by Robert Greer
“That’s a hell of a comparison, Mario, but not such a good one for getting me to agree to your request. Stafford’s still walking the streets. The DA hasn’t been able to get anything close to an accessory-to-murder charge to stick, and Stafford’s lawyers and PR people have him looking for all the world like a victim in every media outlet from here to Albuquerque. Stafford’s probably sitting at home laughing his head off.”
“Trust me, Calvin. They’ll peg Stafford with something in the end.” Mario flashed the hint of a grin. “They got Capone in the end, didn’t they? And he had just as much money and a lot more muscle than Howard Stafford. Besides, I thought you told me that the dead kid’s mother already settled the score.”
“In her own personal way, she did.”
“And we can do the same thing with Rollie,” said Mario.
“What! Burn his house down and disappear?”
“No. Send him a message.”
“And you and me going into the antiques business will send him that message?”
“It’ll tell him that I’ve got people on my side. He already knows about Pinkie, and the two of us working together will send him the message that I’m not into half-stepping anymore. Besides, he already knows who you are.”
“What?”
“Listen, Calvin, I need folks around me who ain’t afraid of shit.” Mario paused to let his message gather steam. “Bottom line is, you and Pinkie fit that bill. I need you in on this, Calvin. At least consider it?”
CJ took in the look of concern in Mario’s eyes. “Am I missing something here, Mario?” he asked, moving the coin and slug from his right hand to his left.
“Nope,” said the insightful onetime Denver crime boss, sensing that for the time being he’d pressed CJ as far as he dared. “Just think about it. That’s all I’m asking. Right now, let’s say we head for that Easter dinner you’ve been promising me all week.”
“And the gold piece and the slug?”
“Like I said, they’re yours to keep.” Mario handed CJ the coin purse. “Slip ’em back in here.”
CJ slipped the gold piece and the slug back into the coin purse, zipped it shut, and followed Mario toward the basement steps.
When Mario reached the top of the stairs, he turned back to CJ. “Hope you got your sunglasses. It’s awful bright outside.” He swung his back door open and stepped out into the noonday sun. “We takin’ my car or the Bel Air?”
“Let’s take the Roadmaster,” said CJ, slipping the coin purse into his vest pocket.
“Good choice,” said Mario, walking across the backyard toward his garage.
“Why’s that?” asked CJ, surprised by Mario’s comment, knowing it was a rare Sunday that Mario took the 1953 showroom-spotless Roadmaster out for a spin.
“Because it’s the choice Angie would’ve made,” said Mario, lifting the garage door. “Always drive your top rollin’ stock on special occasions or when you’re off to visit kin, is what she would’ve said.”
CJ nodded. As he slipped into the vintage machine, he decided to take out the twenty-dollar gold piece and the .38 slug for one last look. As he did, there was a momentary unsettled look on his face that caused Mario to ask, “Something the matter, Calvin?” as he cranked the big Roadmaster’s engine and eased the car back out into the warmth of the sun.
“No,” said CJ, fingering the two objects in his hand as if he were somehow in his mind’s eye weighing good against evil. “Just considering your proposal.”
“Well, take your time,” said Mario, nosing the Buick east toward Mavis’s. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
“I know,” said CJ, squinting pensively into the sun as he moved his fingers back and forth between the gold piece and the slug.
Turn the page to continue reading from the C. J. Floyd Mysteries
Chapter 1
Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel, Interstate 70, Colorado Continental Divide, late August, the Present
Cornelius McPherson loved talking to himself with the rumbling insistence of someone hard-of-hearing, which clearly he was not. He talked to himself in shopping malls, at sporting events, on hiking trails, and in church and once, in a booming voice that startled and unhinged a group of vacationing, camera-laden Japanese onlookers, he held a conversation with himself in the middle of the Colorado capitol rotunda, debating the pros and cons of the Persian Gulf War. More than anything, McPherson loved to talk to himself at work. Talking to himself there, inside a mountain at an elevation of over eleven thousand feet, gave him the in-control, never-alone sense of ease he craved. When you came right down to it—“netted it all out,” as McPherson was fond of saying—he didn’t really talk to himself so much as he recited, mumbled, and hummed, and not just any convenient piece of trendy prose, scripture, or ditty. What McPherson brought forth in all earnestness, more often than not for no ears but his own, was what he liked to think of as the poetry of life. Hymns, nursery rhymes, poems, famous sayings, quotations, and parables all fought for space, churning effortlessly and endlessly deep inside Cornelius McPherson’s head, nudging, sometimes shoving him through the day.
