Cold Skies

by Thomas King

  Margo Knight was probably in her mid-forties, about the same age that Anna had been when she and Callie had been murdered on that lonely beach in Northern California.

  “No,” said Thumps. “What she’s wearing. She wasn’t dressed to come out here. She was on her way to dinner or a party.”

  Hockney sorted through the rest of the contents of the purse. “Wallet’s here. Money. Lipstick. Condoms.”

  Thumps nodded. “Not a robbery and no signs of sexual assault.”

  “Along with a cellphone.” Duke turned the phone over in his hand. It was a BlackBerry. Square, dark, expensive. The kind of cellphone serious business people carried to show that they were serious business people. “Notice anything about it?”

  “It’s a cellphone,” said Thumps. “Every time you need it, the battery’s dead.”

  “Same make and model as Lester’s,” said Hockney.

  “If you say so.”

  Duke dropped the phone into an evidence bag. “You got a cellphone?”

  “Nope.”

  “As acting sheriff,” said Duke, “you’ll be required to carry one.”

  “Then I can’t be acting sheriff.”

  The sheriff got to his feet and dusted his pants. “Lucky for you, I’ve got an old Nokia you can borrow.”

  Over the sheriff’s shoulder, Thumps could see a set of lights heading in their direction. “You call Beth?”

  “Of course I called Beth,” said Duke. “She has a cellphone.”

  “Then there you go,” said Thumps.

  “What?”

  “She can be acting sheriff.”

  Eleven

  It was late when Hockney dropped him off in front of his house. Next door, through a side window, Thumps could see the glimmer of a television.

  “The place finally sold?”

  “It did,” said Thumps.

  “Won’t be easy, you know,” said the sheriff.

  “What?”

  “Breaking in a new neighbour.”

  “He seems fine.”

  “That’s the way things always start out,” said Duke. “You ever see Disturbia?”

  “He’s a computer programmer.”

  The sheriff leaned forward on the steering wheel. “Now, what in hell’s name is that?”

  The light from the television flickered across the porch. In the shadows near the front door, something massive heaved itself up and then collapsed back into a heap.

  “That’s a dog,” said Thumps.

  “That’s a dog?”

  “A Komondor,” said Thumps. “He’s not as alarming as he looks.”

  “Komondor’s a big lizard,” said the sheriff. “Nature channel. Macy and I watched one of those suckers bring down a goat.”

  “You’re thinking of a Komodo dragon.”

  “You ever see Cujo?”

  FREEWAY WAS SITTING on the table in the kitchen, pretending to be an Egyptian figurine. Thumps and the cat had had several long conversations about where cats were allowed and where they were not.

  Thumps had bought Freeway a fabric basket with a soft cream liner that had bird illustrations on the sides. He had positioned it in a corner under the kitchen table so she would have a comfortable hidey-hole.

  “Haven’t we talked about the kitchen table?”

  Freeway had sniffed at the basket, and she had sniffed at the birds, and then she never went near the basket again.

  “Cats aren’t allowed on the table.”

  Freeway slowly leaned to one side, fell over on her back, and stretched out so Thumps could scratch her stomach.

  “Really?”

  Thumps glanced at the clock. Was it too late to call Claire? And what excuse would he make for calling at this hour? What if she wasn’t home? What if she was?

  Just wanted to make sure you were okay.

  Your son said something about a new boyfriend. How’s that going?

  Freeway jumped off the table, but instead of slinking to her bowl and complaining that she didn’t have enough food to survive the night, the cat went to the front window. At first she sat and stared out at the night, and then she began to meow and pace back and forth on the sill.

  Thumps was about to tell her to pipe down when something large and dark leaped up against the glass.

  “Jesus!”

  It was a short, shaggy man with a long, pink tongue.

  Freeway stopped pacing and considered the prowler. She cocked her head and put a paw out. The intruder did the same thing.

  Pops.

  Thumps imagined that he could even smell the dog.

  “Great.”

