by Thomas Zigal
She hadn’t budged an inch from the window. He studied her troubled reflection in the glass. “Who was it, Kat?” he asked. “The timber companies?”
She shrugged, silent and brooding, and he wondered if she would tell him if she knew. “Whoever killed Randy and burned down my house has bought themselves a world of hurt,” she said.
He put his hand on her shoulder but she flinched away from him.
“Let the Sheriff’s Department handle it, Kat,” he said. “You’ve already gone through enough.”
Her expression was hard and cold. “Last time I heard a cop tell me that,” she said, “my husband was in the morgue and I couldn’t move anything but my little finger. After the cops got through being my friend, I was knee deep in hospital bills and lawyers’ fees, and the Feds were threatening me with serious jail time for something I didn’t do. Pardon me if I sound a little skeptical, Kurt. I know you mean well, but you’re playing in a different league now.”
“I’m going to find out who did this, Kat. The boys could’ve been killed.”
She nodded, gazing blankly into the nighttime. “I’m sorry, Kurt. I wish I could change everything. I shouldn’t have dragged you and the children into my life.” She sighed, gave his hand an affectionate squeeze, then turned and limped off toward the hospital corridor. “I’m tired and my leg is bothering me,” she said over her shoulder. “I need to rest.”
“Come on. I’ll take you to my place.”
“I won’t do that to you, Kurt. Wait there while I make a phone call.”
He watched her use the phone at the nurses’ station. She talked to someone, waited, then replaced the receiver with visible frustration.
“Private listing, naturally,” she said, leaning against the desk for support. He could see that she was fading fast. “And I can’t remember the goddamned number.” She peered up at him, blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Give a girl a lift, sailor?”
The Lamar mansion glowed like an ocean liner on the slope of Aspen Mountain. When the deputy pulled the Pitco unit into the spotlighted parking lot out front, a half-dozen people were walking to their cars and Kurt had the sense that a small informal party was breaking up. He left Kat to doze in the backseat and climbed the stone steps to the intercom box at the wrought-iron gates. A housekeeper with an Hispanic accent responded to the buzz, and he asked for Meredith.
“I’m sorry, sir, the reading group is finish already. Was she expecting you?”
“This is an emergency,” he said, staring up at the small surveillance camera recording his presence. “Could you please tell her Kat Pfeil needs her immediate assistance.”
After a long humming silence, Meredith’s voice rang out with the clarity of tapped crystal: “Hello, Kurt.” She was viewing him on the monitor. “Is Katrina in some kind of trouble?”
“Somebody tried to kill her tonight, Meredith. They burned down her cabin.”
“Oh, my god!”
“She asked me to bring her here. May we come in?”
“Yes, of course. I’ll send Gloria out to let you in.”
Meredith met them in the foyer and rushed forward to embrace Kat. “You poor dear,” she said, throwing her arms around the exhausted woman. Meredith was barefoot, dressed in jogging sweats, her famous hair tied back with a band. She looked ready for a workout at the Nordic Club.
“I’m sorry to barge in like this,” Kat said, barely able to hold up her chin. “I think I need to lie down. My leg feels like an anchor.”
“Of course, of course,” Meredith said, sliding an affectionate hand up and down Kat’s back. “Don’t you worry about a thing, darling. Gloria, help me take Miss Pfeil to the sequoia room.”
The three women disappeared instantly and Kurt was left wondering what to do with himself until Meredith returned and he could explain the situation to her, the need for heightened security. He hoped that Neal Staggs’s VIProtex men were stationed about the premises, checking the locks, watching the grounds. The surveillance cameras, the stone walls surrounding the mansion, were precisely what Kat needed to ensure a good night’s rest.
