Strip Search

by Rex Burns

  “Juvenile Division, Sergeant Cole.”

  “Andy, this is Gabe Wager.” He explained who he was looking for.

  “Our files are sealed, Gabe. You know that.”

  “I don’t want to see the files. I just want to know if the names are active.”

  A pause. “Sanchez. Jesus, we got so many Sanchezes. What about birthdates? You got that?”

  “Just the approximate age. I can give you the father’s name.”

  “Well, that’ll eliminate half of them, anyway—the little bastards.”

  Wager told him as much as he knew.

  “All right, hang on—I’ll see what comes up.”

  In a couple minutes he came back with four names from the computer, but none of them matched Tommy’s sons. “That’s it, Gabe. That’s all I got.”

  “OK, Andy. Thanks for the help.”

  Wager hung up, fingers lingering on the smooth plastic of the telephone. Then he swore and quickly hooked four numbers. “Jo Fabrizio, please.”

  “Officer Fabrizio, sir.”

  “You want to go out for a beer after work?”

  “Am I supposed to know who this is?”

  “Dammit, Jo, you know who it is. Yes or no, do you want to go out?”

  “Are you sure you do?”

  “I’m asking, aren’t I?”

  Maybe she figured that was the most she’d get by way of apology. At any rate, she said, “Might as well—it’s the best offer I’ve had all day.”

  “I’ll be by a little after four.” Then he added in a quick mutter which she might not have heard. “And thanks.”

  My Brother’s Bar had changed in a lot of ways: picture windows opening up one dark wall to bring in the light and curious glances from the street, another large room for rush-hour crowds, remodeled bathrooms that lost a lot of the aura which the dank, smelly stalls used to have. The last change didn’t bother Wager, but the windows did; they even had potted plants hanging there, and next would come ferns. Then Wager would have to talk to Demetri—maybe take him out back and read state statute 18-4-507: Defacing Landmarks or Monuments. At least the barroom itself had not changed, and he led Jo to one of the small tables in a corner. He felt more at home with its dimness and the relaxed murmur of late-afternoon drinkers, and it was still his favorite place. No loud music, no tweedle and zap of electronic games, no television set. You could do what you came there for: sit and drink. And, if you wanted, you could talk.

  “Hi, Gabe—the usual?”

  He said yes and Jo nodded, and the waitress, sliding a clean ashtray on the table, went quickly to the pickup with the orders.

  “Did you find out anything for Tommy?”

  He shook his head. “I put out a few feelers. But nothing’s turned up. I don’t really expect it to.”

  “Why?”

  “The lead’s too vague—no specific crime, no names of associates. Unless there’s a complaint record somewhere naming his sons, the chances are pretty bad for learning anything.”

  They talked about how disappointed Tom would be, and what other avenues Wager might try; they talked about the morning’s homicides and about the officers they knew who would be competing in the International Police Olympics down in Arizona. They talked about anything except their argument, until finally, Wager, feeling his third beer loosen the taut muscles of neck and shoulders like a deep sigh, said he was sorry she’d thought he was serious last night.

  “You were.”

  “Not really. Not at first, anyway.”

  “It sure sounded like it.” Jo, still nursing her first beer, looked up. “What gets me is that you say you’re fed up with women who hint around and never say what they mean. And then when I try to tell you something, you don’t want to hear it.”

  “I’m willing to talk about whatever you want to. I just don’t like guarding myself against being used.”

  “Vacation.”

  “Dammit—”

  She laughed. “See? One word and your hackles are up.”

  “Well, that was the wrong word.”

  “Look, Wager, you don’t want to be on your guard around me. Why should I have to be on my guard around you? Why shouldn’t I be able to talk about whatever I want to with the person I care about? Why should part of my life be closed off because you close off part of your life? Don’t you think I get fed up with men who get mad or hurt or sulk when I mention something they don’t like?”

