by Robert Greer
Ponytail swinging, Lenny returned with a wad of rubber-banded hundred-dollar bills. He walked the length of the store past the bookshelf and back to CJ. The book seller returned to the display case and watched, smiling, as Lenny counted out seventeen bills.
“We good to go?” he asked, placing the books he’d again slipped from his backpack on top of the display case.
“Yeah.” Struck by how out of place the uniquely American phrase sounded in the man’s thick Spanish accent, CJ handed over the stack of hundreds.
Without recounting them, the man shoved the bills into his pocket. “My pleasure.” Turning to leave, he took one of CJ’s business cards from a card holder on the countertop, eyed McCabe dismissively, and retreated.
“Want a receipt?” CJ called after him.
The man didn’t answer. Within seconds he was at the front door, greeted as he exited by a new shower of heavy, wet snowflakes.
CJ watched the man move past the front window before sliding the two books toward him. Looking at Lenny in full-choke puzzlement he asked, “Whattaya think? Stolen?”
Lenny shrugged. “You never know in this business.”
“Thought I left those days behind when I got out of the bail-bonding business.”
“Could be you didn’t.” There was a hint of playfulness in McCabe’s tone as he slipped CJ’s check back out of his pocket, snapped it, and said, “But I’m sure as hell good to go.”
CJ nodded, opened the brand book, and began flipping through its pages. “Two for the money,” he said, reaching page thirty. “Thanks for fronting me the seventeen hundred.”
McCabe smiled. “Had to in order to protect my interests. I need a tenant who’s making money.”
“No shit,” said CJ, surprised by the seriousness in McCabe’s tone. “I should make a nice little piece of change on the cattle-brand book.” CJ eased the book aside, eyed its partner, the Montana medicine book, and shrugged. “This one, though, like they say, you never know.”
The windshield of the Volkswagen his mother had leased for him was covered with snow by the time Luis Del Mora had made the eleven-block trek from Ike’s Spot back to where he’d parked the car in an alley. He had intentionally parked almost a mile away from the store, fearful that nearby on-street parking would have made him too visible, vulnerable to being seen by someone who might recognize him or the car. He had angled the lime-green Beetle into a narrow space between two garages, well out of the way of the alley traffic.
He cleared the windshield with a swipe of his jacket sleeve, looked skyward at the approaching darkness, patted the two wads of bills in his pocket, CJ’s $1,700 and the tightly packaged four-inch-thick $10,000 roll beneath it, and turned back to unlock the door.
The book sale had been easy—much easier than he’d expected. And to think that selling the two books had been an afterthought, an add-on to his earlier sale. He broke into a self-congratulatory grin, thinking that the black man at Ike’s Spot showed that African Americans seemed just as eager for money as their greenback-grubbing white counterparts. His sales had been brisk for the past month, and he had no reason to expect they wouldn’t keep rising. He swung open the door, slipped inside the Beetle, and cranked the engine. He’d just started to back out into the alley when a wash of light filled the Volkswagen. He looked back to see a vehicle blocking his way. He waited briefly for it to move. When it didn’t, he swung his door open, stepped out of the car, and said, “Hey!”
Luis Del Mora never uttered another word. Two close-range, silenced shots from a .22 Magnum pistol jutting from the vehicle’s window made certain of that. One bullet ripped apart his windpipe, ultimately lodging deep in his cervical spine. The other shattered the delicate cherubic bone of his forehead before gyrating end over end through his brain. There would be no more words, no more book sales, and no more four-inch-thick wads of money for Luis Alejandro Del Mora.
CHAPTER 3
Celeste Deepstream had been cultivating Alexie Borg for months, hoping to get the once high-profile Russian hockey player to kill for her, and now she was close. As close as Alexie was, as he enjoyed the final titillating seconds of making love to her, to reaching a climax. “Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, yes, yes, yes!” he screamed.
“Alexie, you’re squeezing me too tightly. I can’t breathe.” Celeste’s words came out in a gasp as all 250 pounds of the gyrating Soviet transplant collapsed onto her and Alexie spent himself.
His face a contorted mask of erotic pleasure, Alexie released his bear hug.
“Get off me!” Celeste screamed.
