Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  Emily might get shot. I might get shot.

  The third option was so natural I found myself choosing it without any further deliberation. I took two steps to my right until I was behind the narrow trunk of a beetle-kill pine. I rotated my day pack to one side, reached into the zippered front section, and removed Lauren’s Glock.

  When she wasn’t carrying it—she had a permit for the 9 mm; the airport was one of the few locations where she didn’t have it with her—Lauren stored her loaded pistol in a locked cabinet in our closet at home. I had assumed that it was loaded when I’d grabbed it an hour before and stuck it in my rucksack. It certainly had a magazine in it, but I was intentionally so ignorant about guns that I didn’t know how to determine if the magazine had bullets in it. Nor did I know how to put ammunition into the magazine if it didn’t.

  I’d probably held Lauren’s gun three times before that day. Pulling the trigger? I’d performed that act on handguns exactly three times in my life—only two of those intentionally—but neither time with the Glock.

  I spread my feet, leaned back against the tree, extended my arm, supported my right wrist with my left hand, and tried to line up the sights on the gun on the person in front of me.

  What am I doing? I was doing things I’d seen actors do in the movies. How sorry is this?

  Sam. That’s what I was doing.

  I adjusted my aim about two feet. One foot higher, one foot to the right.

  My eyes were open. Wide open.

  I squeezed the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  The Glock doesn’t have a conventional safety, but Lauren had once insisted on demonstrating for me how to work the manual lock on the back of the grip. Just in case.

  I exhaled. Found the cylindrical lock. Released it. And then I started the process of aiming all over again. Sam.

  The branch I was leaning on snapped. The crack sounded as loud as a shot.

  I watched my target react by lifting himself up from the crevice—he or she was wearing a stocking cap the same gray-brown as the rocks—and then rotate back toward the noise, and me. I squeezed the trigger, firing a round. By then Emily had started barking. The man made a wise decision—he moved forward and crouched to leap down from the outcropping toward the Royal Arch Trail below.

  I thought he was going after Sam.

  Shoot! Shoot!

  The person jumped. I fired two more rounds into the rocks where he’d been perched. My eyes were still open.

  I knew I shot three times because I pulled the trigger three times and I felt the kick of the Glock three times. The sound? I heard the first crack from the broken branch. That was it. I don’t recall hearing any of the explosions from the handgun.

  Still thinking Sam, Sam, Sam, I moved two steps closer to the outcropping, ratcheting Emily’s lead shorter with each step, bringing her nearer to me. Then I did it all again.

  I wasn’t thrilled to see the lack of blood on the rocks. Nor was I disappointed. The ambivalence paralyzed me for a moment. “Sam!” I yelled. “Sam!”

  Emily’s retractable lead was locked down at about two yards. She literally pulled me off my feet when she lurched toward the downhill side of the outcropping. I managed to hang on to the big red trigger grip of her lead as I fell.

  I was gratified that I also managed to keep hold of the Glock without shooting myself or my dog.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  SAM FOUND Emily and me tangled up in her lead. He helped me to my feet. Emily popped up by herself.

  “I was pretty sure you were dead,” he said.

  “I was thinking the same thing about you.”

  He saw the Glock in my hand. I saw his service pistol in his.

  “That was you?” he said. “Those shots?”

  “Yes.”

  “All of them?”

  “How many were there?” I asked.

  “Three.”

  “Yes. All of them were me.”

  His eyes communicated alarm and something else. He raised an eyebrow to let me know what the something else was: amazement. “You’re pretty trigger happy all of a sudden.”

  “Someone was on that outcropping—right there—waiting to ambush you. I tried to stop him. Or her, I couldn’t tell.”

  Odds were even whether he was going to thank me, or chastise me.

  “That’s Lauren’s?” he said. He meant the Glock. His voice was calm, almost soothing. I think he was afraid of what I might do next.

  “Yes.”

  “And you shot it…Why?”

  “The person had a gun. He started to come at me. Then…at you.”

