by Thomas Zigal
“You knew my brother, didn’t you, J.J.?” he said. “Bert Muller, same unit in Nam. I’ve heard you guys could blow up a VC tunnel with nothing but a bottle of nail polish and a Zippo lighter. I guess that means you know how to set dynamite too,” Kurt said, his words scraping at the back of his throat, dry and angry. “And how to mix a Molotov.”
None of this made the slightest impression on Chilcutt. He glared at Kurt with cold, unflinching scorn. “I don’t see your pin,” he said. “We got strict rules here. No pay, no play. My orders are to throw gatecrashers out in the street.”
They stared at each other. A vicious loathing settled in the bones of Chilcutt’s face. Moments passed.
“I’m still sitting here, J.J. Why don’t you make your move? Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to shove that bad hand up your ass.”
Chilcutt laughed, a wicked sound deep in his bear-like chest. “The word on the street,” he said, “is you won’t be able to hide behind that badge much longer, Mr. Use-to-be. And when your time’s up, I’ll be waiting for you.”
“Funny,” Kurt said, watching Staggs stride back toward them, his face vexed and impatient. “Your boss used to say the same thing until somebody stomped all over his nice button-down career. You might want to give that some thought, shithead.”
Kurt saw the harsh light of recognition flare in Neal Staggs’s eyes as he approached the cart. “What the hell are you doing here, Muller? Get out of there. You’re holding up the round.” He retrieved a putter from a bag in the rear of the vehicle. “J.J., stop fucking around and drive this thing up near the green.”
“It’s not his fault,” Kurt said. “I detained him over a missing headlight.”
The ex-agent tested the putter’s grip. Kurt wondered if he was going to bash him in the head with it. “I don’t know why you’re here, Muller, but whatever the reason, it can wait,” Staggs said. “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a golf tournament going on. If I have to, I’ll call security backup and have you removed.”
Kurt watched the crowd bulge out to the taped-off viewing area at the base of a sand bunker. An exuberant gathering dressed in shorts and T-shirts, amusing themselves in the warm afternoon sun. A local TV station was there with their minicam, the reporter speaking into a mike. Kurt thought he recognized someone standing behind the crew, a solid build, arms folded across his chest, observing the action, his long ponytail hanging out the back of a baseball cap.
“I’ve got some questions for your man J.J. concerning one homicide and one attempted homicide in my jurisdiction,” Kurt told Staggs. “Convince me he’ll come back to Aspen tomorrow morning for questioning and I’ll get out of your hair so you can go on with your game.”
He didn’t have anything solid to charge Chilcutt with. He just wanted to sweat him out.
Staggs glowered at the driver. “What’s this all about, J.J.?”
“He’s just yanking us off, boss. The guy’s a joke. Give me the nod and I’ll drag his butt out of here.”
One of the men in Staggs’s golf party had doubled back to investigate the delay. “Is there a problem here, Neal?” he asked. “Why the holdup?”
“Everything’s under control, Mr. Metcalf,” Staggs apologized. “We’re on our way.”
So this was Arnold Metcalf? He appeared to be in his late fifties, as tall as Kurt at six feet four, a rawboned man with a high glistening forehead and dark sunglasses. His tan was genuine and he walked with the lanky stride of a ranch foreman, which made it difficult to imagine him wearing a three-piece suit at the head of a long teak-wood table in the boardroom of his law foundation.
Kurt slid out of the cart and nudged past Staggs, extending his hand to the attorney who had organized this event. “Hello, Mr. Metcalf,” he said, smiling affably. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. I’m Kurt Muller from the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Department. If I’m not mistaken, you and I had a mutual friend in Aspen.”
“I see,” Metcalf said, shaking Kurt’s hand tentatively, his eyes ranging toward Staggs for some plausible explanation for this interruption.
“His name was Ned Carr,” Kurt said. “I believe your people represented him in a lawsuit last year.”
“Yes, we did,” Metcalf nodded formally. “I was very sorry to hear about Ned’s death. Our coalition plans to make a contribution in his name to an organization that was very close to his heart—the American Institute for the Preservation of Free Enterprise. Individuals like Ned are in damn short supply these days.”