  She was taking a lot of the things he felt and turning them around for use against him. Especially that part about not being able to bring up certain topics without someone getting hysterical. Lorraine had a whole encyclopedia of such topics, and now Jo was telling him that he did too. She should have been a lawyer.

  “Well? Am I right or wrong?”

  He took a deep drink and thought about that, and about what was the truthful answer. And when he decided, he felt something akin to a sense of freedom that surprised him—as if some internal fist which had been clenched around the do’s and don’ts of his life had relaxed a bit and it wasn’t so bad after all. “OK. I guess you’re right. We should be able to talk about anything.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Yeah, I do. So go ahead: talk.”

  She laughed again, more with those eyes than with her voice. “No, you start first. Or you’ll say I’m manipulating you.”

  “All right. How’d you like to see a rodeo this weekend?”

  CHAPTER 3

  JO THOUGHT IT was a wonderful idea, and Wager learned something else about her: she knew a lot more about the sport than he did, especially girls’ barrel racing.

  “All girls go through a horsy stage, Gabe. Haven’t you ever heard of My Friend Flicka?”

  “Is that like Lassie Come Home?”

  “Only if you’ve got a small horse or a big dog. I used to barrel race—Daddy bought a quarter horse for me named Doodles. She was quick—good speed and turning. But a lot of girls rode better than I did. I never made it past the Little Britches level.”

  “Why not?” Wager surged the Trans-Am up the wide lanes of I-70 toward Empire Junction and the Berthoud Pass turnoff. Ahead, still bearing large patches of snow on the gray-and-yellow rock above timberline, peaks rose sharply against the dark of high-altitude sky. Closer to the highway, the forested slopes showed streaks of talus slides and plunging streams from the spring runoff, which was heavy this year. A deep snow pack, a quick hot spring: the radio was talking about floods on both sides of the Divide, and already a couple of river rafters had drowned.

  “I discovered boys. And cars. Daddy finally had to sell her. He sold the horse, the tack, the pickup truck and trailer, and he used to say if the barn had wheels, he’d have sold that, too.”

  “He didn’t like horses?”

  “He didn’t like taking care of her. She was never ridden, so she acted up a lot. It was my job, and I didn’t do it. Too busy having fun in high school.”

  The rodeo they headed for was a lesser one, like those sponsored by small towns all over Colorado. It was an amateur show, Jo explained, a pumpkin roller with small prizes and jackpots, and there wouldn’t be any big-name cowboys from the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. “They won’t waste a weekend on a show as small as this one.” But they might see some of the association’s permit holders, young cowboys trying to get enough experience and earn enough money to qualify for the big time. “A rider has to win a thousand dollars before he can get his PRCA card. So it just makes sense to go against people you think you can beat. It’s sort of like minor-league baseball.”

  “I thought that’s what college rodeo was for.”

  “That’s another way of getting experience, and some good training, too, if the coaches are any good. Little Britches, High School Rodeo Association, Intercollegiate Rodeo, they’re all good training. Most of the pros do it that way now.”

  “And for somebody who doesn’t go that route, is this one of the ways?”

  “About the only way. It’s awfu
lly hard, though, to come in green and compete against high school and college rodeo champions. There’s a lot to learn, and a lot of the riders even at these small rodeos have been competing for five or ten years already.”

  Tommy had said the same thing when he telephoned Wager and told him that his sons were supposed to be at this rodeo. The stockman for the show had seen the names on the list of registrants and recognized them. “I don’t know if you want to go over there, Gabe, but if so, it’s on Saturday, near Winter Park.”

  “You want to come along?”

  The telephone was silent, and Wager could imagine Tommy sucking on a cigarette while he thought about it. “No, I guess not. They’d see me and wonder what the hell I was doing there. I got stock to look at, anyway.”

  “I haven’t found any police record on either of the boys.”

  “I’m relieved to hear that. I did find out that John does some drinking at a place in Glenwood Springs—the Hanging Lake Lounge.”

  “Who gave you the information?”

