Into Thin Air

by Thomas Zigal

  Staggs turned to him and glared. His cold eyes dared Kurt to come ahead. Kurt withdrew the .45 from his holster and paused to steady the grip with both hands, the way they had taught him in the army.

  “Kurt!”

  He was hit full force by a flying tackle that knocked him to the ground. When he got to his feet again, stunned and gasping for breath, he saw that Muffin had taken hold of the pistol’s long Western nose and was pitching it over the cliff.

  “Go back to your unit,” she said to him, her lip bleeding from the tackle. “Go back to your unit and pull yourself together, man. It’s over, okay? This one is over. There’s nothing we can do.”

  Chapter eight

  At six o’clock the evening news from Denver showed footage of the riddled farmhouse in Emma and FBI agents examining marijuana plants growing under track lights in the cellar. Neal Staggs told a young reporter, “We’re looking into the strong possibility of a tie-in between these people and at least one murder in the Aspen area.” No specific mention of Omar Quiroga. The reporter signed off the story from a roadside turnout overlooking the charred wreckage of the Buick.

  Kurt clicked off the television and popped another beer. He could hear Lennon playing Nintendo in his bedroom and wished to hell there was something he could do to forget his phone call to Chip’s parents in Vermont. When he glanced up, Muffin was leaning against the door in the mud porch where the skis were racked, her arms folded, a look of weariness and disappointment on her face.

  “Time to get out of the business,” Kurt said, “when you don’t hear somebody walk into your own house.”

  “I can’t believe you’re going to give the commissioners what they want,” she said. “After all the grief you’ve taken from them for so long.”

  Kurt moved his foot, toppling a small construction of beer cans he’d been building for two hours. “I pulled a gun on a federal agent,” he said. “I would’ve shot the man.”

  “You were stressed out of your head. Jesus, watching what happened to Chip—”

  “That’s the nature of the job,” he said. “Grace under pressure. Get used to it. I recommended you as my replacement.”

  Muffin shook her head. “Libbie showed me your letter,” she said. “I don’t think I’m ready for it, Kurt.”

  He knew there would be some resentment from the other deputies in the department, all of them men, but Muffin was the best cop for the job, hands down. No one else had her discipline or training.

  “You need more time to think about what you’re doing,” she said.

  “I’ve had ten years to think about this fucking job and I’m sick of it,” he said. “I’m sick of busting old friends for rinky-dink bullshit. I’m sick of defending the assholes with all the clout. And I’m sick of having to buddy up with psychotic bullies like Neal Staggs. Christ, lady, I don’t like who I’ve become.”

  Muffin walked over, twisted a beer from its plastic ring, and took a long drink. She bent down and studied the bandage over Kurt’s eye. “You probably haven’t even changed the dressing today, have you?” she said.

  He shrugged. It was the least of his worries.

  “I hope this hurts like hell,” she said, ripping off a piece of tape.

  It hurt like hell. Kurt winced as she poked around the stitches. Her warm hands smelled like dispenser soap.

  “Daddy’s got a girlfriend, Daddy’s got a girlfriend.”

  They both turned to see Lennon coming out of his bedroom.

  “What are you two guys doing?” He grinned devilishly. “Making sex or something?”

  Muffin looked at Kurt. “Cable,” he explained.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Go get some gauze for your father, you little delinquent.”

  They waited for Lennon to return from the bathroom with the box of medical supplies.

  “What about Graciela Rojas?” Muffin said. “She’s the one who’s still missing from the FBI sound bite.”

  “That’s your worry now, Sheriff.”

  “You’re starting to piss me off, Muller.”

  Lennon raced into the room with a messy shoe box full of small stained bottles, half-opened packages, cotton balls, rolls of unidentifiable cloth. “Let me do it!” he cried. “I want to do it!”

  “Why don’t you tell Staggs your theory about the insurance money?” Kurt said. “It has a nasty little ring to it. But then again, it might cause some problems with his wetback conspiracy.”

