by John A. Daly
“Oh. Hi, Ron Oldhorse!” Toby explicably welcomed.
Sean’s eyes widened and his mouth gaped open. “Oldhorse?” He suddenly pictured the man clothed in denim with his long hair tied back in a ponytail, the way he was used to seeing him.
Both men stared at each other, cautiously sizing one another up and down, struggling to understand the other’s presence in the bedroom.
Sean knew Ron Oldhorse, but not well. The rumor was that he was formerly in the armed forces, but Sean didn’t know for sure. All he knew was that the man lived as a hermit in the hills outside of Winston. Of Native American heritage, Oldhorse chose to live largely as his ancestors did, hunting for his own food and growing his own crops. He owned a bare-bones cabin with no modern conveniences that was so old and weatherworn that anyone who happened to stumble across it in the woods would probably think it was uninhabitable and had been abandoned decades ago.
Oldhorse had played an incidental but important role in bringing Alvar Montoya, the man who had murdered Sean’s uncle, to justice. For that, Sean respected him, but he couldn’t wrap his mind around why the man would possibly be standing before him now, looking the way he did.
“It’s okay, Sean,” said Toby. “You don’t have to be scared. I just didn’t know that Ron Oldhorse was coming over tonight. That’s why I yelled. Mom’s always telling me that I yell before thinking sometimes, and that I need to process things first.” He swallowed quickly before continuing. “I actually thought I was making some good progress until tonight.”
Both men, still breathing heavily in the awkwardness enveloping the room, held onto their weapons.
Sean frowned. “Why would he be spending the night, Toby?”
Lighter footsteps trounced down the hallway and then Joan appeared by Oldhorse’s side, dressed in a dull blue robe. Her short, graying hair was matted to her head, framing angry eyes.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sean muttered, lowering his chair to the floor.
Joan slid under Oldhorse’s outstretched arm and stood in front of him to face Sean. She was trembling in anger as she glared at him. Oldhorse lowered his knife to his side.
“Sean! Why in the hell are you here?” she screamed so loudly that the others winced.
Sean and Toby exchanged glances.
“Don’t look at my son!” she snapped, commanding the attention back to her. “Why are you here?”
Oldhorse shook his head, taking a breath before he turned around and quietly left the room.
“I wanted him to look something up on the Interweb for me,” said Sean.
“Internet,” Toby whispered.
Sean ignored him.
“At eleven o’clock at night?” she wailed, throwing her hands up in the air and glaring a hole through Sean’s very soul.
Sean’s face soured and he found himself subtly nodding. “I guess you have a point there.”
Her head cocked to an angle and her eyes blinked repeatedly, reflecting the audacity of Sean’s words.
“But it was for something important!” he added up with some gusto in his voice.
“What, Sean? What was so important that you had to sneak in here and scare the hell out of my son in the middle of the night?”
“Me?” he sputtered. “I’m not the one who ran in here waving a knife around!”
“We thought someone had broken in!” she yelled, her nostrils flaring to the size of nickels as she tightened her fists. “What am I saying? Someone did break in! You broke in!”
Toby interjected. “Mom, I actually let him in and—”
“Shut up, Toby!” she bit out.
The boy’s gaze went to the floor.
She ordered her son to close the window where the chilling breeze and blowing snow were still flooding into the room.
“Listen,” Sean said. “He has an article up on the screen here that I need to read, and then I’ll be gone.”
“Oh, no,” she quickly replied with her eyebrows raised authoritatively. “You’re not spending another second inside my home. You’re going to leave right now.”
“Please. This will just take a couple of minutes.”
“No!”
“Mom!” Toby interrupted. “I can just print out the article for him and he can take it with him. Can I do that?”
The expression on Sean’s face twisted into one of perplexity. He looked to Toby, completely forgetting his mother for the moment. “Are you telling me you could have just printed that out on paper and handed it to me through the window?”
Toby nodded enthusiastically, his face wearing a wide smile.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before I climbed inside?”
Toby raised his shoulders and answered, “I wanted you to see my room.”
Joan’s face contorted with perplexity, emulating Sean’s as she twisted her head to glare at her son.
So painfully slow was the speed at which the printer-head glided back and forth across the sheet of paper it had been fed that it took all the strength Sean could muster not to prematurely yank it out of the machine. It gave him a chance to notice that Toby’s pajamas had a pattern of dachshunds prancing along in rows. Sean used to own a dachshund. It also compelled Toby to show Sean the notes he’d taken on the episode of Magnum, P.I. he had been watching that night.
Sean just wanted to leave, especially with Joan hovering in the corner of the room like a buzzard training a scornful eye on the back of his head. She tapped one of her slipper-clad feet, which seemed to count down the seconds until the print job was done. Still, Toby’s account of the investigative skills he’d taken away from the television episode forced Sean to fight back a smirk.
