by Blake Banner
We rolled slowly back through the town and I turned left onto Lickskillet Road. We bumped and bounced down the track till we came to Lefthand Canyon Drive, where I turned left and drove slowly, among the growing shadows on the hills and the pine woods, for about four miles. Just before the road turned north, I saw a ramshackle building on the left, set back about thirty yards, half in among the trees. It was made mainly of wood, with a tall, rickety, gray stone chimney that ran all the way down to the ground on the right-hand wall. There was a broad porch at the front and an open garden, where you could see all the ground had been churned up, and the grass and weeds crushed, by vehicles entering and leaving. I pulled over and climbed out to have a look. There were shutters closed over the windows and when I tried the door, it was locked. I walked down the side and put my hand on the stone chimney. It was cold.
As I came back to the garden, Dehan was approaching from the other side. She shook her head. “Nothing. You think this is it?”
I shrugged with my eyebrows. “It looks like a shack, and it’s where he said it would be.” I didn’t say anything for a moment, looking around, listening. It was real quiet. You could feel the evening gathering, and even the birds were silent. I asked, “You think there’s anything in it?”
She made a face. “Kathleen as a dope smoker? Not really.”
“How about Kathleen coming to her sister’s rescue?”
“Oh man…”
I rested my ass on the trunk of the car and stared at the old ramshackle building.
“What we still haven’t got, Dehan, is a concrete reason why she came here, or why she lied about where she was going. Let me rephrase that. We don’t know where she was going, what her purpose was in going there, or what made her lie about it. All we have is that she lied to her mother and her husband about going to see Ingrid and Alfredo, and she turned up a week later, ten miles away from their house, beheaded, ill-concealed in the woods.”
Dehan sighed and ran her fingers through her thick hair. “So, how would that work? Her sister gets in with bad company. Cannabis is legal in Colorado, but it’s not in New York. Maybe they had a bit of business going, with Pat selling the produce back east. She gets into trouble with them. Who knows? Maybe they were giving her merchandise to sell and she kept the proceeds, didn’t pay, spent it on coke—whatever. They want their money. They’re going to come to New York to collect. She convinces Kathleen to come to the Shack and pay them off, plead for time—again, whatever. Point is, they are mad and they make an example of her.”
“It’s plausible. It’s no less plausible than Greg raping her. We need to come back when they’re open.”
She nodded. “Maybe your man Ned knows what their hours are.”
I smiled. “You think?”
“You never can tell with these clean-living, God fearin’ country folk, Stone. They often have dark secrets.”
The sun slipped behind the trees. Suddenly, there was a sharp chill in the air and the sky seemed to darken. I shifted my ass off the trunk and moved toward the driver’s side.
“You know what they have here, Dehan, as well as bull’s balls?”
“What’s that, Stone?”
“Bison steak.” I climbed in and slammed the door. Dehan got in beside me. I fired up the engine and she turned on the heater. “You ever had a bison steak, Dehan?”
“Nope, but I reckon bison steak is something I could get pretty intense about. I propose a shower, a craft beer followed by a bottle of good wine, and a couple of bison steaks. I think that might be mighty helpful in stimulatin’ them there gray cells.”
“Well, I’s inclined to agree, ma’am, bein’ partial to a beer an’ a bison steak myself.”
And we drove off, into the sunset.
TEN
They had pulled the drapes in the dining room and built up the fire. It was agreeably warm and, looking across the table at Dehan, who was holding her beer and gazing at the burning logs, it was easy to forget we were working and imagine we were on holiday. I was vaguely surprised that the idea of being on holiday with Dehan did not strike me as odd.
She took a deep breath and frowned. “Here’s the way my mind is working, Stone. Our suspect pool is small.” She dragged her gaze away from the burning logs and looked at me. “We have an unknown possible at the Shack, or we have Greg. Whichever way you turn it, we end up with the same result.” She raised her shoulders. “I just can’t imagine that we are going to come up with another suspect. It’s either Mr. X, or it’s Greg.”
