Cooksin

by Rick Alan Rice

  Outside the armory, food tents were being erected, as were long tables to be used for crafts competitions: mostly wood and leather work of various kinds. Main Street had been blocked off between Third and Fourth Streets to accommodate a traveling carnival, primarily offering children's rides and side show games. On the street out in front of the Farmer's National Bank people were gathering around a huge square-cut cedar post, into which ranchers from all around the county were burning their livestock brands. The post would be spiked into the ground, out in front of the armory, after everyone had made their mark, and standing ten feet high it would serve as the spiritual centerpiece for the festivities. As was the case every year, things were expected to get rowdy.

  Downtown businesses were busy by seven-thirty a.m., with people arriving from the countryside with plans to do all their "town errands" in a single day. That provided a steady stream of customers for the clothing, grocery and hardware stores, not to mention the barber and beauty shops. Young bucks, wearing bright blue denims, creased hats and polished boots, gathered on every corner. Fresh-faced young women giggled and squealed as they raced from shop to shop, and allowed themselves the day. Everyone knew the Cow-Cutter's annual bash was the high energy center of Weld County's universe, bigger even than the 4-H and County fairs, and it was anybody’s best chance at a memorable time in any given year. An extension of a practice begun in the 1850s, it was essentially about cowboys celebrating the fall season, when stockers go to auction, and new herds of heifers are started. The idea was to get drunk and have all the fun they could have, because the snow season would soon start in earnest and the grind of winter feeding would begin. That spirit had drifted down from a group of men, so all these years later, long after women had tamed the west, this annual event had the feeling of a slightly pagan, adult ritual. It added a palpable lust to the air that made young girls squirmy, and young boys behave like undersized "men."

  A parade was scheduled to begin at noon, which would start at the baseball diamond, wind down through the middle of town, and end out at the fairgrounds. As was the case every year, the Longmont High School Marching Band would be at the first part of the march, providing cadence. Directly following them would be the queen candidates and other dignitaries, mostly elected officials and locally prominent members of the banking and legal professions, and sometimes well-to-do businessmen. Frank Walker had ridden in the parade once, as a dignitary. This was back when his wife was still alive, and when he was just coming into prominence. He had hated the conceit, posing as someone who everybody else should look at, and swore never to do it again. It was to the chagrin of Viola Walker, who knew Frank's contumacy would one day cost him socially.

  Following the dignitaries would come the floats, mostly sponsored by business and church groups. The Shriners would always march, wearing their magic lantern shoes, their tasseled fezzes, and their scimitars. Following them would usually be a number of proud equestrian riders, decked out in their show garb, followed by families of plain old cowboys, who always seemed a little drab after all the glitz. Somewhere among all that, the Longmont and Weld County fire departments usually paraded a pumper or two, and the sheriff and town marshals would each usually send a squad car. The VFW presented the American flag, and walked at the head of everything.

  Out at the fairground, rodeo officials were registering contestants and organizing the stock barns, filled to capacity with animals trucked in for the cowboy competitions. There would be calf-roping and barrel riding, as well as bronc and bull riding competitions, all featuring professional cowboys from the regular circuit, along with adventurous local amateurs.

  Clouds of dust hovered over the surrounding county roads, as the families of area ranchers and farmers made their way toward town. They criss-crossed the hillsides and flats, some stopping along the way to pay brief calls on friends and relatives, many of whom they hadn't seen since the last big event in town. None of them thought anything about the profusion of cars and light trucks corning in from the south, many carrying grim-faced strangers, come to Weld County not for the parade, dance or rodeo, but to man secret out-posts in the countryside, awaiting a signal to converge on other selected locations. Also traveling anonymously through the countryside was a battered, red Chevrolet pickup. Its driver was unknown to Weld County residents, other than Jake Jobbs, who knew the face, but not the name.

