Trapline

by Mark Stevens

  Allison went back to the middle rider—something different about him.

  They were almost out of view. Their pace was steady but unhurried. They hadn’t looked up or around. The middle one looked smaller, even slight. His head slumped forward and his hands grabbed the horn on the saddle. He wasn’t actively riding. His posture suggested defeat and Allison had the thought, but more of a sharp sensation, like the lightning-quick pain from a mean cramp, that he was captured prey.

  ten:

  monday afternoon

  Trudy Heath’s view of Down to Earth was probably not how they taught you to think about profit and enterprise in business school.

  She cared deeply about the business. Up to a point, she wanted it to flourish. A strong regional brand would be plenty. But soon it could lose its personality and it could morph into one of those other labels that had vaulted from regional specialty to bland, ubiquitous national nothing.

  For now, Down to Earth clicked along. They did well in Meeker and Craig, to the north. They were well known in Paonia, Hotchkiss, Delta, and Grand Junction in a broad arc to the south and west. Their distribution reached Eagle along the I-70 corridor to the east. She had resisted the staff’s push for Montrose, Ouray, Telluride, or maybe even Durango, but she might cave. Basically, the heart of western Colorado was the market for now. She had teamed up with a local distributor—filling up space on trucks already making their rounds—so she didn’t feel any less green or any less local. In fact, she pictured her business with a bit of wonder and awe. It was like trying to figure out precisely how shoveling coal into the engine of a locomotive would propel steel wheels down the tracks.

  It didn’t compute. She tried to imagine all the transactions that had to happen—retail transactions, cash and credit cards changing hands. Phone orders, online orders, one bank account dipping while another—Down to Earth’s—rose. People must have been telling each other, because no advertising had been bought. She’d been lucky with well-placed newspaper articles, glowing ones, and that was that.

  The organization mushroomed like one of those videos on the nature channel that condense three weeks’ of growth for a morel into thirty seconds. She had found the sweet spot of demand and product. But it wasn’t really her. She’d given the green light on a new bottling contract in Grand Junction. She had okayed a new, expansive greenhouse plan in a field halfway to Rifle. But the man behind it all, the man who had come crawling back contritely, sheepishly, sweetly, gently—he had given her a month to pause and reflect—was Jerry.

  Jerry Paige.

  He said all the right things, apologized from the heart and removed the pressure, said he didn’t want to lose her as a friend. Of course, five minutes later, after a kiss, they were all tangled up and laughing and how could she not grant a big old governor-size pardon on the spot. His crimes had been misdemeanors of the heart, of unchecked zeal. This was after the fallout, when he had done his over-the-top and too-pushy speech in front of the school board, embarrassing the whole erstwhile band of reformers and causing the team and its agenda to implode on the launch pad.

  But weeks of space and quiet was plenty of time for Trudy to realize she hated loose ends, despised grudges and loved closure. Especially closures with Jerry, who was an excellent physical companion.

  As the business blossomed, Jerry had offered guidance and suggestions and before she knew it he assumed the role as the unofficial manager of Down to Earth, the new company borne out of The Growing Season, Trudy’s line of pesto products and marinades. The pesto and marinades remained hot items, but now Down to Earth sold organic fresh herbs, organic produce, gardening equipment, soils, mulch, shrubs, trees, bushes, ground cover, birdhouses, and a whole line of sculptures and other outdoor decorations created by local artists. Down to Earth conducted classes for the home gardener. Down to Earth encouraged the home gardener to take care of herbs and produce them at home, so they no longer had to shop at Down to Earth. It was anti-selling and in some crazy way it worked.

  Down to Earth had promoted a corporate giving campaign akin to Ben & Jerry’s. They had the “we’re different” vibe of Paul Newman’s line of grocery items. The brand oozed organic street credibility. Shippable products danced off the shelves of Whole Foods and similar stores with barely a promotional blink. Jerry had a sixth sense for negotiations and hiring. Her staff, in fact, had grown and she had met everyone at one point or another. But she couldn’t really say whether their paperwork was all in order, whether the feds wouldn’t frown. Or worse.

