Blood sprayed four feet across the cell. The shank stuck out from the man’s throat. It hurt.
More blood showered the cell.
God, the pain.
With every pulse beat of his heart, more blood showered out from his throat, onto the floor, onto his thighs, down his chest. The man gurgled. He coughed.
More blood sprayed out from his mouth. He clutched at the sides of his face. He wanted to remove the shank, but he did not.
Instead, he gritted his bloody teeth, and shoved the shank in even further. He felt it puncture the skin at the back right side of his neck.
The damn thing skewered his entire neck.
He tried to lie back down on the bed. He wanted to lie down and pull the blankets up over his chest. He was growing cold, felt a sickening faintness and nausea sweep over his stomach and limbs, as his body emptied its blood all over the jail cell.
He managed to clutch the blanket in his left hand, but he fell down onto the floor.
The blood was now a pool on the floor.
The man lay on his side, coughing and gurgling up all that was left of his life. He stared out across the floor and waited for the end.
Twenty-nine
Abraham Foxwell led his horse through the stable. Outside, the wind and snow howled. Inside, the four men (of which Foxwell was one) saddled up and prepared for their journey up into the mountains. There were lights along the center corridor, and the three men watched Foxwell heading toward the tall door at the end.
“You ready?” one said.
The second said, “Yeah.”
The third climbed up into the saddle.
He guided his horse towards Foxwell. The other two followed on foot, leading theirs by the reins. The horses snorted. Their hooves clomped on the hard dirt inside the stable. Foxwell looked back at them.
Each man carried rifles strapped to either side of their saddles. Each man was dressed for the cold.
At the end of the corridor, Foxwell threw open the door. It slid on rails to the right. It was still pitch black outside, but the snow blasted from left to right across the landscape.
“Any of you want to turn back,” Foxwell shouted over the wind, “now is the time to say so.”
He pushed the door on the left back. The opening out of the stable was now eight feet wide.
None of the men said anything for a moment.
Finally, one man said, “Ride on.”
Foxwell looked up into his eyes. The two others climbed up into their saddles. Foxwell stared at the three men, nodded his head. One man leaned and checked the straps on the rifle hanging from the left side of his saddle.
Foxwell’s ice-blue eyes turned from the three to the wind and snow outside. His horse snorted and shook its mane. Foxwell stared into the cold.
“So be it,” he said, and he climbed up into the saddle.
The horses whinnied with nervous energy. Foxwell steadied his mare, and then started out of the stable into the cold. The three men followed after him. The last pulled shut the doors.
A minute later, the four men were gone. Vanished into the snow and ice, vanished into the darkness. The wind howled, sweeping snow into the horses’ hoof prints like memories so soon forgotten.
Thirty
“The mayor’s gone,” a voice said.
Angie woke to the sound of men whispering in her room. She opened her eyes and looked from the sofa to the kitchen. Jonas sat at the table. He looked up at the sheriff’s deputy across from him at the table. The man stood. He wore a sheriff’s deputy parka with the hood pulled back.
Jonas’s expression was beyond description. “Gone?” he said.
“What time is it?” Angie croaked.
Both men turned and saw her sitting up on the sofa.
“Jesus, now look what you did,” Jonas muttered.
Angie rubbed sleep from her eyes with the back of her hand. She yawned and peered at the men. The wind blasted against the sides of the cabin, rattling the windows in their frames. Angie looked at the glass and saw snow falling outside. It was still dark.
“It’s after five,” Jonas said.
“You’ve been here all night?” she said.
Jonas nodded. “We split the shifts,” he said. “I slept a little.”
“What’s this about the mayor?”
The man looked from Angie to Jonas. He had red hair and dark circles under his eyes.
“Dalton’s people can’t find him,” the man said. “One of his assistants called the house last night. No one answered. The assistant figured he’d passed out, gone to sleep, whatever. But Dalton’s always in the office by five. He didn’t show, and the assistant called up to his place this morning.”
“Just a few minutes ago,” Angie asked. She saw from a clock atop the counter that it was nearly five-thirty.
“Still no answer,” the man said.
“What’s your name?” Angie asked.
“Angie this is Rodney,” Jonas said. “He helped keep an eye on you tonight.”
Angie nodded her appreciation.
“So, the assistant called up one of the mayor’s secretaries who lives out towards Dalton’s place,” Rodney said. “Asked her to check his place on the way in to town. She did. She found the place unlocked, Dalton’s truck in the drive, but Dalton wasn’t inside. He was gone.”
“Gone?” Angie said.
“We just got the call over the radio no more than five minutes ago.” Rodney nodded toward the front of the cabin.
Angie crossed over to the front windows. She saw three sheriff’s deputy Broncos parked in the yard.
“Man, it’s really coming down out there,” she said.
“Six inches overnight,” Jonas said. “We’ve got a winter storm warning for San Juan and San Miguel Counties. Some places could see up to twenty inches of snow between now and this time tomorrow morning.”
“So, what are you going to do?” Angie asked.
