by Mark Stevens
“When are they going to open the bridge, do you think?” said Trudy.
“Not up to me,” said Lemke. He smiled.
Trudy had planned to have a late dinner waiting for Allison and Colin. They were probably back, making do on their own. She settled in for a wait. Her problems were minimal compared to the police effort to find the shooter.
“It’s been a long few hours,” said Trudy. “Is there any word about, you know—”
“From what I heard, it’s going to be touch and go for a day or two,” said Lemke. “Good the hospital was so close.”
At the image of Tom Lamott on the brink of death, Trudy imagined tubes in his mouth, doctors hovering. She found herself wiping away a tear.
“I remember you from high school,” said Lemke. “You were a year ahead of me.”
The comment caught her off guard.
“Sorry to say I wasn’t paying much attention back then,” said Trudy.
“Probably not too many would have pegged you for future entrepreneur—and quite successful at that, am I right?”
Did this mean the official stuff was over? Lemke’s posture hadn’t changed.
“I feel lucky,” said Trudy. “Things have been going well.” The last big publicity splash, which generated another spike in sales, included a full-page article in Sunset.
“My mother swears by your marinades,” said Lemke. “On chicken. Slapped on the grill—that one with basil and garlic, incredible. And I’ve got a couple of sisters who have each taken up gardening because of you—homegrown vegetables, fresh herbs. You are like their guru.”
Trudy didn’t know what to say.
“So let me ask you this,” said Lemke. “Don’t you employ Mexicans?”
Trudy felt the accusation like a knife slipped between her ribs. Trudy’s burgeoning business in West Glenwood stood at a crossroads between regional label and national brand. They had their own greenhouses and contracts with others across the Western Slope, too. A food processor in Grand Junction followed her recipe and packaged the sauces for distribution. The market for her fresh herbs, cross-branded with the sauces, showed staying power. Her produce stands hopped. Investors hovered.
“Sure,” said Trudy.
“So you must have a strong opinion. I mean, on this whole issue.”
“I think the issue has gone way out of control,” said Trudy. “I liked Lamott’s approach.”
“Because it helps you keep cheap labor,” said Lemke. His gaze tightened.
“We do everything by the book,” said Trudy. “If an identity card doesn’t match up, we let them go.”
“For the rest of us to deal with,” said Lemke. “You know things have changed in Glenwood Springs. It isn’t what it used to be, the drugs moving through here, coming up with the brown tide. It ain’t the intellectuals wading across the Rio Grande.”
Trudy squirmed. She thought of her crew and how hard they worked. They were natural gardeners and savvy mechanics. They spread a warm family feeling throughout her operation. They cared about efficiency and floated ideas to improve the work flow.
“You have to realize,” said Lemke, “that if employers only hired people they knew—not strangers on the street, especially if they don’t speak English and especially if you don’t know where they are really from or how they got here, that we wouldn’t be having any of this crap going on. These fights.”
“I can’t fix who lives here,” said Trudy.
“But you don’t have to hire them,” said Lemke. “You hire them and they send the word. Soon, the brother is here. The uncle. Even with the economy in the shitter up here, it pays better and life is better. Their kids sit next to my kids in class and you ought to see the contortions the school goes through to help these kids learn English.”
Trudy kept thinking about her workers, her team. She tried to think if any skilled white gardeners had applied when she posted jobs.
“If I were you, I’d clean up my act. You know, check. Make sure.”
“What do you mean?” said Trudy.
“You know exactly what I mean,” said Lemke. “Go through your stuff, your records. Make sure everything really is on the up and up.”
“What are you telling me?” said Trudy. “That someone’s coming?”
“It’s always coming,” said Lemke. “Now might be a good time to make sure your nose is all-American squeaky clean.”
In a daze Trudy headed back toward her pickup, parked eight blocks south of downtown, halfway back to Sayre Park. A caravan of news trucks had overrun the street by the train station. Television reporters stood in a row. Each reporter had his or her own spotlight.