  Sam’s eyes were still wide. My recklessness had unnerved him. “Want to see what he was trying to ambush me with?” Sam pulled a compact 35 mm SLR from his jacket pocket. “This. You almost shot a photographer, Alan.” He held out his other hand. “Give me the Glock. Half the valley heard those shots. A ranger’s going to be up here any minute. You do not want to be carrying a gun that’s just been fired.”

  “You do?”

  “I’ll show them my shield and my service weapon. It hasn’t been fired. Let’s get out of here.”

  I handed Sam the weapon. He checked the gun, set the manual lock like he did it every day, and stuffed the weapon into his waistband at the small of his back where it was covered by his jacket. I then handed him Emily’s lead and scrambled back up the slope into the woods. I was on my knees for a good minute before I found what I wanted. I jogged back to Sam and dropped the three spent shells from the Glock into his palm.

  “You watch too much TV,” he said.

  What I had done hit me. Shoot! Shoot!

  I barely had time to turn my head to the side before I puked at Sam’s feet.

  We ran into a ranger near the creek. She ordered us to stop. Sam was ready—he had his shield wallet hanging on his belt. He pointed at it and explained he heard the shots, too, but that he couldn’t tell where they came from, and hadn’t seen anything between the creek and the ridge below the Royal Arch. The ranger, a comely woman around thirty who had to put some effort into making her pleasant face taciturn, asked Sam if he was carrying his service weapon. Sam provided it to her. She checked the gun and handed it back. I gave her my driver’s license. She asked a half-dozen more questions about the gunfire, where we were, what we heard.

  Sam answered honestly, within the limits of his lie. I kept my mouth shut—I figured my breath smelled like vomit—except to offer my agreement in as few syllables as possible.

  She wrote some notes and continued up the trail.

  As soon as the ranger was out of earshot, Sam said, “Whoever you fired at didn’t report anything. If he had, her response would be much different.”

  “Which means—”

  “I know what it means.”

  Down in the parking lot at Chautauqua Sam climbed into the passenger seat of my wagon. I rinsed the vomit out of my mouth and poured some water into a bowl in the back for Emily before I joined him up front. He slid Lauren’s Glock into the glove box and tossed the spent shells into the ashtray. He had the camera on his lap.

  I spotted the digital screen on the back. “Let me see that,” I said, grabbing the camera. I powered it up and hit a few buttons—I was much more proficient with digital cameras than I was with iPods, or guns. I scrolled back two shots. “Look.”

  I held the screen up for Sam. It was a shot of us talking on the ridge. He took the camera back and scrolled through a half-dozen more photos of us before the selection changed from the trail to some close-ups of horses.

  He said, “Either there’s a tap on your phone—which is possible—or one of us was followed up here.”

  “You,” I said. I explained about Emily’s wariness on the trail on the way up. “She picked up a scent of somebody she already knew and already didn’t like. That’s why we were in the woods. She tugged me up there—she was insisting we track whoever it was.”

  “Why
does that mean I was the one who was followed? Emily likes me.” Sam didn’t want to be the one who had been followed.

  “Because Emily picked up the person’s scent on the way up. You were the first one up the trail. The person she didn’t like was following you. Ergo…”

  “Currie,” he said. “Damn. Has to be. Emily knew her scent from your house. Didn’t you say it was a guy on that outcropping of rock?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t see a face. The person was wearing a hat—could have been either. Given my recent track record, it might have been a chimp wearing a people suit. It could have been Currie, Sam. Or your grand jury witness. Or someone we don’t even know about. If it was Currie, has she done anything that would allow you guys to pick her up?”

  He looked frustrated. “I can’t think of anything. But she has stuff on us. We have to be careful.”

  “The only legal vulnerability I can think of is what she did with Lauren’s sister. That’s not going to be easy to prove. And it’s not going to be of any interest to the Boulder police,” I said. “But I don’t know everything you know about the missing grand jury witness. Is there any way to tie Currie to her?”