Everybody’s got a song or a rhyme that haunts ’em, McPherson loved to say, and no song, poem, rhyme, or hymn gave McPherson more comfort than the song he was currently humming, the old Negro spiritual “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Just two days from retirement, McPherson was at work and humming that song, doing the same thing he’d been doing for the past three decades and thinking that in less than forty-eight hours he’d be forever free from the cold, dank smells of life inside a tunnel through a mountain. Negotiating his way along a Colorado Department of Transportation tunnel-inspection catwalk inside I-70’s Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel, the same catwalk he’d traveled five to six days a week for pretty close to 7,500 days, McPherson found himself smiling and humming to beat the band.
The concrete catwalk, which hugged the tunnel’s north wall and stood four feet above I-70’s two lanes of westbound traffic, was used for everything from inspecting the tunnel’s aging tile walls for cracks to troubleshooting dangerous grout-line water seepage to providing a 1.6-mile-long conveyance along which the tile washers moved their high-powered water-spray equipment once a year.
It was just past 10 a.m., and traffic on the interstate was surprisingly light when McPherson, nodding and swaying to the beat in his head, wrapped up his rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and cleared his throat in prelude to his always slightly off-key version of “Amazing Grace.”
Thirty-nine years earlier, high in the Colorado Rockies sixty miles west of Denver in the spring of 1968, all the elements of a classic duel between man and the earth had been present when McPherson and fifty other miners had gone underground to begin digging one of the largest automobile tunnels in the world, and clearly the highest. The men were on the front end of a bore into the Continental Divide that started at the eleven-thousand-foot level of Colorado’s treacherous Loveland Pass. Known back then, in a reference to the creek that ran above it, simply as the Straight Creek tunnel dig, the job entailed blasting through two miles of mountain, a geologic fault, and a nightmare of fractured and crushed rock to run a road across—or, more accurately, through, as McPherson loved to phrase it—the top of the world.
McPherson, a squat, five-foot-nine, 190-pound fireplug of a black man with a skullcap of wiry gray hair and grainy, sandpaper-textured, dark-chocolate skin, had been a 150-pound wisp of a man when he’d begun his days as a member of a Straight Creek tunnel-mucking team that would spend five years battling a mountain and the sometimes eighteen-hundred-foot-wide geologic nightmare of fractured and crushed rock known as the Loveland Fault.
During the early days of the dig, project delays, worker injuries, and an unending flow of cash to nowhere were par for the course, but McPherson had stuck it out, watching the project move from being the Straight Creek tunnel bore to a hole through the Continental Divide that would ultimately become the continent-cresting, automobile-streaking
sky window known as the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel. By the time the dig was finally done in 1973, it had claimed the lives of seven men, and as many as 1,140 people had dug and dynamited their way through a mountain. Along the way, McPherson had worked his way up from tunnel mucker to drift runner to bulk-rock-loader operator, and from there to his present job as the Colorado Department of Transportation’s chief Eisenhower Tunnel attendant and troubleshooting walking boss.
Watching the flow of traffic below, McPherson, minus two toes on his left foot that had been there when the Straight Creek dig had begun, broke into a self-congratulatory short-timer’s smile. Transitioning from humming “Amazing Grace,” McPherson, unmarried, childless, and always a loner, moved quickly into an inner-city skip-rope rhyme: Once upon a time the goose drank wine, tried to do the shimmy with a monkey on the streetcar line. The streetcar line broke, the monkey got choked, they both went to heaven on a silly billy goat. After a lifetime of reciting the rhyme, he never missed a word or a beat. Hard hat snugged up and power lamp in hand, he continued walking and scanning the tunnel for burned-out overhead lights, fractured tiles, ventilation problems, and the bane of his existence, eroding grout.