  * * * * *

  Out on the southern edge of town a man driving a late model Chrysler Royal coup pulled to the shoulder of the highway. He reached over and yanked the handle down on the glove box, rummaging inside for a county map. Parked less than a mile outside of Longmont, he could clearly see the landmarks of the town: it's white painted water tower, rising up from near city center; it's new electrical station, providing a constant reassuring buzz and sending dark wires coiling out in all directions; the park along the highway, a memorial to a long ago city mayor; and the covered bleachers at the baseball diamond, standing out among the trees like an open-air cathedral. He was thinking to himself that he had to bypass this berg. Two cars flashed by on his left, both zipping along toward town. Focusing his eyes, he could just about make out movement among the little one and two story buildings up ahead, like watching ants in an ant farm. He was hoping the map would tell him how to get to Walker Ranch without going through all the hubbub.

  Ray Pierot didn't care much for northern folks, which, to him, included anyone living north of Little Rock, Arkansas. They tended to be Germans and Swedes, Irish and bland English, and "bohunks" of various kinds: Czechoslovakians and Hungarians. "The dull races," was how he thought of them, a judgment made largely on the food he'd known them to eat. Meat and potatoes discouraged him, failing to sufficiently celebrate life, the way he thought food should. He preferred comestibles that came from a shell and offered a sense of clear difference between man and meat. He needed spices, too – and more than just iodized salt and black pepper, which is what he was likely to find in these parts. Northern folk seemed to him slavishly lugubrious, dedicated to abstinence in all forms and the dull grind of mundane labor. Ray Pierot was just a little bit scared of people who looked at life like that.

  His xenophobia was ironically countered by the other thing that bothered him about this job, that being the scant size of the local population. Beyond not providing the anonymity of a big city, like New York or Chicago, it translated into vast distances between destination points. The isolation of Walker Ranch would be an advantage, for the hit itself, but getting in and out of the area worried him. There were a lot of open miles to cross and a high risk of chance encounters of the type farm folk for some reason remember. His dress alone would make him "stand out": his white short-sleeved shirt and his suspenders, his light cotton slacks, and his Wellingtons. He'd given some thought to sporting a cowboy hat, but he felt stupid in the things, so he wore his usual straw, with its short up-turned brim partly hiding its vermilion band. The strategy was based more on efficiency than stealth. He planned to be not more than fourteen hours in the area. This afternoon he would locate the site and plan his approach. He would spend a little time searching out a secluded spot, then rest up all afternoon and early evening.

  About ten p.m., he would move into place, parking his car in a ditch off the main road, about a quarter mile away from Frank Walker's house. Jake Jobbs and his "handler" were scheduled to show up about eleven p.m., when it was expected that all the ranch employees would have gone to town for the dance. Somehow, by midnight, the two of them would become dead during the act of robbing Frank Walker's home.

  While Pierot's job was to make death happen, he understood that Pico had hired him more for his creativity than his willingness to pull a trigger. He had a certain genius for camouflaging hits, a know-how when it came to masking a professional job.

  Pierot would have one hour prior to Jake's arrival to come up with something clever. His first best hope was to enter the house undetected and be waiting for them when they got into Frank Walker's safe. He wanted to mak
e it look like a disastrous disagreement between thieves – one that ended in violence. Any variation on that theme would do, as long as it allowed Pierot to do the job, leave a "scene," and hit the road. He was carrying extra cans of gasoline in his trunk, and a small bag of powder called "methamphetamine," a gift from a narcoleptic friend who promised that snorting it would give him sufficient energy to drive non-stop from Longmont to New Orleans. His planned straight-through trip would put him back on Bourbon Street by five o'clock Monday morning, making him available to callers during business hours. He knew it was wise to hold unaccounted for time to a minimum, and was grateful to advances in chemistry that helped him adhere to such counsel. Besides, the sooner he got back to good food, the better.