  Freeway should have been hissing, her back arched, her tail fluffed out to resemble a baseball bat, but instead, the cat began to purr and rub her face against the window. The dog, for his part, began licking the glass with great slobbering strokes and waving a paw at Thumps to ask if he could come in and introduce himself.

  That wasn’t going to happen. The last thing Thumps wanted to do was to encourage Pops to spend his copious free time farting on the front porch.

  Still, Freeway seemed curious, even friendly, and she didn’t have any friends. If this dog was stupid enough to believe that he and a cranky cat could have a future, who was he to discourage a relationship when he couldn’t even manage one himself.

  “That’s Pops,” he told the cat. “Pops, this is Freeway.”

  There was a full moon out. He and Claire had spent one such evening not too long ago at her place, sitting in lawn chairs, watching the moonlight twinkle off the Ironstone River. That was then. This was a different moon, and he was tired. He should be asleep rather than playing chaperone to consenting adults.

  “Don’t stay up too late,” he said to Freeway as he left the kitchen. “Don’t make a lot of noise, and turn off the lights when you go to bed.”

  WHEN THUMPS HAD BEEN a cop in Northern California, he had lived his life on a schedule that had him up in the morning and out of the house before dawn. As a self-employed fine-art photographer, he could, if he felt like it, sleep in, lie in bed at all hours, wrapped up in a soft quilt with pillows braced against his side, while he drifted in and out of dreams.

  Not that Thumps had dreams. Dreams, he imagined, were pleasurable fantasies bubbling with heroic escapades and erotic interludes. What found him in the night were the splinters of memory that tore through whatever peace sleep might provide. Nothing tangible. Nothing in focus. Just a vague assembly of assaults, desolations, and sorrows that rushed out of the shadows and swallowed him whole.

  THE PHONE RINGING at six-thirty the next morning reminded Thumps of his standing resolution to have the damn thing disconnected. He buried his face in the pillow and let the call go to the answering machine. After ten rings, he realized that he had forgotten to turn the machine on. Again.

  Thumps hit the talk button. “Mr. DreadfulWater is out of town and unavailable.”

  “Stop fooling around.”

  “Leave a message at the sound of the beep.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me Lester was murdered?”

  Thumps pressed the off button on the phone and pulled the quilt over his head. With any luck he could sink back into oblivion for another couple of hours.

  Almost immediately the phone went off like a grenade. Thumps let it ring, hoping that Archie would give up.

  “We got disconnected.”

  “No, we didn’t,” said Thumps. “I hung up on you.”

  “That’s the cancer talking,” said Archie.

  “I don’t have cancer.”

  “Diabetes then. Have you heard from Beth?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “I know who killed Lester.”

  The last thing Thumps remembered with any clarity was helping the sheriff and Beth load Margo Knight into the back of Mooney’s station wagon. He didn’t think anything else had happened while he was asleep. But maybe it had. And then again, maybe Archie was just making it up as he went along.

 
“Then call Hockney.” Thumps tried to sit up. “He’s the sheriff.”

  “Duke won’t talk to me.”

  “Then bother Beth.”

  “She won’t talk to me either.”

  “That makes it unanimous.” Thumps hit the off button and rolled back into the quilt. He didn’t expect that Archie was going to go away, and he wasn’t disappointed. This time he answered on the first ring. “Archie, I’m trying to sleep.”

  “You’re kidding. You’re still in bed?”

  “It’s only six-thirty.”

  “It’s nine-thirty.”

  Thumps squinted at the travel alarm on the nightstand. A moment ago, the first number on the clock had been a six. Somehow it had turned into a nine.

  “I need your help,” said Archie. “The water conference needs your help.”

  “I’m sure it will be a great conference.”

  “Great? Our keynote was murdered. How great can that be?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “And now I can’t find Dr. Knight.”

  Thumps struggled to the edge of the bed. His slippers were somewhere in the room. His shirt was over the chair. His pants were hanging on the hook behind the door. Where had he put his socks?

  “Did you mention Knight to Duke?”

  Archie snorted. “He wanted to know if Knight and Lester were close.”

  “And?”