Kurt heard a murmur of soft voices and ventured down the steps to a railed gallery overlooking the cavernous living room. Massive redwood beams braced the bowed ceiling like ribs on an ancient ship. The space below was designed for large gatherings, a showcase of opulent divans and love seats and settees, silent and dusky as a vault, a weak fire flickering in the giant hearth. There were dozens of these places in Aspen and Starwood, monster homes for monster appetites, the architecture as uninspired as an industrial drum. He was considering a return to the foyer when he noticed a golf ball gliding smoothly across fifty feet of virginal carpet and plinking against the base of a lamp. A balding, potbellied man wearing an epaulet safari shirt strode into view in his snakeskin cowboy boots, a putter resting over one shoulder, whiskey tumbler in hand. He stopped to tilt back his head for a long drink and noticed Kurt staring down at him.
“Jesus, Muller,” he said. “Is there nowhere on this planet that’s safe from your interminable surveillance?”
“The dynamite wasn’t dead, Miles. I blew the fuck out of a Dumpster.”
Miles Cunningham tucked the putter under his arm like a British swagger stick. “Well done,” he said.
Kurt couldn’t imagine what Miles was doing here. He was surprised the Lamars allowed him on the premises. “Somebody firebombed Kat’s cabin tonight,” he told the aging photographer. “Randy’s dead.”
Miles lowered his drinking hand, stunned. He looked as if someone had clubbed him across the skull with his own putter. This was the first moment in several years that Kurt had witnessed an expression of concern on the man’s bloated face.
“Fucking curs,” he mumbled, slurring, his eyes narrowed fiercely. “So they finally tracked her down.”
Kurt descended the staircase into the dim living room. “Who did this, Miles?” He expected an accusation against the FBI. Or the timber industry in Oregon.
Miles let the putter drop to the carpet. He finished his drink, trying to collect himself. Sweat beaded his forehead. They hadn’t trusted each other in a long time and it appeared as if nothing would change that now.
“My son and Hunter Carr could’ve burned to death in that fire.” His calm words reverberated in the silence. “Randy was shot to death. If you have any idea who was involved,” he said, “I want you to start talking.”
A moment passed, a dark and fathomless silence filling the capacious chamber. Kurt felt like a lost swimmer drifting deeper into an underground pool inhabited by eyeless fish.
“It’s time you caught up with the rest of us, Kurt,” said a voice above. Meredith was looking down from the railed balcony. “Come to my study,” she said. “You can judge for yourself who’s behind this madness.”
Meredith’s study was tucked away in a corner of the bottom floor, a cozy room crammed with built-in cedar bookshelves and a long conference table spread with magazines, sheets of Miles’s slides, stacks of photocopied articles. Used glasses and empty snack bowls were scattered about, and Kurt realized that the guests had been here for some sort of study group.
Meredith stooped over the table, selecting stapled documents. “We’ve been tracking the antigreens for four or five years now, Kurt,” she said. “They’re becoming as organized as the environmental movement. The difference is, they like their guns. We have strong evidence that they’ve been hiring thugs all over the country to eliminate their opposition. Here, read as many of these as you can,” she said, handing him an armload of articles. “We’re keeping tabs on some of these organizations and their financial backers. There are scads of them now, primarily out here in the mountain states—a loose coalition calling themselves the Free West Rebellion. They pretend to be a grass-roots movement, but most of them are front groups for the corporate honchos in oil, ranching, timber, and mining.”
“And for the Japs who make all those little noise-makers buzzing up and down my backyard,” Mil
es added.
Meredith found more publications, piled them on Kurt’s collection. “Photographs of Free West leaders partying with industry CEOS show up with suspicious regularity in their newsletters,” she said.
“I know about these people,” Kurt said, recalling his conversation with Corky Marcus.
“They think the greens and the EPA have gone too far and they’re fighting back,” Meredith said. “The shit they’re doing has for the most part escaped the news media. There’s a rumor they have a special forces unit called the Night Clubbers—a bunch of Neanderthals in charge of their countersurveillance and thuggery.”
“And you think these Night Clubbers have gone after Kat?” Kurt said, thumbing through the pages.
“Unfortunately no one has ever proved that the Night Clubbers really exist,” Meredith said.
The moment the flames crashed through the window, Kurt had assumed it was the same killers who had pipe-bombed Kat and her husband in Oregon. But now he wasn’t so sure.
