Cold Skies

by Thomas King

  “What about Norm?” Thumps weighed the envelope. “Maybe you should let Norm go.”

  “Now why would I do that?”

  “Because you’re a generous and forgiving man?”

  “Yes, I am,” said the sheriff, bringing the chair to a stop. “Yes, I am.”

  THE LOBBY OF the Tucker was in the same condition as he had left it. Thumps went directly to the house phones.

  “Welcome to the Tucker, your home in the West.”

  “Could you tell me if Oliver Parrish is still a guest?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t give out that information.”

  Thumps tried again. “Could you connect me with Oliver Parrish’s room?”

  “Certainly.”

  The phone rang six times and then went to voice mail. Thumps hung up and then dialed zero. The woman was just as cheery.

  “Could you connect me with Jayme Redding’s room?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Six rings. Voice mail. Okay, so neither Parrish nor Redding was in their room. Thumps stood in front of the massive ornate mirror that took up much of the far wall and tried to imagine where he might go.

  Food.

  Food was the answer to most questions in life.

  The Tucker had two restaurants. The Mother Lode overlooked the river and the mountains and offered patrons an elegant dining experience of dark wood and brass, where the Texas striploin was trucked down from Alberta and the New England lobster was flown in from Halifax. Dinner for two could be had for just under a hundred dollars provided you went without wine and shared a dessert.

  The Quick Claim served breakfast and lunch. It was a bright room tucked away in a corner on the main floor, done up to look like a Hollywood version of a western saloon. The prices, however, were all East Coast. The breakfast buffet including orange juice and coffee was around twenty-seven dollars, or you could order off the menu and pay more for less.

  The restaurant was all but empty. There were four business types in suits and ties in a booth and an older couple hunkered down over books, hardly looking at their food or at each other. Thumps wondered what could be so engrossing. A novel? Non-fiction? There were better places to read, Thumps told himself, than over a meal.

  Neither Parrish nor Redding was to be seen. Disappointing, but no great surprise.

  “Pancho!”

  Cisco Cruz was sitting by himself in a corner.

  “Join me.” Cruz waved him over and signalled the server, who glided to the table with a carafe of orange juice. Cruz reached across the table and tapped the menu. “Order whatever you like.”

  “We’re known for our waffles,” said the server.

  “Not a great idea,” said Cruz. “My friend here has just discovered that he’s diabetic.”

  “Coffee’s fine.”

  The server was all smiles. “We have a very nice vanilla-flavoured Viennese roast.”

  “Black.”

  As soon as the server was out of hearing, Cruz held his hands up in apology. “Sorry about the diabetes. I don’t suppose you want the world knowing your business.”

  “Small town,” said Thumps. “Sooner or later, everyone knows your business.”

  “So how’s the acting-sheriff job going?”

  There was an extra menu and place setting on the table.

  “Thought you were staying out at Shadow Ranch.”

  “I am,” said Cruz, “but I heard the food’s good here.”

  Thumps played along. “And?”

  “Cook can’t tell a steak from a zapato.”

  “Then again, you didn’t really come for the food.”

  The pendant Cruz had around his neck was silver with a stylized face. Thumps recalled seeing the same sort of figure on a small totem pole when he was in a Native art store in Victoria, British Columbia.

  “If you’re a single,” said Thumps, “they generally clear the second place setting away.”

  “And?”

  “Whoever you’re waiting for didn’t show.”

  Cruz shifted in his seat. “You play poker?”

  “Not much.”

  “But you know the basic idea of the game.”

  “Sure,” said Thumps. “I try to take your money. You try to take mine.”

  “Mr. Austin doesn’t play poker,” said Cruz. “Does that surprise you?”

  “He doesn’t like to lose.”

  “He doesn’t like to leave winning and losing to luck.”

  “Thought poker was a game of skill.”

  “Lot of people make that mistake,” said Cruz. “They think the game begins after the deal. Hell, even a pendejo can bet four aces.”

  “And Mr. Austin likes to have all the aces in hand before he bets.”

