Hotshots

by Judith Van GIeson

  “Good idea,” I said.

  “Let me know if anything new comes up.”

  “I will.”

  Mike wasn’t a guy who’d get by Anna’s desk unnoticed. While we’d been talking she’d been spraying, puffing her hair out a few more inches, and filling the bathroom with noxious fumes. It was a type of mating ritual, but like a peacock flashing its feathers at a quail, it was wasted on Mike. It would take a woman with soot on her face and a hard hat on her head to turn him on. But he did smile at Anna as he left, which made her day.

  “Who was that?” she asked the minute he was out the door and, I hoped, on his way to climbing Sandia Peak.

  “Mike Marshall.”

  “Is he single?”

  “Single, but in mourning. He was Joni Barker’s boyfriend.”

  “The woman with the snakes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It won’t be long before somebody snaps him up.”

  “It’ll take a certain kind of woman.”

  “I guess.” She sighed. Anna might like to get to know Mike Marshall better, but I didn’t think she’d be willing to pick up snakes and put out fires to do it.

  21

  I WENT BACK into my office and called Sheila McGraw again. “Anything new on the investigation?” I asked.

  “Henry discovered that Ken Roland has a good alibi. He was in bed with a waitress in Oro.”

  “Not Karen?”

  “No. Somebody else.”

  “He likes waitresses, doesn’t he?”

  “Waitresses have time to mess around in the afternoon. I don’t, do you?”

  “Not often,” I said. “Tell me why you think being in bed is a good alibi.”

  “The woman involved claims she’ll swear to it in court.”

  “Could be he gave her a big tip.”

  “Could be. But Henry found a witness to corroborate Ken Roland’s story, the property manager of the complex where the lady friend lives. He saw Roland’s Ferrari pull in that afternoon and it was still there when the guy went off duty at six. A Ferrari isn’t the kind of car you’re likely to forget.”

  And no one’s likely to forget a large tip. “Thanks for the info,” I said.

  “I owed you one. You saved me the effort of tracking down Ramona.”

  “There’s always the possibility that somebody else wanted to torch Roland’s house, isn’t there? Somebody who hated development. One waitress too many, maybe, who bore him a grudge.”

  “That would make more sense if his lady friends were firefighters.”

  “They’re not his type.”

  “Too powerful,” Sheila agreed.

  We said our good-byes and hung up. Then I dialed the number I had for Jackie in Cloud. I got a recorded message saying in singsong operator voice, “We’re sorry. You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service.” I dialed information, asked for a listing for Jake Sorrell, and was told that number had been disconnected.

  “Was it 970-555-1240 before it was disconnected?” I asked.

  “I can’t reveal that information,” the operator said. “It was an unlisted number.”

  The next step was to call Forest Sentinels to establish whether Jake Sorrell was a member. I didn’t want to do it myself since the sound of my voice could get the wrong reaction from wolf woman. I asked Anna to make the call.

  “Okay,” she agreed. “But who’s Jake Sorrell?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  She dialed the number, fluffing her mane while she waited for someone to answer. “Hi,” she said eventually. “Could I talk to Jake Sorrell?”

  The question at the other end must have been “Who’s calling?” because Anna’s answer was “A friend.”

  “Do you know where I could reach him?” she asked. There was a pause, then she said, “Okay, thanks,” and hung up.

  “That was a tough lady,” she said.

  “If it was who I think it was, she keeps a wolf for a pet.”

  “That figures.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said he wasn’t there and she didn’t know where he was.”

  “Did it sound like she was covering for him?”

  “Kinda.”

  ******

  It appeared that Jake had gone even deeper into hiding, and if anybody knew why, it would be Ramona Franklin. I hoped Mike had kept his word and headed for the La Luz Trail, but just in case, I didn’t waste any more time getting to Ramona’s.

  “I’m outta here,” I told Anna.

  “What should I say if anyone calls?”

  “I’m gone for the day.”