  The day after the shooting in Glenwood Springs, the view from the highway made it look as if even more media had arrived. Trudy could only glance. Going sixty on the tight curves by the hot springs in Glenwood, she wondered if she would ever see the footbridge without thinking of Lamott and the blood. It wasn’t the memories, it was also the sounds and the nausea that went with thinking about Lamott and the inconceivable anger behind whoever pulled the trigger.

  Trudy steered off the highway and looped over the bridge through downtown, heading south to her headquarters in a small business park, the Valley View, seven miles south of downtown. Down to Earth was squeezed in between an electric supply company and a used car lot. The green-gray building sat up along the highway, directly across the Roaring Fork River from a sprawling golf course and down the hill from one of the Colorado Mountain College campuses, to the east. Inside were cubicles for the staff and the guts of a warehouse with all the stuff of their business—bottles, soil, herb pots, hoses, lumber, planters, shovels, rakes, fertilizer, seeds, packing materials.

  Jerry sat at his desk in an open-door corner office. Trudy was surprised to see him, alone, given the number of times she had pictured the sheriff or federal immigration authorities poring through her files or lining up her workers, giving them all the third degree.

  Files flopped open on Jerry’s desk and steam floated up from a mug of coffee at the ready. His look was grim, but she didn’t want to know. Not yet.

  A kiss, a hug, and she poured herself a cup of tea in the kitchen, an unoccupied cubicle nearby.

  “Bottom line,” said Trudy.

  “We have issues,” said Jerry.

  “I thought we confirmed every match,” said Trudy. “Or tried to.”

  “We’re waiting on about seven, maybe more. The socials didn’t match at first. At least, the system kicked them out and now we are supposed to have the employee contact the Social Security Administration, to see if it was a typo or some other clerical error.”

  “Out of how many employees now?” Trudy hadn’t kept up since they passed two-dozen. Jerry knew the needs and knew how to hire.

  “Thirty-nine,” said Jerry.

  The number scared her—all the promises bound up in each paycheck.

  “Last time I checked—” said Trudy.

  “I know,” said Jerry. “New greenhouse over in West Glenwood, we bought a bottling plant in Rifle, plus running around the maintenance work. It’s all labor.”

  “Have we told these seven what they’re supposed to do now?”

  Trudy felt she had dropped a ball she didn’t know she was carrying.

  Jerry’s prematurely gray hair was pulled back in a tight pony tail. He checked the hair tie’s tightness as a security tic. He wore checked flannel shirts, favored prints in green. He was taut and lanky underneath, his yoga ritual unchanged for years. The casual appearance and physical health belied the business intensity. “They won’t do it,” said Jerry. “They won’t contact authorities. So why ask?”

  “Because we’re supposed to,” said Trudy. “At least the responsibility would shift to them, right?”

  “For a while,” said Jerry. Despite being two years younger than Trudy, he came across these days like the one with the wise old head. According to the calendar, she was coming up on forty but when Jerry focused on business, he looked half way to fifty. The sparkling whites of his brown eyes
, behind ever-present bifocals, revealed his inner youth. “A month or two. And then we’re supposed to let them go.”

  “But—”

  “But what?”

  “But you always have a plan.”

  Jerry smiled, but it was a weak version. “You know me too well.”

  Jerry tapped his pen, wobbled his head like he was weighing an offer, and held her gaze. His in-the-moment quality was one of his strengths.

  “You know what we’re up against,” said Jerry.

  “Well, everything,” said Trudy. There was a well-respected grower in New Castle that had distributed across Colorado for years.

  “The only thing we’ve got going for us is brand loyalty,” said Jerry. “Our products are good, but we cost more. We’re up against the high-tech greenhouses in California, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Fresh herbs are being air-freighted from Peru and Israel, all that mineral-rich water for the Mediterranean herbs.”