“One miner dead, one miner hurt real bad, and the next day a well-known green is firebombed,” he said, eyeing Meredith and Miles. “That sounds like retaliation to me.” Maybe Neal Staggs was right for once. “Is there some kind of guerrilla war going on between you people?”
He watched them trade looks. “The war has been going on for decades, Kurt,” Meredith said. “It’s just starting to get real nasty.”
Kurt held a sheet of slides to the light. Head shots mostly, men in gray suits. “Considering what happened to Kat and Randy, do either of you feel you need police protection?”
Meredith shook her head, smiled. “As you can see,” she said, “I’m well watched after.”
Miles knelt down and withdrew a Beretta .22 automatic from inside his cowboy boot. “A man had best carry his own life insurance,” he said, palming the small assassin’s pistol. “Save your boy scouts for the DUIS out on the highway.”
Kurt felt his jaw clench. “Kat Pfeil told me she didn’t need any protection, either,” he said. “And now her bodyguard is dead and her place has been torched to the ground. Time for a reality check, Miles.”
He asked to look in on Kat before leaving, and Meredith led him to the guest wing and down a long quiet corridor lined with family photographs of smiling back-country campers and ski parties out on the slopes. “If there’s any way I can help Kat,” she said, “please call on me. I’ll do whatever it takes to nail those bastards.”
“This may help,” he said, indicating the stack of articles under his arm. “You’ve given me enough bedtime reading for a month.”
They stopped in front of Kat’s door. “You know, Meredith, in the old days, when one of our buddies did something wild ass and stupid, we called it revolutionary,” he said, “and we stood behind it, right or wrong. I’m wondering if you and your little tea group are still operating under that same misguided principle.”
“What are you driving at?” she asked, raising a defiant eye-
“If you knew that somebody in the green movement killed Ned Carr, would you report it?”
She folded her arms across the jogging sweatshirt. “I don’t condone murder under any circumstances, Kurt,” she said. brow.
“You didn’t answer my question. Would you report it?”
“Yes, I would,” she said coldly. “Now listen to me. I don’t know who killed Ned Carr, and neither does my husband. I hope we never have this conversation again.”
Kurt leaned against the doorjamb. “Is Lee in your study group? He doesn’t seem to be around tonight. Does he know about your research?”
“Lee is a very busy man. When you run a worldwide communications network and one of the most popular ski companies on the planet, you don’t have time for study groups. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have other guests to attend to.”
After Meredith walked away, Kurt knuckled lightly on Kat’s door. He heard faint footsteps, a low voice: “Who is it?”
“Kurt. I hope I didn’t wake you up.”
The door cracked open and Kat reached out for his hand, pulling him quickly into the dark room. She locked the door behind them and sagged into his arms.
He could feel her lean, sinewy body beneath the silk pajamas. “I’m glad you’re still here,” she said, kissing him on the chin, her breath minty from toothpaste. The stack of articles fell, pages fluttering like the wings of a nocturnal bird.
“What was that?” she said, startled, nervous.
He hugged her closer. “My homework assignment. I’ll get them later. How are you doing?”
“I’m having trouble calming down,” she said, leading him by the hand through the darkness to a window seat. “Stay with me awhile.”
“Can I get you anything? Some brandy?”
“No, just sit with me. I’ll be all right.”
She stretched her legs across the cushion and lay back in Kurt’s arms. Out the window, beyond the compound walls, shadowy moonlight softened the dark fir groves higher up the slope. They held each other in a long consoling silence and Kurt expelled a weary breath, releasing all the tensions of the past few hours. He buried his face in her wet hair, its sweet fragrance of herbal shampoo.
“Randy was right,” she said. Her heart was beating rapidly beneath his hand. “We shouldn’t have started. That’s my fault too. I should’ve kicked you off my property the minute I laid eyes on you.”
“Kat.”
“Then those boys would be home sleeping in their own beds, where they belong.”
“You don’t have to do this to yourself.”
She began to shiver violently, as if she’d succumbed to a sudden, racking fever, and he held her the way he held Lennon when the child was ill, rocking her slowly, coaxing her into the soothing rhythms of his own heart.