  Guided by landmarks and street numbers I reached Ramona’s trailer in fifteen minutes. Her yard was bare. The guy next door was tending his flowers. Parked in front of the trailer was the white Ford pickup with New Mexico plates that Mike had described, except that he hadn’t mentioned it was splattered with mud. The business cards Henry and I left had been taken from the door frame or rattled loose by a power stereo pounding down the street. The doorbell chimed when I pushed it. A little girl wearing a pink flowered dress came to the door. Her black hair was cut in bangs that framed her enormous eyes.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” I responded.

  “My name is Hanna.”

  “My name is Neil.”

  “Can you spell Hanna?”

  “H-a-n-n … a?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can you spell Neil?”

  “No.” She laughed. “You want to see my mom?”

  “Yup.”

  “Hey, Mom,” she yelled.

  “I’m coming, Hanna,” Ramona replied in her soft, steady voice. She came to the door wiping flour from her hands onto her jeans. “Hi,” she said to me. “We’re making fry bread.” I might have surprised her or Mike might have warned her; her face showed no sign of either. “Come in.”

  I followed her into the trailer, which was spare and tidy and smelled like something delicious was baking. A small gray, black, and white Navajo rug was tacked to the wall. Textbooks were on the bookshelves. The TV was on but nobody was paying any attention. It was background light and music.

  “Do you mind if I finish?” Ramona asked, leading me into the kitchen.

  “No, go ahead.”

  “Hanna always likes this part.” Ramona picked up a lump of dough from the kitchen table, rolled it flat, and slipped it into a pan of hot fat on the gas stove. The fat popped and hissed. Hanna laughed and clapped her hands. A drop of fat flew out of the pan and landed in the flame, which blew up in long, hot fingers. If it had been my kitchen I’d have been looking for the fire extinguisher, but Ramona grabbed Hanna, sat down, and waited for the flame to subside. The soot marking the ceiling indicated they’d seen this kind of action before. When Ramona judged the fry bread to be done she took it out to drain and turned off the burner.

  “Would you like some?” she asked. “It’s good when it’s warm.”

  “Okay,” I said. It seemed rude not to accept. Besides, I like fry bread. It seemed even ruder to accept the bread and continue my investigation, but that was something I couldn’t help. My life had been saved on Thunder Mountain, but it had been endangered, too. If Ramona was covering for Jake, or if she’d been involved with him, I needed to know.

  “Hanna likes it with cinnamon and sugar,” Ramona said, sprinkling some powder on Hanna’s.

  “I’ll have mine plain,” I said.

  Hanna curled up in her mother’s lap and licked the sweet stuff from her fingers. Ramona popped the tab from a Miller Lite. “Like a beer?” she asked.

  “No thanks,” I said. Hanna smiled at me from her mother’s arms. I hated to disturb the harmony in the kitchen, but sometimes harmony—like broken bones that haven’t been set right—has to be shattered before it can be mended properly. “I went back to Thunder Mountain Sunday,” I began. “I ran into some bird watchers and they told me they saw a brown tru
ck with Colorado plates coming down the road at a high rate of speed around the time the fire started. Did you see it?”

  Ramona looked down, shook her head, and rested her cheek against Hanna’s silky hair.

  “Mike told me the Jackie you were staying with in Cloud is Jake Sorrell.”

  She nodded.

  “He also told me Sorrell is the crew boss who hired you and Joni.”

  “That’s right. He did.”

  “Mike said Jake’s very bitter about what happened at Lone Ridge.”

  “He lost three of his crew there,” Ramona said. “That hurt him very much.”

  “What kind of vehicle does he drive?”

  Hanna nestled against her mother, sucked her thumb, and watched me with big, dark eyes. “I don’t remember,” Ramona said.

  “Tom Hogue died on Thunder Mountain,” I said, “and I almost lost my life. If that was Jake’s truck and he was there, I need to know.”

  Ramona hugged Hanna and said nothing.

  “What does he look like?” I asked.

  “He’s kind of skinny.”

  “Does he have shoulder-length black hair?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I talked to a man when I was in Oro who must be him. Is he involved with Forest Sentinels?”