Floating on a sea of pleasure, Alexie rolled from on top of the onetime Miss Acoma Indian Nation and former world-class swimmer and flopped spread-eagled onto the bed. “You’re something,” he said, exhaling. “A woman to make a man forfeit his dreams.”
For Celeste, the feeling wasn’t mutual. In all their months of lovemaking, Alexie had brought her to climax only once. He was burly, rough, and unschooled in the ways that made woman release their juices. But he was necessary—a cog that counted. He was a brutal oaf at best, but he would be her conduit to eliminating CJ Floyd, the man who had stolen her life, so in the long run it was Alexie Borg who would service her needs.
Relaxing onto a pillow and propping himself up, Alexie ran a rough, callused hand along Celeste’s inner thigh until he reached the sweet softness that had given him so much pleasure. “This you Indians should mass-produce.” He capped the remark with a snort and a less-than-gentle squeeze.
Celeste responded with a string-along smile.
Alexie frowned, recognizing the smile for what it was. “What? Alexie’s not good enough for you?”
“You’re plenty,” Celeste said, her words programmed and robotic.
Alexie inched himself farther up in the bed and, running his eyes up and down Celeste’s exquisite body, scrutinizing every inch of her as if there were parts he believed he owned, said, “You remember, of course, the wreck you were when I found you? Are you now so far removed from that wretched state that you no longer feel the need to service me?”
Celeste answered with silence, vividly remembering the state she’d been in when Alexie had found her. She had been depressed and recovering from wounds she’d suffered in a shoot-out with CJ Floyd in the New Mexico Sangre de Cristo mountains. She had been forty pounds overweight, a fugitive, and barely in touch with reality as she’d moved back and forth between Taos, New Mexico, and the surrounding mountains. Alexie had dropped out of the sky to save her from herself and temper her long-festering grudge against Floyd—but only temporarily.
She had been a University of New Mexico world-class swimmer and a recently selected Rhodes Scholar poised to study anthropology at the University of London when a collision between her drug-addicted twin brother, Bobby, and Floyd had derailed her plans. Her dreams had been swamped because of Floyd, and because of Floyd, Bobby was dead.
Thirty-two years earlier she and Bobby had been born six minutes apart on a kitchen table in a crumbling two-room Acoma Indian reservation adobe. All her life Celeste had been stronger, smarter, and wiser than Bobby, miles ahead of her brother in all the things that mattered, ascending as he spiraled downward. It was as if the couplet of DNA she had sprung from had harbored all of life’s richest components, while Bobby’s had been stripped bare. Until the day he died, Bobby’s one claim to fame had been that he was the oldest.
She had turned down the Rhodes Scholarship to spend time detoxifying Bobby, who had been strung out on Ritalin, Percocet, alcohol, and model-airplane glue, and in time Bobby had won that war with drugs. But her painstaking intervention had transformed her from caring sister into Bobby’s permanent crutch, and the bond between them, though no less tenacious, had degenerated into an unhealthy codependency fueled by Bobby’s instability and her deep sense of guilt.
And then had come Floyd, an unrelenting bounty-hunting bear of a black man hired to track down her now dried-out, bond-skipping brother, who’d turned his talents to the work
of a smalltime fence. Floyd had tracked Bobby across two states before hog-tying him in chains, dumping him in the back of a pickup, and hauling him from Santa Fe to Denver to face charges of transporting stolen weapons and illegal fireworks across state lines.
While awaiting trial Bobby had tried to kill himself in the Denver County Jail. Guilt-ridden and enraged, Celeste had unmercifully beaten the seventy-five-year-old skinflint bail bondsman who had hired Floyd to track down Bobby, blaming that man for her brother’s plight. When the old man had died from his injuries, Celeste had received a plea-bargained manslaughter conviction that had earned her a twelve-year prison sentence. She’d never again seen Bobby alive.
With five years of model-prisoner check marks next to her name, chits that included saving a prison guard’s life, teaching college-credit courses to inmates, and founding a Native American prisoners’ prerelease job opportunities program, she’d masterminded an early release, dumping buckets of remorse around the room at two critical parole hearings and playing the role of a long-suffering sister forced all her life to shoulder responsibility for her bad-seed twin. She was paroled after serving just under half of her original sentence.