The traffic crawled crossing the river. A cluster of flashing lights blasted the rise to the east, on Lookout Mountain trail. Spotlights lit up the forest like the spaceship descending in Close Encounters. If that had been the sniper’s perch, it would make the shot in Dealey Plaza look like the one in Ford’s Theater.
Trudy snaked her way through town and came up to speed on the interstate. The pickup climbed Glenwood Canyon, following the tight curves in the road.
Was Lemke’s warning for real?
Was it based on anything?
The pickup rambled out of the canyon and the traffic sped up. Trudy slowed at the Dotsero exit, ducked back under the interstate and followed the road north, into the black summer woods.
Her thoughts returned to the footbridge, those surreal seconds that had already moved into a section of her memory where all thoughts and all the associated sounds, smells, and sights would be kept in a hermetically sealed container for as long as her heart kept beating.
The planning that must have gone into those seconds of action—and the cold-hearted nerves behind the trigger—gave Trudy a shudder.
She cracked the front window, tasted the cool night air. A freight train ambled along on the far shore of the pitch-dark river, heading in the opposite direction. Piercing squeals of steel on steel floated across the night. Her headlights caught a porcupine scampering across the road. From the rear, the porcupine was a headless ball of spikes. It looked perfectly alien and terribly alone.
five:
monday, early morning
Duncan Bloom stared at his newspaper’s website. The first bit of instant history was in the books.
“Dem. Senate Candidate Lamott Shot Downtown.”
It was 2:38 a.m., a grueling fourteen hours since the shooting. The cops had so little information that most of his first piece was all from eyewitnesses inter-mixed with reaction from political and civic leadership.
The newspaper had thrown everything at it that they could, but the big boys from New York and L.A. were already here or on the way, landing now at Eagle-Vail or DIA, speeding along the interstate with all their presumptive access and armies of producers, fact-checkers, investigators, and sources.
A bottle of red wine served as dinner and drinks in one convenient container, supplemented by a package of gas station peanuts, hours ago, and a granola bar grabbed from the abundant stash of supplies where the police set up shop at the train station. Given the paucity of edibles in his carriage house, rented from an active, bright-eyed widow, the wine would have to do.
It was three blocks straight up Lincoln Avenue to the scene that was now putting Glenwood Springs on the national news map. Bloom lived at 10th Street and Lincoln. The floodlights and police were buzzing around 7th Street, by the river, and up in the woods to the east of Lincoln Avenue on the base of Lookout Mountain. From the window over the kitchen sink that faced north, the glow that rose from the police encampment looked like premiere night in Hollywood. The people who lived in the houses smack next to the scene would need sleeping pills tonight. For Bloom, sleep wasn’t on the agenda.
Bloom scrolled to a number on his cell phone and hit redial. The big boys were coming, but Bloom wasn’t about to choke o
n their exhaust. This was his story, this was his town. He’d been right there for Chrissakes.
The moment Lamott fell defined surreal. He stewed about those split, fragmented seconds over and over. He had already played them in his mind a thousand times. He relived them as he interviewed witnesses. He relived them as the cops interviewed him. He was treated like any other witness put through the drill at the train station. Bloom knew four shots for sure, but there might have been more. How did he know if the first shot didn’t miss the bridge? He didn’t. Trudy Heath was at a nearby interview station, being grilled at the same time.
“Officer DiMarco,” said the voice, no tinge of excitement.
“How ya doing?”
“Better question for you. Not every day you’re kneeling over a man with bullet holes.”
“All instinct,” said Bloom. “Who’s running the show?”
Deputy Sheriff Randall DiMarco was the nephew of Bloom’s landlord and had been an even-tempered source. In Denver, it had been a challenge to get to know cops as individuals. Up here, it was possible.
“State moved in—CBI, FBI, governor’s office, you name it. We ran the show for about the first six minutes.”
“Are you where you can talk?”
“In my cruiser, taking a break,” said DiMarco.
“Out at the scene?” said Bloom.
A radio squawked on DiMarco’s end. “Does it matter?”
“I’m sure it’s a cluster fuck,” said Bloom.
