Trapline

by Mark Stevens

“Nobody is saying the United States of America should abandon the English language,” said Lamott. “Hardly.”

  Lamott smiled. He watched the statement sink in.

  This was all said in Spanish, but Bloom could follow along with the script e-mailed (“please keep the Earth in mind should you choose to print this document”) in advance.

  “But to work with each other—and I would suggest that the United States and Mexico not only must work together, but that we rely on each other—we must understand each other. And what better way than to speak each other’s languages, I ask you?” Famously, Lamott had learned every lick of Spanish in his middle and high school years at a public school, the Denver Center for International Studies, and then the University of Colorado, where he had double majored in Spanish and Political Science.

  Ronald Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall. Tom Lamott wants to bring down the tortilla curtain.

  A photographer draped with a bundle of cameras around his neck stood two stairs up and behind Lamott, snapping away.

  “Thank you, Glenwood Springs,” said Lamott. “Thank you for your hospitality. We all know there are challenges today—primarily economic—and we must work together to repair what’s broken. We can do that if we work together, if we find common ground and agree on a plan. I know words are easy. The work is hard. But if we’re committed to do it, we can find a way.”

  No script. Metal water bottle in one hand. Audience rapt.

  Briefly, Bloom thought Lamott caught his eye. And Bloom wondered if Lamott knew that the reporter who had hounded him in Denver now worked in Glenwood Springs.

  “If you want to see conditions deteriorate with your neighbors, you build higher fences, point fingers, and make up scary scenarios that play on fears. I believe we can do better. Come November, I hope you will give me a chance.”

  The immigration “problem” had faded as a front-burner campaign issue with fewer immigrants making their way illegally across the border—lower birth rates in Mexico, for one, and scarce jobs in the United States, for two. But hatred simmered.

  Wild applause. Whoops like a sporting event.

  Again Lamott seemed to look over and nod in Bloom’s direction.

  No matter what had happened in Denver, Bloom would treat this day like any reporter covering any campaign stop. He considered himself pretty good at burying the hatchet.

  “Now the campaign manager wants a few pictures of me on the bridge. I need a few minutes alone up there. Again, thank you to each and every one of you.”

  He respects his audience. Or fakes it extremely well.

  Standing in the throng of Lamott’s supporters now, Bloom thought he could feel the city turn, ever so slightly, on its collective heels.

  Lamott’s official media spokesperson, the young and stunning Stacey Trujillo, who had first greeted Bloom when Lamott stepped off his bus back in Sayre Park, gave Bloom a head nod as if to say “follow me.” Bloom wedged his way through the crowd and up the pedestrian bridge.

  “Just wanted to make sure you’ve got all you need,” she said.

  “Is it like this everywhere?” asked Bloom. “This kind of a turnout?”

  “It’s insane,” she said. “In a good way.”

  Over the first part of the bridge going north, steel mesh siding rose about twelve feet on both sides. You could walk over the Colorado River and then the four lanes of Interstate 70, but you couldn’t jump and kill yourself and you couldn’t throw any crap over, either. The northern half of the footbridge had a railing of more or less regular waist-high height and more mesh from the grade level up to the railing. You could jump, Bloom supposed, but you’d land in the parking lot of the hot springs pool and at least they wouldn’t have to put boats in the water to fish you out.

  Ahead, Tom Lamott posed, smiling and then not smiling, leaning on the rail and then standing more erect, arms folded over his chest.

  The photographer took pictures at a rapid-fire pace, from fifteen feet away.

  The first bullet smacked metal near Lamott. A sharp zzz-ting.

  Bloom ducked, put his arm up in a gesture of useless reflex. The sound alone was mean and violent.

  Stacey let out a yelp like she’d been goosed. The photographer froze.

  The second zzz-ting struck closer to Bloom than the first. Bloom’s skin prickled. Stacey yelped again.

  The third shot had the zzz but no ting and Bloom heard Lamott cry out like he’d been punched. His white golf shirt blossomed bright red at his shoulder.