Last night, night before, twenty-four robbers at my door. I got up and let ’em in, hit ’em in the head with a rolling pin. His cadence now on automatic pilot, McPherson scanned the vast catalog of skip rhymes in his head, searching for one that was appropriate for someone just two days away from retirement. Finally he belted out, The white boys had a rooster, they set him on a fence, the rooster crowed for the colored boys ’cause he had some sense. He cleared his throat in preparation for a second verse when, without warning, every light in the tunnel blinked out. A fraction of a second later, the five-foot-thick, rebar-reinforced concrete catwalk he was standing on, a 1.6-mile-long virtual seawall, buckled and caved in. Losing his balance as he leapfrogged to a platform of stable concrete a few feet away, McPherson fell to one knee.
“What the shit!” He scanned the darkness with the powerful lamp in his right hand, arcing the light back and forth as warning sirens sounded all around him. Twenty yards ahead of him, a tractor-trailer braked to avoid crashing into a half-dozen pieces of catwalk concrete that had tumbled down onto the roadway. The braking semi jackknifed, and its trailer kissed the tunnel’s north wall, sending a Fourth of July celebration of sparks shooting up into the darkness.
A horn blast erupted on the heels of the now steady wail of the sirens. Five seconds later there was a second horn blast, and five seconds later another. McPherson’s throat went dry as he recognized the blasts and sirens as the synchronized, coded alarm announcing that the Eisenhower Tunnel had been hit by an earthquake.
The tunnel’s walls and the I-70 roadway popped and cracked and buckled as McPherson grabbed a piece of the catwalk’s railing and chanted, Apples, peaches, pumpkin pie, all not ready holler, “I!” For three lingering additional seconds the tunnel walls and the mountain behind them hissed and snapped and groaned. Boulders and rocks the size of small cars, free from a thirty-four-year encumbrance of concrete, rebar, and tile, dribbled down onto the interstate until finally the horn blasts and sirens stopped and the sound of rushing water and the echo of a lone car horn blaring in the distance were the only things McPherson could hear.
As loudly as he dared, McPherson announced to himself, “I’m still alive!” Still hugging the catwalk’s twisted hand railing for dear life, he steadied himself on what was now an undulating platform of concrete rubble and shook his head in disbelief. Before he could screw up the courage to take a step, the backup diesel generators sparked the lights back on. The tunnel was filled with a haze of smoke and dust, but he could see the jackknifed tractor-trailer thirty yards ahead of him, and tunnel lights beyond it to the west. A midsized European SUV had slammed into the trailer, nosing its way beneath the rear end like a rooting terrier. The trapped SUV and squatting trailer sat cockeyed across the interstate, locked together, blocking the lanes in both directions. Recognizing that both the truck driver and the SUV’s driver were at least moving, McPherson exhaled a sigh of relief.
With his view of the tunnel to the west blocked by the semi and a particle-filled cloud of smoke, McPherson turned back to see a drunken conga line of pickups, big rigs, and cars tossed hither and yon on an undulating conveyer belt of roadway that stretched a half mile back to the east portal. A dozen or so dazed-looking people who’d escaped their vehicles were moving through the haze, climbing over stalled cars and trucks and rock, making their way toward the east portal and daylight.
McPherson patted himself down, reassured that everything was still in place. Disbelief filling his voice, he said, “A fuckin’ earthquake. Who in the hell would’ve thunk it?” A cave-in was what old-time tunnel muckers and drift runners like Cornelius McPherson worried about. Oh, he’d heard people talk about the risk of a quake, and he knew that the geologists and engineers who’d designed the tunnel were aware that the Loveland Fault and plate of rock were primed for an earthquake. The tunnel design team simply never could judge for certain how powerful an earthquake to engineer for. Now ya know, now ya know, now ya know, McPherson chuckled aloud, aware that he’d just lived through the earthquake equivalent of a hundred-year flood.
