by Robert Greer
“Guess so,” the man on the other end of the line offered as, easing up in bed, he eyed the outline of the woman sleeping next to him. “Wait a minute—I need to get to a place that’s a little more secure,” he said, slipping out of bed and walking to another room. “Okay, I’m set.”
“You could’ve stayed put,” said Cassias. “I’m done.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
“Do I need to call you before I do Satoni?”
“No. Just use your judgment.”
“Damn. Satoni’s fallen that far outta grace?”
“It’s a different time, Napper,” said Cassias, calling the man by his code name.
“Guess so. Anything else?”
“Yes. Don’t get sloppy. There’s already been enough sloppiness.”
“That was Ornasetti’s doin’.”
“I don’t care whose doin’ it was,” Cassias said, slamming a fist down on the desktop. “I just don’t wanna see any more of it.”
“Got ya.”
“Good. Now go back to your dreams,” Cassias said, cradling the phone.
The man known as Napper tiptoed back toward his bedroom, stood in the bedroom doorway, and watched the chest of the woman in the bed rise and fall. Deciding that he wouldn’t chance disturbing her, he turned, walked back down the hallway, grabbed a blanket from a hall closet, and headed for another bedroom to think over a game plan for taking out Ornasetti and Satoni.
Randall Maxie’s massive belly undulated in a final wave of sexual delight as the smallish, dark-haired Latina from Denver’s central motor-vehicle office, the woman who’d provided him with all the vitals he needed to locate Damion Madrid, wiped a stream of ejaculate off his belly with a steaming hot towel. The sounds of Beethoven’s violin concerto echoed in the background. Smiling and watching the woman dry him off, Maxie sat up in the oversized leather chair where he seated himself on those nights when the woman either mounted him or stroked him to climax and asked, “Did you know that Beethoven only wrote one violin concerto?”
“No.” The woman tossed her towels onto a nearby table.
“Well, he did.” Realizing that he’d overshot the woman’s frame of reference, Maxie slapped his belly. “A genius only needs one shot.”
The woman flashed Maxie a subservient smile.
“You busy Thursday?” he asked, rising out of the chair.
“No.”
“Good. I’ll need you here again.” He lumbered across the room, naked, and retrieved one of the half-dozen ankle-length silk robes he’d had made on a trip to Japan six months earlier. Slipping into the robe, he sidestepped his way over to a nearby scale and mounted it. The scale quickly registered 313 pounds. “Weight’s holding steady,” he said proudly as he turned to face the woman. “Now, go ahead and get dressed, and make sure I can see you. And try putting your fishnets back on slowly for a change.”
The woman walked over to a closet that was just to the left of a wall-mounted sixty-inch plasma-screen TV, pulled back the accordion-style closet doors, and slipped a halter top, a pair of fishnet pantyhose, and a pair of faded shorts off the only hanger inside.
“Like I said, slowly,” Maxie reiterated as he watched the woman slip the halter top over her head and slowly into place. She spent the next couple of minutes wiggling into her pantyhose and form-fitting shorts. Maxie smiled as she made a final adjustment to the halter top. “Good. I like it. Thursday at seven,” he said as she moved away from the closet. “Think I’ll have you ride me for a change.” Maxie sidled up to her, drew two tightly rolled $100 bills out of the pocket of his robe, and slipped them into her palm. “See you Thursday.”
“Thanks,” the woman said sheepishly, turning to leave.
“And thanks for the info you gave me on that Madrid kid. It helped a lot.”
“Anytime. I’ll let myself out.” The woman walked out of Maxie’s study and rushed down a hallway toward the front door of his North Denver townhouse, praying for a breath of fresh air.
Maxie slapped his midsection and nodded. She’d done what she had been there for, and he’d paid her. He wasn’t about to walk her to the door.
Fifty minutes later, after listening to the London Philharmonic’s recently released rendition of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, Maxie set aside an unfinished snifter of brandy and rose from his favorite chair to finally go to bed. He’d almost reached his bedroom when the call he’d been waiting for all night came in. It was 3:15 a.m. when he picked up the wall-mounted receiver and said, “Maxie here.”
“You no longer report to Ornasetti,” the man who called himself Napper said matter-of-factly.
Maxie grinned. “You got a money deal to go along with that order?”
