Astride a Pink Horse

by Robert Greer

  “I warned you earlier that we’d likely need to talk to Reverend Jackson,” Freddy said to Cozy. “You up for staying in Cheyenne another night and talking to him tomorrow morning? I would, but I’ve gotta be back in Denver for a seven a.m. meeting.”

  Shrugging, Cozy said, “Yeah.”

  “Great. I’ll have what we’ve discussed here tonight knitted into a story by first thing in the morning. How about ‘Nobody Knows Thurmond’ as the header?” Freddy said, chuckling.

  “It’s pretty much accurate,” said Cozy.

  “More accurate than your first two stories,” Bernadette said, frowning. “No more hammering the air force, Freddy, okay?

  Because if you do, I’ll become very uncooperative. I’ll also make sure someone hammers back.”

  “Message received, Major.”

  “And I’d be real careful with my finger-pointing in the future if I were you,” said Bernadette. “The FBI doesn’t care whose sock drawers they ransack.”

  “I’ve had FBI types on my doorstep before. CIA types, too,” Freddy said. “Handled ’em both.”

  “And us OSI types? Have you dealt with us before?”

  “No, I haven’t, but I’ll be sure to give you a heads-up on the experience after I’ve worked with one for a while,” Freddy said with a wink. “For now, is there any other serious digging we need to do?”

  “We should probably look a little more closely at those Seattle and Canadian leads that have turned up,” said Cozy.

  “And I’ll keep trying to connect with an army friend of Giles’s,” said Freddy. “A guy named Otis Breen who Giles played interservice league basketball with. Howard Colbain gave me his name. I haven’t been able to catch up with him by phone yet.”

  “Guess at this stage, any lead’s worth working,” said Bernadette. “Why don’t you give Cozy and me this guy Breen’s contact info, too?” Sounding exhausted, she asked Freddy, “Mind if I take another look at the cockpit?”

  “Be my guest.” As she rose and headed for the cockpit, Freddy whispered to Cozy, “Guess it’s hard to take the hunt out of the dog.”

  “Guess so,” Cozy said, watching Bernadette disappear into the cockpit.

  A couple of minutes later, Cozy stepped into the cockpit to find Bernadette staring out into the darkness. Handing her Otis Breen’s phone number, he said, “Ready to run you home.”

  When she turned to face him, he couldn’t help but notice a look on her face that he knew all too well. It was the hurt-child look of someone who’s lost an opportunity to fulfill a dream.

  “She just left with that same reporter who was at Hawk Springs,” Carlos Alvarez announced as he sat in the dark in his Jeep just outside a Cheyenne airport security fence, night-vision goggles in hand, talking nervously on his cell phone to Colonel DeWitt.

  “And the other man with them? What happened to him?” Colonel DeWitt asked.

  “He’s still in the plane.”

  “Has to be Dames, Coseia’s boss,” said DeWitt. “He’s a pilot. I’ve checked. How long were they inside?”

  “From the time Major Cameron and Coseia arrived until a couple of minutes ago. Forty minutes or thereabouts.”

  “Well, well, well. The flypaper gets stickier. Stay with Coseia and Cameron.”

  “Yes, sir. They’re getting into Coseia’s truck. My guess is, he’s taking her home.”

  “Question is, to whose home? His or hers?”

  Sounding and looking deflated, Alvarez said, “Good question.”

  “I’m going to need a lot of help on this one, Captain. Especially if things start to go south and I have to lean on Major Cameron. Her father’s a retired one-star, you know. And not without influence. He’s the son of a Tuskegee airman, no less. Gotta watch how hard you lean when you’re dealing with that kind of history.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “Good that you do. Thanks to Major Cameron, this whole Tango-11 fiasco is likely to end up with the two of us sitting at some murder trial in a civilian courtroom. Think you can handle the pressure if it comes to that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good again. Call back and debrief me when you’re done with your surveillance for the night.”