  “You too?” said Archie. “Not everything is about sex, you know.”

  “Archie . . .”

  “Get dressed. The Aegean in an hour.”

  “Archie . . .”

  But this time, it was Archie who hung up on him. Okay, so it was later than he had thought. Time to be up and moving. He felt his face. He had another day before he’d need to shave. The shirt he had worn yesterday still smelled fresh.

  Yes, he could have told Archie that Knight’s body had been found out at one of Orion’s test sites, but sharing information about an ongoing police investigation wasn’t his job. If the sheriff wanted to tell Archie, he would tell Archie. If Lester and Knight were sexually engaged, well, it wasn’t his concern.

  As he brushed his teeth, Thumps debated whether to make his own breakfast or to stop at Al’s and start the day off right. Not that the day hadn’t already started without him. And he had eaten at Al’s yesterday. Of course, there was no reason why he shouldn’t treat himself well. He had read somewhere that one of the keys to good mental health, and by extension, physical health, was something called “tempered self-indulgence.”

  Thumps suspected that he had seen the phrase in an article in Reader’s Digest, a magazine known more for its sappy anecdotes and right-wing grousing than for its accuracy. Still, he liked the general concept and was willing, for the moment, to suspend his disbelief.

  The house was remarkably quiet, and it wasn’t until he had dressed and was standing in the kitchen that he realized what was missing.

  “Freeway?”

  By now, the cat should have been dragging him out of bed. He had installed a cat flap in the door that led to the yard, but Freeway was not a fresh-air enthusiast. She preferred the luxuries of a toilet with water in the bowl, a soft sofa to scratch, a dish full of food, and a carpet on which to puke. She would go outside from time to time, though Thumps suspected that these forays were just to remind herself that inside was the better choice.

  “Freeway?”

  The cat’s bowl was full. There was no vomit on the rug. No kitty corpse floating in the john. Thumps went to the kitchen and looked out the window. No Freeway. For just a moment, Thumps wondered if the cat had run away with Pops.

  “Hey, diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle . . .” There was a dog in there somewhere, but as Thumps checked the rhyme in his head, he remembered that it was the dish that had run away with the spoon. The dog in the poem had laughed, though Thumps couldn’t remember why.

  Thumps opened the refrigerator. It was more gesture than anything else. He had already settled on Al’s, had decided he should give “tempered self-indulgence” a try and not be so dismissive of a new concept.

  THE DAY WAS crisp and cheery as only spring days can be. As he stepped outside, Thumps noticed two things. First, Freeway was on his new neighbour’s porch, lounging in a white wicker chair. Pops was sitting next to the chair beating his tail against the deck. Every so often, Freeway would casually wave a paw in the dog’s direction, and, each time she did, Pops would quiver with what was evidently delight and beat his tail harder against the boards.

  Thumps wasn’t really sure he wanted to know.

  “Hell of a nice morning.”

  Thumps turned to find a black Cadillac Escalade parked at the curb and two men standing next to the car. One was a Hispanic man in his early forties, shorter than Thumps but more powerfully built and in better shape, with black stubble for hair. The other man was taller and older. He was wearing a tan suit that had been made for him. And a cream summer Stetson. Thumps had no idea who he was, but the tall man looked as though he had just stepped off the front page of a fashion magazine.

  “You must be Mr. DreadfulWater,” said the older man in the Stetson.

  Whoever he was, the man had a first-rate orthodontist as well.

  “I’m Boomper Austin.” The man ambled up the walk and thrust out his hand as though he were trying to punch a hole in plate steel.

  Thumps tried to remember if he had ever met a Boomper.

  “It’s a family name,” said Austin, reading his mind. “Historical artifact that we pass around every generation or so. And this is my associate, Mr. Cisco Cruz.”

  “Cisco,” said Thumps. “As in The Cisco Kid ?”

  Cruz was dressed in jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black windbreaker that was two sizes too large. He wore a silver pendant on a leather thong around his neck and a thick, ugly watch on his wrist that looked as though it had been made out of old truck tires.