She had tried to kill the brown-skinned, square-jawed, wiry-haired bail bondsman Floyd half-a-dozen times, but she’d always failed. This time she was determined not to. This time she had Alexie, a Russian bear who had briefly moved with her from Taos to the sparsely populated White Sands Missile Range country outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, far from the law and any hint of limelight. A man who had been forced to America by the fall of communism to seek the good life he had enjoyed as a pampered Soviet athlete. Now, as a member of an elite arm of the Russian mafia, he fenced stolen airplane parts, illegal weapons, and medical contraband and smuggled rare art objects and priceless tapestries.
No pain, no gain, Celeste thought, responding finally to Alexie’s question by reaching down and cupping his penis. “I’m not too far removed from anything,” she said, skating an index finger back and forth across his testicles. “I just had a temporary lockdown because of Floyd.”
“You lock down far too often over the bail bondsman, and always it seems to occur in the midst of our lovemaking. I have told you, I, Alexie Borg, will handle this.”
Celeste sat up in bed. “I’ve told you before, Alexie, Floyd’s no longer a bail bondsman. Problem is,” she hesitated momentarily and frowned, “he’s just as shrewd and probably just as fearless.”
Alexie smiled. It was the secure smile of someone with inside dope. “But he’s American. He has weaknesses.”
“Not the Sundee woman, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ve tried that route already, remember?”
“Close,” Alexie said with a chuckle.
“What, then?”
Running his finger in a circle around one of Celeste’s firm, ample breasts, he said, “His possessions. The precious inventory he houses in that store he calls Ike’s Spot.”
“Floyd’s the one I want eliminated,” Celeste protested, grabbing Alexie’s finger. “Not a store full of junk.”
Alexie slipped his finger out of her grasp and licked it sensuously. “In Russia we have a saying: ‘Some pigs must die at the trough.’”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, I will soon have an international present for your Stetson-wearing African American cowboy. One that will be delivered to Ike’s Spot, the trough that he eats from. A message that will be delivered directly from the Middle East.”
“How soon?”
“Tomorrow. Perhaps the day after.” Alexie slipped an arm beneath Celeste, forcefully rolled her on top of him, and ground his body into hers, quickly bringing himself to a new state of hardness. Within seconds he had slipped inside her.
Preparing herself for Alexie’s spastic, cumbersome onslaught, Celeste kept thinking, No pain, no gain, recalling words that had once been part of an athletic training mantra that had driven her to Olympic-caliber level. It was a mantra she repeated to herself in silence as, ignoring Alexie’s grunts and plunges, she envisioned the death of CJ Floyd.
Rare collectible finds always kept CJ preoccupied, to the point of often interfering with his sleep. Unearthing, researching, authenticating, and cataloging a rare porcelain license could consume him for days. So it wasn’t unusual to find him at one a.m. trying to put a collector’s face on the two books he’d bought. He was seated at the eighteenth-century French partner’s desk that Mavis had given him the day he’d opened Ike’s Spot. As CJ had watched Morgan Williams and Dittier Atkins, two down-on-their-luck former rodeo stars who had done odd jobs and a little surveillance for him when he was a bail bondsman, struggle into Ike’s Spot carrying the 350-pound desk, he’d asked Mavis why such an expensive one. She’d said, “So you can do the authentication research you’ve always done on your kitchen table in style.”
He had pretty much wrapped up dealing with the 1883 Wyoming cattle-brand book, having called his friend, the former ranch foreman, Billy DeLong, in Baggs, Wyoming, for the long and short of it. The now teetotaling, wiry, rough-cut sixty-five-year-old, who’d lost his left eye to diabetes and Old Crow, had said, “A 123-year-old book full of cow tattoos, now, that’s sayin’ somethin’.” CJ knew he had a real find when Billy, a man prone to understatement, had told him the book was probably worth about five grand. CJ had screamed, “No shit!”
Aware that the brand book wasn’t the kind of item he could put out in the store for looky-Lous and kids with Popsicle hands to paw over, he had priced the book, given it an inventory number, slipped it into a small safe in the doorless, unpainted cubby that served as his office, and moved on to the Montana medicine book.
