if he’ll make the trip south. But we’ll have to see.”

  Following Lootie’s directions, Prehost didn’t make a single wrong turn on the way to the little log cabin on the hillside above Left Hand Creek. The green Pathfinder was parked twenty feet from the front door.