This guy was bullshit. Ned didn’t believe in any organization beyond the math columns in his own checkbook.
“We’re treating Ned’s death as a possible homicide, Mr. Metcalf,” Kurt said. “I would like to ask you some questions about your relationship with the deceased.”
Arnold Metcalf looked at Staggs and laughed. He spread his arms in the direction of the waiting audience. “You’ve caught me at an inconvenient moment, Sheriff. I’m trying to raise money to help people like Ned Carr survive against the odds.” The genial smile remained in place. “Why don’t you make an appointment with my secretary?” he said with a note of good-humored exasperation. “We’re in the phone book.”
Kurt didn’t have another day to waste. “This is police business, sir. I’ll be waiting for you when the tournament’s over.” He turned and regarded J.J. Chilcutt. “And I’ll be waiting for you, too, my friend. Pitkin County Courthouse, tomorrow morning at nine.”
Chapter thirty-three
By the time he’d made his way down the grassy slope to the stringed-off gallery, the man was no longer standing where Kurt had seen him. He couldn’t be certain it was the Lone Ute, only a vague suspicion, something in his bearing, and the ponytail. As he ambled through the flock of sedate, leisure-class retirees, searching for the Denver Nuggets cap, Kurt’s eye wandered toward the woods seventy yards beyond, where a solitary figure was heading into the trees. He recognized the loping movement of that body, the swinging tail of dark hair, from the night the intruder had bolted from Ned’s cabin. It had to be him.
A wall of ponderosas rose up abruptly at the outer boundary of the manicured course. Kurt buttoned his jacket, tucked in his tie, and sprinted for the spot where the man had gone in. Huffing hard, he slipped between the first tall trunks into a hidden undergrowth of juniper bushes. He knew how foolish he looked thrashing through the forest in a suit and tie, slapping branches out of his face, collecting loose mulch in his dress shoes. He stopped to listen for footsteps in the woodland ahead but heard no sounds except birdsong and his own labored breathing. Out of public view now, he pulled the Smith & Wesson .45 from his shoulder holster and snapped open the chamber, checking the rounds. He didn’t know what to expect. Maybe the man he’d seen wasn’t the Lone Ute after all, just some innocent golf groupie in need of a long private piss.
He thumblatched the pistol back in the holster and pressed on through the thicket, looking for a trail of any kind, five good yards of clearing. Sunshine fought its way down through the towering limbs overhead, a haze of pollen suspended in the slanting shafts of light. In this jungle it was impossible to quiet his clumsy passage. He searched the brushwood around him for something out of place, a snatch of clothing, a pair of watchful eyes. It had been years since he’d gone hunting for game and he realized that his stalking skills had all but vanished. He recalled how he’d made himself invisible as a young boy with a pellet rifle, becoming a leaf, a twig. Slowing respiration, relaxing his body, flowing into the chlorophyll.
He held his breath and squatted down on his haunches, closing his eyes, listening. Birds twittered; a wasp buzzed nearby in the trapped, musty heat. After a few moments he heard a branch snap and opened his eyes, gazing into the foliage at knee level, waiting for other signs. There was no motion anywhere, the branches so still he wondered if the air ever stirred beneath this impenetrable canopy of bark and hanging vines. The man, whoever he was, had been swallowed whole, consumed by wood spiders. Or more than likely he
had finished his business and returned to the course.
Kurt smiled at his folly and bent over to untie his dusty shoe, shake out the soil and cool leaves. He heard a footstep and glanced up, oblivious to the whooshing limb until it clubbed the back of his head.
Chapter thirty-four
A sharp-toed cowboy boot nudged at his ribs. When he opened his eyes, there was a man standing over him, pointing a pistol at Kurt’s face. He knew instantly it was his own Smith & Wesson. “Sorry I had to hit you, hoss,” the man said. “I saw you had a gun.”
Kurt sat up, touched the broken skin on the back of his neck, rubbed blood between his fingers. Six more weeks of stress leave, then all this relaxation was over.
“That’s the second time you’ve nailed me,” Kurt said, his head still ringing from the blow. “I’m starting to wonder about our friendship.”