  She dribbled hydrogen peroxide onto a cotton ball and helped Lennon wipe his father’s brow. “You telling me you’re not going to lift a finger to help find Dr. Rojas?” Muffin said.

  Kurt winced again. The wound was stinging. “You read my letter,” he said. “‘Resignation effective immediately.’”

  “Dad, do you feel any better now?” Lennon asked.

  Muffin dabbed away the white foam bubbling around the stitches. “All right, if that’s the way you want it,” she said, “I’ll find the woman myself. But let me offer you some advice, Muller.” She stood up and hummed the wet cotton ball at an ashtray. “Next time you’re out in the middle of the night trying to impress a date, consider a cheap motel.”

  After supper Kurt drove to the West End to drop Lennon at the home of an old family friend. Mildred O’Carroll was a widow now and lived alone in a modest fifties bungalow that had become almost invisible in this hodgepodge neighborhood of remodeled baby Victorians and industrial-sized winter residences. She and her late husband had been the first professional filmmakers to prop cameras on their shoulders and follow pioneer hotdoggers down the rugged new snow trails of Western America. When Kurt was a boy, Mildred O’Carroll had a flair for riding pants and tight pullover sweaters, cut her hair like a man, and sported a silver cigarette holder. She introduced his parents to Gary Cooper. Now she could have been anybody’s grandmother.

  “How’s my beautiful boy tonight?” Mrs. O’Carroll greeted them at the door. She gave Lennon a hug, then released him to inspect the awkward tripods and archaic movie cameras arranged about her paneled den.

  “What do you hear from your mother?” she asked cheerfully.

  “It’s too hot in Scottsdale this time of year,” Kurt said. “I wish she could come and stay awhile.”

  For nearly forty years Mildred O’Carroll and Hanne Muller had been best friends. They drank coffee together late in the afternoon, when shadow spilled down the mountain and the skiing was over. But now Kurt’s mother lived in an artificial green suburb manufactured out of desert. ‘This is your old gal, der Ewige Jude,’ she would announce over the phone, ‘the wandering Jew, calling from the Dead Sea.’ Her doctors insisted that the Aspen altitude was bad for her heart, the winters too long.

  “I ought to give her a call,” said Mrs. O’Carroll. “I’ve been thinking about her. Maybe I’ll go visit her after the leaves turn.”

  Kurt smiled. “I’m sure she’d love that,” he said.

  She hunted down her glasses for a better look at the bandage on Kurt’s forehead. “My, my,” she said, her eyes enlarged through the lenses. “Is everything okay, Kurt?”

  “Of course it is.” He patted her wrinkled hand, then turned to leave. “I shouldn’t be out more than an hour or so.”

  He drove into the business district and parked his Jeep in the alley adjacent to Silvia’s Diner. He noticed a tow truck slowly cruising the lantern-lit streets and stepped out to speak to the driver.

  “I think you know my Jeep, Dwight,” he said. “I come back and it’s gone, I’m going to be very upset.”

  The driver gave him a Skoal-lipped, leering grin. “S’matter, Muller,” he said, “have a bad day at the office?”

  Tow-truck drivers circled silently through the small business district like vultures preying on fresh kill. They demanded big cash to remove a boot, threatened tourists with tire tools, shortchanged the city its cut.

  “Dwight, I’m going to be honest with you. I hate tow-truck companies,” Kurt said, resting his hands on the window frame. “I
hate tow-truck drivers. If I had my way, you’d all be run out of town.”

  “What I seen on the news,” Dwight said, “you’ll prob’ly git run out of town ’fore I do.”

  Kurt gazed down the street, watching tourists huddle in front of Elvis’s sports car on display at Boogie’s, considering whether to cuff Dwight upside the head. He reached through the window and grabbed the man’s collar. “You tow my Jeep, Dwight,” he said, knotting the shirt tighter, “I’ll come looking for your sleazy ass.”

  Silvia’s Diner was located in a hideaway corner below a warren of trendy, overpriced dress shops. Hers was the only place in Aspen where county road crews ate alongside millionaire film producers. Three wooden picnic tables with counter service, unless Silvia liked you and brought out the food herself. Customers chose their drinks from an ice chest and paid by the honor system at the end of the meal.