Rodney said, “We can’t do a damn thing until this storm clears. We’ve got a couple of deputies checking out his place right now, but if they don’t turn up nothing, we’re stuck.”
“Can’t put out a search on him in that?” Angie said.
“Plus, early season snowstorm like this,” Jonas said, “it’s gonna bring out every yahoo with a pair of skies from L.A. to Alamogordo.”
“Skiers?” Angie said. The thought had not occurred to her until right that moment.
“Telluride’s gonna have more powder than any other place in the U.S.,” Jonas said. “We’ll be swamped with fender benders and traffic tickets and drunks at the local bars the next seventy-two hours. We can’t afford a search.”
“Maybe the bastard will turn up,” Angie said.
“Maybe,” Jonas said.
“Is there any way we can hold off the skiers?” Angie said.
Jonas looked at her as though she should have known better. Angie showed no emotion.
“No way,” he said. “You’re thinking the bear?”
“I’m thinking the bear,” Angie said.
Thirty-one
By nine A.M., the town of Telluride had quadrupled in size. The two public parking lots by the main gondola and chairlift up the mountain were full, but cars were backed up out on the street still trying to get into the lot. All along either side of the street, cars parked parallel, and booted skiers carried skies and poles across the street to buy their lift tickets.
It had snowed furiously overnight, and there was no end in sight for the storm during the next twenty-four hours.
There are few towns as well-equipped for an early-season snowstorm as Telluride, Colorado, but even still they found themselves undermanned and understaffed for the flood of people. Hotels quickly filled up for the night, and they did not have the employees on schedule at restaurants to handle the breakfast crowds. Managers scrambled to call up workers to see if they could come in to work the next few days.
The ski rental shops did not have enough people to work efficiently, a
nd customers grew impatient and angry. One woman had to wait nearly two hours to get her skies.
Angie ate breakfast alone in her cabin because Jonas and the rest of the sheriff’s deputies were needed in town. After eating, she showered, dressed, and decided to drive in to town to see if she could be of help.
There still wasn’t any word about Mayor Frank Dalton. He hadn’t shown up at his office, and he wasn’t at his house. There were enough other things going on at the mayor’s office to keep everyone busy, and the phone hadn’t stopped ringing all morning. And, he’d only been missing a few hours so far. If there was no word from him by day’s end, then there would be genuine concern.
Still, Angie decided to stop by his place on the way in to town to see what she could see. She didn’t like Dalton. She knew he was the enemy, but he was a person and he was missing.
• •
Angie could just barely make out the tracks in the snow. It had been a couple hours since Dalton’s secretary stopped by his place, and the snow had accumulated another few inches in that time.
Her Bronco’s wiper blades tugged back and forth on the window, and the defroster was on its warmest setting. Still, the left blade was iced over and streaking badly on the glass. Angie wheeled the truck up toward the farmhouse.
She parked behind Dalton’s snow-covered truck.
It looked eerie standing there alone in the snowstorm, covered in powder. The snow was falling so heavily it was like a thick fog, and Angie put the truck in park, killed the ignition, and popped the emergency brake.
Her door squealed with rust as she opened it. She stepped out and slammed it shut. Her boots crunched in the powdery snow. They’d gotten a good seven or eight inches up here overnight, and she crossed to the side door of the farmhouse. It looked like a laundry room inside.
On the steps, Angie turned and glanced out at the yard. She saw a tire swing down the hill. It was at the furthest reach of her sight through the heavy snowfall, but she could see that the snow on the ground underneath it had accumulated so much that that the tire looked like it was sitting on top of it.
She turned and knocked on the door. She waited five seconds.
No answer.
She knocked again and tried the doorknob. It was not locked, and so she opened the door and called out, “Hello? Anybody here? Mayor Dalton, you home?”
She stood there on the top step with the door partially open. She could see a kitchen through the laundry room, a kitchen table, a stove across the way. There was no sound from inside the house, and so she stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
“Hello,” she called, walking cautiously into the kitchen. “Anybody home?”
It was obvious the place was deserted.
• •
Angie noticed the gun rack above the fireplace was empty.
Odd, she thought. Everything else seemed in place in the living room. There was a chair over by the window. It faced the yard, so that the occupant could gaze out through the snow to the driveway. Angie looked around the room.
Dalton kept a clean house for a man that lived alone. It looked like there were three back bedrooms adjacent to the living room, a single bathroom at the end of the hall. Angie looked at a painting on the wall. It was of a quail hunt, men in hunting jackets, pointers staring intensely over the tanned waist-high grass.
She’d been nervous stepping into the house uninvited and without authority but now that she was inside and realized she was alone, she calmed a little. She glanced back into the kitchen.
The odor of burnt food lingered in the air. It was stale and thin, as though it’d been trapped inside the house for several hours, but something had definitely burned on the stove.
She saw a pot and stepped back into the kitchen.
“Jesus,” she said.
The beans at the bottom of the pot were charred black. She glanced at the stovetop and saw that the dial was off.