  * * * * *

  Py had awakened early, though he'd had a difficult, restless night. He couldn't stop thinking about what was going to happen this evening: about how Jake's rendezvous with uncertain destiny was growing closer and closer, which to Py felt like a relentless trek to doom. It felt like time was running out, propelled by incidents that occurred without warning and hastened the awful end. Jake's impulse to rush over to confront Frank Walker about the murder of Pete's bull had been a perfect example. Py had wanted to have one last night with his best friend, but events intervened. Jake had been too battered, upon his return, to want to do anything other than repair to his bed and mend. So, their last night together had become another disappointment. Py lay on his bed knowing it was over – that after tonight, Jake wouldn't be there for him anymore.

  He had wanted to hold on to their last evening together, and it had slipped away.

  Brimming with surfeit anxious energy, Py had rolled out before the sunrise and made himself a breakfast of toast and butter. Pete and Tory had stayed up late, talking well into the night, and he looked in on both of them but found them deep in their dreams, which he envied. He made a pot of terrible coffee, too strong to enjoy, and washed down what he could with a couple large glasses of milk. It was still before seven a.m. when he went out to the pasture to check on the yearling. It was a trip he now wished he hadn't made.

  Lined up along the fence row behind the barn, Py saw a sight he had only seen once before: the day Walt Vrbas died. It was a flock of vultures with naked red heads, nearly twenty of them, sitting evenly spaced atop a row of fence posts, facing the morning sun with their wings held out to their sides. The first time he had seen this he had been taken with the religiosity he felt in their identical posturing. They appeared to be at prayer, though exactly what deity they worshipped Py did want to imagine. He could only think that it was Death, because this was these bird's constant calling. It was what they lived for, and what they breathed. They were here, at Parker Ranch, because something or someone was about to die. It was all Py could think. These awful birds knew something, and it was with this ritual that their part in whatever was happening would all began. Something or someone was soon to be dead.

  * * * * *

  "I want to post that property – around the house and along the field road over to the Parker property. Something about this just doesn't sit."

  Tom Bickering paced back and forth before a map of Weld County which he had tacked to the wall, and onto which he had outlined in red the area around Frank Walker and Pete Parker's holdings. Several other agents, including Arkie Wheeler and Glenn Tyler, sat around other desks in the cramped office, on the second floor of a red-brick building in Denver's Laramer section. It was an annex location of the FBI's regional office, which Bickering had requested because it kept him away from the regional director, "the meddling bureaucrat," as he called him.

  Bickering was nervous over the lack of preparation time for tonight's raid. Arrangements had quickly been made to position agents around the "distribution centers," as Jake called them. On Bickering's signal they would conduct simultaneous assaults, expecting to catch the majority of the perpetrators with stolen items in their possession. That part was relatively easy, at least logistically. Bickering had commandeered nearly fifty agents for the job, as well as adequate transportation and armaments. All of the time they had to develop strategy had gone into safeguarding those men, the goal being to launch a strike that was quick and decisive to the extent that Lorenz Pico's people would not have a chance to start a fire fight. "Nobody gets hurt," that was the directive. He wanted it clean and efficient. He didn't want to worry about agents getting killed because his department had rushed into something for which it had not adequate prepared. Bickering felt confident about "the springing trap" part of the operation, providing the information Jake Jobbs had given them, regarding times, places and personnel strengths was accurate. He instincts about Jake told him the information was good, but he had spent less than an hour with him, and there was no putting out of mind the fact that Jake Jobbs was a con man who was out to protect his own skin. Now it was a skin Bickering couldn’t help but consider.

  "What are you thinking, boss?" Agent Wheeler asked.

  Bickering frowned and looked hard at the map, as if answers were contained there in the cartography. "Jobbs told me something that's been bothering me ever since," he said. "He told me that he had tried to get out of doing this job – that he's been paying off a debt, that's just about done. He didn't want to go through with this, and he told Pico about it."

  "What's that about," Agent Tyler asked. He was late getting involved with this case and was still in the dark on several points. "Why'd he want out."