CJ assigned Medicine in the Making of Montana, by Paul C. Phillips, published in 1962 by the Montana Medical Association and the Montana State University Press, inventory number 301 and the shorthand log-in name The Lazy MD.
The book opened with a preface on the history of the medical practices of Montana Indians in the 1830s and moved on in the first chapter to document a list of the medical supplies carried by the members of the Louis and Clark expedition, but what caused CJ to puzzle as he flipped page by page through the 564-page volume was not what was contained within the book’s bound buckskin boards but what was missing. The front and back panels and the book’s first and last pages opened into two identical buff-colored, center-creased maps of Montana. The map in the front of the book that showed the territories of a host of Montana Indian tribes looked original and pristine. The end map, however, had been damaged, and pieces of yellowed cellophane tape and fragments of what appeared to be either string or fishing line clung to the tape as it crisscrossed the map in a perfectly centered X. The string or line appeared to CJ to have at one time secured something to the back board. A barely visible note printed in lowercase letters near the upper right-hand corner of the map read, page 298, Covington.
Intrigued, CJ flipped to page 298 and began reading. The page began with a discussion of the election of a recording secretary to the Helena, Montana–based medical association before going on two paragraphs later to describe in dry, succinct terms the life of Jacob L. Covington:
Dr. Jacob L. Covington left little record of his early life, but from accounts of his younger brothers and other family members, he was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1838. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1860 and practiced in Pennsylvania until 1866, when he moved to Helena. The reason he gave for the move was that he was attracted by the climate. In 1868 he moved to Laramie, Wyoming, to become a doctor for the Union Pacific Railroad. He worked for the Union Pacific from 1868 until 1870 but returned to Helena the next year and established his living quarters and office in the St. Louis Hotel. Covington, an avid photographer, worked and lived at the hotel until it burned down in 1880. The doctor narrowly escaped death by sliding down a pillar to the street, but his 470-volume library and his surgical instruments were destroyed, along with most of his photographs.
&nbs
p; CJ reread the paragraph, deciding after the second reading and a perusal of the biographies of a dozen other doctors that there was nothing unusual enough about Covington’s background, education, medical practice, or life’s tragedies to distinguish him from the hundreds of others described in the book, many of whom had had hobbies that had ranged form ornithology to fly fishing, and most of whom had been educated back East. There was one thing that was strikingly different about the Covington biography, however: the entire bio had been underlined perfectly, and almost imperceptibly, in pencil. CJ flipped to the book’s endboard and tried to match the underlining with the notation that had been penciled on the map of Montana, but he couldn’t. He reread the biography a final time. Assured that he hadn’t missed anything, he shrugged, closed the book, and nudged it aside, convinced that the Wyoming cattle-brand book had been the real find of the day.
He checked his watch and decided that one-forty would have to be the witching hour for the day. He thought about whether he should put the book he now thought of as The Lazy MD in the safe with the brand book. Deciding it wouldn’t hurt, he walked over to the safe, knelt, and ran the combination. As he held the door open, he had the feeling that he’d missed something important in the book. He had noted that except for one minor page tear, some smudges, and three or four barely perceptible page crimps, the book appeared almost as pristine as the day it had been printed. He slipped it into the safe, wondering as he closed the door why he was so drawn to a drily written book on the history of medicine in the nation’s third-largest state when he probably should have been more concerned about whether the book or its companion had been stolen, and whether the cops and the rightful owner would descend on him, confiscate his finds, and charge him with trafficking in stolen merchandise.
He rose and dimmed the store’s lights, ready to head for Bail Bondsman’s Row and home. Donning his Stetson and slipping on his jacket, he stepped outside to be greeted by a warm chinook breeze. The temperature had risen twenty degrees since the young man with the books had walked into Ike’s Spot on a rush of frigid air. Springtime in the Rockies, CJ thought, heading for the sagging poor excuse for a garage where Lenny McCabe allowed him to park his 1957 drop-top Chevrolet Bel Air each morning. He slipped into the Bel Air, considered the day’s events and the rapid double-digit rise in temperature, and shook his head, thinking, Rocky Mountain weather—you never know what to expect.