  Sam narrowed his eyes. “Do you know anything about that witness or her purse that you’re not telling me?”

  My mouth was dry. I finished the water in the bottle that I’d opened for the dog. “I know what the grand jury is investigating. The hit-and-run on that cop.”

  He mouthed a profanity. “Any point in asking how you know?”

  “Lauren didn’t tell me. Leave it at that.”

  He twisted on his seat to face me as much as the confined space would allow. “I’m going to ask once: Do you know anything at all about that hit-and-run? Don’t fuck with me on this, Alan.”

  “Not a thing I didn’t learn from reading the Camera or looking in that damn purse,” I said. “I assume the purse-lady is still missing?”

  “Yes,” Sam said.

  “Can you tie Currie to her? That would get the police department’s attention.”

  “The accident was late last summer.”

  “The witness didn’t come forward until…?”

  His eyes got wide. I watched his hands round into fists the size of cantaloupes. “You’re implying—”

  “I don’t know anything about what happened, but it seems to me that it’d be pretty easy to pretend to be a solitary witness to a traffic accident that had already been described publicly down to the last detail. How would you guys know whether or not she was fabricating what she was telling you?”

  Sam said, “Especially since she got cold feet before she gave us anything we could use.”

  “There you go.”

  I checked my phone. Three bars. Two missed calls from my wife. “I need to get back to Lauren.”

  He climbed out of the car. “I’ll be in touch,” he said before he closed the door. “Amanda Ross will never be the same. That asshole crushed her leg. She was a triathlete. She was training for that hundred-mile run up in Leadville.”

  He walked toward his Jeep. He stopped halfway there, retraced his steps and opened the door to my car. “Thanks,” he said. “For what you did up there. It was stupid…and it was absolutely reckless.” He grinned. “But I appreciate that you had my back.”

  He closed the door. I hit the speed-dial for Lauren’s mobile.

  “Hey,” I said. “Sorry about the signal problem earlier.” I’d already decided not to worry her with what had happened on the trail. At some point before she came home I’d get Sam to show me how to reload the magazine of her Glock. “You got my e-mail about your sister?”

  I expected anger from her that I’d been out of touch. I didn’t get any. She said, “I just got off the phone with her. She told me about the picture you sent. This is all Michael’s doing?”

  “Appears to be. He has some pretty good help.”

  Her voice was hollow. “It won’t change anything with the U.S. Attorney. The federal prosecutors won’t care that I was entrapped. I was in possession of a controlled substance. I conspired to bring it across an international border. I’m screwed.”

  “I figured that. I’m sorry. Did you talk to him today? The U.S. Attorney?”

  “Briefly. We agreed I need a lawyer. I’m going to see a guy in the morning here in Denver. He’s supposed to be good. How did you put this together?” she asked.

  “I’ll walk you through it later. Basically, I got a break tracking down Michael’s accomplice. I assumed there would be a state-hospital connection. There was. Once I found out that Nicole Cruz had been a patient there, and was—”

  “So what happened in the barn—you were set up, too?”

  “I was set up too. I’m in the same position you are, though. My patient died. Won’t matter to anybody that she knew McClelland in Pueblo.”

  “God.”

  “Nicole Cruz led me indirectly to a woman named J. Winter Brown. She was another patient in the forensic unit in Pueblo. A friend of McCelland’s. She’s the one who befriended Teresa in Washington, and fed her the drugs for you.”

  “It just goes on,” she said.

  “Sam’s been pulled into it too.”

  “How?”

  “Long story. McClelland’s getting even with all of us, Lauren.”

  “He’s back in custody.”

  Her voice was hollow. She knew that McClelland being back in custody wasn’t much of a victory for our side. “Doesn’t matter. The woman is still out there and she’s as dangerous as McClelland. You can’t come home until we know what she’s up to.”

  “I can’t go to Bimini.”

  “Pick someplace else. If you need to stay in the state, do it. But take Grace someplace, please. Don’t tell me until you get there. And start using pay phones.”