  “Yes, sir.” Alvarez closed his cell phone and laid it on the seat beside him. He’d had the sense from the way Bernadette had avoided him at work that she might have spotted him as he’d trailed her from Hawk Springs. He’d make certain this time, however, to stay far enough behind the reporter’s dually to remain undetected. Disappointed, he thought that if Colonel DeWitt did pull Bernadette off the Tango-11 investigation and he ended up as her replacement, he’d lose any chance of bagging the woman whom nearly everyone in the missile detachment called “Brown Sugar” behind her back. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but his ambition, like Colonel DeWitt’s, trumped a roll in the hay any day.

  For Silas Breen, it had been one dog of a day. After he’d left South Bend on an emotional high, things had gone downhill fast. First, he’d had trouble with his truck—minor trouble, but trouble nonetheless. The time required to repair another blown tire and replace an uncooperative radiator thermostat had put him further behind, and, combined with the hours he’d spent at Notre Dame, he now found himself close to twelve hours behind his delivery schedule. Add in the extra mileage he’d have to log traveling to Lubbock instead of Amarillo, and he expected to arrive fourteen to fifteen hours late.

  He could try to make up the time by running all night, like old-time over-the-road truckers used to do, but if he did, the Star Wars–looking mileage, time, and distance computer sitting just inches from his right hand, a tool that had replaced outdated handwritten truckers’ logs, could be his undoing. Especially if he were unlucky enough to have some eager port-of-entry flunky at a weigh station demand a point-to-point time, distance, and mileage printout. If he got caught cheating the system that way, he’d likely receive the kind of hefty fine that would wipe out a good portion of the trip’s profit. Shaking his head, muttering, “Shit,” and speeding down I-55 past a sign that read, “St. Louis—46,” he expected that it would be one in the morning before his head hit any pillow.

  He’d talked to only three people since leaving South Bend: the young girl who’d taken his McDonald’s order just south of Chicago, the toothless old man at a gas station who’d illegally plugged his flat tire instead of breaking it down and patching it properly, and the Mexican who could barely speak English who’d fixed his radiator problem. More importantly, though, he hadn’t talked to F. Mantew all day. He’d finally decided that that was a good thing. If Mantew didn’t care about him being on time with his delivery, why the hell should he?

  Holding up an arm to ward off the headlight glare from an oncoming semi whose driver had failed to dim his lights, he muttered, “Jerk,” slowed his rig, and retrieved a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich from the open cooler on the seat next to him. When a second truck rolled by, its lights on high beam as well, he countered by flashing high beams of his own and yelling, “Asshole!” before angrily chomping into his sandwich and mumbling with his mouth full, “Fuck Mantew.”

  Kimiko Takata refused to leave Heart Mountain until she’d watched the sunrise, so while Rikia sat in the backseat of the station wagon with the vehicle’s interior lights on and a flashlight in one hand, working out math calculations and putting the final polish on his paper for El Paso, Kimiko sat outside, her eyes fixed on the sun.

  “Do you know how many lives were destroyed here?” she asked Rikia, breaking a fifteen-minute silence.

  Repeating the number he’d heard her quote since his childhood, he said, “Thousands.”

  “Thousands out of the 10,767 who were imprisoned here, to be exact.”

  Rikia wanted to shout back, But there aren’t any people here now, Kimiko. No more internment camp, no more barracks, no more barbed wire, and no more guards. Just a bleak, dusty sagebrush plain. He knew better, however, than to challenge Kimiko when she was in one of her increa
singly frequent retrospective moods. Those moods sometimes transitioned into long, blank, empty stares, and any attempt to question her would only serve to spike what he’d come to realize was creeping dementia.

  Adjusting herself on her stool, Kimiko swept her right arm in a slow arc from west to east. “Barbed-wire fences surrounded this dreadful place for as far as you could see. Guard towers equipped with high-beam searchlights surrounded the compound, and although the American government has always claimed that the guards were unarmed, they weren’t.”

  Remaining silent, Rikia continued with his equations.

  “The barracks were no more than tar-paper shacks.” Kimiko slammed an arthritic fist into her palm. “Barbaric! There’s no other word for it.” Pointing toward Heart Mountain Butte, she talked in a whisper as the sun peeked from behind a thin layer of clouds. “We only had a single stove for heat and one light fixture in the center of the room, and we sometimes slept ten to a room.”