On the TV, one fuzzy, over-enlarged video from a cheap camera caught the attempted assassination. A teenage girl had been standing on the train station platform and accidentally recorded the moment. She’d been shooting a video of her sister. You could make out Lamott and his entourage on the footbridge, then a minute of posing for pictures and then the ugly inevitable. Some video editor had highlighted Lamott with a circle of light and Bloom could see himself, a vague figure moving toward Lamott as he went down.
“What about the photographer?” said Bloom.
“Which one?” said DiMarco.
“The professional.”
“You think you’ve thought of something we haven’t?”
Bloom sipped his wine. It was his fourth glass but he felt oddly sober.
“Did those shots have anything interesting in the background? Are you looking at those?”
DiMarco slurped a drink, likely a Diet Mountain Dew, snapped his nicotine gum. “I gotta get back to looking around in the dark for nothing.”
“So they showed something.”
“I don’t know every detail of the investigation.”
“You would have heard a tidbit if it was good,” said Bloom.
“It’s possible,” said DiMarco. “But I didn’t. Are we off the record or on?”
“Off,” said Bloom. “If I need something to quote, I’ll tell you.”
The Garfield County Sheriff’s office seemed competent and most of his encounters with individual cops had been civilized.
“If anyone has picked up a trail, I haven’t heard,” said DiMarco.
“Don’t you think you’d have something to go on by now, some breadcrumbs?”
“Don’t mention food to me,” said DiMarco. “And I’m not exactly in the inner loop.”
Bloom pictured the Lookout Mountain trail in mid-August. It was no hot spot like Hanging Lake, halfway up Glenwood Canyon. No signs drew tourists. The barely-marked trailhead started behind a house with a clothes line and small flower garden.
“That trail heads up over the top,” said Bloom. “To the east.”
“Don’t try to play cop,” said DiMarco. “Right now the cops and detectives in Glenwood Springs outnumber the citizens of this hamlet about two to one. We’ve got angles coming out the wazoo.”
A jolt caught Bloom like one of those flash headaches that make you wince and then goes poof.
Through the mayhem of the last twelve hours, he had forgotten the phone call.
“Hang on,” said Bloom.
“I’m hanging,” said DiMarco. “But actually, I’ve gotta go.”
“No,” said Bloom. “I might have something.”
“Don’t jack me around.”
“I’m not,” said Bloom, his mind flashing back and his whole body coming alive like he’d touched an electric fence. “I had a wacko on the line this morning. This guy wanted to double-check the times of Lamott’s schedule for the day. Said he was a freelance photographer.”
“Time was this?”
“After I got to the office. Little after ten.”
“He was focused on the footbridge?” said DiMarco.
“Everything, really,” said Bloom. “Start to finish, the whole campaign stop.”
“How long was he on the phone?”
Bloom stood up, energy rekindled. The work phone stored records of inbound calls.
“A minute, two maybe,” said Bloom. “Hard to remember but not long.”
“The voice?” said DiMarco.
“Deep,” said Bloom. “But chit-chatty like an excited tourist.”
“Name?”
“I don’t remember it or if he said.”
“Hang on a second,” said DiMarco.
They had printed details of Lamott’s planned campaign stops in the paper. Not much had changed in terms of timing or logistics. Was there some other detail the caller had been after? Bloom wracked his brain. The swirl of events was thick. Bloom recalled the routine note-taking prior to the shot and his brief chat with Trudy Heath. That calm moment put the alluring Allison Coil, Trudy’s pal, back in his thoughts in delicious fashion. Then there was Lamott’s canned speech and he had followed Lamott up on the bridge. And then everything was a blur and he was swallowed whole by the whale-sized moment and plunged into a dark, busy blur of questions, digging and writing that had consumed the last eight hours. He knew it was the biggest news event he had ever covered. The steps were all the same as every other story, but the intensity factor was off the charts.
“Your office closed?” said DiMarco.
“I can get in.”
“You going to need us to have a warrant?”
“We’re cooperative,” said Bloom. “If there’s nobody down at the office, I’ll call and check with the upper-ups. I suppose this can’t wait until morning.”
