by Jim Heskett
A little smile came to his face when he saw a turnoff for a shortcut on the lower section of the trail. He used to take this hidden path through the scree field to stop by his high school sweetheart’s house sometimes.
Layne could have easily played the field back then; he had plenty of eligible female suitors pursue him. But Layne had mostly chosen the serial monogamy route through his early years. And on into adulthood, actually.
Layne pushed along the trail, gripping the soup cans and staying careful with his footing since a layer of morning dew had turned into sheets of ice. A quarter century ago, Layne’s older brother Randall had taught Layne how to wrap chicken wire around his shoes for better traction. Of course, teenaged Layne thought chicken wire shoes looked ridiculous, and he would only wear them out on the trails where no one could see him. But, as dumb as they looked, the homemade crampons had worked.
As Layne had left the cabin, George Parrish had still been asleep. A groaning snore emanated from the room every few seconds to let Layne know his father was still alive.
Layne had considered waking the old man, but didn’t see the point. George Parrish could not be made to discuss anything he didn’t want to discuss. If Layne wanted to know about the man who had disappeared and George's role in it, he would have to investigate. He would have to figure all that out on his own.
Layne would have to get his hands dirty. Not for the first time.
As he entered the town proper, he could see a dormant building near the old VFW. The former ice climbing school. It led out to a natural wall of ice at that end of town. The giant structure that had been a major source of town tourism for decades, but now the business had closed. Lights off, boarded up, it looked foreboding.
As Layne jogged into town and slowed, he watched two cars park at the tiny city hall building. A Black woman in her mid to late thirties left the car, accompanied by a younger white man. He looked like a “pretty boy” type. She had wavy hair down to her chin, and she wore a form-fitting blue suit with no earrings or necklace. The white man was under thirty, with pale skin and sharp brown hair, with a hair style that had to be carved by a blow dryer. This guy looked like a corporate climber. Honestly, Layne thought the younger man looked more mayoral than the woman.
But she had to be the mayor. Layne set his soup cans down by the sidewalk and jogged across the street toward her. He stopped a few feet short. “Mayor Caldwell? Can I speak with you?"
The mayor tilted her face toward him, and for a brief moment, Layne met her eyes, and he was surprised by a profound sadness lingering there in her features. The sort of sadness people only let out when alone, when no one else can see it.
But it only lasted a second. She didn’t answer, averted her eyes, and then she continued inside the building. Layne couldn't tell if she hadn't heard him, or if she had heard him and elected not to respond. Even though it had lasted half a second, the oddity of the exchange wasn’t lost on Layne.
But someone else did respond. The white man trailed the mayor. Once she was inside the building, he looked back toward Layne, frowning and shaking his head.
Layne still approached. As he started up the steps to the building, this new man slid over to block Layne's passage.
"The mayor is not available."
Layne put his hands on his hips. "I just need to talk to her real quick."
“That’s not going to happen. We have an extremely busy day. If you hadn’t noticed, we’re the first ones here. Most of the town is still sleeping, so it’s not exactly office hours, either.”
“Sure, man, I get it, but this is important. I just need sixty seconds of her time.”
The young man’s expression didn’t change. “I don't think so. Not this early when she hasn't even had her coffee yet. Can I ask who you are?"
Layne did not extend a hand, but he did try to smile. "Layne Parrish. I’m a former town resident, just back for a visit. I’ve never seen you before, though. Who are you?”
“I’m the mayor’s assistant, Jordan." Layne looked past him and into the window to the building. He could see the mayor through the window, studying them via a tiny corner where she had pulled back the curtain.
Peeking out the corner like a paranoid drug addict.
Layne thought about an operation from a decade before. He and members of the team had infiltrated a gambling cartel in North Texas. It turned out, the entire criminal ring was fueled by methamphetamine. Layne remembered those same furtive corner-of-the-curtain glances from the people in the apartment building.
No reason to equate the two experiences, though. No reason to think the mayor was a meth addict. But she did seem paranoid, no doubt.
He raised his hands in surrender. "Okay, okay. I’ll try later.”
Jordan gave Layne a self-satisfied smile as he backed away. "Just give our office a call. You can make an appointment anytime." With a snarky smile, Jordan slipped away into the building.
Layne checked his watch and bounced in place a couple of times to keep his heart rate up. He wondered if Bob's diner had good pancakes.
7
Winnie Caldwell approached her office. The door inside the city hall building said City Manager, but her actual title was Mayor. But that didn’t matter, because she was beholden to the city council, regardless of her title.
She set her purse onto the chair and then pressed the button on the coffeemaker as she stood before the window, looking out over her town. Icy condensation lined the corners. These leaky windows needed to be replaced. But, it wouldn’t be great optics if she ordered new windows for city hall while the town was under such a heavy financial burden. Especially new windows ordered by the town’s first African-American mayor. Everything she did came under scrutiny, whether it deserved it or not.
So, she pulled her coat tight to seal in her body warmth, and she reminded herself to scoot her desk closer toward the middle of the room. The heat gathered there, for some reason. She had a wool skullcap in her bag, but with meetings all day, she didn’t want to mess up her hair.