The secretary must have turned off the stove when she checked out the house. Why didn’t she say anything about the stove being on? Angie thought.
Angie stared at the pot a moment, her mind between conscious and subconscious thought. And then, it clicked with her what it meant.
Dalton had left the house while cooking up these beans. Or had been forced to leave the house.
Whatever the reason, he’d probably been gone since making these beans. He’d been cooking. That gave her a better idea of how long Dalton had been missing.
At least twelve hours at this point. Angie glanced at her wristwatch. If he was cooking dinner.
She thought of the truck and crossed to the doorway by the laundry room. She stared out the window at it. The hood, roof, and front window were absolutely covered in snow, easily seven or eight inches. The back window of the cab was too vertical for snow to accumulate on it, but the runners on either side of the truck bed had several inches of fresh powder on top of them.
“What are you looking at here?” Angie whispered to herself.
She stared through the heavy snowfall for a few seconds. The wind picked up and whispered over the house.
“He didn’t drive his truck anywhere,” she said, realizing. She turned and looked at the stove. “But he was in the middle of cooking dinner.”
Quickly, she looked out toward the drive to see if she could see any other car tracks in the snow, but aside from hers, the snow looked completely untouched.
That doesn’t really prove anything, she thought. Enough snow fell overnight that if he’d left in another car, you wouldn’t be able to see the tracks, now.
“Hmmm,” she said, thinking. “He left on foot, or maybe in another car.”
Then, she remembered the gun rack. She stepped back into the kitchen and passed through to the living room. She stared at the empty gun rack on the wall. From where she stood, she could easily turn her head and see the stove. Her eyes darted from the pot atop the stove to the empty gun rack.
“Something happened to prompt him to take down that gun,” she said, “in the middle of cooking up those beans.”
Angie wasn’t exactly sure what she was looking at, but it gave her a bad feeling.
“He didn’t take that truck, so he either left on foot or went in somebody else’s car.”
Maybe he just had an empty gun rack, she thought.
She gazed calmly around the rest of the room. Everything was very well made, very clean. The coffee table was clean. The ornaments and decorations around the room were cohesive, well put together. Dalton had entertained people in this room. He’d put a lot of thought into how it looked. It didn’t make sense that he’d have an empty gun rack.
And then she thought of something that had caught her eye when she stepped through the laundry room, something she hadn’t even thought about consciously. Something that her eyes had passed over nonetheless.
“Didn’t I see a box of shells?” She started walking back toward the laundry room, and sure enough, on a shelf above the washer and drier, she saw a small rectangular box of cartridges. She reached up and pulled one out of the box.
It was brass colored with a round nose that was slightly reddish in hue. It was a long cartridge, almost as long as her index finger. Angie didn’t know a whole lot about guns and ammunition, but she knew enough to know that this was a cartridge for a rifle. The kind of rifle that would have fit into the gun rack above the fireplace.
Quickly, she crossed back into the living room. She searched around the rest of the house, looking for another gun or gun rack to which this cartridge might have belonged. She opened closets and the back three bedrooms. She found no other rifle.
She checked the closets in the bedrooms. There was no other gun, and Angie slowly realized her hunch had been correct.
Frank Dalton had been cooking dinner, when something prompted him to take down that gun and leave the house. Most likely on foot.
It did not look like he’d come back since.
Thirty-two
Rudy Worth was the on
e who found the man with no name sprawled on the floor of his jail cell. Rudy’d been a guard for just over thirteen months at La Plata County Detention Center. Most of the criminals at the Center were either awaiting trial and could not afford bond, or had been convicted of non-felony crimes and were on short stays of less than fourteen months.
Standard Operating Procedure at the detention center was to hold inmates the first night in a group cell without a bed, until individual unit cells became available. On any given night, this “holding” cell contained as many as fourteen newly arrested inmates. There was a single steel toilet in the corner with absolutely no privacy and no toilet seat.
Once an individual unit cell became available, they would move the criminal there for fourteen to twenty-four hours. This was done to assess the criminals’ behavior and to purge their bodies of whatever drugs or alcohol they may have had in their system at the time of arrest. After the stay in the individual unit cell, if the criminal could not post bond and the guards were reasonably assured of his mental state, the criminal would move into the general detention center population to await trial.
The general population had four large cells. In each, there were twenty-four bunk beds, three stainless steel picnic tables seamlessly welded to the floor, a shower and bathroom area, and an outdoor courtyard area that measured ten feet by eight feet and was surrounded by high brick walls on all four sides.
Because the man with no name had no identification, refused to cooperate with his arresting officers, and had tried to kill Angie Rippard, they found an individual unit cell for him right away. He was too big of risk to put in the group holding cell.
He may very well have killed someone.
Minutes before opening the man’s cell, Rudy had been playing solitaire on the computer in the guard station. From the guard station, he walked ten feet, where he was admitted through a steel door, which was electronically opened by one of his fellow guards (there were four on duty at the station). From the doorway, he walked fifty feet down the corridor past six cells on either side to reach No Name’s cell.
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