Pariah

by Thomas Zigal

  Extracting a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, Marley walked away from the door and took a seat at one of the dining tables. “Is this the smoking section?” he asked no one in particular. “Waiter, I’ll have the yellowtail and some warm sake.”

  Kurt propped the shotgun against the wall and waited for the others to move out of the doorway so he could keep an eye on the creature. The smell was horrendous, a mix of putrid fish remains and the animal’s foul breath and the scat it had left somewhere in the room. As she raised her head from the bucket, licking her yellow teeth, Kurt could see a plastic DOW tag clipped to the bear’s ear. She had been captured once before.

  These small black bears lived in the higher elevations of the valley, but developers were building monster homes up there now, each one at least ten thousand square feet on five acres of cleared land. The construction activity was not only scaring the bears, it was depleting their food sources. Over the past three years they had been coming down to civilization in alarming numbers, marauding through garbage cans, occasionally breaking into a home while the occupants were away. Though everyone in the county had been warned repeatedly not to feed the bears, some misguided fools were still setting out food in the hope of befriending the creatures. It was spoiling them, eliminating their natural fear of man.

  The Department of Wildlife’s response was clear and straightforward: They tranquilized bears found wandering in populated areas and transported them back to the wilderness. But the bears kept returning. The bolder ones had lost their inhibitions and the dow was concerned that humans might get hurt, perhaps a child. So now they ear-tagged captured bears and employed a “three strikes” policy. A bear caught for a third time was euthanized by lethal injection.

  Kurt watched the animal knock over another garbage can and devour a slew of fine bones. He hoped this wasn’t the beginning of a new pattern of bear behavior. The local restaurateurs weren’t exactly tree-hugging naturalists. They would poison every bear in Christendom to defend a single serving of poached salmon in white wine sauce.

  “Here’s Linda,” Joey said, mashing out his cigarette in a teacup.

  Deputy Ríos trotted into the dining room with the CO2-powered Cap-Chur rifle, which fired a small tranquilizer syringe filled with a muscle relaxer called Rompun and the anesthetic ketamine hydrochloride, a potent combination. First it made the bears happy, then it knocked them out.

  “Who’s been eating my porridge?” Linda said, handing the rifle to Kurt. She was a robust young woman, early thirties, with thick muscular thighs and a strong upper body. “What have we got here, boss?”

  “A mama bear without reservations,” Kurt said.

  He held the door open with his knee, cocked the lightweight rifle, and took aim. When he sighted down the barrel, scanning the far corner of the kitchen, all he could find was the bear’s plump backside protruding from under a sink. He pulled the trigger and the rifle popped like a boy’s .22 rabbit gun. The bear yelped, spun around in circles chasing her tail, and crashed against a tall column of container shelves, toppling them to the floor. Then she stopped suddenly in her tracks and studied Kurt, her small black eyes blinking like an old drunk’s at closing time. In less than sixty seconds the animal rolled onto her side, snorted mournfully, and began to nod off.

  “She’ll be snoring in five minutes,” Kurt said. “But Rick may have to shoot her up with another dose before we start moving her into the cage.”

  The six officers gathered at the swinging doors, waiting for the bear to fall asleep. Once the animal’s breathing had slowed to a somnolent rhythm, her jaw slack and drooling, Kurt entered the wrecked kitchen with the others close behind. They circled the animal where she lay sleeping in the broken glass. His first guess had been right: she looked to weigh 250 pounds, a smooth black coat with no apparent signs of scarring or trauma. No one spoke as they stared down at this beautiful creature who had lost her fear of humans.

  “Wonder if she’s carrying cubs?” Muffin said. “It’s that time of year.”

  Joey Florio knelt down next to the animal. “Well, old girl,” he said, running his hand affectionately across her bristly pelt as if petting his favorite collie, “you got in over your head this time.” Stroking her leg, he gazed about at the destruction. “The Man won’t let you mess with his sushi.”