In the mottled forest light he could see the man clearly for the first time. He was older than Kurt had imagined, maybe fifty, thick shoulders, an expanding beltline, his handsome Indian features beginning to line and sag with age. His nose had been broken long ago and had never been reset. Those dark puffy eyes retained the haunting hardness of a man who had done serious time.
“We need to get something straight,” the Indian said. “I don’t want to keep looking over my shoulder to see where you are.”
Reaching into his hip pocket he withdrew a wallet and tossed it at Kurt. A private investigator’s license, state of Colorado. The name under the photograph read Jesse Nighthawk, with an address in Durango.
“We’re working the same case,” Jesse Nighthawk said. “Ned Carr was an old friend of mine.”
Kurt was momentarily speechless. He handed him back the wallet and stood up, removing his jacket, brushing leaves from his pants. “What happened with the dirt-bikers?” he asked.
“I started shooting that big forty-four and they scattered.”
He snapped open the revolver, emptied the chambers into his hand, and slid the bullets into his pocket.
“I owe you,” Kurt said.
Nighthawk returned the unloaded pistol grip-forward. “You still have something that belongs to me,” he said. The eagle-bone choker. “I want it back.”
In the rear of the Tudor castle, a patio café looked out over the first tee and the immaculate course stretching far into the distance. The waitresses were dressed as English milkmaids. The menu explained that General William Jackson Palmer, the founder of Colorado Springs and original owner of these grounds, was obsessed with British history and had attempted to fashion his early settlement as a small-scale London.
Kurt and Jesse Nighthawk sat at a table whose umbrella resembled a sixteenth-century silk parasol. From the outset their waitress had cast a suspicious eye on the ponytailed man wearing a Nuggets baseball cap, but Kurt’s well-heeled presence seemed to neutralize the tension. She hadn’t noticed the blood on his shirt collar.
“Whose party are you with?” she asked, her pencil poised.
“Neal Staggs and J.J. Chilcutt,” Kurt responded without hesitation, and the young woman wrote something on their ticket.
Over sandwiches Kurt asked Jesse Nighthawk why he was involved in the investigation. “You said you were an old friend of Ned’s. Is your interest personal,” he asked, “or are you working for somebody?”
Nighthawk regarded him with patient eyes. “A little of both. These are lean times and I usually take pi work where I can get it,” he said. “Right now I’m on a retainer with an outfit called SPIRITT.” He pulled out his wallet and removed a business card, dropping it on the table in front of Kurt. “Here, I can’t ever remember what the damn letters stand for.” The Society for the Preservation of Indian Resources in the Tribal Territories, headquartered in Santa Fe. “It’s a coalition of Native tribes, maybe twenty, twenty-five of them. Cherokee, Hopi, Sioux, all the major players. These bloods have their shit together. About ten years ago they set up a corporation to manage business on Indian lands. Oil and gas, uranium, commercial fishing, the whole nine yards. The idea was to run the store real slick, like Exxon and Anaconda. So they hired an OPEC engineer to oversee field operations, a Jewish lawyer to handle contracts, and a Japanese marketing analyst to keep the books and supervise investments. Nobody on the team but all-stars.”
“Good move,” Kurt said, smiling appreciatively.
Nighthawk remained expressionless, imperturbable.
“Ned phoned me about three weeks ago to say he wanted SPIRITT to manage his mine operations after he passed on. A custodianship until his grandson reaches twenty-one,” he said. “Then the young man can do whatever he wants with them.”
This was the last thing Kurt expected to hear today. Ned turning his two mines over to Indians.
“The SPIRITT lawyers were supposed to meet with Ned this week to see what he had in mind,” Nighthawk explained, “and then they were all going to sit down with that lawyer who manages his estate and put everything in writing.” He sat back in his chair and wiped mustard from his fingers, his head fixed proudly on a huge neck. “But somebody dropped the hammer on the old boy before the deal could go down, and now it’s like the phone conversation never happened. SPIRITT’s pissed at me because their pricey lawyers got jazzed up over the idea and logged some expensive case time for nothing.” He moved his head slightly, cracking his neck. “My credibility is shit at the home office.”
