Cold Winter Sun

by Forder, Tony J.

  I had to wonder if he had the balls to be hiding something from me. Likely. But he’d given me a town, somewhere to begin our search. Which was more than we had before. If we managed to drive away from here without firing a shot, then it would have been worth the risk after all.

  The breeze picked up and the desert dust swirled and settled back down again. The air was dry and stuffy and tasted foul. The light was winking out, and I thought we had overstayed our welcome.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  I turned to face Terry who was now standing by the Jeep. None of us had seen or heard him coming. He held in his hand the laser scope from his rifle.

  ‘The real deal was never on you,’ he said. ‘Either of you. Only the sighter.’

  ‘That’s true.’ I nodded to confirm. It was important to me that the cops understood we had wished them no harm. ‘But,’ I said as I saw Clark’s hand flexing once more. ‘We do have one more partner in the game. He fixed his nest a long way out, so you’re painted for him and you will never even hear his bullet coming if you make a move on us.’

  ‘Who the fuck are you guys?’ Fraser asked.

  ‘Nobody. You never came out here, you never met us. You go about your business, we go about ours. That’s all this needs to be if you keep your man Clark in check.’

  ‘That might be a struggle,’ Fraser admitted.

  Terry was now back at the Jeep and behind the wheel, which was rumbling in the background. I stepped forward two paces, drew the Sig and blew out one of the rear tyres of the police SUV.

  Clark’s face grew all kinds of serious, and Fraser didn’t look best pleased, either. ‘The fuck you do that for?’ he asked.

  ‘Just to buy us some time. Anyhow, we’re gone. Thanks for the tip.’

  ‘Hey!’ Fraser called after me. ‘Tell me something.’

  I turned. ‘Would we have shot you?’

  ‘Something like that, yeah.’

  ‘Not unless absolutely necessary. Only if our lives depended on it. Like I said before, I hated doing this to you two, especially now that I see you are both honourable and professional men. But we were in a bind. We wanted information you had. That’s all it was.’

  Fraser seemed to chew that over.

  ‘Now you tell me something,’ I said. ‘Out of interest, if we’d asked to meet you in a diner or mall, would you still have tried to pull your guns on us?’

  ‘Absolutely. Like you said, you gotta take control. Crowded situation, I would’ve had my weapon out on you from the moment I saw you.’

  That was good enough for me. As crazy as my plan seemed, it had been the right one after all. We got out of there. A mile into the highway, I tossed the burner. I had no idea if it could be traced, but it had served its purpose. The cops had provided us with our next move.

  10

  It didn’t take us long to drive through Corona. The main road slicing through the dot of a town on Highway 54 took us past an auto sales that seemed to specialise in beaten-up old trucks with more gaping holes than metal, a budget motel in the process of being refurbished, a number of general stores, a bar, and a couple of fuel stations.

  It was a curious mix. The relatively new sat shoulder to shoulder with the very old, fresh alongside shabby, in-use sandwiched between the abandoned, maintained abutting neglected. Some buildings looked as if the owners had simply given up hope and moved on, allowing their properties to become ramshackle, while others suggested the locals were at least attempting to regenerate the place. Red or sand-coloured brick buildings dominated Main Street, some of which looked unfinished, as if the developers had perhaps run out of finances part way through. Decay had set into others, stucco having fallen away to expose the brick framework beneath. I circled back a couple of times and navigated the side streets for a while. A Baptist church looked to be one of the few places in good order, sporting a fresh coat of white paint, which I guess spoke volumes for the people who lived in the town. Elsewhere, the dwellings and other structures we drove by reeked of neglect. Following our third drive-through I pulled the Jeep off the road about a mile outside Corona’s perimeter. I kept the engine running and the heat on because it had turned cold outside.

  It was the morning after the evening before, and I was more than a little anxious.