  With no forewarning, the bear lifted her wobbly head, growled weakly, and was suddenly on her feet. Joey rolled away as the unsteady animal swiped at him with her paw, missing his face by inches. Everyone scattered. Kurt fumbled with the breech of the Cap-Chur rifle, trying to load another tranquilizer dart. The bear fell over, still woozy from the drug, then reared up on her hind legs, pawing at the air and growling in a fierce, angry roar. Muffin and Linda Ríos were cornered behind the dishwashing machine.

  “Hang on!” Kurt shouted, working the jammed rifle bolt. “I’ll take her down.”

  Two quick shots rang out and the animal’s head exploded, spewing blood and skull fragments against the tile wall. It dropped deadweight to the floor and writhed for several seconds in a bloody spasm, then lay still, panting hard.

  Kurt looked over at Mike Marley, crouched beside a grill. His .38 was still poised in the shooting position, smoke curling from the barrel.

  “Goddammit, Marley!” Joey said, crawling out from under a sink. “You didn’t have to blow the poor fucking thing away!”

  “She almost took your face off, Florio,” Marley said in a calm voice.

  Kurt finally had the rifle loaded. “Step back, people,” he said. He aimed and fired a dart into the animal’s huffing chest. She wasn’t going to survive those head wounds. The ketamine would put her to sleep before she suffered any more agony.

  “Kurt had another tranq,” Joey said, coming at Marley. “You didn’t have to do that, asshole!”

  “I saved your life, man,” Marley said, holstering his weapon. “So back the fuck off.”

  Joey Florio was a small scrapper with a quick temper. Though a head shorter than the Aspen cop, he grabbed Marley by the shirt and ripped off three buttons before Kurt could step in and lock an arm around his deputy’s neck and pull him away. Muffin and Linda Ríos rushed over, restraining Marley from throwing a punch, and then helped Kurt hustle Joey out of the kitchen.

  “Let go of me!” Joey said, fighting to free himself from their grasp. “I’m going back in there to kick his fat ass!”

  “No, you’re not,” Kurt said, gripping his arm and shaking him. “You’re going to the courthouse with your partners. If I catch you back here, or I hear you’re hassling Marley later on, I’ll suspend you for a month without pay. Is that understood?”

  “The guy’s a trigger-happy dickhead, Kurt!” Joey said. “He wanted to shoot her from the git-go.”

  Kurt motioned to the two deputies to take him away. “Get the fuck out of here, Joey. You’re making things worse.”

  Once they were gone, Kurt collected himself, straightened his bow tie, and shoved through the swinging doors into the kitchen. Marley and his partner were standing over the dead bear. Her face was destroyed. Blood had pooled around the animal and a long, thin stream was snaking toward a floor drain. The kitchen looked as if it had withstood four hours of hand-to-hand combat at close quarters.

  “Hey, man, I’m sorry. I thought she was going to hurt somebody,” Marley said, avoiding Kurt’s furious glare. The two cops stared down at the creature with pity and remorse. “The situation was out of control.”

  Kurt was angry at Marley but also at himself. If he hadn’t fumbled with the Cap-Chur rifle, maybe this would have ended differently.

  “It was a tough call, Mike,” Kurt said, shaking his head sadly. “You took the sure way out.”

  Marley looked officially contrite. “I appreciate that, Kurt. I hope you won’t forget to say that in your report.”

  Kurt gazed down at the bloodied animal. “Rick Keating from the dow will be here in a little while with a cage truck,” he said. “Tell him the whole story, start to
finish. He’ll probably have to write something up for the Wildlife Department.”

  “You leaving now?”

  “That’s right. But I’ll call the owner. He’s got some serious cleanup.”

  “Who’s gonna lug this big fucking thing to the truck?”

  “You are, John Wayne,” Kurt said. “You shot her, didn’t you?”

  After checking in briefly with his deputies at the courthouse and making the phone call to an irate restaurant owner, Kurt went home and collapsed onto his bed without even removing his rented shoes. He was exhausted but still too edgy to sleep. Nicole was on his mind.

  Seeing her again after nearly a year. The letters. It was all too confusing to sort out.