Gripped by the uncertainty of the moment, he’d almost forgotten about the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt until a voice he recognized as that of his supervisor, Franklin Watts, crackled on a wave of static: “Corny, you all right in there?”
Breathing hard, McPherson answered, “Yeah.”
“We just had an earthquake. Golden’s already been in touch. They’re reporting a 6.7 on the Richter scale.”
Aware that the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado, forty miles and nearly six thousand feet of elevation back down I-70 and the mountain, was linked directly to the tunnel’s command center, McPherson barked, “We got lights in here, and you, Franklin, bless your ever-lovin’, pea-pickin’ Tennessee heart, have got a bunch of hysterical people headed your way, scramblin’ like shit for the east portal. There’s a semi with a sport ute pooched up its ass blockin’ the roadway just up ahead of me.” Barely pausing to take a breath, McPherson added, “We’re ’bout four-tenths of a mile in, I’d make it. Most of the cars I can see are bumper to bumper. A few of ’em are kissin’ a tunnel wall, but I don’t see none overturned. Can’t be certain, though; there’s so much haze and smoke in here. Sure as hell can smell gasoline, though.”
“I’ve got paramedics and a disaster team headed your way. Another one’s headed in from the west. Can we get past your wreck?”
“Nope. That semi’s straddlin’ the whole damn road.”
“Shit! How many people you think you’ve still got in there with you?”
McPherson eyed the crumbled concrete that had been a catwalk, then glanced back toward the line of westbound vehicles below. Counting the vehicles off one by one in his head, he said, “I can only see as far back as maybe fifteen vehicles. Figurin’ two people to a car, and stretchin’ that out a little—not countin’ the folks that hauled ass as soon as things started movin’ and shakin’—I figure maybe twenty, twenty-five.”
“Can you walk any of ’em out?”
“If they don’t all run the hell outta here first.”
“Then get to it.”
“I’m on it.” McPherson had started to climb over the catwalk’s twisted guard railing when he heard, just barely but perceptibly for an old tunnel rat like him, the unmistakable sound of rushing water. He glanced back toward the tunnel’s south wall. “Hey, Franklin, I got water spittin’ at me from somewhere. Wait a minute—I see it. There’s water gushin’ outta a break in the south wall of the tunnel just up ahead of me. Didn’t see it before, but I sure as hell can see it now. I better check it out.” For the first time since the earthquake had hit, McPherson, iron-willed tunnel rat, miner, and seasoned digger, felt himself shaking. “I think we got a seam break up ahead.” Suddenly his whole body turned sweaty.
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br /> “How bad?”
“Can’t tell.”
“Damn! Scratch that victim lead-out we were just talking about,” said Watts. McPherson could picture the other man stroking his chin thoughtfully. “I’ll send Wilkerson in to handle that. If we’ve got a crack in the mountain, we’ve bought ourselves one hell of a problem. See if you can figure out what’s goin’ on with that stream of water. And Cornelius, better make it fast.”
“Is it safe in here, Franklin?”
“The folks who engineered the place claim it is. And she just stood up to a near 7-grade Richter hit, didn’t she? I’d say you’re pretty safe there for the moment. Long as we don’t get another tremor. Take a quick look at our problem. You’re the only eyes and ears I got right now. Then haul ass outta there.”
“Okay. One quick look and I’m gone.” McPherson fumbled with his walkie-talkie, making certain the volume was set on high, clipped it to his belt, took what he hoped wouldn’t be his last look through the haze toward the queue of surprisingly orderly people who were making their way over rubble and stalled vehicles toward the east portal, and shouted, pretty certain none of the people could hear him, “Help’s on the way!” Hitching up his pants before heading toward what looked to be a gushing waterfall, he swallowed hard as for a fleeting second he brought into focus something he hadn’t seen in decades: the unmistakable belly of the mountain he had once cut his way through.
When he got close enough that his legs were being pelted by a shower of ice-cold water, silt, muck, and broken tree roots, he realized that what had seemed to be a massive waterfall from his earlier vantage point was, on closer inspection, simply a fire-hose-sized stream of water spewing from an automobile-sized rhomboid-shaped hole in the south tunnel wall.