  By the time we had left the two cops behind in Roswell, Terry and I decided it was too late in the evening to do anything about what we had been told. There was also a fair chance that Fraser and Clarke had requested a car or two sat on the place in case we showed up. Terry and I were both beat, so rather than getting a taste of Roswell’s night life, we made our way back to the airport and crashed out on board the plane which was now sitting inside a shared hangar. A few of the seats reclined far enough back to make comfortable beds, and there were shower and other facilities on board. Neither of us wanted to go through the fuss and bother of booking into a hotel. The Lear provided us with everything we needed, and with the door closed we managed to keep out most of the fumes coming off the warm oil and aviation fuel.

  We had picked up a takeaway pizza close to the airport and I was making my way through my third slice when I got a call from Donna. She told me they had received a mail from the FBI, with a couple of photographs attached. The photos revealed a hold-all, and spread out next to it lay some clothes and a washbag. The attire was male, the bag a soft brown leather.

  ‘We showed the photos to Sheryl,’ Donna said, her voice low and hugely dispirited. ‘She’s positive it all belongs to Vern. None of us knows quite what to make of it.’

  I had to think about that some. ‘It’s useful information,’ I told her. ‘But it’s neither a good nor bad sign. Don’t fret about it too much.’ I caught her up with our progress, omitting the fight with the men from Reno, and the part about pulling guns on a couple of Roswell PD cops. There was no point in worrying her unduly. I didn’t tell her about Corona, either, only that we had a lead we were following up on in the morning. I didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves or go into any detail at this stage. The mantra that the less you told people the less they could tell others remained true, even in these peculiar circumstances.

  I was still waiting for a response from Drew about my hacker suggestion, but when I asked to speak to him Donna told me he had not yet arrived home from work. I asked her to remind him that he owed me a call. Before we were done, she handed her phone to Wendy.

  ‘Hey, Dad.’

  ‘Hiya, kiddo. How was school?’

  ‘School. Mostly lame, but it’s okay. I miss you.’

  That felt so good to hear. Not too long ago I had a feeling that my daughter and I were drifting apart, but the simple act of being with her for even a few hours had convinced me that the gap between us was not so large after all. Miles, yes, but nothing we could not bridge.

  ‘I miss you, too. I expect to be gone another few days, but I meant what I said last night, sweetheart. When this is over, you and I will spend some time together. Just the two of us.’

  ‘Sure. I’d like that.’

  ‘Hey, I thought about something when I was lying in bed. You remember when you were a little kid and you’d sneak into our room during the night?’

  ‘Yeah. I’d snuggle down right in the middle of you and Mum.’

  I laughed. ‘I’m not sure about snuggle down, more like stretch out like a starfish and force us to the edges of the bed. But what really used to crack me up was that you’d scuttle in and bring one toy with you. Always the Disney one, Sebastian from The Little Mermaid. As soon as you realised we weren’t throwing you out and back to your own bed, you’d go back and forth between the rooms fetching the rest of your stuffed menagerie. I can’t count the number of times the night reverberated to the sound of your little feet padding in and out of our bedroom. Then we’d wake up the next day surrounded by all these glassy, beady eyes.’

  Wendy had started out chuckling as I reminded her of this childhood ritual, but by the time I was finished she was howling with laughter. ‘Some
times you got cross with me and sent me away, but mostly you put up with it and let me stay.’

  ‘Truth is, it was never a matter of putting up with it. I loved it. Loved the fact you wanted to be with us. Loved waking up to find you still there. We only ever sent you back on the odd occasion so as to remind you who the bosses were.’

  ‘Somehow, I think I was always the boss in those days, Dad.’

  ‘I think you’re right, kiddo. I’m not sure that ever changed, actually.’

  ‘It’s cool that you remember all that. Love you, Dad.’

  I felt a solid weight drop into my throat. If there were more wonderful words you could hear from your own child, I had yet to learn of them. ‘I love you more,’ I told her, understanding that I could never describe how powerful that emotion was.

  After we had finished eating, Terry and I decided we would head to the place marked on the map first thing in the morning. At that point neither of us knew what to expect, nor what we might find. We just hadn’t expected it to be more nothing. Which was pretty much what we had found.