I dragged my mind back from the strange places where it had been wandering and thought about what she had said.
“I agree.”
“So we need to eliminate either Mr. X or Greg.”
“Getting hold of her credit card, phone records, and emails will help.”
She grunted quietly and turned back to the fire. “There is not a lot more we can do with Greg right now until we get those records…”
I interrupted her. “Actually, there may be.”
She frowned. “Like what?”
“The DNA samples taken with the rape kit. DNA testing has come on since 2012. I think we should resubmit the semen, have it sent to Frank back at the lab, see if he can make anything of it.”
She nodded. “Yeah, that’s good.”
“It will be interesting to see how Greg reacts when we ask him for a sample for comparison.”
“Yeah.” She nodded again. “Anyway, where was I going… I’ve been thinking about the shack.” She grinned. “According to Ned, they open after nine P.M., and it’s ‘not the sort of place we would want to go.’ If we turn up there looking like this…” She gestured across the table at me with her open hand, then back at herself with both hands. “…Let’s face it, we have ‘COPS’ written all over us. Not only will they not tell us shit, we’ll be lucky to get out alive.”
I frowned. “What do you suggest?”
“We don’t go as cops.”
“Undercover?”
“Not exactly. I don’t think we are authorized to conduct an undercover investigation here, so there could be problems with the legality of any evidence we gather that way. But there is nothing to stop us going along for a drink, is there?” She spread her hands. “We’re waiting on Kathleen’s records, we have some time to kill, we heard there’s a bar of local interest, so we went along in our free time…”
I smiled. “We don’t need to tell them we’re cops.”
She grinned again. “And if we are off duty, we don’t need to look like cops.”
Peaches and Cream’s mother brought out our bison steaks with a look of real satisfaction on her face, like she’d bred them, slaughtered them, and cooked them herself. She poured the wine and said, “Enjoy your meal,” as though she really meant it. We did our best.
The next twenty minutes went by in almost total silence. If you have never eaten a bison steak, it is hard to convey just how engrossing they can be. These animals live wild, they eat grass and they are not pumped full of hormones and other crap. The meat is lean and has a flavor that is hard to describe, except to say that it is beyond exquisite. In Valhalla, only Odin gets to eat bison steak. It would not be an exaggeration to say that we ate in reverent silence. The only sound that we were aware of was the crackle and spit of the fire. Occasionally we would pause to sip the wine and exchange a smile. Other than that, we focused only on the noble meat.
When the last piece was gone, we sat back in our chairs and Dehan drained her glass.
“Man,” she said, and nodded slowly.
“What did I tell you? Is that something?”
I called Peaches and Cream Sr. over and ordered a Bushmills, and Dehan had one, too. Then we sat with our chairs turned toward the fire and our legs stretched out and sipped.
“Don’t shave.”
“OK.”
“And after you shower in the morning, don’t brush your hair, just let it dry anyhow. We’ll get you a sweatshirt from the general store, and some jeans, and
maybe some Timberland boots. Get you roughed up a bit.”
“What about you?”
“I look rough anyhow. Maybe I’ll get a woolen hat, and some of those gloves with no fingers. You know the ones?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You know how to roll a cigarette?”
“No.”
“OK, I’ll roll them for you.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“You did once, and you will again tomorrow night.”
I studied her face. She was smirking at the fire. She was right, though. If we were going to get any information from the crowd at the Shack, we needed to fit in, and that meant being a couple of dope heads from New York looking for some fun in Colorado. I sighed.
“But we go armed.”
“Yup.”
“And let’s be clear about our objective.”
She nodded. “You want to define it for us?”
I thought about it. “We are there to find out, A, if they had a deal with Pat to distribute and/or sell dope in New York, and B, if Kathleen came to see them on the night of…” I thought about it. It was a forty-hour journey at least. “On the night of the 8th of July.”