  The fourth shot caught Lamott as he buckled and he spun. He crumpled and rolled, ended up on his back.

  Bloom grabbed his phone. Password in, phone button pushed.

  Don’t blow this.

  He dialed, flattened down. He tried to crawl under the asphalt.

  Bloom looked out through the mesh and up the river, scanning. There was nobody on top of the train station. The river looked normal. He crab-walked over to Lamott, stayed low.

  “911 Emergency. May I help you?”

  A woman’s voice. Calm.

  Stacey sobbed. Bloom stared out through the steel mesh, searching for anything out of place in the riverside bushes or woods that covered the slope in the far distance, upriver.

  The rip in his shirt offered an ugly window into Lamott’s upper chest—blood gushed from the cavity and raced down his neck. The blood pooled black behind his head. Between pulses of red fluid, a shattered bone, most likely clavicle, revealed jagged edges. The sound coming from Lamott’s throat was a dry rasp. Agony. Shock. His mouth was frozen open in horror and disbelief. Desperation filled Lamott’s eyes. Lamott’s look might have been the same if he was falling backward off El Capitan.

  “Are you there?” asked the voice in Bloom’s ear. “Are you there?”

  three:

  sunday afternoon

  “Yes, but that was after I found the sticks,” said Gail, who had taken a breath. “A pile of brush and stuff. I didn’t see at first what was underneath.”

  Allison looked at Colin, sure she could read his thoughts.

  Mountain lion.

  Tact suggested that you didn’t utter the deduction out loud unless you were prone to yelling “fire” in a crowded theater.

  The odds of a mountain lion attack were about the same as plopping a penny into a slot machine in Black Hawk and watching it transform itself into a thousand dollar bill. There were mountain lions all over Colorado—at least every part of the state west of the Front Range. Sightings were rare, attacks few and far between.

  Allison ran her internal range finder and imagined an elk walking at the tree line. It would be a long shot and beyond most shooter’s capabilities, especially uphill, but some nuts would try. She figured six hundred yards to the forest’s edge, all uphill.

  As much as she had been scanning the tree line where the foursome had been looking, she hadn’t spotted any human activity.

  Colin pointed to where a man emerged from the woods. The man peered through a pair of binoculars.

  “He’s checking on us,” said Hank. “That’s my dad. He wants us to all stay here in a group until they come back. Every few minutes, he comes out.”

  Allison wondered if Colin might stay behind to keep the kids calm, but knew better than to ask.

  “I’m coming,” said Colin.

  Had her thoughts always appeared in instant script on her eyelids or scrawled across her forehead?

  Allison picked out an indirect route to avoid dense sections of waist-high brush. Peak wildflower season had ebbed, but the undergrowth lit up with yellow touches—sunflowers, daisies, and alpine buttercups. The torch had been passed from the July cornucopia of columbine, blue flax, and fireweed, though some hung tough. The official start of fall waited in the wings, nearly a month away, but its harbingers were right on cue.

  The man with binoculars was
Larry Armbruster. He was bald, medium height, and his hunting camos probably fit him twenty pounds ago. His chin was home to a wild goatee—long and untrimmed—and the rest of his face sported thick stubble. “Pleased to meet you,” said Armbruster. With no apparent chit-chat skills, he led them thirty paces into the woods.

  The ground had been well trampled. Finding a mountain lion track—or the tracks of bear or anything—would be a challenge. Nonetheless, Allison preferred to stare at the ground and not at the destination, which emitted a gut-tossing odor. Colin jammed mouth and nose into the pulled-close collar of his jean jacket. Allison used the crook of her elbow.

  It didn’t help.

  “Not the afternoon we had planned,” said William Sulchuk. No greeting. The odor made talk unappealing. The less breathing, the better.

  William Sulchuk was a sturdy six-footer. His hair was conservative corporate under a Denver Broncos cap. He wore a faded jean jacket over dark blue jeans and simple hiking shoes, nothing fancy. The whole presentation said affable, cool—if a bit too put-together.