  He doubled the pillow beneath his head and clicked on the TV at the foot of his bed, channel surfing the usual early-morning fare for insomniacs: old black-and-white movies, hand-wringing ministers, belligerent political wonks, satanic music videos, laugh-track family episodes from his childhood. He had almost achieved that blessed state of cool white cathode bliss when something caught his eye on the vh? channel, a grainy video of a blues band playing on a dark smoky stage back in the ’70s. When the camera moved in for a close-up, Kurt could see that the young man under the spotlight was Rocky Rhodes. His long graceful fingers were crawling up the Rickenbacker neck like a willowy spider. He was tall and ruggedly handsome and slightly bowed at the shoulders, unruly bangs of thick brown hair falling across his tightly closed eyes, sweat dripping from a youthful beard. Kurt had seen him perform at the Wheeler Opera House here in town, ’74 or ’75, and this was the way he would always remember the rock star, lost in the ecstasy of his music. A handheld camera captured shadowy glimpses of the other players—the classically trained Gahan Moss arched over his keyboard, and their bare-chested drummer pounding frantically on the skins—but they were peripheral to Rocky himself, luminous at the center of the stage. Kurt listened on, sleep-dazed and slightly mesmerized, as the singer slipped back into his lyrics, a gravelly moaning blues, and for an instant he felt something stir deep inside him, something that had lain dormant for many years, the raw hurt and longing of those times.

  Later he realized he must have drifted off to sleep listening to Rocky perform. He thought maybe the phone was ringing, but he was too far gone to lift the receiver. Somewhere in the smoky shadows of a dream he heard the drummer’s relentless beat, pounding louder and louder, until he was awake again and he didn’t know why.

  It was still dark outside when he opened his eyes. The digital clock said 5:32 and the television screen hissed gray static. The pounding was louder now, more persistent, and he gradually understood it wasn’t a tom-tom but someone knocking on the door of his house. He threw on the overcoat he’d used as a blanket, retrieved his flashlight and Smith & Wesson from the bedside drawer, and rumbled down the stairs.

  “Who the fuck is it?” he said in a sleepy voice.

  “Open up, Kurt.”

  It was Muffin Brown. She had come to tell him that Nicole Bauer’s body had been found on the rocks forty feet below her redwood deck.

  Chapter five

  Kurt stared at her body in the cold pale light of dawn. She was lying on her side, wedged between two boulders. Snow had formed a crust over her twisted limbs. Her mouth was open, her teeth bared in a hideous grimace. One arm was lodged out of joint behind her broken neck. He knelt down to cover her exposed legs with the bloody flap of her robe. “Haven’t you taken enough pictures?” he asked the coroner, a dour Canadian named Paul Louvier who was standing among the icy rocks with a camera bag slung over his shoulder.

  Dr. Louvier nodded. “Okay, let’s get her to the morgue,” he said. “Nothing else I can do down here.”

  Kurt was still in shock, unable to locate his personal anguish amid function and duty. He felt himself floating above it all, in some remote and dreamlike state, certain he would wake soon in Nicole’s arms and she would assure him that this was just like the other dream. But when he leaned closer and brushed the cold crystals from her face, peering into those dead eyes, he knew this moment was as real as darkness itself.

  “Are you okay, Kurt?” asked Muffin Brown, standing beside him.

  He couldn’t speak. He sat back in the snow and began rocking slowly with both arms locked around his knees.

  “Come on,” she said, trying to lift him to his feet. A deputy named Dave Stuber stepped over to give her a hand.

  “Let’s go inside. The guys can help Dr. Louvier take care of this.”

  The fire had burned itself out in the bedroom hearth and a deep chill filled the room, its terrace doors left open while the deputies tromped in and out. They had taped off a narrow area from the doors directly to the railing, a path where footsteps disturbed the snow.

  “Two sets,” Muffin said, crouching to point out the different prints. “Around four-thirty Miz Bauer’s chauffeur, Kyle Martin, heard a scream and rushed up here. He found these doors wide open and came out on the deck. His are the bigger skid marks right through here.”

  Kurt walked around the tape to the railing. Morning light seeped over the ridge of Red Mountain, revealing hunky, snow-shrouded formations in the ancient boulder slide below, where two deputies were now shifting Nicole’s body into a long black zipper bag under the watchful eye of the coroner. A few years ago, while digging through the department files in an unrelated case, Kurt had discovered photographs from the Rocky Rhodes crime scene and he’d seen what those boulders could do to a body.