  “An old boy I used to travel with. He saw Johnny there three or four times, he said. John’s working out that way, but he didn’t know at what. I don’t know if there’s anything to it, but that’s all I got.”

  “I’ll check it out. If you hear any names, let me know.”

  “Will do, Gabe. Adios.”

  And he had checked out the bar, with the same results: nothing official in police files, no contact card in the DPD computer.

  They slowed behind a laboring tanker truck that jetted black smoke from its upright exhaust as the driver geared down on the long climb to the summit. When a passing lane opened, Wager swung out and floored the pedal, the Trans-Am settling against the pull of its engine to dodge quickly back in front of the truck.

  “I’m glad the road’s not icy.” Jo looked over the edge of the unguarded highway where the tops of pine trees fell away toward a foamy streak glimmering far below. “It’s a bad road in winter.”

  “You come up here skiing a lot?”

  The question meant more than it asked, and Jo answered its full range of inquiry. “Not anymore.”

  That was the way they handled the inevitable questions about each other’s past. First, Wager tried not to ask because it wasn’t any of his business; and if on some impulse he did, he refused to pick at scabs. That had been another of Lorraine’s specialties which surfaced through the cracks of their marriage: she just had to know—completely, precisely, absolutely. She had to know what he meant when he said anything and what he meant when he was silent. And if he had no intended meaning at all, she had to know what that meant, too. She would have, he’d often thought, done damn well in the old Interrogation Unit. “I never learned to ski.”

  “We’ll have to try cross-country.”

  “Is it any easier than downhill?” Wager had seen a film of a hot-dogger bouncing down cliffs of humped snow, blond hair wild against an aura of glaring sun, knees almost as high as his black goggles while snow clods exploded from his skis. He’d be willing to try it. Even if it broke both his legs—and it probably would—Wager would try it. But he wasn’t sure how much he’d enjoy it.

  “Not necessarily. But we can go at our own pace. We won’t try anything we’re not ready for.”

  “All right,” said Wager, relieved. “You got a date for next winter.”

  They crested Berthoud Pass, skirting a parking apron crowded with cars bearing a variety of out-of-state license plates. Beyond the heavy dark timbers of a restaurant, the towers of a cable car marched above stony tundra and snowfields toward the peak above. Across the highway, a closed chairlift disappeared among stunted pines. Ahead, flanked on the east by the wall of the Front Range, a gully dark with pines gradually widened into a broad valley that was patched here and there by the paler green of aspen stands. Far to the north, a band of ragged blue and snowy glimmer, was Rocky Mountain National Park.

  “Sometimes I forget all this exists,” murmured Jo.

  Wager’s eyes and mind were rested by it, too. It had been a long time—over a year?—since he had been away from the streets of Denver with their steady pulse of unnatural deaths and far from natural lives. He, too, had forgotten how clean a sky could be, how massively the earth could loom over the scratch of a highway down below, how far—when the walls and office towers and neon glare were gone—one could see. His hand touched hers resting on the seat between them. “It’s peaceful.”

  Her hand turned up to welcome his.

  Stretched across the highway that formed the main street, a red, white, and blue banner read “Welcome to Buckaroo Days.” On the dozen or so lamp standards that marked a vague center to the string of buildings scattered down each side of the pavement, red, white, and blue ribbons spiraled up to a cluster of wind-tossed bows. A Saturday jam of pickup trucks and four-wheel-drive vehicles filled the lot of a large, modern grocery store advertising cold beer and picnic supplies. Car traffic moved slowly up and down the highway to nose in and out of the few side streets and to swing in sudden halt at various shops and motels and fast-food stores that filled the ground floors of timbered buildings whose cantilevered balconies thrust out over busy malls. Wager asked at a gas station for directions to the rodeo grounds and then followed the highway a mile or so until they saw the large sign and arrow pointing left: “Buckaroo Arena—Rodeo Today!”