“Kurt,” she said, squeezing his arms tighter around her, “when the bomb went off I was five months pregnant. I lost a husband and a daughter too.”
He kissed her hair. “Jesus, Kat, I’m sorry.”
“Michael pampered the hell out of me. We both knew the baby was a blessing at forty. We talked about leaving Oregon for a while, raising her in a quiet country town somewhere—maybe Aspen—till she was old enough to understand our work.” Warm teardrops wet his arms. “Now that part of my life is over and done with too.”
She unbuttoned her pajama shirt and slid his hand against the rough puckered skin where her breast had been. “This is who I am now,” she said. “Dry as a stick, inside and out. When a pipe bomb goes off under your belly, everything dies.”
He slowly withdrew his hand and held her close. She began to weep, and he understood that this was what she needed most of all. There were worse things than reliving the terrible moments that had shattered your life. Forgetting was the greater sin.
The woman in his arms eventually cried herself to sleep and he found himself drifting down the cold dark corridors that haunted his own dreams. Somber images floated through his mind, two boys wandering among broken tombstones, his brother’s fractured face staring up at him from the body bag, a knife blade at his son’s throat. He was hopelessly lost in the black labyrinth when a loud thumping noise startled him and he sat up. It might have been the bedroom door. He listened hard, rubbing his face and eyes to wake himself, waiting, his mind straining against the silence.
Convinced it had been a dream, he lifted Kat into his arms and took her to the bed, placing her head on a lacy pillow, buttoning her pajama shirt, drawing the covers around her. He kissed her forehead and groped his way toward the door, his boots soon shuffling over loose paper, the sound like footsteps through dry leaves. Remembering the pages now, he bent down and gathered them up, then backed out of the room, closing the door with a light click. Turning, he stumbled headlong over a body lying in the hallway and the pages again scattered in the air.
“God damn!” he said, rolling to his feet, crouching, ready to swing.
“Mmumfrdlphart,” muttered the figure sprawled across a golf club. “Frdlmmummerphut.”
<
br /> “Miles, you asshole. That’s a good way to get your jaw broken.”
“Hmm, hmmm. Wha? Christus! Whah’s that? Charlie incoming? Suck on this, yellow man!” he mumbled, attempting a lazy swing of the golf club at Kurt, the putter rising scarcely an inch off the floor.
“You’re drunk, man. What the fuck are you doing there?”
A rotten breath escaped Miles’s mouth, a long hissing sound like a punctured tire. He lifted his face from the carpet and peered up at Kurt through bleary eyes. “Must’ve blacked out in the shelling,” he said. “How long have I been in this trench?”
“You need to sober up and go home.”
Kurt knew the phone number for Tipsy Taxi.
“Mercy Jesus,” Miles moaned, sitting up, holding his head, collapsing back against the wall. “What were they firing at us? Howitzers?”
Kurt knelt down and began collecting the pages again. “Get a hold of yourself, buddy. It’s the nineties.”
Miles stared ahead, motionless, his eyes open but watery and unfocused, his mouth slack, a trickle of drool running down his chin. Sweat drenched his wide forehead, his neck, soaked a large circle through his safari shirt. He had lost one of his cowboy boots and it was nowhere in view.
“Are you going to be okay, Miles?” Kurt asked, touching the man’s clammy wrist to check his pulse.
Miles gripped Kurt’s hand with surprising strength, a clamp like a machinist’s vise. “She was a fine woman, Muller,” he said, his words finding greater clarity now. “I think I was halfway in love with her.”
And then it all became clear. The late-night visits to the cabin, the stoic loyalty.
“Rare is the woman who appreciates a pearl-grip Colt.”
Miles and Randy. The perfect match.
“I’m sorry, Miles. I liked her too.”
The man’s nails were embedded in Kurt’s wrist, digging deeper, an unconscious fury. “Tell me we’re going to find the swine that did that to her,” he said. “Say it, Muller. Tell me we’re going to hang their shriveled balls from a lamppost.”