“It’s been discussed.”
“And?”
“The deal’s this. You walk away from what you’ve been doing for Ornasetti all these years and find yourself a new fish. That way you get to keep listenin’ to those operas and symphonies you like so much.”
“What?”
“You heard me, you big tub of lard. You make yourself scarce, and from now on you report to me.”
Maxie erupted in laughter.
“Laugh all you want, friend. This has top-level clearance.”
“Prove it,” Maxie said, incensed. He slammed down the phone, muttered, “Fuck you, asshole,” and continued into his bedroom.
He was sound asleep an hour later when a follow-up call came in. With his head abuzz from too much brandy, he answered, “Maxie here.”
“Maxie, it’s Cassias.”
“How the hell do I know that?” Maxie shot back.
“Because what you told Napper got relayed back to me. I understand you wanted corroboration on an issue, so I’m obligin’. Ornasetti’s no longer your problem—he’s ours. And here’s some advice. Stick with what you know, Maxie. Shakedowns are for sinners. And here’s a final piece of advice. Keep what you know about the Ducane issue to yourself. It’s a way to ensure that you can continue to enjoy Beethoven. Peace to you, my friend,” Cassias said softly and hung up.
Realizing that he’d misjudged the gravity of the situation, Maxie sat straight up in bed. A personal call from Carmine Cassias meant that for once in his life, he’d better follow instructions. There’d be no more mopping up for Ornasetti. He’d come to the end of that road. It was time to forget everything Ornasetti had ever mentioned to him about the Kennedy assassination, but more importantly, it was time to completely erase from his mind the lengthy set of problems Ornasetti had had with Antoine Ducane.
Rivulets of sweat rolled down his face as he climbed out of bed, walked over to one of the two south-facing windows in his bedroom, and cranked the window open, hoping that the crisp 4 a.m. Rocky Mountain air would help him think. It wouldn’t be hard to take a few steps back from Ornasetti. Ornasetti had as much as asked him to do that already. And it wouldn’t be difficult to erase things from his memory, but he wouldn’t run. Running would destroy his reputation, and reputation was all he had in his business. What he needed, he told himself, fanning fresh air against his face with his right hand, was something to take his mind off the fact that a steamroller could still roll up out of Louisiana and flatten him. Something that would allow him to tread water for a while. Something that would offer him a diversion. Suddenly he stopped fanning himself and smiled. He had just the thing. It had slipped his mind with all the phone calls. What he had was in fact a godsend—a little unfinished business with Damion Madrid.
He had no idea how long it would take Napper or whomever Cassias sent to settle up with Ornasetti—a few days, a week at the most, would be his best guess. What he did know was that he’d be settling up with the Madrid kid immediately.
Damion was already gone when Julie, who hadn’t slept all night, rapped on his bedroom door just before 6 a.m. and called out, “Damion? I’m making waffles.” With less than two hours of sleep under his belt, Damion had left the house an hour before daybreak to head for the one place
where he knew he could think and clear his head. Under the guise of a 1:30 a.m. truce, he and his mother, who were barely communicating after he’d finished his story about the strange man in the car at the Glendale basketball courts, had gone to bed following a parting admonishment from CJ to call him in the morning.
Damion didn’t respond to her second call for waffles, their customary Saturday-morning breakfast, so Julie knocked on the door a second time, telling herself that maybe he’d gone out for an early-morning run. When he didn’t answer, she pushed the door open to find the room empty and his bed uncharacteristically unmade. Startled, she shouted, “Damion?” Rushing across the room, she flung back his closet door to see if the hiking boots and ankle and wrist weights that he normally wore on training runs were there. She let out a gasp when she saw the boots and weights arranged in a neat pile in the back corner of the closet. Suddenly the events of the previous night began playing themselves out once again.
Out of sync and trying her best to think in logical terms, she rushed from room to room calling out Damion’s name. When she got to the garage and found his cell phone sitting on the top of the sprinkler-system timing box and his SUV gone, she panicked. She thought about calling CJ as she rushed back inside the house and down the Spanish-tiled hallway that led from the garage to the kitchen, but for some reason she felt too guilty to do so. Instead she raced to the phone in the kitchen and dialed Shandell Bird’s number. When Shandell answered, his voice an early-morning foghorn, she asked, trying her best not to sound flustered, “Morning, Shandell, is Damion there?”