  “Ours taste better,” said Trudy.

  “And we got lucky,” said Jerry. “The whole buy-America, buy-Colorado wave. We’re riding it.”

  “Where are you going with this?” said Trudy.

  “Where I’m going is we’ve got to protect what we’ve got. You don’t want to put all this at risk.” Jerry had a touch of professor in his soul. Maybe too much.

  “So how?”

  “Subcontracting,” said Jerry.

  “I’ve seen them go over this on television. It’s not right.”

  “I know,” said Jerry. “And I know what every other business does—but have the subcontractor set up first.”

  Between Officer Lemke’s warning and this shaky plan, Trudy felt oddly trapped. Every thought was woven like a braid with the dread born yesterday at the base of the footbridge.

  “A subcontractor buys us arm’s length,” said Jerry. “Separation.”

  Jerry paused. He knew he was gaining headway.

  “You look like you’ve got one more thing to say,” said Jerry.

  If there was a scale for measuring inscrutability, Jerry was a lightweight—an open book.

  “Why do we have to do their job for them?”

  “Whose?” said Trudy.

  “The government’s,” he said with some snap. “They’re the ones not protecting our borders. Why should we have to play defense for them?”

  For the first time since her seizures stopped, following the successful temporal lobectomy that had ended her days as an epileptic, Trudy had the sensation of fog and floating, of seeing everything through a thick mist. It wasn’t hard to imagine the whole business going poof like a gust from a hurricane doing its thing on a birthday cake candle. But these weren’t seizures. Those had been fixed through surgery after George’s exit to state prison.

  “You should have seen the look on the cop’s face,” said Trudy.

  “He was reacting to the moment,” said Jerry. “Cops think they know how to fix everything. Part of their nature.”

  “But if we go to a subcontractor, or try to set one up, that will be so obvious. They would all be working for us one day and then working for somebody else the next and still doing all the same stuff in the same places.”

  “It might have to be done gradually—start with the maintenance crew first.”

  “And let them go?”

  Jerry gave a shrug. “What’s the difference if we make the move or if ICE forces the issue?”

  Trudy pictured the conversations with the employees—breaking all the bad news, how the word would spread. “They depend on us,” she said.

  Jerry shrugged. “A job is not a lifetime guarantee.”

  “You’ve already decided,” said Trudy.

  “I’m suggesting,” said Jerry. “But you have to figure they all know each other, passing tips around. Not often you get a heads-up. We got lucky again.”

  “I wouldn’t even know where to start,” said Trudy.

  She had slowly given over control to Jerry. He knew the books, the online banking, the passwords, the cash flow, the payroll, the contracts, the debt. She signed papers as he explained. There was good communication and everything checked out. Things they ordered showed up. Except for the wonderful, lounging sex—Jerry didn’t care for quickies, preferred to relax naked or with few clothes on and talk for a while, see what developed and repeat—Jerry could have been her most trusted brother. She had turned into another chapter of herself and how she had behaved around George. She demurred. She wasn’t evaluating hidden dangers or preparing for them. She played second fiddle. Or played for another band. It was hard to admit. Allison would never have lost control.

  Maybe it was the shock from yesterday’s event, being right there, but she realized suddenly that she was about to tear up.

  “They’re so loyal,” said Trudy.

  “Most,” said Jerry. “We’ve had turnover. It’s not like old company towns where you see them at Little League and the grocery store and church. We don’t know them, not really.”

  Jerry took off his wire-rims, wiped the lenses with a tissue.

  “We didn’t promise them anything except pay,” he said. “Work comes and goes; they come and go.”

  Jerry put his glasses back on.

  “However, there’s a situation going on now. Alfredo Loya. Usually when someone slips back into the twilight, it’s not too big a deal. They seem worried this time. Someone called back to Guańajato where he’s from and he hasn’t turned up.”