  William introduced Allison to the other two in the group—Arthur “but everyone calls me Dusty” Brock and Neil Goodwin. Brock had a moustache that looked like it had been a fixture for decades. He was dark and squat. Goodwin stood back and waved from a distance as a greeting. Hunters came in every shape and size, but other than Larry Armbruster these guys all looked like they expected to hunt and hike or camp grit-free.

  Allison introduced Colin and then Armbruster headed back to the ridge to check on the young ones.

  “The kids tell you?” said Sulchuk.

  “Got the general idea,” said Allison. “The dispute about who spotted it first is not going to be settled anytime soon.”

  If mountain lion had been the killer, he had feasted first on the legs. There wasn’t much left. The head and torso were completely mauled but the shape of the flesh and one intact ear gave plenty of indication of the human form.

  The body had come to rest on its right side. The man’s left arm ended at his wrist. The right arm underneath protruded at an impossible angle back where no arm could go without being disconnected from its owner. The man’s shirt sported no discernible color or style. There was no clear indication of intentions to hunt. A camouflage pattern on a jacket, for instance, might have helped. The shirt looked like it had been wet and then dried. His torso had turned a sickening brown, the same swampy color produced by combining all the finger paints in first grade. His jaw gaped open, his eyeballs were history. Perhaps a snack for a lucky crow. Flies feasted and dense knots of maggots dined where the torso came to an abrupt end. A layer of grit and loose sticks covered the body, but the handiwork was sloppy.

  How many people on the planet were so inured by death or a corpse they had no reaction to it? Embalming fluids, silk-lined caskets, and giant flower displays were all designed to soften the grizzly details of what happens to the body when the motor stops ticking. When the death was violent, like this one, the transformation from complex breathing life form to decomposing mass of ex-Homo sapien was lightning-quick. The wilderness treats a human’s demise the same way a busy highway treats road kill. With indifference.

  Allison pulled her phone from her jean jacket, waited for the device to channel its inner coffee.

  She wanted wildlife officers on the scene as soon as possible, with a houndsman in tow and a couple of Treeing Walker hounds to pick up a scent. She wanted the coroner’s analysis. She wanted the body examined for every scrap of animal DNA, whether it was mountain lion or bear. Sticks and other detritus that the animal had used to cover the body needed checking for DNA and saliva. She wanted the whole scene studied in exacting detail for stray animal hairs and saliva around the wounds. The flies and maggots and birds and other critters, depending on their size, could consume the rest of the corpse in days. Every minute counted.

  “Wildlife officers are going to want to track this cat—as soon as possible,” she said. “You don’t want a cat out there that’s had success with a human. I’ve got no cell, by the way, at least from my feeble rig.”

  “We tried, too,” said Sulchuk. He seemed oddly untalkative.

  The three fathers stood back in a semi-circle. They looked defeated and indifferent. She turned to look back through the trees to the ridge. Armbruster had his back to them, binoculars glued to his eyes.

  “Triangle Mountain,” said Colin.

  “Probably the closest spot,” said Allison. “And only reliable about half the time, when the sun is just right.”

  Allison led the way back to the open sky at the top of the hill. The foul cloud from the half-corpse seemed to follow.

  “Any chance you packed a tarp?” Allison asked. “A blanket? A sleeping bag we can sacrifice?”

  “Day trip,” said Sulchuk. “We’ve got nothing that big. And if the cat comes back?”

  A gentle breeze sliced through the woods at their back as they stood at the top of the open hillside. Arthur Brock and Neil Goodwin started working their way down.

  “If the cat comes back while we’re gone, we’ll have less of the body to work with,” said Allison. “I’ve got that spare poncho rolled up behind Sunny Boy’s saddle. I’ll take my chances on the rain—even if it looked like a downpour coming, we’ve got to keep the critters and birds off. As much as possible, anyway.”

  Armbruster volunteered to retrieve the poncho and headed off.