“No, ma’am,” said Shandell, responding to Julie in the mannerly way he always used when speaking to a woman.
“You didn’t go on a run with him, did you?” Julie asked, hoping against hope that Shandell’s answer would be yes.
“Nope. We decided not to run ’til this afternoon.”
“Did he tell you what he planned to do this morning?”
“No. Something wrong, Ms. Madrid?”
“No, no. I was just fixing breakfast, and Damion’s not here.”
“That’s funny. Maybe he went for a jog on his own.”
“Maybe. I’m sure he’ll be back soon. Sorry to wake you up.”
“No problem,” said Shandell, sounding puzzled. “Can you have Damion call me when he gets in?”
“Sure will.” Julie hung up without saying good-bye. She walked across the room, confused and concerned. Scooting a stool up to the cooktop island, she sighed and sat down. Her heart raced as she considered the fact that her only child, the treasure of her life, might be running from her. And all because she’d carried a volatile package of hate around inside her for far too long. She needed to fix that problem, find a remedy for it, in the jargon of the legal profession. But more than anything, she needed to reconnect with her son.
Rising from the stool, she walked back toward the room’s wall phone. Halfway to the phone she stopped and paused to think about what she was going to say when CJ picked up the phone.
Chapter 18
Pinkie Niedemeyer got an early-morning, black-coffee-charged start out of Denver after being roused from a blissfully peaceful sleep by a 7 a.m. phone call from Mario telling him that CJ, motivated by a frenzied call from Julie, had called looking for Damion Madrid. When Pinkie had protested having to traipse off after a twenty-year-old who was probably simply out sowing his wild oats after Mario had asked him to go look for Damion, Mario had pointedly said, “Track down the boy, Pinkie. Your debt ain’t fully paid up yet.” Unhappy about the assignment but cognizant of the fact that he owed his life to Mario, Pinkie had taken off for the Pawnee National Grassland, the place where Damion’s best friend, Shandell Bird, had suggested to CJ, who was running the traps in Denver, that if Damion were troubled, he’d probably head to to think things through.
Northeastern Colorado’s Pawnee National Grassland is a two-hundred-thousand-acre expanse of short-grass prairie. The main entrance to the grasslands is marked by a simple weathered U.S. Forest Service marker thirty-six miles east of the Colorado State University dorm room that Damion Madrid and Shandell Bird had shared during their junior year.
Damion’s daybreak pilgrimage to the grasslands had taken him north up I-25 to the outskirts of Fort Collins, where the interstate intersects Colorado state Highway 14. From there the drive to the grasslands, a drive he’d made more than a dozen times before, was a forty-minute trek east across rolling prairie and the South Platte River basin.
Damion had never heard of the wide expanse of prairie that before the 1930s Dust Bowl had once been productive farmland until he’d begun his stint at CSU. A foreign exchange student from Brazil had suggested that he visit the grasslands after CSU had suffered a devastating basketball loss to archrival Wyoming—a loss in which Damion, highly touted and starting as a freshman, had missed what would have been the final game-winning shot. That student, now his girlfriend, had claimed that according to Native American tradition, the grasslands were a place for reflection that had recuperative and regenerative powers. He’d shrugged off Niki Estaban’s suggestion for months, skeptically agreeing to go see the Great Plains monument to peace and tranquillity on a cold, crystal-clear, ice-blue morning in early March, as long as she’d go with him.
The first time he saw the two rugged, imposing, forlorn-looking buttes towering over an endless sea of partially snow-covered grass, he knew he’d connected with a lost part of himself. His trips to the Pawnee, as he referred to what he now saw as a mystical place, had become common enough that his basketball teammates had jokingly taken to calling him Blood Brother, a nickname that Shandell simply shortened, whenever the situation called for it, to Blood.
Damion’s two favorite grassland haunts had become Lips Bluff, the western butte, which rose majestically out of the pancake flatness, and the surprisingly lush Crow Valley campground with its shaded campsites and groves of cottonwoods. He loved trekking across the Pawnee’s chalky, sandy soil toward the base of Lips Bluff in the early morning, always stopping at his favorite place along the way, a hardscrabble red-cedar break where geology had been beaten back by botany and a small thicket of the hardy evergreens that some claimed were no more than devil’s weeds thrived.