  Cruz pushed his plate to one side. “Man likes to have the whole deck.”

  Thumps gestured to the second place setting. “Redding?”

  “You asking as acting sheriff, or is this just innate curiosity?”

  “Little of both.”

  Cruz pushed back his chair. “You take care of yourself, vato,” he said, dropping his napkin on the table. “Diabetes is nothing to mess with.”

  THE COFFEE WASN’T BAD, and it wasn’t good. It was black and it was hot. Thumps sat back and checked the room again. The suits were gone, off to do battle with supply and demand. The old couple hadn’t moved. Library books. He could see the stickers on the spines. Thumps found himself feeling sorry for them. Maybe they couldn’t afford to buy books. Maybe they were living on a pension, and this meal was a monthly treat.

  The man looked up and said something to the woman. Then he reached out and put his hand on hers. It was a gentle gesture that took Thumps by surprise. Whatever else they had, they had each other.

  Here he was sitting in the same restaurant by himself with only the menu to read.

  Twenty-Six

  The Aegean was quiet and even darker than before. Several customers were wandering through the stacks, and there was a young man sitting on a sofa, thumbing through a large book on Rembrandt, turning the volume to try to catch whatever stray light might be available. Archie was nowhere to be seen. With any luck, he was at lunch, and Thumps would be able to get in and out of the store before the little Greek even knew he had been here.

  “Thumps!”

  So much for luck.

  Archie hurried out of the back area, waving a sandwich in one hand. “You should have told me you were coming.”

  “Just needed to borrow your computer.”

  “You still don’t have one?”

  Thumps did have a computer. It just didn’t work. And he was in no rush to get it fixed. When it was working, he had had to wade through a daily blizzard of obnoxious emails. Free trips to Paris, pleas from Nubian princesses to help them with their fortunes, easy and inexpensive ways to enlarge your penis.

  “I won’t be long.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Archie. He set the sandwich down on the desk and moved the mouse. “You want the internet?”

  Thumps opened the envelope and took out the flash drive. “Just need to take a look at a couple of things.”

  Archie raised his eyebrows. “Evidence?”

  “Archie . . .”

  “This the files from their cellphones and laptops?”

  “Archie . . .”

  “What? You don’t trust me?”

  “It’s an ongoing investigation.”

  “So, what’s wrong with a little ongoing help?” Archie moved into a blocking position, putting himself between Thumps and the computer. “Besides, you don’t even know where to put that drive.”

  Thumps reached around and plugged the drive into a USB port.

  “Lucky guess,” said Archie. “Now let’s see you open the file.”

  Thumps hoped that a window was going to pop up with a prompt and he would be able to look at the files Stick had loaded onto the drive without having to involve Archie.

  No window.

  Thumps dragged the mouse around and click
ed on an icon he didn’t recognize.

  “That’s Windows Media Player.”

  Thumps clicked on a second icon.

  “And that’s Dropbox.” Archie was smiling.

  Thumps took the flash drive out and then eased it in again. Still no icon. This was why he didn’t care if his computer was working. Functioning computers were just as frustrating as non-functioning ones.

  “You know they offer computer courses at the college.” Archie forced Thumps out of the chair and worked the mouse. “Okay, there are two files. ‘Lester JPEGs’ and ‘Knight JPEGs.’ Which do you want to see first?”

  “Lester.”

  Archie ran the mouse to the bottom of the page, clicked on an icon. Thumps tried to watch what the little Greek was doing, but it was like following a sleight-of-hand artist with three cups and a pea.

  “Nothing much,” said Archie. “Four photos.”

  The first photo was of a car.

  “BMW,” said Archie. “Looks like a 7 Series.”

  The second and third photos were taken on a golf course overlooking the ocean. Thumps recognized the hole immediately.

  “Pebble Beach.”

  The fourth photograph was of a young woman sitting at an outdoor café with a busy cityscape in the background.

  “Girlfriend?”