Sean had long fancied himself an amateur investigator—a man with a keen eye for detail and a knack for forming conclusions based on available evidence. Though there were often mixed results when it came to the accuracy of those conclusions, Toby believed Sean to be the real deal—an expert in the realm of examination and analysis. Sean had once told Toby that he gathered those instincts from watching crime shows on television, and the boy had clearly taken the remark to heart.
Once the second sheet of paper, a bit crinkled from fresh ink, finally slid onto the plastic tray attached to the printer, Joan’s raised finger pointed Sean to the front door. Sean snatched the printed article and acknowledged Toby with the nod of his head before briskly making his way through the narrow hallway that led through the heart of the small house. Lots of pictures decorated the walls; all were either of Toby alone or the boy with his mother. They spanned several years.
Sean was outside of the front door in no time, standing on a small cement porch that revealed another man’s footprints in the snow. The door quickly slammed behind him.
When Sean circled around to the front of a small garage that protruded out a bit from the house, he found Ron Oldhorse, now fully clothed in jeans and a homemade coat that looked to be made of buckskin. He stood in the driveway close to the garage door, smoking a cigarette that was dark in color, and definitely not store-bought. It was probably homemade as well.
“Is that you, Oldhorse?”
Sean asked. “It’s hard to recognize you with your pants on.”
“Bite me,” said Oldhorse.
“Is that a peace pipe?” Sean asked sarcastically.
“You wish,” Oldhorse muttered. His voice exuded the same monotone depth Sean was accustomed to from their sparse dealings in the past.
Snow continued to fall from the dark sky above as Sean drew in closer. “So how long has this being going on?” he asked, still trying to wrap his mind around Oldhorse’s relationship with Joan. To him, they were polar opposites. Joan was uptight, conservative, and very outspoken. Oldhorse was a socially inept free spirit who diligently kept to himself.
“A while,” Oldhorse said before taking a smooth drag on his cigarette.
“Is it supposed to be a secret or something?”
Oldhorse said nothing, glaring out beyond Sean’s shoulder with indifference.
He wondered if Oldhorse knew the answer himself or was just being aloof. He pivoted to stare out into the night in the same direction as Oldhorse. As a frosty breeze brushed along his face, Sean thought about Toby and what it might mean to him to have a man back in his home after so many years. Like Sean, Toby’s father had abandoned him at a young age. Sean knew it had to be tough for Joan to raise a boy with autism on her own, but it was clear that she had done a good job thus far. He just hoped that she had thought through bringing someone like Oldhorse into their lives. After a few moments, he spoke. “That boy’s special, you know?”
Oldhorse nodded his head and took another drag. “That’s why his mother doesn’t want you around him.”
Sean let a conceding chuckle escape his lips. “I know,” he said. “I guess that’s what makes her a good mom.”
About a minute went by without either man speaking a word. They just stood there in conjoined silence as delicate flakes of snow dotted their bodies.
“You need a ride?” Sean offered, aware that Oldhorse didn’t own a car. “Or are you staying here tonight?”
“Staying here.”
“All right.” Sean headed for the car when Oldhorse unexpectedly spoke again.
“I’m meeting with Lumbergh in the morning.”
It was unlike Oldhorse to prolong any form of small talk. From Sean’s experience, a conversation with the man was typically like talking to a brick wall. It made no sense to Sean why his brother-in-law would need to talk to Oldhorse, a man who had no interest in town business whatsoever. He wasn’t even sure the two had spoken since the Montoya shooting. He glanced back. “Lumbergh? Why?”
Oldhorse shook his head, his gaze still trained forward. He took another drag before saying, “Don’t know. He left a note on my door. He wants to meet. I’ll find out tomorrow.”
Chapter 5
Police Chief Gary Lumbergh’s exhausted eyes burned a hole through the thin computer screen that was propped up along the center of his redwood desk. His dark, thinning hair was uncharacteristically frazzled. A light green, button-up shirt that had been neatly pressed that morning now hung off his short, thin, 135-pound frame in a rumpled, dampened mess. Half of it was untucked, dangling over the edge of his pleated pants following a hasty trip to the restroom.
His left arm was suspended below his chest in a wide sling. It was an irritating but necessary companion following his recent shoulder surgery, glenohumeral joint reconstruction. He hoped it would be the last time he would have to come under the knife.
The past six months hadn’t been easy for the chief. The hail of automatic gunfire that had left him with a collapsed lung, a broken humerus, and a family of lead lodged under his flesh was a memory he had hoped to one day leave behind. His small, damaged body, however, seemed determined not to let him forget.