He parked at the Crow Valley campground just before 7:30 a.m., to be greeted by air that was unseasonably crisp and a sky that was gemstone blue. There were no other vehicles parked at the campground, and he’d encountered only one other vehicle, a mud-splattered step-side pickup, on his way into the Pawnee. He spent an hour at the campground, sitting around thinking and trying to accommodate to the fact that things might never be the same between him, his mother, and CJ. When he left the campground and headed east to begin the long hike to Lips Bluff, a healthy breeze had picked up. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a white SUV lumber slowly past the campground. It was only the second vehicle he’d seen on the property the entire time he’d been there.
Clad in Levi’s, a faded blue chambray shirt, and a pair of run-over hiking boots that he kept in his SUV, he adjusted his sunglasses, tugged at the strap on his binoculars, and took a drink of water from the dented, navy-issue canteen that CJ had given him a few years earlier. CJ had carried it during his time in Vietnam.
Fifteen minutes later, as he closed in on what would be a brief rest stop, he watched two red-tailed hawks drift lazily overhead before soaring toward the cedars. When he reached the forlorn-looking cluster of cedar trees, he paused to drink in the overpowering evergreen smell, then wove his way along the outer margin of the isolated thicket. When he reached a familiar tree cluster, he kicked at a fallen tree to rout out any prairie rattlers and sat down.
He sat motionless for a while, gazing out at the sea of late-summer grasses, then watched a horned toad seemingly upset by, rather than fearful of, his intrusion hop slowly away from the uprooted end of the fallen cedar. His thoughts soon undulated back to the turmoil and tension of the previous evening. He still wasn’t certain whether his mother’s reluctance to
show her full displeasure at his divulgence of a long-cloaked family secret was because someone had tried to kill him earlier in the day or because she was so shaken by the confluence of events that she was saving the wrath of her full disapproval for a more appropriate time and place.
Mindful of the possibility that someone could have followed him to the Pawnee, though it was a possibility that he pretty much discounted, he’d nonetheless kept a watchful eye on his surroundings from the moment he’d left his house. Sensing that he’d come to the right place to reflect on his problems, soothe the wounds to his psyche, wash away his guilt, and reenergize, he felt the tension finally begin to escape from his body.
Glancing toward Lips Bluff, he took a sip of water just as a gust of wind kicked up. In the distance he could see what looked like a wind-induced dust devil. He watched the dust cloud rise on the wind just west of the bluff, expecting it to dissipate quickly. When it didn’t, he brought his binoculars up and focused them on what was now a straight arrow of dust rising from the trail that led from Lips Bluff.
His jaw dropped when he realized that someone on an ATV four-wheeler was headed across the parched terrain on a beeline toward him. Aware that motorized vehicles were forbidden in the grasslands, he sensed that he’d somehow locked on to trouble. There was no way anyone could have smuggled an ATV onto the grasslands without being noticed—unless, he told himself, they’d been bold enough to cross adjacent private lands to gain access to the back side of the buttes, the clear direction the ATV was headed from.
Recognizing that the ATV was still more than a mile away, he quickly ran down a list of who the driver might be. The possibility that the rider could be someone from the U.S. Forest Service, a joy-riding outdoorsman, or a rancher from an adjoining private ranch looking for strays came to mind first. He swallowed hard when he got to the possibility that the rider could be Mario’s shooter. His hands trembled briefly as he struggled to keep his binoculars trained on the ATV, and he tried to fathom how anyone could possibly have known where he was unless they’d followed him from Denver, watched him leave the Crow Valley campground, and then outflanked him. All of which were possible, he reluctantly admitted, especially since a vehicle with an ATV’s maneuverability and speed could easily outpace someone on foot. Even so, he wondered why he hadn’t heard the guttural sounds of a four-wheeler until he thought about the fact that the Pawnee was surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of private land. Anyone wanting to get around him while he was taking his time walking the only trail that led to and from Lips Bluff could’ve cut across any one of a half-dozen pieces of private land, and as absorbed as he’d been in his own thoughts, he likely wouldn’t have heard the ATV until it was too late, thinking that the engine noise was coming from outside the bounds of the Pawnee.