  “Any point in taking a picture or two?” said Colin.

  Back at the body, Allison and Colin stood on opposite sides of the half-corpse, taking pictures one-handed. Evidence had been trampled by the four children and now, in all, six adults. Allison stared off into the woods, wondering which way the cat had run—if it was a cat—after hiding its cache.

  “No matter how he died,” said Allison. “How long do you think it’s been?”

  They were walking back to Lumberjack. The shadows from the ridge behind them had grown longer.

  “Two days at the most,” said Colin, who appeared to have given the question some serious analysis.

  “Not a big guy,” said Allison

  “Hard to say for sure,” said Colin. “Given the legs. Or lack of.”

  “Give me your impression. Head size, shoulders.”

  “Compact, maybe. But I wasn’t taking notes,” said Colin. “I was trying to breathe.”

  “Anything seem odd to you?” said Allison.

  The mental movie clip in Allison’s head ran in a loop. Victim’s point of view, walking through the woods or up the broad hillside. Was he a hunter out scouting? While the clothing on the half-corpse was all one blotchy bloody color now, it didn’t appear to be camo. Hiker? Any sign of a backpack, day pack? Hat? Maybe a fisherman headed to a favorite hole? With what fishing pole?

  “Not really,” said Colin. “But I’ve known guys who have spent all their lives in these woods and never seen a mountain lion in person or a mountain lion kill. Tracks, yes. But that’s it.”

  Possible victim types in the Flat Tops in August comprised a short list—hunter, hiker, camper, fisherman, horseback rider, what else? Maybe a stray scientist.

  “Unusual, sure. But if he was hungry,” Colin. “Every attack is calculated on some primal instinct. The lion figures his odds and starts to chase—or not. You?”

  “Nothing looked right to me,” said Allison.

  “Really? Nothing?”

  “There’s some other story going on,” said Allison.

  “Why so sure?”

  “I can’t put my finger on it,” said Allison. “A feeling. I can’t picture it happening.”

  “Happens so rarely, how do you know what to picture?” said Colin.

  “Just going on gut,” said Allison. “So you think it’s possible?”

  “Hungry lions happen, stray hikers happen,” said Colin. “And possible covers a lot of ground.”
>
  four:

  sunday evening

  She knew the cop.

  “You still live up Sweetwater Road, back in by the Flat Tops?”

  “Same general area,” said Trudy. Sometimes being recognized was good for the business. This wasn’t a good time.

  “What brought you down?” He was a city policeman, not a sheriff’s deputy.

  “Same as everyone else,” said Trudy.

  “You were close to the footbridge?” said the cop. “When he went up?”

  “Right there,” said Trudy.

  “Did you see him get—”

  “No,” said Trudy, cutting him off. “I was lower, down below. I was going to walk over to the hot springs so I was waiting for the bridge to clear. But no.”

  They were sitting on two metal folding chairs, face to face. The cop’s name was Gary Lemke. She remembered him from high school. Lemke had greeted her warmly.

  He was short and stocky. He had brown-red eyebrows and a ruddy round face. After hours and hours of witness interviews, he didn’t seem a bit worn out.

  The police had taken over the train station—inside and out. Boxes full of packaged snacks and bottled water appeared like an airdrop into a third-world disaster zone. There were reporters, news trucks, a First Aid station, and more cops than Trudy would have guessed worked on the entire Western Slope. The initial burst of panic—when the throng of Lamott’s followers flinched and gasped as one—had given way to a trained bureaucracy doing its thing. The whole city remained on lock down.

  “Did you hear anyone at all during the day say anything crazy-sounding or angry?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Everybody knows about the freaky protesters. Spooky.”

  “Did you notice anything at all?” said Lemke.

  Most everyone had pointed to a spot further east, up the river.

  “No,” said Trudy. “I looked this way, didn’t see anything.”

  “A rooftop?” said Lemke. “A window?”

  “Not really,” said Trudy.

  Lemke took a couple of notes, but they couldn’t have been much.