by Thomas Zigal
Deputy Mac Murphy waved from behind the wheel.
“Just for a few more days,” Kurt said, as much for Meg’s benefit as for theirs. “Everything’s going to be normal again real soon.”
Two of their classmates walked past the squad car and stopped to admire it. “What did you guys do?” asked a girl named Lauren.
“We were playing Monopoly and the cabin blew up,” Lennon said.
“Way cool,” she said, and they all turned and raced one another toward the classrooms, their backpacks rattling.
Kurt and Meg stood together and shouted their good-byes, watching the children disappear into the corridor. Horns were tooting now, the late arrivals urging Mac Murphy to move along out of the drop-off area. Caffeinated mothers who didn’t care who he was.
“I’m glad to hear things will be normal soon,” Meg said, turning to glare at someone honking impatiently from a Saab. “Is that a prediction or a promise?”
“It’s a promise, Meg. I’m going to bust the people who did this to us.”
To us. As if they were all one big happy family.
“The boys are still pretty nervous, Kurt,” she said. “Yesterday Hunter wanted me to close all the blinds in the house in broad daylight. He thought that would keep the firebombs away.”
“Jesus.” Kurt shook his head, angry at himself, blaming his own lack of vigilance for what had happened.
“Are you okay?” she asked, touching his forehead, the side of his face. “Your face is red. You feel warm. Have you got a fever?”
It was true, he wasn’t feeling well. His arm throbbed and he suspected he needed an antibiotic for the infection. “It’s been a rough week,” he said.
Horns were honking again. She gave him a quick hug and crawled back into the squad car, rolling down the window. “Tell your friend she ought to take better care of you,” she smiled.
“My friend?” he said, confused, half asleep on his feet.
She raised her chin toward the parking lot across the street. Muffin Brown was sitting in her unit next to Kurt’s Jeep, eating breakfast from a paper bag.
“At least you both share the same lifestyle,” Meg said.
The squad car pulled away into the chaos of departing traffic and Kurt returned to the lot. Muffin acknowledged him with a finger raised from the foam cup at her lips. “I thought I would find you here,” she said, brushing Egg McMuffin crumbs from her lap.
He folded his arms and rested his butt against her back door. “What’s the word on Gillespie?” he asked.
“He finally heard from his lawyer. The guy’s flying in from Colorado Springs around noon. Corporate jet. Impressive representation for a man living on a deputy’s salary.”
Kurt watched the last of the mothers trail off toward the exit. “They’re not getting away with this,” he said. “I don’t care who’s involved.”
Muffin stepped out of the Pitco unit and stood next to him, her back braced against the driver’s door. Steam whiffed from the cup in her hand. “We located Nathan Carr,” she said. “He’s a high-school chemistry teacher in Seattle. Two kids, seven and ten. Boy and girl.”
The news was an unpleasant shock. He would never give voice to such a dark thought, but Kurt had been hoping that Nathan was dead.
“I asked him if he knew his sister had a kid and he said he’d heard. Said he’d been planning a trip to Aspen this summer to see his father and the boy.”
“How thoughtful of him.”
“I couldn’t get a read on whether he was willing to take Hunter. He seemed pretty upset by Ned’s death. I’m sure he needs some time to process it all.”
Hunter in Seattle. City life. How could he possibly adjust to such a vastly different world? He would miss these mountains. And Lennon. Maybe he doesn’t want the child, Kurt thought. He has two of his own.
“What kind of guy would have to think about taking his dead sister’s son?”
Muffin finished her coffee and tossed the container on the rising knoll of cups littering the back floorboard. She extended her arms and squatted in a deep knee bend, joggling herself awake. “Kurt,” she said, “I hope you’re preparing yourself for what’s coming.”
He watched the windows of a classroom. He could see children gathered around their teacher, jumping up and down, arms outstretched like beggars, eager for whatever she was handing out.
“If Nathan Carr decides to accept custody of Hunter, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
He shoved off from the patrol unit and circled around to his Jeep. “Thanks for the consoling advice,” he said. “You can always be counted on to cheer me up, Brown.”
“Are you coming in to meet Gillespie’s lawyer?”