  Rikia barely looked up. He’d heard Kimiko’s Heart Mountain stories scores of times before. He knew all there was to know about the tragedy of her flight from Japan before the war. She had been sent by her father to America to live with relatives so she’d be out of harm’s way when the American invasion of Japan that he had long been predicting came. The invasion never came, however, only Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the bomb. Shaking his head and completing an equation that now took up the better part of three pages, Rikia jotted, 21H + 21H±X + Energy and smiled as Kimiko continued.

  “I’d only been in America for nine months when they stuck me in this awful place. Are you listening to me, Rikia?”

  “Yes, and I know. It was a terrible time back then, and unfortunately for us Japanese, it hasn’t changed.” Rikia had his own reasons for hating the people he was now forced to call his countrymen—people who had killed his relatives and in all likelihood, as far as he was concerned, planted the seeds for Kimiko’s dementia. Even now, in spite of his reputation as one of America’s most stellar mathematicians, his colleagues, educated people who should have known better, whispered and joked about his speech impediment and his Goodwill-bought clothes. Those things, however, amounted to no more than pinpricks to him. What infuriated Rikia most about living in a country he’d never had a choice about coming to was that, in spite of his lofty academic credentials and international reputation, his life’s work remained scoffed at, labeled by most of his American colleagues as no more than pseudoscience.

  Over the years, their skepticism and lack of support had caused his National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation proposals to be denied and had delayed groundbreaking publications. If it weren’t for the backing of a few highly regarded Japanese and European mathematicians, he had every reason to believe that by now his work would have largely been dismissed.

  When Kimiko announced loudly, “Sun’s almost up,” he ignored her and began putting his papers away. Unwilling to listen to any more of her Heart Mountain stories and sounding frustrated, he said, “You’ve seen your sunrise, Kimiko. I think we should go.”

  Kimiko’s response, “Yes. I think we should,” surprised him. She added, “Now, when the authorities come to question me about Tango-11, I will have the resolve to stand up to them. I only needed a dose of Heart Mountain medicine to bolster my courage.”

  Rikia simply answered, “Good.”

  Twenty minutes later they were back on the highway, headed home for Laramie. Kimiko’s dull, accusatory monotone echoed in Rikia’s ear as she read from her father’s Hiroshima diary: “ ‘Suffocating clouds of dust swirled around me. Thick, stifling, blackish clouds filled with everything from the tiniest of dust particles to sheets of human skin. I could see that houses had collapsed or been blasted totally apart all around me. In every direction, twenty-foot-tall telephone poles continued to ignite and explode like towering pine trees caught in some horrific forest fire.

  “ ‘People meandered past me as I walked along the road. The anguished looks on their frequently skinless faces begged for explanation. As I headed along the river once again to watch a group of catatonic-looking survivors place sliced cucumbers on the soon-to-be-fatal burns of their neighbors, my thoughts drifted back to the charbroiled man astride his pink horse.’ ”

  The early-morning reception Bernadette got when she called Otis Breen at his home in Kansas City was cold and clearly on the suspicious side. Breen, who admitted to having known Thurmond Giles and to have played interservice league basketball with and against him, remained evasive until she announced, stretching the truth, that she was the lead air force OSI officer in charge of investigating Sergeant Giles’s murder.

  Sounding stunned, Otis Breen asked, “What did you say your name was again?”

  “Major Bernadette Cameron.”

  “And you work out of?”

  “Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne.”

  “Wyoming. Understand the wind blows a tad bit out that way. So, how did Thurmond buy it?”

  “A rural-route mail carrier found him dangling by his ankles from a chain inside the personnel-access tube to a Minuteman missile silo. He had five stab wounds in his back.”

  “Can’t say I’m surprised,” Otis said after a brief silence.

  “In addition to the stab wounds, the head of his penis had been cut off, wadded up in a piece of paper, and stuffed in his mouth.”

  “That figures, too. Thurmond wasn’t very picky when it came to findin’ somewhere to stick his member. I wouldn’t put it past a jealous girlfriend or some jealous husband to do him in.”