  “Miz Bauer’s footprints are slightly smaller,” Muffin said. She was kneeling now, pointing with her gloved hand, talking to Kurt as if he were actually listening. “She was barefoot, and she must’ve been running.”

  He turned to glance at the tracks. “Running?” he said.

  “On the balls of her feet,” she said. “Look at the spacing. A longer stride, no heel marks.” Muffin was always right about detective work. “Pardon the expression, Kurt. It looks like she took a flying leap.”

  “Two makes?” Kurt said, curious now. He squatted beside his deputy to study the tracks, which had hardened in the snow.

  “Right. Kyle has identified himself as the other one.”

  “Where is he?” Kurt asked.

  “Dotson’s talking to him downstairs. Florio’s with the other Bobbsey twin, Lyle Gunderson.”

  They walked back into the bedroom. He had never been here except at night, and now, in the stark morning light, cold and harshly white, the place felt stripped bare, devoid of human history. It wasn’t the same room anymore. Her death had reduced the space to the sum of its furnishings.

  “The chauffeur said you were here last night,” Muffin said, raising an eyebrow. She was a small woman with deep brown eyes and a wholesome alpine tan. Over the summer she’d cut her hair shorter than Kurt’s and it was only now growing out, a thick tuft protruding from the back of her department cap. “I didn’t realize you knew Nicole Bauer,” she said.

  “She won the date with me at the Les Dames benefit.”

  Muffin stood next to the bed, regarding the tossed sheets and rumpled quilt. “Some women have more money than good sense,” she said.

  He had hired her six years ago, when she was only twenty-four, a graduate of the police academy in Casper, Wyoming. He’d watched her develop into a first-rate cop, but more than that, she had remained his most loyal friend through some very difficult times. A couple of years back, when he’d nearly self-destructed during a murder investigation, Muffin was the only one who hadn’t given up on him.

  “The receiver was hanging off on the floor,” she said, pointing to the telephone on the night table. One of the deputies had set it back in place. “I’ll check with the phone company to see if there were any calls.”

  She bent down to read the label on an empty bottle of Macallan Scotch. Ice melted in a tumbler with a trace of lipstick on the rim. “Looks like she was hitting the sauce pretty hard,” Muffin said. “Did she seem inebriated when you left her?”

>   Nicole had enjoyed expensive single malts. During their brief affair she’d tried to make a Scotch drinker out of Kurt.

  “No,” he said. He thought about their last embrace, her body soft and warm. An hour’s sleep had sobered her. “A couple of drinks, that’s all.”

  He opened the night table drawer. Among Nicole’s tubes and fragrant vials lay the Beretta .25 and the amber bear-shaped earrings she had worn last night. He pushed them aside and rummaged through her effects. “There were some letters tied with a red ribbon,” he said. “They were on this table. Has anyone taken them?”

  “We haven’t touched anything.”

  He opened the container of Risperidone with its sticker forbidding alcohol. Only four pills remained.

  “Why don’t you leave everything alone,” Muffin advised, stepping closer to have a look at the contents of the drawer. “In case there’s more to this than a simple suicide.”

  He stared at her with a dazed expression, more surprised at his own conflicted feelings than by what she had just said. In spite of all the evidence, it hadn’t sunk in yet that Nicole had taken her own life.

  “Those letters are very important,” he said, returning the pills to the drawer and closing it.

  “What letters are you talking about?”

  “Hate mail,” he said. “Somebody was making obscene threats and she wanted me to do something about it.”

  He suddenly remembered the ring. Nicole had thrown it against the hearth screen. He walked over to the fireplace and knelt down to search the carpet, sweeping his hands through the thick sand-colored piling.

  “Are you looking for this, Kurt?” Muffin opened her glove and the ring appeared in her hand as if she were performing a magician’s trick. “I noticed it earlier and wondered what it was doing on the floor.”

  He stood up and took the ring from her, studying the I Ching engravings, running his finger along the inside of the band. The gold was as smooth and worn as his mother’s wedding ring. It had worked itself around someone’s finger for more than a few years.