  The woman was young, not yet thirty, with auburn hair that she wore to her shoulders. Professionally dressed. If Thumps were guessing, he’d imagine that she worked for an insurance company or a brokerage firm. Maybe government.

  “Not Chinook,” said Thumps. “Bigger city.”

  “Sacramento?”

  The woman wasn’t looking at the camera. She was looking away as though lost in thought.

  “Probably.” Thumps leaned back in the chair. “What about Knight?”

  Archie clicked the mouse and suddenly the screen came alive with thumbnails.

  “Someone likes to take pictures.” Archie began scrolling through the images. “Woman didn’t understand the concept of ‘delete.’”

  “Can you arrange them by date,” said Thumps, “from the last picture taken to the first?”

  Archie clicked the mouse again and the thumbnails magically rearranged themselves. There were some general landscapes of the Ironstone River Valley. By the look of them, they were taken from a moving car. Others were of downtown Chinook.

  Thumps watched the images move across the screen. “Is that the Flying J truck stop?”

  “And the main street of Chinook.” Archie shook his head. “But not one picture of the Aegean. You believe that? Woman had no sense of history.”

  The next twenty photographs were of the interior of an office complex: cubicles, file cabinets, people standing in doorways, a conference room with Lester sitting at the head of the table, looking presidential. On the wall above his head was the Orion Technologies logo.

  “Someone should have taken her phone away.” Archie pushed back in the chair. “Or turned off the camera function.”

  Knight might have been a scientific genius, but she was a terrible photographer. Most of the photographs were badly composed, and many were out of focus.

  “That it?”

  “That’s it,” said Archie. “Did we find anything?”

  “Nope.” Thumps pulled the flash drive out of the computer.

  “Hey,” shouted Archie. “You can’t just pull it out. You have to log out of the program. You could destroy the data on the drive.”

  “Sorry.”

  Archie cocked his head to one side and glared at Thumps. “You know something.”

  “Just picking up pieces.”

  “And you’re not going to tell me?”

  “Nothing to tell.”

  “You figured it out, didn’t you?” Archie stabbed a finger at Thumps’s chest. “They were murdered. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Ongoing investigation.”

  “That’s what the Nazis said.”

  “That’s not what they said.”

  “It could have been.”

  “Okay, you want to help?”

  Archie wasn’t convinced. “Is this where you tell me that I can help by minding my own business?”

  “No,” said Thumps, “this is where I ask you to do some research.”

  “Quid pro quo. Were Lester and Knight murdered?” Archie crossed his arms and waited.

  “Probably.”

  “Okay,” said Archie, “I’ll do the research. What do you need?”

  Thumps slipped the flash drive back into the envelope. “I need you to find out everything you can on Boomper Austin, Cisco Cruz, Jayme Redding, and Oliver Parrish.”

  Archie frowned. “Redding is one of the good guys, and Cruz and Parrish are just hired guns.”

  “Everything you can find.”

  Archie followed Thumps to the front of the store. “And while I’m researching, what are you going to be doing?”

  “Shopping,” said Thumps, as he pushed through the doors. “I’m going shopping.”

  THE CHINOOK Cash and Carry was the inexpensive grocery in town, and it was where Thumps shopped when his bank account was low. He preferred the Albertsons on the west side because it generally had the better produce.

  Today, the tomatoes at the Cash and Carry looked reasonably good. For hothouse tomatoes. Thumps had had vine-grown tomatoes when he was a kid, so he knew the sweet taste of a real tomato. Maybe next year he’d clear part of the backyard and put in tomatoes and bush beans, a little lettuce.

  He didn’t see Eleanor Lake until it was too late.

  “Well, if it isn’t the photographer.” Eleanor didn’t look any happier than she had at the motel.

  “Hello, Eleanor.”

  “Hear you’re acting sheriff.”

  “You heard wrong.”

  “How about you open up my rooms so I can rent them.”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Honeymooners came by this morning. Wanted to rent Number 11 real bad. Offered me triple what I normally charge.” Eleanor picked up an apple, turned it over in her hand, and then put it back in the bin. “Said it was their lucky number.”

