by R. J. Jagger
The gas tank must have ruptured.
She approached with a racing heart, listening for sounds but getting none.
Twenty yards away she shouted, “Are you okay?”
No response.
She called out two more times as she closed the gap.
No response.
Inside, the man was a motionless bloody mess.
Fallon shook his shoulder.
He didn’t respond.
She heard no breathing.
She saw no movement of his lungs.
“Hey.”
She didn’t know how to feel for a pulse, but did anyway, both on his wrist and neck. She didn’t detect any vein movements.
A wide gash was on his forehead.
It went all the way to the skull.
Lots of blood had come out of the wound but none was coming out now.
“You’re dead,” she said.
He looked to be in his early fifties.
Now what?
Suddenly she did something she didn’t expect. She reached into the man’s back pants pocket and pulled out a wallet.
Inside was a lot of money, enough to keep food in her mouth for months judging by the looks of it.
She searched the glove box.
Inside was a Smith & Wesson revolver, a six-shooter.
The chambers were loaded.
There was also a box of shells.
She grabbed them both and took one last look around.
A briefcase was on the back floor. She muscled it out from behind the seat and tried to look inside but it was locked. It felt like there was paper inside.
Money?
The car key was still in the ignition.
It was one of several keys on a ring. One of them probably went to the briefcase. She grabbed them.
Now what?
Nothing.
She was done.
She took off her skirt, tied it into a pouch and put the keys, gun, bullets and wallet inside. Then she tied the other end to the handle of the briefcase.
There.
Now she could carry it all with one hand.
That would give her a free one to climb up with.
The big trick now was to not slip on a rock on the way up.
Twenty steps from the car she turned and shouted, “I’m sorry. I really am.”
9
T wo hours of fight, that’s what Shade had to endure before the storm lost its bite and passed over. The chop got replaced with rolling swells. She was able to dry out now that the wind wasn’t picking spray off the surface. She had no idea where she was other than somewhere between Cuba and the Keys. She deployed the main sail to full extension and continued north.
She needed sleep.
She needed it badly and she needed it now, but the boat had no autopilot and the wind direction was sporadic, meaning she had no option but to stay at the wheel, either that or shut the sails down altogether and bob.
She’d sleep later.
Right now she needed distance.
The more distance the better.
The sky slowly morphed into a lighter and lighter shade of black, the horizon appeared and then the water became visible, at first just the white churn, then the rest.
The day was coming.
Someone would be in the marina by now. If the boat hadn’t been reported as stolen, it would soon. Shade went to the transom to see if the name of the boat was painted on.
It was.
Bonita Wind.
The letters were red and large.
They’d be readable through binoculars.
A motorboat on these seas could close the gap from Cuba in an hour or two if it knew what direction to go. It was unlikely she’d be in American waters at that point.
There was no use worrying about it.
All she could do was continue north and hope for the best.
Hours later, with the sun bright and the air hot, a vessel from the north spotted her waving arms and diverted over. It turned out to be a small navy cutter. A dinghy got lowered and four men motored over.
Shade grabbed the rope when they got alongside and said, “My name’s Shade de Laurent. I’m with the CIA.”
“Do you have papers?”
“No but I have a phone number.”
By early afternoon she was back in her Washington D.C. apartment.
A debriefing meeting was scheduled with Kent Harvin and others for three o’clock.
Until then she’d sleep.
Sleep.
Sleep.
Sleep.
That’s what she was doing when a knock came at her door. At first she let it be but it didn’t go away. When she answered, a man was there.
He had a message for her.
10
W hen Senn-Rae left, Wilde dropped the top of the ’47 MG/TC and pointed the front end towards the place where Mr. Smith buried the body of his little bondage friend, Madison. Up above was a crisp blue sky overflowing with massive amounts of sunshine.
The car was running good.
That could change at any minute but didn’t feel like it would—the sky was too blue. The car was more in the mood for mechanical drama when it was out in the middle of nowhere and the sky was churning with angry black thunderclouds.
Wilde bought it cheap last year from a guy who didn’t want to go through another winter without a heater, especially in a vehicle that had the steering wheel on the wrong side. The guy said, “This car will do a hundred and sixty.”
Wilde raised an eyebrow.
“No way.”
The man nodded.
“It will, but you have to drop it out of an airplane to get it. On the road it’s good for only half that. Still, that’s eighty and eighty’s not bad.”
It was a tiny little two-seat death trap.
It had no bumpers.
It had no radio.
It had no back seat.
It had no hardtop.
What it did have, however, was a Moss Magnacharger engine under the hood and tan leather seats that seemed to attract the female figure. It also had British Racing Green paint. There was no better color and never would be.