  “He knows Ellie O’Connor and some other people there.”

  “I tried to call him, but his phone’s been disconnected,” I said.

  “I didn’t know that.” Ramona looked up quickly and I glimpsed her eyes. They were black wings beating against the bars of a cage.

  “Sooner or later he’s going to be questioned,” I said. “He’s a former firefighter who bears a grudge against the Forest Service and has a connection to a radical environmental organization.” If Sheila didn’t come across Jake Sorrell herself, I had good reason to turn her on to him. But I thought it would be better if I talked to him first. Somehow I had the idea that if I knew what had happened at Thunder Mountain I could help Ramona better than she’d been helping herself.

  “It was my life on that mountain,” I continued. “It’s my clients who are being treated as suspects.” If she chose to, Ramona might have reminded me that I wouldn’t be here talking, that I wouldn’t have a life, if it hadn’t been for her, but she didn’t. She asked Hanna if she wanted any more fry bread. Hanna pouted and said, “No.” She was getting the vibe that I hadn’t come there just to eat the bread and chitchat.

  If I’d asked Ramona what I owed her for saving my life, she would have answered, “Nothing.” But in my mind I owed her everything. If nothing else, I could prevent her from taking the rap for a fire Jake Sorrell had planned or started. When it came to motive, Sorrell could beat any of the other suspects. His life had been ruined by fire and the policies of the Forest Service, and it appeared that his vehicle had been on the scene. If Ramona was covering for him, or involved with him, I intended to find out. It might make it darker for Hanna today but a whole lot brighter down the road.

  “If you’re protecting him, Ramona, you shouldn’t be. You have your own life and you have your daughter to think of.” Ramona made no response. “Can you tell me how to get to his house?” I asked.

  “It would be better if you didn’t go.”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  “I’ll do it.” Ramona sighed.

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow. I can leave Hanna with my aunt and go up there in the morning.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t go alone.” To me Jake was a guy who was very close to the edge. Who knew what would happen if he went over? “He could be dangerous. I can go with you.”

  “It’s okay. Jake is my friend.”

  We’d finished our fry bread and the time had come for me to leave. “Thanks for the fry bread,” I said.

  “It’s nothing,” Ramona replied.

  Hanna walked me to the door. The big eyes that had welcomed me when I came in were doing their best to avoid me on my way out.

  22

  ON MY WAY home I thought about Tom Hogue clicking his remote, raising and lowering his hearing level. An amplifier could be a useful device. A hearing-aid store would sell the one Hogue wore, but I thought I was more likely to find what I wanted in I Spy, a store on Menaul that sells surveillance equipment, stun guns, pepper spray, and all the self-defense paraphernalia that’s on the fringe of paranoia and legality. I Spy was in a strip mall. No attempt had been made to paint and shape the burglar bars to pretend they were decoration. I Spy was a hardcore, hard-edged, functional kind of place. One of those places where a woman is suspect, even a hard-edged, functional woman.

  The guy behind the counter had hair clipped close to his skull and rifle-scope eyes.

  “I want something that can pick up a conversation from a distance,” I said.

  ******

  I stopped at the Kid’s shop to try my eavesdropping device out. Los Lobos was blaring and he didn’t hear me pull into the parking lot. He was working on a Dodge truck up on the lift and he didn’t notice me walk by the open doorway. Mimo did and squawked “Hello,” but the Kid didn’t pay any attention. “Hello” was one of the few words Mimo knew and he (or she) repeated it often. I walked past the shop and across the field behind it, measuring my paces, casting a long-legged shadow that reached halfway across the field and turned my strides into giant steps. I thought fifty yards would be far enough for my purposes, but I reached the ditch before I got that far. The water was a steady brown flow. The ditches that bring irrigation water into the valley wash garbage and sometimes even bodies out. A plastic container bobbed in the brown stream. Weeds grew tall on the banks. Sunflowers were blooming and dancing in the wind.