Winnie opened the cupboard above the coffee maker and removed her medication dispenser, one of those plastic containers with letters for each day of the week on the sub-compartments. Winnie didn’t feel old enough to need one of these, but no way would she remember her meds if she didn’t. She sometimes wondered if skipping a day or two of her pills would be the worst thing in the world… she wouldn’t have dry-mouth, leg cramps, and baffling weight gain and loss.
But, she’d been down that road before; thinking she was healed and could quit the pills. That never ended well.
While she waited for the coffee to brew, she chewed her medicine allotment for the day and glared at the lockbox in the cupboard. She sighed at it. Eventually, she found herself taking it down and putting the box on her desk. She hadn’t seen this one in a while, in the way that common objects become invisible if you don’t pay attention to them on a regular basis.
Inside, she found her old setup, the one she’d used before she bought the nice camera. The box contained a tripod for her phone, a clippable ring light, small containers of different kinds of sand, and a few knives.
Winnie had found a small taste of internet fame a couple years before, with her YouTube channel. She’d had an idea to mix sand with low-grade adhesives so it could be shaped. Actually, it wasn’t her idea, because she had seen a street artist doing it on Pearl Street in Boulder. But no one had mass-marketed these creations before.
Originally, she’d intended to make sand sculptures she could sell online and to shops in the tourist towns. But, she coincidentally discovered that people really enjoyed videos of knives slicing and dicing through various objects; viewers liked watching the process.
Soap was a popular item used in other closeup cutting videos. In the soap videos, a pair of disembodied hands would score a bar of soap and then shave layers, so the scored parts would crumble off. The process was relaxing and simple and something to zone out to when you wanted to clear your mind and
cleanse the palette with simple repetitive actions.
So Winnie started making sand sculptures and then shaving them into pieces with her knife. The blade made a satisfying scratching sound as it carved through the formed sand. And, since she couldn’t sell the work, it made sense to record the process and put it online. Just her hands, the blade, and the sculpture on a well-lit table.
At first, people loved the videos. She would regularly get thousands of views within the first few days. Her closeup videos showcased her slicing sand sculptures of Mount Rushmore, or Superman, or anything. She made a sand sculpture nativity scene a couple Christmases ago, and slicing it into pieces had earned thirty thousand views on day one.
It had seemed like the beginning of a career. A way to flee Shotgun forever, because internet content creators could live anywhere. For the first time in years, Winnie had hope.
But then everything changed. The view numbers fizzled from a flood to a trickle, and she lost her passion for making videos. Now, she was lucky if she made the time to create one every three or four months. And, for the hours of work, she would garner a hundred views. Not enough to make money from advertising.
And, in the back of her head, Winnie knew her drinking had to be the cause. When drunk, hungover, or thinking about the next drink, she had zero inspiration to create. And once she was no longer regularly making videos, her fans lost interest.
And she knew that had to change.
“Nothing changes, if nothing changes,” she said to the coffee maker as it sputtered black liquid into the pot.
A knock came at her door and she turned back toward it to see Jordan enter the room. She quickly put the lid back on the lockbox and then slid it underneath her desk.
He smiled. So young and handsome, with a square jaw that still somehow made him look baby-faced. He had toned arms and a slim waist. In a suit, he looked like a corporate climber. In jeans, he looked like a down and dirty biker. That sort of chameleon flexibility intrigued Winnie. She wanted to know how many layers deep the real man was hiding.
Winnie would be lying if she said she’d never thought about asking Jordan to stay late one night. For work. Order a pizza and grab a twelve-pack, then see where the evening took them. But, no. The first Black mayor of Shotgun sleeping with her white assistant? Not great optics there, either.
“Thanks for that outside, Jordan,” she said.
“Of course, ma’am. I know how you are before your morning coffee.”
Winnie grinned. “Ain’t that the truth.”
“I just wanted to remind you about the budget meeting. They moved it back to four.”
She winced as she checked the wall clock. Four o’clock was a long way away, but she had an unlimited number of things to do between now and then. “Thank you.”
A pained expression crossed his face, and she could see the bad news there, ballooning inside his head.
“What is it?”
Jordan opened his briefcase and removed a letter. “This came last night, from the BCS.”
She grunted a sigh and held out her hand to accept the letter as the coffee pot sputtered and hissed. “Let’s tear it off and see how bad it hurts.”
With a bashful look like a dog in trouble, Jordan crossed the room and handed her the letter. Across the top: Colorado Western Slope Big Cat Sanctuary.
The sanctuary operated about two miles from the north edge of town, up the mountain pass and back down the other side. They housed mostly lions, with a few tigers, jaguars, and smaller cats. And they’d been fighting a complex legal battle with the town for a solid year. It had started with an accusation that CWSBCS had been illegally dumping solid trash near the town and leaking pollutants in the rivers. The suits and counter-suits had blossomed since then into a prolonged fight to the death.
“What does it say?” Jordan asked.
“They want to move back the date of the deposition.”
He pursed his lips. “Again?”
“Again.”