“I’d love to see the weasel’s face when he watches the video of his boy switching off the oxygen. But if I’m not there by noon, start without me. You and Dotson can handle him.”
“What the hell’s more important than the Gillespie interrogation, Kurt?”
Finding Jesse Nighthawk, he thought. “I’ll be in touch.”
He drove to the airport hangar and tracked down Wing Taylor wandering through the welders’ shop with a crumpled invoice in his hand, bawling out everyone in his path. When he saw Kurt he stopped and grinned, tonguing the wet cigar stub to the other side of his mouth.
“Hey, Wing,” Kurt said. “You ready to ramble?”
“Goddamn right,” Wing said. “Anything but this.”
Chapter forty-one
Their flight took them over the Gunnison Gorge, a steep-walled trench the river had scoured through ten million years of sediment down to the deep, ancient gneiss. In a short while they were soaring above the broken necks of vanished volcanoes in the Uncompahgre Wilderness, a landscape of snow-packed summits and long green valleys as stunning as the glacial basins of Switzerland. An hour later, they landed on a sand-blown runway at the desert edge of the Southern Ute Reservation. It was late morning. Kurt instructed Wing Taylor to stay with the plane while he went into the La Plata County Airport terminal and rented the only available Jeep from the only rental agency in the building. Durango was fifteen miles away.
He remembered fragments of that sleepy cowboy town he’d passed through with his family as a boy, on their way to Mesa Verde, and a stoned road-trip in a VW microbus with Meg and Bert and Bert’s girlfriend, Maya Dahl, a peyote pilgrimage to Anasazi holy places in the remote canyons of the Southwest. Today, making his way along this flat, parched country where the Utes had been interned for more than a century, he decided it was time to introduce Lennon and Hunter to the awesome sandstone balconies of the Cliff Palace just west of here, and to the kivas and pictographs scattered across these desolate mesas. The boys were at the perfect age to wonder.
He crossed the highway bridge over the shaded Animas River, noticing a band of kayakers fighting the spring-melt waters below, and cruised into the old part of town, a gentrified historical district with upscale boutiques and bistros and a refurbished Victorian hotel. Tourists waited at the antique depot to ride the famous narrow-gauge railway up to the ghost town of Silverton, forty-five miles north in the San Juans.
Kurt parked on the street and found the address listed for Nighthawk Investigations, but it turned out to be a storefront art gallery located between a health-food café and an India import shop. He checked the address again and then wandered up and down the block, searching for some sign of a detective agency, a security company, a collection agency. There were waterbeds, used books, Western boots, and tofu—but no shamus. As a last resort he returned to the art gallery and stepped inside, rattling the dried gourd shells lacing the door. It was a newly remodeled space featuring Native American pottery and basketwork under a double row of track lighting. The pleasant, high-country aroma of piñon emanated from a burning stick of incense. An attractive young dark-haired woman, possibly Ute, sat behind a desk in a sunlit corner, typing on a computer. She glanced over and smiled. “If I can help you with anything,” she said in a soft voice, “just let
me know.”
He lifted a clay serving bowl and examined the simple markings. “I’m looking for a man named Jesse Nighthawk,” he said.
She pointed indifferently toward a door in the rear, a subtle admonition that said, Oh, you’re one of those people, and continued with her work as if he had never appeared.
The door gave way into a dim workshop area filled with packing crates and sheets of bubble wrap. A long scarred table was scattered with black markers, rolls of tape, cutting blades. The place smelled like sawdust and damp cardboard. He was about to turn around and ask the young woman again when he noticed another door, its paint shedding in loose green curls. The john? he wondered, walking over to try the knob.
“Close the fucking door!” snapped the bulky figure bent over a developer tray in a red-lit darkroom.
“Hello, Jesse. How’s the picture business?”
Nighthawk spun around at the sound of the voice and came toward him, but Kurt drew the .45. “Relax,” he said, showing the weapon. “I’m not here to pop your balloon. Unless there’s something you’ve forgotten to tell me about Ned Carr.”
A slow recognition passed over the man’s face. “Muller?” he said. “Jesus Christ, man. What are you doing here?”