  “Mr. Austin is in town for the water conference.”

  Austin took off his hat. “And I’ll bet you’re wondering what in the hell this idiot is doing standing on your property. Am I right?”

  Thumps hadn’t had much sleep and he hadn’t had breakfast and the last thing he wanted to do was exchange pleasantries with a Boomper. “Bank owns the place,” he said. “I just look after it for them.”

  “You see, Mr. Cruz, a sense of humour. It’s one of the marks of a civilized man.” Boomper turned back to Thumps. “You know V. Tony Hauser? Works out of Toronto?”

  Thumps had never met Hauser, but at a show in San Francisco, he had seen a number of his photographs that had been shot on a Folmer & Schwing 12 x 20 banquet view camera.

  “Large format,” said Thumps. “Platinum and palladium prints. Does a lot of portraiture.”

  “Mr. Hauser did one of me,” said Austin. “A Polaroid of all things. Amazing what you can find in a portrait that you hadn’t noticed before.”

  Thumps tried to place the accent. Visually, the man was West Texas—white hair, blue eyes, tanned skin—but there was East Coast privilege lurking in his vowels.

  “I have a set of his Algonquin Park images. I imagine you sell your photographs.”

  “I do,” said Thumps.

  “Then I’ll take half a dozen. You pick them.”

  Thumps didn’t know if the man was naturally charming or if he had worked at charisma until he had mastered it.

  “Think of it as my way of paying you for your time.”

  “I’m on my way to breakfast.”

  Boomper nodded. “And I’m not one to keep a man from his feed.”

  Cruz took a card out of his pocket and handed it to Thumps.

  “Austin Resource Capital,” said Boomper. “That’s me. R. B. Austin. The R is for Randall, in case you were curious.” Austin took a postcard out of his pocket. “You probably recognize this.”

  Thumps nodded. “Ansel Adams. Tetons and Snake River. 1942.”

  “I have two original photographs of that scene that Adam
s himself printed. If you’re agreeable, one of them is yours.”

  Thumps looked at the card for a long moment. He had always admired that photograph. Not that he was a great fan of Adams, but Tetons and Snake River was one of those images where, in that moment, all the elements had come together, and Adams had captured them. Thumps had seen any number of photographs made by other photographers of the same spot, but none had ever moved him the way Adams’s effort had.

  “I’m real fond of Adams,” said Austin. “I don’t just give these away.”

  “What is it you want?”

  “You know the name Richard Throssel?”

  “Throssel was a Native photographer,” said Thumps. “Early nineteenth century. A contemporary of Edward Curtis. Cree.”

  “Adopted by the Crow,” said Austin. “I have several original photographs and I can get others. You can take your pick.”

  Cruz shifted his feet. “Sir, you have a meeting in less than an hour.”

  “Cisco is reminding me that I don’t have time to talk photographs,” said Boomper. “But we’re not talking photographs, are we, Mr. DreadfulWater? We’re horse trading.”

  Cruz nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “And I’m hoping Mr. DreadfulWater here likes the look of my horses.”

  Not many people knew about Richard Throssel. Austin might be a rich blowhard, but he knew photography. Thumps wondered what else he knew.

  “I don’t need an answer right away.” Austin pulled the brim of his hat down and angled it to one side. “I’m having a little party up at Shadow Ranch tonight. Why don’t you stop by? Bring a friend if you’re so inclined. Cisco here will make sure you’re on the guest list.”

  The sun caught the ring on Boomper’s finger.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” He turned the ring back into the light and the deep red stone flashed with fire. “Just had it made. One of the perks of being filthy rich.”

  “Ruby?”

  “Lot of people would think that,” said Boomper. “Course it could be almandine garnet or imperial topaz or maybe a piece of cuprite.”

  “But it’s not.”

  “Red beryl,” said Boomper, his voice betraying his pleasure. “Stuff was discovered in 1958 by one Lamar Hodges while he was prospecting for uranium. The Ruby-Violet mine in the Wah Wah Mountains of mid-western Utah is about the only place in the world where you can get gem-grade stones.”