  Thinking suddenly about Elaine Richardson, Bernadette said, “Food for thought.”

  “So, how’d you get my name?”

  “By way of a man named Howard Colbain. Turns out a couple of decades back, Sergeant Giles had an affair with Colbain’s wife. Any chance you know Colbain?”

  Breen took a long, deep breath before answering, “Nope. But I may have known the wife. A chunky little white girl outta Iowa. I’m thinkin’ her last name was Colbain, at least, and that she was a second lieutenant.”

  “Right on both counts,” said Bernadette, who’d been able to gather several official air force photos of the late Annette Colbain.

  “Then yeah, I knew her, and I’m pretty sure she ended up killin’ herself. Thurmond mentioned that to me once.”

  “She did.”

  “Means she couldn’t have killed Thurmond, then.”

  “No. But from what you’re confirming about Sergeant Giles, there may have been more jealous husbands or spurned women out there. Can you think of any other reasons why someone might’ve wanted to kill him?”

  “Yeah, money. That and the brother’s over-the-top ego. They both tended to keep him in hot water.”

  “Can you give me a for-instance?”

  “Sure. Back in the early 1980s we had a pretty high-flyin’ interservice all-star basketball team. One that would’ve matched up pretty well with some NBA squads. I was twenty-five at the time. Could’ve jumped outta the gym back then,” Breen said proudly. “Thurmond was a year or so older. We ended up playin’ just about everywhere on the planet for a couple of years. Here in the U.S., Asia, Europe, you name it—real easy duty. Anyway, somewhere along the line Thurmond got it in his head that we should set up a wagerin’ system that would allow folks to bet on our games. Nothin’ involvin’ point-shaving or shenanigans like that. Just good old-fashioned illegal bookmaking on the side. Thurmond worked out a system that eventually had him and a couple of other guys on the team makin’ serious money. A grand or so a game, it came out later.”

  “And you weren’t involved?”

  “I ain’t that stupid. We were in the military, remember? No need riskin’ time in the brig over a game meant to be played by children. Anyway, like always, Thurmond ended up with his tit in the wringer. And just like always, he skirted the problem because of his connections. A couple of high-muckety-muck generals who I was later told were in on the bettin’ scam with him got him off wit
h just a hand slap.”

  “And nothing of consequence ever came of it?”

  “Not a damn thing but a bunch of military gossip. Thurmond was charmed like that. The only time I ever saw the spell broken was when the air force ended up sending him off to some Mojave Desert no-man’s-land of a base in California as punishment for his over-the-top workplace womanizing. It was a shame, really, especially for somebody with Thurmond’s talent. I expect you already know that that squirrelly lookin’ SOB was one of the top warhead maintenance men and troubleshooters in the business. It was common knowledge even among us army types that if the air force had a problem with a nuke back then, anything from a wiring problem to missile transport issues to a loose-fittin’ bolt, they called Thurmond.”

  “And he’d fix it?”

  “Absolutely, and because of those skills, unlike most senior enlisted guys, he spent a hell of a lot of his time winin’ and dinin’ with the brass. A habit that along with his womanizin’ cost him in the end. But it’s always that way when someone higher up the food chain is lookin’ to take the glory, right, Major?”

  Ignoring the bait, Bernadette said, “And did someone higher up the chain end up with what should have been Sergeant Giles’s glory?”

  “You got that straight. Wouldn’t have, though, except for Thurmond’s big mouth. Told me so himself. Turns out that when those disarmament treaties with the Russkies started taking shape in the late ’80s and the air force was told to downsize its nuclear arsenal, Thurmond’s the one who got the assignment to straw-boss the crews who were deactivatin’ those puppies. And wouldn’t you know it, that slick-assed beanpole of an egomaniac figured out how he could stand down those missiles in half the time the brass was thinkin’ it would take, and with half the manpower. Problem is, braggart that he was, Thurmond shared his plan with one of his superiors. Some kiss-ass light colonel who ended up implementin’ the deal and takin’ all the credit. Thurmond was bitter for the rest of the time I knew him over the fact that some up-buckin’ officer stole his idea and his glory.”