“Agreed.” She sipped her whiskey and rolled it around her mouth for a moment before swallowing it and sighing. “Man, that’s good. So, we’re going to have to play it by ear, but we should have some kind of basic plan.”
“Yeah, I would say our main target is the barkeep. Try and get into conversation with him. Maybe we are open to doing some business with him, selling dope back in the Big Apple. See where that leads us. Meanwhile, sound out the other customers too, see if anybody remembers either of them.”
“And if they get suspicious…”
“We leave. We don’t want a conflict on Sheriff Watson’s turf. And we sure as hell don’t want a shootout.”
We were quiet for a while. With the wine and the whiskey, and the warmth of the fire, I was finding it hard to keep my mind on the case. Dehan seemed to be miles away, transfixed by the wavering flames. The orange light bathed her face and I was struck, not for the first time, by how perfect her features were. It was a fact she seemed to be totally unaware of. I surprised myself by asking, “How are things with your Uncle Ben? He still trying to fix you up with rich surgeons?”
She gave a small, comfortable laugh. “No, I behaved so badly with the last surgeon he tried to set me up with, I think he’s given me up as a lost cause.” She sipped and sighed again. “You ever miss it? Family life?”
I hesitated, not sure what the answer was. “I miss the idea of it. The idea of the companionship. The idea of being able to share a thought, an idea, a feeling, without having to say anything.” I shrugged. “But I never had that. How can you miss something you never had?”
She looked at me for a long moment. Her expression was serious. Eventually she said, “I don’t know. But I miss it too, and I never had it either.” She drained her glass and leaned forward to slap my leg. “C’mon, big guy. Let’s get some sleep.” She stood. “If you snore, I’ll gut you and leave your body in Lefthand Canyon for the coyotes.”
“Snore?” I said, as we tramped up the stairs. “The way you hawk and stridulate, I’ll be lucky to get to sleep at all.”
“Hawk and stridulate…?”
“Yup.”
The next day was pretty uneventful. I was not allowed to shave when I got up, and after I showered, Dehan spent almost fifteen minutes jabbing her fingers through my hair to make it look as though I hadn’t combed it. Apparently, if I simply didn’t comb it, it looked as though I had combed it. That’s forty-six wasted years right there.
Then after breakfast, we went and spent three hundred bucks on buying clothes to make me look disreputable: some torn jeans that were more expensive than the ones that hadn’t got torn yet, a black sweatshirt with a large cannabis leaf on it and the legend, ‘High, how’ya doin?’ in faded letters, and a pair of Timberland boots that cost almost as much as my car.
This all made Dehan smile a lot. “Yeah, man. You look cool. You should dress down a bit, you know that?”
“What is this, Dehan? Is this method? Are you getting into your role for tonight?”
She raised an eyebrow at me, which made the manager of the general store simper and move away to his till. “Hey, dude, I don’t know where you were raised, Stone. But I was raised on the mean streets of the Bronx. I don’t need no method. I am the streets!”
I rolled my eyes and paid, and we took my new image to trudge through the woods in Lefthand Canyon for a few hours till the sun started to slip. We found nothing, but that was pretty much what we expected to find. Five years of snow, rain, wind, large and small animals and a million bugs had removed any trace of Kathleen’s murder and her killer. Nature is ruthless about life and death. They are to her as breathing in and out are to us. It’s only human beings who make a big deal out it.
As the sun began to slide off the big blue dome of the sky and into the western hills, we began to trudge, slide and stumble down the steep bank toward my car. Then Dehan stuck her hands in her back pockets and asked, “So, Stone, I’m a working-class girl from the Bronx, Mexican Catholic mom, Jewish dad. You know all this about me. What about you? You’re pretty secretive, you know. Stone...” She savored the name. “What is that? English? German? You working-class? Middle class?” She spread her hands. “You drive a classic Jaguar. You know your wines. You use words like stridulate. What’s the deal with you?”