  “I’m sure the sheriff is working as fast as he can.”

  “Triple,” said Eleanor, looking at another apple. “And can I rent Number 11?”

  Thumps put a head of lettuce in his cart.

  “I cannot.” Eleanor tossed the apple back in the bin. “Because Number 11 is all tied up in yellow police tape and making me poor instead of making me money. And because I’m not making money, I get to waste my time shopping and getting my hair cut.”

  Thumps reached for a sack of onions.

  “And if that isn’t bad enough,” said Eleanor, “here I am standing in produce, talking to a photographer who doesn’t know the first thing about running a motel.”

  “I’ll talk to the sheriff,” said Thumps. “I run a small business. I know how tough it is to make ends meet.”

  “That lump of a sheriff sure as hell don’t,” said Eleanor. “Man’s been glued to the public tit so long, it would take a crowbar and half a dozen strong men to pry him loose.”

  “Must have been hard saying no to that couple.”

  “Don’t get me started.” Eleanor snorted as though she were a small whale coming up for air.

  “You happen to remember what kind of car they were driving?”

  “Of course I remember. Fancy black thing, so you know they had money.”

  “Black Cadillac Escalade?”

  “Triple,” said Eleanor, picking out another apple and holding it up to the light. “They were going to pay me triple.”

  THUMPS LEFT ELEANOR to her apples and pushed the cart around the store at race pace—eggs, potatoes, ice cream, tomatoes, cheese, chicken—replacing the damage that Cooley had done to his refrigerator, and was through the checkout, into the Volvo, and out of the parking lot in record time.

  In the bright sunshine, the Wagon Wheel looked as though it had been abandoned somewhere back in
the twentieth century, and perhaps that’s how all motels looked in the middle of a day. There was only one other car in attendance. A blue Toyota was parked in front of the ice dispenser, a hatchback shot through with rust and listing to one side as though it were in need of a hip replacement.

  Thumps parked the Volvo under a tree at the far end of the motel lot. From there he had a clear view of the office and the long line of rooms. When he had left the Cash and Carry, Eleanor was still pushing her cart up and down the aisles, and allowing time for the shopping and her haircut, Thumps reckoned that he had at least an hour before she returned.

  The envelope was on the passenger seat. Thumps picked it up, gave it a quick shake, and tossed it in the back on top of his jacket with more force than was necessary.

  Enough was enough.

  The sheriff could do his own investigative work. What the hell was Thumps thinking? Here he was sitting in his car in the middle of a day watching a motel room. He wasn’t a cop. Not anymore. Maybe Eleanor’s couple in their fancy car and the peculiar interest in Number 11 had been Redding and Cruz, or maybe the man and woman had been exactly what they said they were, honeymooners whose favourite number was the next prime after seven.

  Seven-eleven.

  Craps or a convenience store.

  But if it was Redding and Cruz, what was a bodyguard for a billionaire doing with a newspaper reporter? The sheriff had already searched both rooms, and Thumps couldn’t believe that Duke would have missed anything. Why would Redding and Cruz take a chance on getting caught breaking into a crime scene?

  Of course, one way to find out would be to break in himself. Hockney might not take kindly to finding Redding or Cruz in either of the rooms, but Thumps had the dubious protection of Costa Rica and the sheriff’s wife.

  As he sat in his car, he tried to remember the various techniques for breaking into a room. If the lock was as old as the motel, he might be able to get in with a credit card, though that always worked better in the movies than it did in real life. There was a trick with a car jack where you spread the frame until the door swung open. He could give that a try. If he had a jack.

  But he didn’t.

  Or he could just yell, “Acting sheriff,” kick the door down, and rush into the room with guns blazing.

  And what would he do once he got inside? Tear up the carpet? Pull down the ceiling tiles? Slice open the mattress? Unscrew the vents and search the furnace ducts? Stick a hand down the toilet and feel around for a plastic bag filled with evidence of some sort or another?