“So you want to know what went wrong?”
Nighthawk nodded.
Kurt understood now why he had been poking around in the Carr cabin. “The other night at Ned’s place,” he said. “You were looking for something.”
“A document, a note to himself, a phone bill. Hell, I didn’t care. Anything I could use to trace names, enemies. I’m going to find out who trashed this deal, and why. My reputation is on the line—and my meal ticket.”
“I’ve got to be honest with you, Jesse. I’m having trouble with this.” There were loose ends dangling all over the man’s story. “Why would Ned want you people to run his mines instead of Tyler Rutledge?”
Jesse Nighthawk shrugged, as lost for explanation as the next man. “I’ve known Tyler since he was a wiseass teenager,” he said. “I don’t think Ned intended to cut him out altogether. But Tyler’s a fuckup and Ned probably didn’t trust him to pay the bills and negotiate the leases and do all the things you have to do to keep that two-bit business in the black. SPIRITT is a proven expert in resource management.”
Kurt couldn’t argue with the fact that Tyler was less than reliable. “You’ll have to forgive me if my questions sound a little skeptical. I’ve been a cop too long,” he said. “Let’s start at the beginning and go real slow.”
He had seen a lot of Ned and Hunter during the past four years but had never heard the old man mention Jesse Nighthawk. “How do you know Ned Carr?”
Kurt could see by the defiant look on the man’s face that he was not accustomed to explaining himself. He seemed to be considering whether to tolerate this inquiry or stand up and go his own way. Finally he relaxed, folded his hands, rested them next to his plate. “Ned saved my life,” he said.
Kurt stared at him.
“I’m an alcoholic. Ned was my AA sponsor. If he hadn’t come along when he did, I’d be dead of cirrhosis by now, another Indian statistic.”
Kurt had heard that Ned was a heavy drinker in his youth. “You met him in AA?”
“No, I met Ned about fifteen years ago in Gunnison,” he said, cocking his head to one side, “back when I was a wrangler for the Ute tribal ranch out at Pinecrest. In those days I spent most of my Saturday nights in the county drunk tank. Ned had the hots for some ol’ gal in town and came to see her every once in a while. On his birthday him and the girlfriend got carried away and started shooting off fireworks and the Sheriff’s Department busted him, and Ned gave them some shit so they threw his butt in the slammer with me and five or six unhappy Ute brothers. At first I thought, hey, this fat old goat-roper is going to get his ass kicked
. But Ned was such a good bullshitter he had everybody laughing. He sat down in a corner of the cell and started telling weird ghost stories, and the next thing you know, the drunks were so scared they went crawling under their blankets. They thought Ned was ini’putc’, the Ghost himself.”
Kurt smiled, remembering how Lennon and Hunter had always been frightened and enthralled by the old man’s tales.
“After everybody nodded off, me and Ned got to talking and he invited me to come visit his mines in Aspen. The only mining I knew about was the uranium strip mining where I grew up, the reservation south of Cortez. I didn’t want anything to do with mining. It was the miners that had chased our people out of the mountains into the desert. Hell, because of gold and silver we ended up living in a shithole wasteland even the buzzards wouldn’t fly over.”
Kurt had immersed himself in Native American books as a twelve-year-old boy and knew Ute history. The Blue Sky People, the People of the Shining Mountains, seven distinct bands spread across what was now Colorado. They had summered in the Roaring Fork Valley, preserved their game in the ice caves of the Grottos. Toward the end of the Civil War the government had bribed them to move west of the Continental Divide, promised money and livestock and generous provisions if they would leave the mountains to white men with gold fever. Half of Colorado would always be Ute, the government pledged in writing, a treaty guaranteed forever. The bands complied, but the bounty was never delivered. Less than twenty years later the government seized the rest of Colorado and divided the Utes into three reservations. By that time the bands had dwindled in number and spirit and offered only isolated resistance. The great graying Ouray, appointed chief of the Utes by long-coats in Washington, was content with his farmhouse and sheep and annual government stipend, and he remained silent and accommodating during the relocation.