  Silvia was a tall, gregarious Chicana from southern New Mexico. She did everything—cooked, ran the register, scrubbed pans. When Kurt walked in, she was standing at the grill in the rear, speaking Spanish to the two Salvadoran girls who helped with the cooking. Her long black hair was tied back in a ponytail.

  “Hello, Kurt,” she said, brushing past him with two steaming plates of her incredible chile rellenos.

  “I need to talk to you, Silvia.”

  “It’s a busy night,” she said, hurrying to place the plates in front of a middle-aged couple wearing a conspicuous amount of turquoise jewelry.

  Kurt noticed three young Hispanic men hunched over a table next to the ice machine, eating in silence. Service workers, either cooks at another Mexican restaurant in town or condo maintenance men. They had noticed him, too, and began whispering to one another.

  “Silvia,” he said when she rushed past him again, “this is real important.”

  “I’m swamped, Kurt,” she said, returning to the grill without meeting his eyes. “Maybe you should come back some other time.”

  He went behind the counter and took her arm. “It’s important, Silvia,” he said, leading her toward the back door.

  One of the Salvadoran girls saw what was happening and began protesting in excited Spanish.

  “Tell her it’s okay,” Kurt said.

  Silvia said something to the girl and then allowed Kurt to lead her through the rear door to the dark disposal area out back, a nest of foul-smelling garbage cans.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Kurt Muller, coming into my place like that and pushing me around?”

  Silvia was wearing a soiled apron over a magenta tunic that reached her knees.

  “Is there something you wanted to tell me about some friends of yours living out in Emma?”

  She sighed and folded her arms across the apron. “Those people weren’t hurting anybody, man,” she said. Her anger was palpable. “So they were growing a little dope in their cellar. So fucking what? You had to blow them away for that?”

  “We had a deal,” Kurt said, pressing toward her, “and I’ve kept my end of the bargain. I don’t hassle your people for green cards, I don’t let Immigration tramp around my county looking for illegals. Otherwise half the help in this town would’ve disappeared a long time ago. All you had to do was let me know if they started acting like bad citizens.”

  “I told you I wasn’t going to narc for you, man.”

  “I don’t pop people for lids of grass. I never have, goddammit. You know that. But the Feds say those people killed that writer, Silvia. Now I want somebody to tell me what’s going on.”

  She looked at him and laughed dryly. “You’re making them sound like Colombian drug lords,” she said, “instead of dipshit mojados with holes in their shoes. Jesus Christ, Kurt. I’ve known those people three, maybe four years now and they wouldn’t do something like that.”

  “One of them took Chip Bodine hostage and he ended up dead,” he said. “He tried to blow me off the road.”

  “That was Guzmán,” she said. “Guzmán was a little crazy. The others aren’t like him. They work hard and send their money back home to mama and the niños. They go to Mass on Sundays. So they smoke a little dope sometimes. You ever scrub pots for a living, Kurt?”

  He could see into the open kitchen door of the German restaurant across the alley. Waitresses with blond pigtails darted about dressed in dirndls.

  “A federal agent was hit, Silvia. A chopper was fired on. Are you telling me Guzmán was the only one with a gun?”

  Silvia sighed. “I don’t know. Figure it out yourself, Kurt,” she said. “Their house was surrounded by cops, a helicopter was scaring the shit out of them, and they knew if they got busted their kids would be taken away someplace and they’d all be deported. What would you do if you thought you might never see your little boy again?”

  He had known Silvia for years, since she first opened her restaurant. She’d catered most of the parties in his reelection campaigns. He wondered if Silvia was the ‘dear old friend’ Staggs had linked to the mojados and their dope.

  “In Mexico,” she said, “if somebody pounds on your door, cops or not, you don’t come out with your hands up. It’s not machismo, man, it’s survival sense. The guys outside are going to waste your ass one way or another, so you may as well go down fighting.”

  He could still see the woman lying facedown in the kitchen, commandos tracking through her blood. The child crying in the hallway.