Winnie grumbled and dropped the letter on her desk. Another delay. Another month of paying the lawyers to do no work. Another month draining the town’s coffers. She had started to think the sanctuary’s plan was to outlast them, to bankrupt the town and then make all these legal problems disappear. Shotgun was close enough to ruin that it wouldn’t take much.
“Sorry, Mayor,” Jordan said. “Do you want me to put off the budget meeting?”
The coffee pot dinged and Winnie watched a bead of condensation from the top left corner of her office window streak down the glass. “No, I should go. Just one more of my thousand cuts.”
He stared at her for a second, maybe unsure how to interpret the comment. Or maybe he wasn’t familiar with the reference.
“I’d like to get in a quick hike around lunch, so I need to double-time everything this morning. It’s going to be a rough day.”
“Of course, ma’am. I’ll give you the room.”
He backed out of the door and she sucked her teeth as she stared at the coffee mugs next to the pot. No cream and sugar, because she hadn’t remembered to bring them from home.
“Okay,” Winnie said as she crossed the room and chose the blue mug, “let’s try to keep it together for one more day.”
8
Layne watched Mayor Winnie Caldwell and her assistant Jordan disappear into the building. Layne had disliked Jordan’s smug demeanor instantly. He’d kept his chest puffed out and his hands wide at his sides, in a show of dominance, and the conversation had gone downhill after that.
Layne understood the guy was doing his job keeping weirdos from bothering the mayor, but he’d gone a little overboard with the attitude. He was the mayor’s assistant in a tiny town, not a bodyman for the president.
Layne had first hoped to speak with the sheriff, who was also the owner and proprietor of Bob’s diner. But apparently Bob was out of town on business for the day. The whole department only consisted of a handful of employees. At least back when Layne lived here, most of them were only part-time. They might not even have that many now, with the town’s tourism drying up in recent years.
So, Layne had planned to ask the mayor if she knew anything about the disappearance of the man who’d abandoned his car at the hardware store. Also, he wanted to feel out how much she and others knew concerning his father’s involvement. If Layne couldn’t get answers from George, then he would have to widen the net.
But maybe it was better this way. Maybe better not to involve the authorities at all this early. If Layne had to wait another day or two before going to the mayor or the sheriff, that would give him time to build a better set of information about the topic. So far, he didn’t have squat.
Layne checked his pulse and found it had settled since ending his jog, so he decided to walk the last couple blocks to the diner. He glanced around Main Street, thinking about those teenage nights down here, driving up and down the street, looking for other kids, looking for something to do. Shotgun nightlife always left a lot to be desired. With Denver hours to the east and Grand Junction hours to the west, town kids had to get creative. Parties out by the waterfall were common until a string of bear attacks one year put an end to that. Sometimes, the more adventurous kids wandered into the mines with headlamps and cases of beer. Layne had joined a time or two, but he never felt good about venturing down there. Those rock walls always seemed ready to give at any moment.
Layne pulled the scrunched-up windbreaker out of his pocket, since the sweat slicking his skin now embodied the full brunt of this cold October morning. He slipped it over his head as he passed the alley between the drugstore and the Chinese buffet. Overhead, the clouds were a mix of milk and charcoal, which probably meant more snow at some point today.
He didn’t see the leg swing out from the alley.
The extended foot smacked him in the knee, and Layne tumbled forward. He managed to tuck and roll into a somersault so he wouldn’t crack his head on the frozen sidewalk. After his legs followed, he planted his hand
s to stop his momentum.
Layne popped up and spun just in time to see a fist coming at his face. He leaned back, out of the way. He jumped back a full step to get a solid look at his aggressor. A white guy, tall, thick, with gauze covered in duct tape over one of his fingers.
“Paul,” Layne said. The same former football teammate who had attacked Layne at the bar last night. “Hold up. Stop.”
Instead of replying, Paul made a fist with his other hand and swung. But, he was slow and lumbering, and Layne easily leaned to his left to avoid the punch. It whiffed in front of his face.
“Paul? What are you doing? Knock it off.”
Layne took another step back as the aggressor advanced. Layne gave Paul a shove on the shoulders to push him back and create a little space.
Teeth gritted, eyes flaring, Paul made another attempt at a hook. But, with the icy sidewalk underfoot, he slipped and crashed down to the ground. A groan escaped his lips, and Layne looked around the street to see if anyone was watching. A guy outside the barbershop had his eyes down at his phone, but that seemed to be it.
“You done?” Layne asked.
Paul sat there, panting. He didn’t try to get up.
“Look at me, Paul.”
The big guy did. His face was a wash of anguish, and he grimaced at his injured finger. “It’s pulsing.”
“That’s what happens when you start a fight while you’re injured. Blood flows.”
Layne stayed five feet back—well out of range for another sloppy attack. But he kneeled next to the curb so he could meet Paul’s eyes. “What’s going on, man? Weren’t we friends in high school? We played varsity together. What beef could we possibly have?”
“I’m supposed to drive down to Denver today to start work on a job tomorrow. How can I work with a broken finger? They’re not going to put me on a crew if I can’t use both my damn hands.”