  "Classic case of short-timer's sweats," Agent Wheeler said with certainty. "I saw it in the war. Guys know they got a ticket home if they can just stay alive a little longer and they get scared they ain't gonna make it. Sometimes they desert."

  Bickering shook his head. "No, I don't think that's it in this case. I don't think Jobbs is scared. I think he's unrealistically optimistic, but I don't think he's scared."

  "What do you mean?" Tyler asked.

  "I think he's established some relationships in this town he's come to, and I think he got side-tracked by them and doesn't want to give them up," Bickering said. "I think he convinced himself that he'd paid this debt to Lorenz Pico down enough that he could buy himself out of the rest of it."

  "Pretty naive, I'd say," Wheeler said.

  "I think it's an aspect of this guy's personality," Bickering said. "He struck me as a strange individual – not a criminal, though. Maybe a loser, but not worse. Maybe not even that. The thing is, I think he grossly miscalculated his dealing with Pico. I got this gut feeling that Jobbs is going to get hit."

  "It would make sense," Tyler said. "I don't know a lot about the case, but it appears to be a classic. Jobbs has outlived his usefulness and now he's a liability."

  "And he's already raised enough stink to make the bad guys nervous," Wheeler added.

  "Maybe I've got Jobbs all wrong," Bickering said. "Maybe he isn't as naive as it may appear. Maybe he saw that he was coming to the end of the line with Pico, and knew what might happen. That would explain why he blew his cover the way he did – went public, as it were. Whatever the case, I'm afraid this guy ain't gonna make our rendezvous tonight."

  "What are you thinking, Tom?" Wheeler asked.

  "I'm thinking about Lorenz Pico's reputation," Bickering said. "He's a suspect in not less than twenty homicide cases currently under investigation. This guy is cute – he doesn't seem to do the work himself, at least no one's been able to prove anything to the contrary. People around him end up dead, though, that's for certain."

  "So you're thinking tonight's his night?" Tyler asked. "That's why you want the posts?"

  "My guess is, if you're Lorenz Pico, it comes down to not whether, but when to do it," Bickering said. "Do you wait until the heist and collect all your targeted merchandise, and then silence the informant? Or do you hit him the night of the job, when you could conceivably build yourself a little cover?"

  "Either way, doesn't a guy turning up dead kind've tie directly to the robberies?" Tyler asked. "How many people get murdered in Lon
gmont, Colorado in any one year? And how many large scale robberies take place?"

  "The last murder there was in 1923," Wheeler said. "I looked it up."

  "Obviously the thefts will soon be discovered," Tyler continued. "Why wouldn't Pico wait – you know, do the job, then some time in the future, when Jobbs least expects it – bang!"

  "I don't think so," Wheeler said. "Jobbs has already been too noisy. He's got people nervous. He's challenged Pico's authority and screwed up his own part of their deal. If I'm Lorenz Pico, I take him out before he takes me out. I'm with Tom – I think Jobbs is going down tonight."

  "So that's it, Tom?" Tyler asked. "That's why you want the posts – to protect this guy?"

  Bickering nodded with uncertainty. "I'm not sure we can protect him," he said. He pointed to the map. "Look at that topography: it's flat, open countryside. I think we should post-up here, here, here and here," he said, pointing out positions around Walker Ranch. "I don't see how we can get closer than, what . . . four hundred yards? We can at least shadow Jobbs' movements. He's the trigger for our sting; he's what we're timing everything by." Bickering stopped for a moment and seemed to go into a deep thought.

  "What is it?" Wheeler asked, noticing his distraction.

  "It just occurred to me that there's another reason to watch Jake Jobbs," Bickering said. "Who knows for sure that he isn't gonna get nervous and pull a trigger on Pica's handler, then disappear into the night himself?"

  "Could happen," Wheeler said, glancing over at Tyler.

  "I think we need to be there, whatever the case," Bickering concluded.