  “The Feds are going to pin a murder on them,” he said. “Is there anyone who’d know if that writer went out to Emma? Anyone still alive.”

  She thought for a long time before speaking, her tall lean silhouette facing him in the dark.

  “Angel Montoya,” she said finally.

  “Angel Montoya?”

  “He lives out there,” she said in a quiet voice. “But he was here washing dishes when the shootout went down.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He won’t talk to you, Kurt.”

  “Why not?”

  “You killed his brother.”

  He felt as though the wind had been knocked out of him. “You know me better than that,” he said.

  He looked up at the sky. Low cloud cover, not a star in view. Last night in the Grottos the stars appeared close, stark, the Milky Way like crushed glass.

  “Get him to talk to me, Silvia,” he said.

  “You’re wasting your time.”

  “Tell him I’m not one of the Rambos.”

  Silvia untied the apron and looped it over her head. She stood there in silence, carefully folding the white cloth. “I hope to god, Kurt, you didn’t have anything to do with shooting those people,” she said, struggling to control her rage.

  With the edge of his boot Kurt scooted a flattened aluminum can toward a barrel. “We’ve known each other a long time, Silvia,” he said. “I don’t know why you think I could do something like that.”

  She looked away. Everything about this conversation was slowing down, taking on added weight. “Nobody knows what to expect from you,” she said. “When you first started, it was all a joke. Hippie sheriff of Aspen. Everybody had a good laugh.”

  Kurt rubbed his beard, remembering that first chaotic week in office. The national publicity. The cameras following him everywhere. She was right. Even The Village Voice had taken potshots at him.

  “People talk about how the job has changed you,” she said. “I guess it had to. Everything else has changed. The world’s so fucking hard now. I just don’t know who Kurt Muller is anymore.”

  He didn’t know who he was now either. A man without a job. A little boy’s daddy. A witness to a senseless slaughter.

  He stepped toward her and tugged the sleeve of her tunic. “Tell Angel Montoya I want to talk to him,” he said.

  She would find out soon enough that he’d resigned. He turned and walked off down the alley. “And tell him I didn’t shoot his brother.”

  He needed to sort things out. He needed to find a nice quiet corner to nurse a beer and brood over the pieces that w
ouldn’t fall in place. But after tonight’s news coverage he knew he couldn’t walk into one of his favorite bars, Little Annie’s or Shooter’s or the Jerome. Too many solicitous bartenders, too many opinionated regulars. Too much cheap advice from the bottom of a bottle.

  Around the corner from the pedestrian mall a pair of California developers had opened a posh restaurant, nouvelle cuisine with razor-edge decor from the L.A. art world, heartless and cold as stainless steel. Another resort investment destined to go belly up in six months. No one Kurt knew could afford to eat there.

  He ordered a drink in the smoky bar and sat at a table far in the rear. These turnover places stored layers of history like ancient cities, one civilization on top of another. He could remember other names, other lives within these walls. He came here with Meg and Bert and Maya in the days when folksingers used capos and sat on stools.

  The waitress didn’t recognize him. Only one party was waiting for dinner, three glamorous young couples straight out of a Michelob commercial. They were occupied with appearances and the sound of their own sparkling laughter. Kurt drank his designer beer slowly and thought about Quiroga and Graciela Rojas. He had to find out what had happened to them. He figured he had another twenty hours of grace before the commissioners accepted his resignation and people stopped giving him the time of day.

  At a pay phone outside the men’s room he dialed Jake Pfeil’s number. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d spoken to Jake without a lawyer present. Now Jake was the only person in town who could help him.

  “This is Gordon, darling,” Kurt said when the answering service picked up. Jake was always meeting with guys named Gordon. “I’m supposed to have dinner with Jake tonight but I’ve forgotten which restaurant. Was it Abetone’s?”

  He knew Jake dined out every night, a rotation of Aspen’s finest restaurants.

  “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t give out that information.”

  “Be a dear and tell me, hon. He’s going to hate me if I’m late again.”