  ‘Well, I’m puzzled,’ I said to Terry, as we sat in the Jeep on the side of the road. Corona lay behind us, a forgotten town undeserving of a red circle around it.

  He nodded and stroked his chin. I could hear the harsh scuff of nails on beard stubble. ‘What was so important about this place that they had to mark it off on the map?’

  ‘You think the cop was bullshitting us? That he deliberately sent us to the quietest town in all of New Mexico out of pure spite?’

  ‘Maybe. I didn’t get that read from him, though.’

  I shook my head. ‘No, me neither.’

  ‘But there’s nothing here, Mike. No reason to come here deliberately, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Maybe the reason for the mark is not the place itself,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe it’s about a person. What if it’s simply a meeting place?’

  Terry sighed. He made no reply. There was nothing to say, not without some hard facts to wrap our brains around. Now that we had laid eyes on the place and driven through it a few times, the question remained: if you were going to meet with someone, why Corona of all places?

  Frustrated, I took out my mobile. I had no signal. I slammed my palm against the steering wheel and cursed. I swung the Jeep around and crawled slowly back in the direction of the town, checking the signal as I steered with one hand. The moment I had a couple of bars I edged back onto the dirt verge once more and pulled over. I used Google to look up Corona, adding ‘NM’ when all I got were links and images to the beer company. I jabbed on a link that looked intriguing, read the first couple of paragraphs on the web page that popped up, and then set the phone face down on my lap. I sat there staring out of the windscreen at the mountain ranges away in the distance to our right, the dilapidated beginnings of Corona peeking out from behind a slight curve on the road ahead. It was a stretch of wide blacktop that you’d blow through on your way to somewhere less dead, only now I knew it had a history.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ Terry asked, fixing me with those stone-dead eyes of his. ‘I know that look, Mike. I’ve heard those gears in that big brain of yours squeal like that before.’

  ‘Just a thought,’ I said. ‘Just a coincidence, perhaps. Maybe not.’

  ‘Go on then. Spill.’

  I shifted in my seat to face him. ‘Okay. So as far as his family were aware, Vern was headed north from Las Vegas, intending to camp out in the desert. Now, I happen to know that you go in a certain direction from there and you end up passing close by Edwards Air Force base. Edwards is otherwise known as Area 51. That’s a bit of a pilgrimage if you’re a UFO nut.’

  ‘So..?’

  ‘So, were you aware that where we landed in the Lear was once the Walker Air Force base, which at one point was simply known as Roswell Air Force base?’

  ‘And? Don’t get me wrong, this is a fascinating story, Mike, but that is the name of the city where the airport is situated. Other than the fact that I now know it was once an Air Force base, I still don’t understand what you’re getting at.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘Come on, Terry. No need to be tetchy. I could tell you, but I’m trying to get it to dawn on you the way it did me. It might mean more that way. Don’t think of it as a city, or the airport. Think of the name. You’ve heard the name Roswell before, I know you have. Then put that together with the old Air Force base.’

  Terry looked hard at me. For a moment I thought I had angered him, but then I realised he was simply straining to think. A moment later I saw the flare of recognition in his eyes. I assumed it looked something like the one in mine a few minutes earlier.

  ‘Okay, yes. Roswell, where that UFO supposedly crashed back in the fifties?’

  ‘Close. It was actually in June or July 1947.’

  ‘And what exactly does that have to do with Corona?’

  ‘The UFO supposedly crashed on a ranch deep into the desert. Back then, Corona was the closest inhabited town to the crash site.’ I jabbed a stiff finger at the dark smear ahead of us. ‘This is where it was first reported.’

  Terry puffed out his cheeks. ‘So why do people call it the Roswell UFO crash site and not the Corona UFO crash site?’

  ‘Because when it first came to the attention of the media, people didn’t know the full story.’ I read off my phone again before continuing. ‘It was a while before the crash was even reported. A few weeks, apparently. Soon as it was, the Air Force was all over it like a vegan on tofu. Them and the men in dark suits. They closed the place down, took the debris back to the closest major city, and by the time the news leaked the name of Roswell became synonymous with the crash. It was only much later when the actual site was identified and revealed to the public.’