“I like to drop in at odd times myself, Jesse. Keeps everybody honest.”
There were a dozen eight-by-tens drying on a line. Kurt yanked one free, an excellent close-up of Arnold Metcalf standing on the golf green next to that South African mining engineer in the natty hat.
“Why don’t we go somewhere and have a nice long talk?” Kurt suggested.
“Whatever you say, hoss. You’ve got the gun.”
Nighthawk pulled back a heavy black curtain and they entered a small storage room with a single transom window high above. Misshapen rectangles of sunlight had bleached out the old political posters tacked on the wall. BIA = CIA. FREE LEONARD PELTIER. ALCATRAZ FOR THE INDIANS. Judging by the columns of books wobbling among the uncrated pottery, Jesse Nighthawk was a voracious reader of anthropology and science fiction, with an impressive collection of Playboys yellowing in another corner.
“Have a seat there,” Kurt said, motioning the gun at a metal chair. He didn’t want Jesse sitting behind that industrial desk, where there was probably a pistol in one of its drawers.
“You can put that thing away, Muller. I’m not going to jump you.”
Nighthawk sat in the chair and folded his large arms across his chest. An inch of hairless flab was visible between his beltline and the bottom of the tight Los Lobos T-shirt he was wearing. “Where I come from,” he said, “we’ve got better ways to treat a man who’s saved your life.”
“You lied to me, Jesse,” Kurt said, slipping the .45 back in his shoulder holster. “You haven’t worked for SPIRITT in a good long while. So who are you taking these pictures for?” he asked, dropping the photo of Arnold Metcalf in the detective’s lap.
“For the only boss who can tolerate my wicked ways,” he said with a cunning grin, tapping his chest. “Numero uno.”
“Bullshit.” Kurt peered around the dusty room. “You can’t afford to work for yourself. I don’t believe you.”
“I hope this doesn’t come as a big surprise, Muller, but I don’t give a rat’s ass what you believe.”
Kurt pulled the chunk of platinum ore from his jacket pocket and held it out in his open palm. “This is what you were looking for that night in Ned’s cabin,” he said. “Isn’t it, Jesse?”
Nighthawk stared at the rock.
“Yeah, it’s high-grade platinum, all right. And it’s from the Lone Ute, unless Ned was pulling everybody’s leg. You want it so bad?” he said, pitching the fragment at Nighthawk. “You can have it. But tell your clients if they’re after the mine, they’re too late. Metcalf and his South Africans have already dug around in the stopes and they know it’s platinum rich. They’ve got paperwork that says they’re in charge of Ned’s holdings.”
Nighthawk leaned forward, his forearms resting on his knees. He tossed the rock in the air, caught it, felt its weight, turned the piece over in his hand, studying the rough texture. “Ned cut them in at forty percent,” he said after a long silence. “Do the math. That’s still not enough to call the shots at a stockholders’ meeting.”
“Where did you come up with that?”
Nighthawk flashed his dark eyes. “He told me.”
“When he called and told you he wanted SPIRITT to run his mines?”
“That’s right. The kid takes the other sixty percent. If Metcalf shows you something that says different, check to see if the signature’s dry.”
“And you’re still saying that Ned wanted your people to manage Hunter’s sixty percent.”
“Just like I told you, hoss. Until the boy is twenty-one.”
“Can you prove that? The forty-sixty split?”
Nighthawk shook his head slowly. “Why do you think they offed him when they did?” he said. “They knew I didn’t have anything in black and white, and they wanted to make sure it stayed that way.”
“Arnold Metcalf’s got paper, and you’ve got squat.”
“Squat plus zilch, my friend. Don’t I know it.”
“He’s a big-time lawyer, Jesse. He’s got a whole kennel full of hotshot legal counsel with Ivy League pedigrees. What’s going to stop them from cooking up a will that says the Free West Coalition is the sole guardian of the Ned Carr mines?”
He studied Kurt through small mischievous eyes, his huge head canted slightly on a thick neck. “You and me,” he said with a grin.
Kurt stared back at him and began to laugh. “They’ve got lawyers, guns, and money. We’ve got squat plus zilch.”