He recalled sitting next to Oldhorse that fateful July day, drooped over in the passenger seat of a car as they sped down a twisty mountain road, desperate to make it to the hospital. He’d been a bloody mess, with cloth strips torn from an old sweatshirt holding his arm together. He’d been shot up badly by Alvar Montoya and was fading in and out of consciousness. He’d barely made it to the hospital alive.
As if the surgeries weren’t reminder enough of that day, recent revelations were now playing a far more cruel game on his psyche. He had learned at the beginning of the month that Alvar’s older brother, Lautaro Montoya, had escaped from a maximum security prison in Chihuahua, Mexico. He’d been serving time for drug trafficking on top of a murder rap for taking out a rival dealer. His escape route was an underground tunnel that he’d been working on over what local authorities believed was a span of two years.
“He was a committed man,” the warden of the prison had told Lumbergh in a thick Spanish accent over the phone.
The tunnel, thirty-five inches in diameter, had extended over fifty yards. It led straight from a removable cluster of tile in the wall behind Montoya’s cot to the open desert just beyond the outside prison walls. Left behind in the tunnel were several makeshift chisels and a sledgehammer, thought to have been supplied to him by a corrupt prison guard.
In Montoya’s cell, a number of articles from Mexican newspapers detailing the death of his brother Alvar were found taped to a slab of cement. The shootout between Alvar and Lumbergh had been big news in Chihuahua. The Montoya family had a long criminal history throughout the area, much of it pertaining to violent, sadistic behavior including several suspected homicides. Most were never proven. With one brother behind bars and the other reported dead, celebrations ensued throughout numerous localities, and the tale of Alvar’s slayer, Chief Gary Lumbergh of Winston, Colorado, spread like wildfire south of the border.
The discovery of the newspaper clippings in Lautaro Montoya’s cell was information relayed to Lumbergh not by Mexican authorities but by a local journalist covering the story, who thought it important to pass along.
Lumbergh initially gave little credence to the journalist’s concerns, but a week later, when he began receiving eerie calls at the office from a man speaking only a single word in Spanish before hanging up, the chief ’s worries intensified.
Marranito. Translated into English, it meant “baby pig.”
The chief ’s attempts to trace the number back to an individual proved fruitless as the calls were placed from a prepaid cellphone. He was, however, able to determine that the phone had been purchased in a border town just south of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Anyone traveling from Chihuahua to central Colorado would pass through Las Cruces on Interstate 25.
Sitting alone in the silence of his office, with the past still on his mind, Lumbergh continued to punch buttons along his keyboard, using only his right hand. He’d been doing it for hours as his mind drifted into memories.
He stopped for a moment, sliding open the top drawer of his desk and latching onto a brown prescription bottle. His thin, slightly trembling fingers worked its lid in an awkward motion as he cradled the bottle against his chest. Using a technique he had mastered in recent months, he was able to twist off the lid and conquer its safety mechanism without having to use his other hand.
He popped a couple of mid-sized white and yellow capsules into his mouth, hesitating a moment before flinging a third one in. He then reached for the three-hour-old, half-empty mug of coffee that sat on a coaster o
n his desk. He washed the capsules down his throat in a single gulp and then used his tongue to pry the long-expired wad of chewing gum from the inside of his cheek. He brought it back to the center of his mouth and gnawed on it feverishly before glancing at a picture propped up on the corner of his desk. It was of him and his wife celebrating his recent thirty-ninth birthday at a local restaurant. Both wore broad smiles.
After returning the mug to its coaster, his hand went back to his computer mouse resting on the blue pad that had a digital image of a police badge emblem on it. He navigated to a couple of web browser windows he had opened earlier that night, logging back into various law enforcement databases whose connection sessions had timed-out.
His eyes surveyed a handwritten list of names from the top sheet of a notepad that lay on his desk. The word “Aliases” was written and underlined. Half of the names he’d already crossed out with a pencil. He typed the next unblemished one into an input field on the computer screen. A tap of the “Enter” key revealed multiple rows of thumbnail pictures: prison mug shots. All were of men with dark hair. Most looked of Hispanic descent. He clicked on one of the pictures.
“Tell me someone picked you up, pendejo,” he muttered.
A sudden thud somewhere from the front of the building yanked his attention from his computer. His mouth slid open. His gaze zipped past the numerous plaques and awards that hung from his office wall—recognitions he had earned in his former life as a police lieutenant in Chicago. He felt like the accolades were taunting him as he swallowed some bile and quickly flicked off his desk lamp.
The lamp was the only light in the room other than that coming from his computer monitor, which he briskly turned off as well. He hurriedly rose from his leather office chair and reached into the brown leather side-holster stripped below his ribcage. He pulled out the Glock and relieved its safety, wincing from a jolt of pain that went up his opposite arm from the movement.