“No,” said DiMarco. “Time is the enemy. And she’s growing fangs.”
six:
monday morning
Morning cracked open the day.
Allison walked the well-worn path from her A-frame across the open field to Trudy’s place, tucked next to a grove of trees but in a spot that could catch sunlight during the day, at least in the summer. Colin led the way on the narrow, winding path that cut through the field.
A finger of smoke rose from Trudy’s chimney. There wasn’t a hint of a breeze. The agenda was simple—lead authorities to the torn-up body near Lumberjack Camp. Sulchuk and the others all had commitments and couldn’t return to the site.
They had managed to raise a cell and contact the police around 8 p.m. The 911 dispatcher had been thorough and detailed when Allison made the report, passing her off to someone to go over all the particulars again. The cop mentioned the shooting in Glenwood Springs and that explained why they were so short-handed. Allison couldn’t imagine it. The news explained her dispatcher’s somewhat harried state. The half-corpse was bad and unsettling enough—
Allison still felt certain that the mountain lion scenario held no credibility—but trying to imagine the attempted assassination was a double whammy.
“Smell anything yet?” said Allison.
“Bacon,” said Colin. “The fake stuff.”
“I’d eat a picture of bacon,” said Allison.
“I’d eat the camera before it took the picture,” said Colin.
Regular g
rocery store trips had not yet become part of their domestic—Allison hated the word—routine.
“One of us is going to have to maybe settle down and get that damn little house in order,” said Allison.
It was a running joke. Theirs was a match made deep in the woods and it worked. One of the reasons was that they both shared the notion that keeping house, cleaning house, repairing house, enjoying house, or thinking house was low on the list of priorities. It was nice to have a bed, for all the reasons it was nice to have a bed. In fact, the loft bedroom and spectacular views of the broad field and mountains to the east were now permanently part of the imagery that went with the memories of making love with Colin. The bed had become theirs, not hers. Beds were good things and Allison was also generally in favor of a roof, especially in winter, but all the rest of what came with the term “house” was vastly overrated.
Especially if you had a neighbor and friend whose talents in the kitchen were both innate and refined.
The kitchen hummed. Two cats lay about, completely unexcited by the guests. Batter bolstered with fat blueberries dripped from a spoon in gooey dollops onto a cookie sheet. Trudy aimed each dollop with care.
“Scones,” said Trudy when Colin asked. “To go with poached eggs and broiled tomatoes.”
“No bacon?” said Colin. Trudy shot him a look and a smile. “What I meant to say was yum.”
Colin liked to balance his intake of organic ingredients with a healthy portion of animal fat. You can lead a cowboy to bean sprouts, but you can’t make him chew.
Trudy poured coffee and they quizzed her for her version of events. Allison shook her head repeatedly, finding it hard to imagine being so close to the shots.
“Couldn’t sleep,” said Trudy. “I kept thinking about all the little things I could have done. You know, to make it all come out differently.”
“The cop sounds out of line,” said Colin. “Way out of line.”
“That was the capper,” said Trudy. “He probably thought he was helping me. Maybe he knows something, but he was so dire.”
Allison recalled the timid woman she had met when Trudy was still married to George Grumley, who ran a wicked world of rigged hunts behind Trudy’s back. Allison had knocked on Trudy’s door the first time they met and had found a meek flower child with little experience in the big wide world. In the end, Trudy had played no small role in helping learn the truth about her husband’s racket and it all came out, including his role as a double murderer, when the sheriff and the prosecutors were finally done. Trudy had shaken the experience like a snake shedding a skin. She would always broadcast more femininity than Allison—her curves were better—but she’d added confidence to the mix and the time she spent in the fields and gardens had added a glow to her beautiful skin, which she tended carefully with organic sunscreens. Trudy was wary of synthetics at every turn. The face Trudy once kept hidden behind too-long hair was now open to the world. She had lost a bit of the flower child earth woman and had gone with a look that was sleeker, but she still oozed all things wholesome and healthy.