Nighthawk began to laugh now too. “They don’t stand a fucking chance,” he said.
Kurt wiped at his eye with a finger, trying to get control of himself. Trying to wrap his mind around this whole ludicrous situation, the sixty-forty algebra of murder. Something besides the math wasn’t adding up.
“I’m hearing a little voice in the back of my head, Jesse. A little voice that’s wondering what’s in this for you,” he said. “SPIRITT let you go, so there’s no use pretending you’re winning one for the brothers. Who are you doing this for?”
Nighthawk stood up and tossed the rock on a mess of shipping papers. The surface of the desk was so cluttered with photo contact sheets and scribbled notes it would take another geologist to find that chunk of ore again. He began to rummage through the chaos, searching for something, and worked his way slowly around the desk to the drawers.
“I’m in it for the same reason you are, Muller,” he said, reaching down for the drawer handle.
“Don’t do it, Jesse,” Kurt said, unholstering the .45 under his jacket.
Nighthawk stared at the gun. “There’s something I want to show you,” he said, his hand slowly disappearing behind the desk.
Kurt cocked the hammer. “Raise your hands where I can see them and step away from the desk,” he said. “I don’t want this to get rude.”
Nighthawk narrowed his eyes at him, stubbornly held his ground.
“Raise your hands, man. Do it now.”
Slowly, reluctantly, the detective lifted his hands above his head. “You people have no honor,” he said bitterly.
Brandishing the pistol, Kurt walked around the desk and glanced at the rust-pocked drawer.
“There’s something I wanted to show you, asshole,” Nighthawk said. “I think it’s probably in the top left-hand side. Open it yourself.”
Kurt stared at the drawer. A trip-wired latch was the oldest trick in the book. J.J. Chilcutt would have rigged it to blow off an intruder’s hand. Maybe Jesse Nighthawk possessed those same perverse skills.
“Step out of the way,” Kurt said, and Nighthawk did so with a disgusted shake of the head. Kurt knelt down and searched for loose wires, metal tubing, anything out of the ordinary. “Okay,” he said, standing, backing away several steps, the gun still in his hand. “Go ahead and open i
t.”
Nighthawk hesitated, his mouth forming a wicked smile.
“Open it, Jesse. Show me what you want to show me. Let’s see what you’ve got in there.”
Nighthawk lowered his hands. “I’m not sure you can handle this, Muller,” he said, his smile turning darker.
Kurt shrugged. “Then don’t waste my time, man.”
Nighthawk stepped forward and opened the drawer. When nothing happened, he glared at Kurt with upturned palms, like a magician after a coin trick. “You look a little nervous, hoss,” he said. “Did you expect a rattlesnake?”
Kurt glanced in the drawer. More receipts, invoices, scraps of paper.
“With your permission,” Nighthawk said with a sarcastic nod.
“Go real slow.”
It didn’t take him long to find the object. A six-by-nine photograph in a bronze frame. He handed the glass-encased picture to Kurt. “Don’t drop it,” he said. “It’s my only one.”
Kurt recognized her instantly. Marie Carr was smiling at the camera, holding her baby swaddled in a crib blanket. And looming behind her, his arms around both mother and child, an ageless Jesse Nighthawk.
Heat rushed up the back of Kurt’s neck. “My god,” he said, laying his gun on the desk.
“Like I told you, I’m in this for the same reason you are,” he grinned sheepishly. “For the boy.”
Jesse Nighthawk was Hunter’s father. Kurt sank down on the green vinyl cushion of an old slat-backed office chair and gazed at the photograph in his hands. “You and Marie,” he said, hearing the astonishment in his voice.
Nighthawk nodded. “We got to know each other when I was working the mines with Ned,” he said. “The old man eventually found out about us and chased my ass off with a shotgun. But Marie and me saddled up every once in a while, whenever we crossed paths and the spirit moved us. She claimed the pregnancy was an accident, but I knew better. She was thirty-eight and running out of biology.”
Kurt was surprised at himself for the sudden protectiveness he felt toward Marie and her son. “Where were you during the shitwork, man? My ex-wife stood by her through the birth,” he said. “You never came around after Hunter was born.”