  He turned in behind an oversized pickup towing a horse trailer with two brown rumps jiggling against the sway of the dirt road. They lurched through the stately shade of an aspen grove and then into a stubbled field where teenagers wearing orange vests wagged their hands at the arriving cars and headed them into dusty parking rows. At the far end of the field where tires had mashed pale tracks in the mown grass, the arena’s white paint glared in the sun, and they heard the quack of the announcer’s voice introduce someone who mumbled something into the microphone and was answered by the sound of polite applause like a mild surf lifted on the wind.

  “Do you want to look for them before we go into the stands?”

  Wager nodded. “We can ask around, anyway.” He wasn’t sure what he would do if he found them. Check them over; see if they had two legs, two arms, one head, all regulation issue. Tell them hello from their dad, maybe. And perhaps admit to himself that they weren’t the reason for this trip but the excuse—that it made Wager feel less guilty about sneaking out of Denver for a while.

  He angled away from the line of people in boots and cowboy hats and jeans filing from the parking lot toward the grandstand gates. “Where are they likely to be?”

  “Behind the chutes looking at the animals, I suppose. But we’ll probably need a pass to get there.”

  They walked around the outside fencing, where officials and participants parked their cars. Here and there, cowboys unloaded gear from camper shells that weighed down the back of their pickup trucks; vans, their side doors and roof vents flung open for a breeze, showed other cowboys eating or smoking and working with ropes or leather rigging. Most were young, and near some stood nervous mothers and fathers asking if their son was sure he had this or that, or offering advice he already knew, or making him idly kick the dirt with red-faced embarrassment. Others, old enough to be free of parents, looked their way and grinned and turned to the more serious business of sizing up the girls. They flitted like butterflies through the cowboys’ parking area and then resettled along the fence near the contestants’ gate. There, number tags pinned to the backs of checkered shirts, young men filed in and out past a guard who looked like the others except for a cast on his leg and a badge on his shirt that said “Arena Policeman.” Wager asked if he knew the Sanchez brothers.

  “Not offhand. You got numbers for them?”

  “No. But they’re registered.”

  The guard called to one of the girls. “Teri, let me see that there program you got.”

  The girl, seventeen or eighteen and chewing gum behind lips that never closed, said sure and glanced carelessly at Wager in his city clothes and t
hen eagerly back at a pair of cowboys wearing large shiny belt buckles.

  “Yeah, here they are. Numbers thirty-seven and thirty-eight. They’re in all five events, so they’re probably over with the riding stock behind the chutes. They’re holding the drawing now for the timed events,” he explained. “Most of the boys like to be there. Sorry I can’t let you in without a pass.”

  “Any place I can leave a message for them?”

  From the stands came the steady clump of boots on boards and a ripple of laughter at an exchange between a clown and the announcer.

  “Arena secretary’s office, I guess. It’s over there.” He pointed to a door leading to a small room tucked under the stands.

  Wager thanked him and led Jo to the plank door. A hand-lettered sign said “Arena Secretary: If You Got Business Come In. If Not Keep Out.” He opened the door.

  It was a cramped room with a beat-up metal desk piled high with papers and folders and even a stack of black-and-white photographs of smiling cowboys. Thumb tacked to the unpainted board walls was a variety of lists and notices; half-buried on the desk, a portable radio reached its antenna up for air and a drawn-out voice sang, “I’m laying down my ace of hearts for you.” A harried woman under a tangle of bleached hair looked up and tugged a cigarette off her lip. “You need something here?”

  “I’d like to leave a message for James and John Sanchez. They’re riders.”

  “Riders and ropers, too. Sure, stick it up on that wall there. But hurry up—I got about two minutes to get up to the booth and then this office closes.” She turned back to the form and scratched at it with a pencil.

  Wager tore a leaf from his green pocket notebook and scribbled a line, then found a free thumbtack and stuck it to the board under the messages sign. “If the office closes, how will they get this?”

  “It’s open at halftime for a little bit. It opens for payoffs as soon as the rodeo’s over. If they win something, they’ll sure as hell be here. If not, they might. You finished yet?”