We got to the bottom of the hill and came out of the woods and I unlocked the car. We climbed in and I sat for a while staring at the road as dusk slowly encroached. Finally, I shrugged.
“No deal. I’m not secretive, there’s just not mot much to tell. Your family is more interesting than mine. Dad traced his family back to the war of independence. They were Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Brooklyn. Strict, strong. Fought for the king.” I laughed without much feeling. “Always defending the losing side, that’s us. Mom was a small, pretty, weak woman. They were unhappy, but never enough to talk about it, and never enough to do anything to fix it.” I smiled at her. “They did their duty, and then they died.”
“Wow…”
“Not really. No big deal.”
I turned the key, felt the satisfying rumble of the big four-liter engine and pulled away, back toward Gold Hill. Dehan shifted in her seat so she could face me.
“I remember something I read once about Chagall.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Chagall, the painter?”
“Yeah. I told you. You’re not the only guy who uses Google, remember? It said that the important thing about Chagall was not what he put into his paintings, but everything that he left out.”
“Huh.”
“I didn’t get it at the time, but now I understand what they meant. It’s what you just did.”
“Is it?”
“You know it is. You just told me exactly nothing about your childhood and your family. But when you did that, you told me everything.”
We ground and bumped our way up Lickskillet Road and then headed east back toward Seven Hills. Eventually, as we were approaching the Wagon Wheel, I said, “So, we going for another bison steak tonight, before the Shack, or something lighter?”
She looked at me a long time before answering. Finally, she said, “I don’t do light, Stone. I do heavy, and intense. It’s part of the stereotype. Like you with your WASP stiff upper lip.”
ELEVEN
We arrived at the Shack at ten. The shutters were open and the windows were glowing with a warm, amber light that turned the building and the hillside behind it into a black mass against the translucent night sky. It reflected off the chassis of a handful of trucks and bikes, and occasionally flickered as a body moved past inside. You could make out the strains of music. It sounded like the Eagles. Some things never die.
I parked near the gate, where I couldn’t be blocked in, and where it would be easy to get out in a hurry if we needed to. Dehan gave my hair a last r
uffle and we climbed out into the icy night air.
We pushed through the old wooden door into a surprisingly large, crowded room. There was no hush as we stepped in. They didn’t all go quiet and turn to look at us with suspicious eyes. They ignored us completely.
On the far right, there was a large, stone, open fire built up with big logs. It was burning well, casting an agreeable, flickering glow, and the room was warm. There were maybe fifteen tables scattered around the floor, and most of them were occupied. On the left, opposite the fire, there was a long bar with two men behind it, serving drinks to half a dozen guys leaning on the counter. At a couple of tables in the corner, by the fire, I counted six men in biker’s leathers. They were all either bald or had very long hair. A couple of them had forked beards. On their jackets they bore the emblem of the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels.
Just about everybody else looked like your stereotypical off-grid hippie, in used jeans, nondescript shirts, and long hair. About the only thing to distinguish the men from the women was that most of the women didn’t have beards, and most of the men didn’t have breasts. Most.
The only people who stood out from the crowd were two guys who were sitting with the Angels in the corner. If they’d been in a club in the Bronx I wouldn’t even have noticed them. Here they stood out like nuns at a clip joint. One of them looked like Ray Charles, black glasses and all. He laughed a lot and held a cigarette in his left hand in a way that told you he was never without it.
Next to him was a Latino in his mid or late thirties. He had pale blue eyes you could see clean across the room, and a scar down his left cheek that twisted his mouth and made it look as though everything he looked at he found nauseating.
I saw all this in the time it takes to close a door. Then Dehan was clinging to my arm and leaning on me and saying, “Stop staring, laugh and buy me a drink.”
She laughed to illustrate her point and pulled me toward the bar. We found a vacant spot and one of the barmen approached us, smiling.