  ‘Okay, so I see the thread you’re drawing together here. Vern possibly went to Area 51, may have driven all the way down here to maybe take a look at the site, and then his vehicle was found the other side of Roswell. None of that explains why, nor if it was even Vern who made those trips. And it still doesn’t tell us where he is now.’

  ‘But it’s something, right?’

  Terry twisted his face. ‘I’m not sure, Mike. I’m hearing a lot of speculation that may or may not involve Vern. If he was off on some UFO hunt, why would he not call home first?’

  ‘I don’t have all the answers, Terry. Perhaps he got excited and overwhelmed by it all. And yes, I am speculating. Speculation is all we have right now. But it would maybe explain why Corona was circled on the map.’

  I was about to say more when I noticed a vehicle pull up behind us. It was a black-and-white SUV. Although we had swapped the Jeep’s licence plate back for the original one, having stolen and used a plate from a shopping mall car park before our run-in with the cops, I wondered if our description had by now been put out on an all-points bulletin call. Fraser and Clarke might not have wanted to admit how easily they were taken down, so it was possible that they had kept our encounter to themselves as I had suggested they do. If not, there could be eyes on the roads looking for a silver Jeep with two men in the front seats. We were some way from Roswell, but the cruiser slipping in behind us gave me a bad feeling.

  I checked out the cop in the door mirror. I saw then that I had been wrong. It was a sheriff’s vehicle, and the man exiting the vehicle was a sheriff and not a police officer. He was getting on a bit. Late forties was my guess, though his bushy moustache was perhaps adding a few years. He hefted his gun belt a couple of times and placed a white Stetson hat on his head. The sheriff ambled across to the door on my side. He remained clipped, hand nowhere near his weapon. Did not appear to be expecting trouble. I buzzed the window down and raised a half-smile. Full beam worried people. Made it appear as if you had something to hide.

  ‘Good morning, officer,’ I said. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘Morning, young fellah,’ he said in a low drawl. He ran a finger and thumb in opposite directions across his moustache. ‘Name’s Sheriff Dwight Crozier,
and I was about to ask you the same thing.’

  ‘No, no problem here, sheriff.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Only I saw your vehicle on the side of the road and wondered right away why you’d be pulled over here when you got a small town up ahead you can stop at. Thought you might be having car problems.’

  ‘No, we’re fine thanks. We were just having a chat. Thought it best to pull off the road while we were doing so.’

  The cop peered beyond me at Terry. Left his eyes there a few seconds while Terry stared ahead impassively. ‘That an English accent I hear?’ Crozier asked, his gaze dropping back on me.

  ‘It is. Good ear. Americans often confuse it with Australian.’

  ‘Me and the wife spent a month touring the UK back in…oh, 2009. You people have a rich history behind you, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Yep.’ I nodded, smiled again. ‘And an uncertain future.’

  ‘Well, that goes for all of us I reckon.’ The sheriff chuckled softly and took a quick peek in the back, saw nothing to trouble him. ‘Where you folks headed today?’

  I thought about the best thing to tell him. We were pointing back towards Roswell, but I did not want his mind going there in case it reminded him of something he might have heard on his radio earlier in the morning. Something popped into my head and I thought maybe we’d caught a break.

  I pulled a ‘you got me’ face. ‘I’m sure you get this all the time out here, sheriff. I was a little embarrassed to tell you why we pulled off the road, because we were actually talking about how we might find out where the crash site was. We didn’t want to ask in town in case we looked foolish, so we’ve been driving around for a while trying to find signs for it. We thought it was on the outskirts of Corona, but we can’t find a thing.’

  I saw Crozier relax and knew that had done the trick. I’d noticed his senses were heightened, and even if he wasn’t aware of an APB I did not want him to think of us later on. Assuming this was his patch, my guess was he fended off UFO thrill-seekers all the time.