It also had a name, Blondie—inspired by the vanilla ragtop.
He took Santa Fe Boulevard south and let the miles click by. The buildings got less impressive and less frequent, finally giving way altogether to native topography. Fifteen miles later he came to a narrow unmarked dirt road that mysteriously disappeared to the east into rolling terrain. It was choked with weeds and looked like a firefighting access road long abandoned.
This was it.
He turned left.
The ruts kept his speed to a crawl. The foliage was bent, not obviously but enough to suggest that another car had been here within the last week or so.
No doubt Mr. Smith.
Two or three hundred yards into the journey Wilde found what he was looking for—a small grouping of four or five pinion pines.
He pulled over and killed the engine.
Then he had a bad thought.
Would Blondie start again?
He cranked over the key and fired her up.
No problem.
Okay.
He turned her back off and stepped out.
Would she start the next time? How ironic would it be if he just used up the one start he had left? He almost cranked her over again to check, then decided he could be playing this game all day.
Forget it.
A handful of magpies flew out of the pinions. Crickets chirped. A light breeze gently rustled the native grasses. The air didn’t smell like Larimer Street. In fact it didn’t smell at all.
The quietness was absolute.
Except for the insects, not a sound came from anywhere.
He headed for the pinions, which were thirty steps off the road. Sure enough, there was a shallow grave. The dirt was loose. Wilde squatted down and pulled enough away to confirm that the hole was empty.
He stood up and looked around
.
He saw nothing other than nature.
Then something happened.
A rustling sound came from the backside of a yucca.
Wilde wandered over and found a snake.
It had the markings of a prairie rattler. He stepped closer, pretty sure it was just a bull snake impersonating a rattler. It curled up, raised its head and shook the non-business end.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “The real deal.”
He let it be and headed back to Blondie. He was just about to get in when he noticed something that wasn’t nature. It was the top of a boxcar a hundred yards or so to the south, barely visible over the top of a rolling ridge.
Interesting.
He headed back to Santa Fe, drove south and came to a second road, a broader one that had once been gravel, one that led to an old abandoned switching yard.
The tracks were in disrepair and overgrown.
An old boxcar had been left there to die.
So had a gondola, farther down.
Both were rusted, cockeyed and beyond salvage.
Wilde looked north to see if he could see the grouping of pinions where the grave was.
He could see them, but only the very tops.
If a man was standing there—say, Mr. Smith—he wouldn’t be able to see him. He headed up the boxcar ladder to see how visible things were from that vantage point.
A pungent odor suddenly filled the air.
It got stronger as he climbed.
When he got his head up to where he could see on top, he found the source of the stench.
A woman was up there.
A dead woman.
She looked to be in her early twenties although it was hard to tell given what the sun and the insects had done to her.
Wilde got all the way up and walked over. There were no obvious wounds. A hatchet wasn’t sticking in her head. Her throat wasn’t slit from ear to ear. There were no bloody gunshot holes. Still it was obvious she’d been murdered. That was clear from the way she was dressed—like a pinup model—and the way her body was posed.
Someone had staged her.
Someone knew exactly how he wanted her to look.
Wilde looked to the pinions.
From up here on top of the boxcar he could see the grave.
11
F allon had one thought and one thought only as she climbed out of the canyon, namely that the dead man’s briefcase was full of money. It was the right weight. She could almost smell it.
Money.
Money.
Money.
Where’d he get it? Did he rob a bank? Did he blackmail someone? Was he up to his eyebrows in a life of crime and twists and shadows?
It didn’t matter.
The only thing that mattered was that she had it.
The climb made her muscles burn and her lungs pound but she made it up without a fatal misstep. She caught her breath for a few minutes, then untied her skirt from the handle of the briefcase. She stuck the smallest key on the ring into the lock to see if it fit.
It didn’t.
She tried the others.
They didn’t fit either.
She looked around for a rock big enough to smash the stupid thing open when she saw something she didn’t expect. Her car, parked where she left it a hundred yards down the road, wasn’t the only one there.
A second vehicle sat behind it.
It was big, fancy and shiny.
A woman suddenly appeared from behind it and walked in Fallon’s direction.
She looked to be about thirty.
Her skirt was tight and ended below her knees. Her hair was long and black, her blouse was fancy and her heels were high. Even at this distance she looked expensive on every level. Her walk was purposeful and strong.
Was she a friend of the dead man?
A lover?
An accomplice?
Fallon checked the gun.
Bullets were in the chambers.
Holding her skirt full of treasures in one hand and the briefcase in the other, she headed towards the woman.
It would be best to confront her head on.