  We agreed to talk again soon. I spoke to Gracie for a few minutes. When we hung up I drove across the parking lot and found a public phone near the Dining Hall.

  “Sam?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s possible that Currie may not know we’re on to her. That could be an advantage.”

  He was silent for a moment. “I didn’t consider that. I’m almost to her apartment right now. Maybe I’ll send her those flowers instead.”

  I got back in the car and looked at the spent shells.

  I’d fired the gun with my eyes open. I wondered if that was progress.

  The cloud was no closer than it had been before. There were no wolves in the vicinity. That was good.

  FORTY-NINE

  I WAS sorting the detritus of the desecration of my daughter’s bedroom into two piles—salvageable, and not—when I got a call from Cozy. “You’ve had an interesting couple of days,” he said.

  You don’t know the half of it, I thought. “Kirsten filled you in on what happened at the Justice Center?”

  “She did. During a crisis when you could have been a sympathetic figure you managed to offend the very people who will ultimately decide whether to prosecute you. A curious tactic. Someday I hope you will explain it.”

  I couldn’t think of a noninflammatory reply so I stayed silent. I chalked it up as a small victory in my anti-pettiness campaign.

  Cozy went on. “I thought you would want to know that I just got a call from Elliot Bellhaven. He proclaimed it a courtesy, which concerns me no end. The news is that McClelland’s on his way to New Max in Cañon City. He’ll be reevaluated there—from a security point of view and a psychiatric one—to see if he can or should be returned to the forensic facility in Pueblo. The state may petition the court to have him stay in the penitentiary while his competency status is reevaluated.”

  “Thanks for that news,” I said. I wasn’t surprised.

  “The DA’s office is in some disarray right now—getting a special prosecutor in place to take over that grand jury is awkward for them—but I don’t think you should become complacent about the death in your neighbor’s barn. When the
rest of the forensics and the labs come back you could find yourself in fresh jeopardy. Certainly civil, possibly criminal.”

  That wasn’t news, either. I said, “Complacence isn’t something you need to be concerned with.” I thought about telling Cozy all the things I knew that he didn’t know. None of it was urgent and I would prefer to have that conversation with Kirsten. I would be admitting some things that wouldn’t present me in the best possible light and Cozy’s bedside manner needed some work.

  Assuming my family was safely out of town, my biggest remaining personal jeopardy had to be something that would make me appear criminally liable for Kol’s death, or something that would tie me to the missing grand jury witness. For Michael McClelland to do any more damage than he’d done, he would have to reveal some evidence that aggravated one or both of those vulnerabilities.

  I hoped there were no witnesses to my recklessness with Lauren’s Glock.

  As I cleaned up my daughter’s room and made a list of all the things I needed to replace, I wondered what time bomb McClelland or his minions might have planted in my house during the break-in that would stain me with the taint of the first two problems, and when it was scheduled to explode.

  Just before dusk Sam called from a pay phone. The man had a huge stash of quarters. No greeting. His voice was icy, with just a hint of the warmth of irony at the edges. “Justine Winter Brown—aka Currie the nutritionist—has one solitary prior. Assault with a deadly weapon. The victim? Her boyfriend. The weapon? A ball-peen hammer. Gives you the shivers, don’t it? Her defense? PTSD from chronic domestic abuse. Jury bought her story, or her lawyer’s story; I don’t actually know whose story it was. But that’s why she was in Pueblo. Not guilty by reason of insanity. She was there getting…well. According to her jacket, she was planning to live somewhere near Ft. Morgan after her discharge. Want to hear the psychobabble?”

  “Of course,” I said. “It’s the best part.” I was thinking about all the psychological excuses I’d devised for Michael McClelland after his crime spree.

  “Beyond post-traumatic stress disorder, the buzzwords are ‘hostile-dependent,’ ‘passive aggressive,’ and ‘cunning.’”

  “Not too imaginative. Anything there that doesn’t fit?”