  “Where did he work?”

  “Wherever we needed him. He could fix anything—pumps, mechanical stuff—and he can do it fast. A real knack.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Last day here was two weeks ago, but it’s not like I can go poke around and try to pick up his trail. He’s just gone.”

  Now the tears came, trailing down her cheek. A couple. She had so much to do, so much she would do. She didn’t wipe them away.

  “Is he one of the ones, one of the ones without a matched social?”

  “Yeah,” said Jerry. “He’s one of the seven.”

  eleven:

  monday afternoon

  The police staged the media briefing at the gazebo shelter in Sayre Park, not far from where Lamott first stepped off his campaign bus before his long meet-and-greet stroll through town and his appointment on the pedestrian bridge.

  Sheriff Allen Marrs handled the news conference flanked by deputies, City Council members, the mayor, and a bevy of state and federal types whom Bloom had never seen. Today, they were props. It wasn’t hard to imagine the cluster-fuck cop meetings and, without anyone in custody, the tension.

  Facing the scrum of media, Sheriff Marrs looked tired. He was smart not to shave. You didn’t want to show up looking like you’d thought about primping. Marrs had a high forehead, dark eyes, and a moustache that curled down at the corners.

  The main theme was reassurance. Sheriff Marrs was seasoned enough to follow the script, which was fluffier than cotton candy. He used lots of words, but added nothing new.

  Every possible resource devoted to the manhunt.

  We have leads but I can’t go into detail.

  Glenwood Springs is a safe and caring community.

  We urge anyone with information to step forward.

  Reward funds have been established for the successful prosecution …

  No mention of the disposable phone.

  Bloom had been in big media hordes in Denver and this one was right up there—national and Denver crews, national and local print reporters, Grand Junction, Spanish-language news stations, magazine writers. On the national news scale, the attempted assassination of a U.S. Senate candidate rated a nine or ten. The immigration theme would make Glenwood Springs a trough for media feeding for weeks and months to come. Editors were making notes to do anniversary stories. For Bloom, the te
eming pack of reporters brought back the old days of Denver, the occasional flare-up of news that drew the outside buzzards.

  This first wave brought the high-powered reporters with access to private jets and staff to help with logistics. Waves of others were moving out, the army of grunts. Bloom wanted to work alone but also relished the challenge. This was his town, his story. It might not be a bad time to outwit his old Denver-based cohorts.

  The general working theory rested on the idea of shots coming from somewhere in the first few hundred yards of trail that led up Lookout Mountain.

  There was a trail to the top of a high knoll overlooking the confluence of rivers, but it was lightly travelled and mostly by locals.

  The possible escape routes numbered two.

  The first escape route would be the trail up and over the Lookout Mountain peak. Perhaps the shooter quickly transformed into a backpacker and walked innocently away. He might be still walking.

  The second escape route would be straight down through the scrub to the streets on the eastern edge of Glenwood Springs.

  If the up-and-over theory was correct, the shooter would have had a healthy head start and, obviously, he didn’t have to stay on the trail.

  The cops preferred the mingle-with-civilization theory and they indicated that somebody probably saw the shooter escape, but didn’t realize it. They were urging everyone who might have been hiking or driving in the area to recall everything they had seen.

  Bloom thought one other theory was being overlooked—a variation of the return-to-civilization theme. What if the shooter came down the hill but hopped over the train tracks and went down to the river to a waiting kayak or raft? Maybe there was too much exposure—the river would take the shooter right under the footbridge—but recreational kayaks and tourist rafts were common.

  Distance was the big problem with Lookout Mountain as the shooter’s perch. The reports so far had settled on 500 yards. The distance would depend on the height of the shooter’s precise location on the hill, which sloped up and away to the east. For every foot of elevation the shooter might have wanted, he had to add four or five yards more distance. The shot wasn’t impossible, but it would require skill, practice, and balls the size of grapefruits.