The woman fixated on Fallon’s thighs and panties as she approached but it wasn’t clear if the stare was sexual or curiosity. They stopped a step short of one another. The woman dropped her gaze to the briefcase for a heartbeat then locked eyes with Fallon.
She was stronger up close.
Fallon wasn’t sure she could take her in a fair fight.
“Are you okay?”
Fallon hesitated and then stepped around the woman.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
She kept walking without turning around.
“Yeah, thanks for asking.”
She heard no footsteps behind her.
Ten steps later the woman said, “Hold on a minute.”
Fallon stopped.
Then against her better judgment she pulled the gun out of the skirt, raised her arm towards the sky and fired a bullet. She turned and said, “You never saw me here. Do we have an understanding?”
A pause.
Then the woman nodded.
“Yes,” she said.
“Good. Stay right where you are until I leave.”
At the car, Fallon wrote down the woman’s license plate number and shoved the paper in her purse. Then she fired up the Packard and waved at the woman who watched her with a rotating head as she passed.
The briefcase was on the seat next to her.
“You better be filled with money,” she said.
Ten miles later she pulled to the side of the road, got out and slipped her skirt on. No one was around. The air was coffin-quiet. She set the briefcase on the ground and shot it until the lock blew apart.
She heard nothing but looked around one last time just to be sure she was alone.
What she saw she could hardly believe.
A car was heading her way.
Coming fast.
12
S hade read the message that got delivered by a man she didn’t know:
my dearest shade, i wish i could tell you this in person and i wish i could hold you in my arms. monday night at the bar, tehya was murdered. someone stabbed her in the heart and then scalped her. visible moon was working that night and we have not heard from her since. she is gone. we do not know if she is alive or dead. i am sorry to have to tell you this. - mojag
She slumped on the couch and closed her eyes. She never liked the idea of Visible Moon running the bar, not for a moment. It was a setup for disaster from day one, out there in the middle of nowhere, filled with drunks, no security to speak of other than the gun under the counter. It was a time bomb with a short fuse. That fuse didn’t get any longer when Tehya started showing up six months ago and doing the whole sex-in-the-backroom thing.
Mojag should have never left Visible Moon alone.
It was his bar, not hers.
He should have run the place himself.
He was to blame.
Everything that happened was his fault.
Shade reread the message, crumpled up the paper and threw it against the wall. Then she packed a small suitcase and called a taxi. Two hours later she was about to board a twin-prop plane for Denver. From there she’d take a puddle-jumper to Santa Fe.
She called Kent Harvin, the Assistant Director of the CIA.
He was in a bad mood.
What she had to say wasn’t about to improve it.
“Something’s come up. I’m not going to be able to make the three o’clock debriefing this afternoon.”
Silence.
“Unacceptable. Be there.”
“I can’t.”
“That’s a direct order.”
“I have to go to New Mexico.”
“Why?”
“A friend of mine disappeared,” she said.
“A friend?”
“Right.”
“A contact?”
“No, not a contact, a fr
iend. This has nothing to do with my job.”
“Then it can wait.”
“I wish it could.”
A beat.
“What’s your friend’s name?”
“Visible Moon.”
“Visible Moon. What kind of name is that?”
“It’s Navajo,” she said. “She’s Navajo.”
Harvin exhaled.
“Be at the three o’clock meeting. You know better than anyone how much we have riding on all this. We need to know what went wrong and we need to know it yesterday.”
The line went dead.
Shade hung up and boarded the plane. Fifteen minutes later it lifted into a blue but turbulent sky and headed west.
She closed her eyes and pulled up an image of Tehya being scalped.
She could see the bloody red mess.
She could hear the sawing of the knife and the tearing of the skin.
She could see the hand holding the knife.
It was a white hand.
13
F rom the boxcar, Wilde headed to Senn-Rae’s office on 16th Street, the bustling heart of Denver. The problem was there was no such address and no such office.
What the hell?
Okay, she wasn’t an attorney.
She had no office.
So who the hell was she?
He called her from a phone booth and said, “Your office doesn’t exist. What kind of game are you playing?”
“I don’t play games.”
“Allow me to disagree,” he said. “When you give someone a business card for an office that doesn’t exist, that’s called playing a game.”
A beat.
Then, “There’s an alley off 16th between California and Champa. Head in there and see what you can find.”
The line went dead.
Wilde headed into the alley, saw nothing, kept walking and then turned down a one-lane delivery alley that ran between 16th and 17th. On a steel door was a crude sign, Senn-Rae Vaughn, Attorney at Law. Wilde opened the door and found himself in a tight stairwell. He headed up. The door on every floor was locked except for the last one, the one on the sixth floor.