  I pointed my listening device at the Kid’s shop, plugged in the earphones, and clicked it on. First I heard Los Lobos singing “Volver” in the style I call ranchera grande, but I didn’t consider hearing that a major eavesdropping event. Los Lobos could be heard all over the valley. I fiddled with the controls, turned up the volume, then heard Mimo squawk “Hello” again, which was an accomplishment. Mimo couldn’t be heard without help from where I stood. Then the Kid said, “‘Adios,’ Mimo, say ‘adios.’”

  “Hello,” repeated the bird. The Kid was trying to expand the parrot’s vocabulary, possibly even make it bilingual, but Mimo was stubborn. “Hello,” it squawked again.

  “Pendejo,” swore the Kid.

  “Pendejo,” swore the bird.

  I turned the listening device off, crossed the field, and walked into the shop.

  “Hola, Chiquita,” he said. “Qué tal?”

  “Okay,” I said. “And you?”

  “Good.” he replied.

  “You taught Mimo how to swear?”

  He was startled. “How did you know that?”

  “I could hear you talking from the ditch.”

  “How could you hear that from all the way back there?”

  “Pendejo,” the bird cackled again.

  “Càllate,” said the Kid. Be quiet.

  “I bought this listening device on my way home. I was trying it out.” Like many people who work with tools, the Kid is fascinated by them in all shapes and sizes. He took the listening device from me and studied it.

  “What do you need this for?” he asked.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Dígame.”

  “Ramona is going back to Colorado tomorrow to see Jake Sorrell. I think he’s the guy I talked to in Oro.”

  “The guy in McDonald’s?”

  “Right. If he is Jake Sorrell, he’s the crew boss who hired her and she stayed at his place after the fire. I want to hear what they have to say to each other.”

  “Why?”

  “I think he may have started the fire I was in. He was wounded on another fire in Lone Ridge, Colorado, and three of his crew members died. He’d made recommendations that could have prevented the South Canyon disaster, but the Forest Service never listened to him. The truck that was seen near the fire is probably his
.”

  “Ramona was on the mountain then, too, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Do you think they were working together?”

  “I don’t know, but I intend to find out.”

  “Why? It’s her business, no?”

  “No. Sooner or later the arson investigators are bound to get to Jake Sorrell. Suppose he implicates Ramona then? If she won’t help herself she needs somebody to help her. I owe her that; she saved my life.”

  Mimo, whose bright eyes had been bouncing back and forth from me to the Kid, screamed “Pendejo” again.

  “Quiet, Mimo,” I said.

  “Why not let the investigator talk to this guy Jake? Why do you have to do it?” I had considered asking the Kid to come with me, but was rapidly changing my mind.

  “I don’t know if I am going to talk to him,” I said. “Maybe I’ll just observe.”

  “You never just observe. And if you find out he started the fire, what do you do then?”

  “Try to get him to turn himself in, and if that doesn’t work, pass whatever I find on to the arson investigator.”

  “And if Ramona was involved?”

  “I’ll see she gets a good lawyer.” Jeremy Toner was a public defender I knew who had brains, compassion, and a minimal interest in bucks. I’d have taken Ramona on for nothing myself if that had been possible.

  “I don’t think you should go,” the Kid said.

  No shit, I thought, but what I said was “Why not?”

  “It’s not your business.”

  “Well, I’m making it my business.”

  “I didn’t like that guy Jake’s looks.”

  Let a man put his clothes in your closet and before you know it he starts telling you who you can hang out with and where you can go.

  The Kid turned back to the Dodge pickup, a truck that had seen a lot of hard driving, about two hundred thousand miles worth. “When this guy had his oil changed, somebody put in dirty brake fluid and it polluted the whole system. He was driving when the brakes came on and he couldn’t release them. He was lucky. It could have been the other way. He could have stepped on the brakes and have nothing happen.” He shook his head. “That would have been a disaster.” Was he saying that disastrous accidents happen often enough without looking for them? “It’s a big job. The system has to be cleaned out. I promised him I would finish tomorrow. When are you leaving for Colorado?”