by Mark Stevens
But all other details about his face were subordinated by the face tattoo. The police department news release cautioned that the rendering of the face tattoo was an approximation, but the impression on their sketch was that the man had asked the tattoo artist to draw a grid or spider web over his face. The overall look said outcast and I know it. Certainly somebody would recognize the drawing, unless the suspect had been in hiding for the past couple years and only now emerged for the purposes of this shooting.
The cops wouldn’t say much about how the composite drawing was produced, whether it was from one eyewitness or several. Bloom had no trouble imagining it came from someone at Glenwood Manor—or several someones at Glenwood Manor—who had put two and two together and realized they had seen the shooter and had fallen for a repairman or building inspector ruse or a “friend of a guy on the second floor” story as his ticket into the building.
As if the drawing wasn’t enough, the release said he was armed and “extremely” dangerous.
“Thank you for the helpful tidbit,” Bloom told the email version of the news release on his computer screen.
Bloom’s phone buzzed with a new text—an alert from the Denver Post about the cops’ announcement. Pulling up his newspaper website, Bloom smiled. His story, albeit brief, was already posted.
DiMarco answered on the sixth ring.
“Playing hard to get?” said Bloom.
“I’m busy,” said DiMarco. “Surprised you weren’t the lead lemming at the rodent festival.”
“Like being there would have added anything,” said Bloom. “Maybe I could have experienced in three dimensions what I get electronically from your PR shop. Almost nothing.”
“You don’t like our drawing?”
“You talking to tattoo artists too?”
“In this country and twenty others,” said DiMarco. “For starters.”
“The guy could scare the stink off a skunk,” said Bloom. “Who spotted him?”
DiMarco laughed. “Same thing the guy from NBC asked. You guys share a certain level of obvious.”
“Whoever spotted him got fooled by some set-up, some scheme to get into Glenwood Manor. You’re trying not to embarrass.”
“We got feelings to consider,” said DiMarco. “It’s true.”
“So they spotted him at the apartment building?” said Bloom. “You’re confirming that?”
“What apartment building?” said DiMarco.
Bloom could hear the straight-face snicker in his voice. He let utter silence tell DiMarco he wasn’t playing.
“Okay,” said DiMarco at last. “How can I help you if you won’t tell me which apartment building?”
“Give me a break,” said Bloom. “Okay, on background, do you know anything more, where he’s from?” The phrase person of interest flashed but Bloom refused to utter it. “Seems to me there aren’t too many dudes on the planet that look like that.”
The shift to chat mode might work. On the other hand, DiMarco knew all the tricks.
“In order,” said DiMarco. “No. I don’t know. And I agree.”
“Guess I have to go down to Glenwood Manor and talk to the residents one by one,” said Bloom.
“Knock yourself out,” said DiMarco.
Browsing the web as he talked, Bloom found an alert on the NBC web site—Tom Lamott had allegedly responded to a question by squeezing his wife’s hand. The doctors were urging caution.
“But I need a favor, too,” said Bloom. “You can get my editor’s bulldog teeth out of my butt.”
“Maybe I think that’s a good thing,” said DiMarco.
The owner of the bulldog teeth sat at his desk behind a waist-high partition talking with a large man who now had his back to Bloom. The man’s shoulders were wide. He had short, carefully-cropped hair. His shirt was blue, but more of a work shirt than business. Coogan’s gaze looked submissive. Less bulldog, more puppy.
“Because you don’t want me to get fired so you can continue to control the media,” said Bloom.
“Right,” said DiMarco. “Almost forgot my motivation. At your service.”
“I need you to run a license plate,” said Bloom. He pulled out his notes, including details Trudy had relayed.
“No magic word?” said DiMarco.
Bloom sighed. “Fuck you,” he said.
“That’s better,” said DiMarco. “Whose plate?”
“I’m trying to find out the who,” said Bloom. “It goes back to this ICE thing.”
“Call ICE,” said DiMarco.
“Yeah and then call the Pentagon and ask them how many bullets they own,” said Bloom.
“Give me the context,” said DiMarco. “Where’d the plate come from?”
“Someone who saw a van in action,” said Bloom. “Moving illegals around, I suppose.”
“What are you going to do with the information? Don’t you have enough to do?” said DiMarco.
“I can multi-task,” said Bloom.
“Lay it on me,” said DiMarco.
“It’s only a partial,” said Bloom. “Wouldn’t need you if it was a full.”
“A partial?” said DiMarco.
“The first half,” said Bloom. “CL9.”
DiMarco paused. “Could be hundreds,” he said.
“Registered in Garfield County or out here somewhere? Eagle County? Connected to a van?”
The man talking with Coogan—talking to Coogan—stood. He had world-class jowls and the kind of wide, proud belly that made Bloom think of steakhouses and steaming piles of heavily-buttered mashed potatoes. He had a dark moustache. He didn’t smile as he shook Coogan’s hand, but something about the space between them said Coogan had lost.
“Might narrow your options,” said DiMarco.
“Can you run it for me?”
“What are friends for?” said DiMarco.
“And when you corner Lamott’s shooter in some back-alley hell hole, don’t bother calling anyone else but me.”
“Of course,” said DiMarco. “I’m always thinking of you.”
Coogan’s visitor departed and Coogan had covered half of the ten steps to Bloom’s desk.
Bloom hung up.
“What’s the afternoon look like?” said Coogan. It wasn’t a real question.
“Big question in my mind is how’d they get the composite—who described the man they’re after? Thought I’d go to the apartment building, Someone’s gotta know who gave the cops the info.”
“Keep on it,” said Coogan.
“And if it was the apartment building he had to have had help, getting in and out,” said Bloom.
One of the whacky theories a conspiracy theorist might concoct was that perhaps the shooter had help diverting the cops to Lookout Mountain—delivering convincing accounts of the shots coming from farther east, up the hill.
“Everything we can get by deadline,” said Coogan. “Blow it out. Somebody must have seen this dude.”
Coogan’s words didn’t have the usual zing. He looked like he had been dressed down a notch or two. Bloom was dying to ask for the identity of Coogan’s visitor and then thought better to leave well enough alone.
Everyone’s got problems, thought Bloom. Everyone.
thirty-two:
wednesday, late afternoon
Download the spirit of Devo. Be tough, find food, stay hydrated.
Another day, another slog.
The distance wasn’t that bad. At the end of the trudge would be Trudy and her kitchen.
Hunger nagged at Allison’s insides, but it wasn’t true hunger, just a body grumbling about lack of routine. She wasn’t that tired, just pissed off she didn’t have a horse. She wasn’t that wet, but her bone marrow was starting to slosh around.
Sunny Boy.
The dogs.
Dillard.<
br />
And company.
Why didn’t they come after her? Was she being followed now? Doubtful. She gave an occasional look over her shoulder, but the woods were too wet, too inhospitable.
So why cut the horse loose—or steal it? At least she’d have some good leads for the cops, if they could be bothered.
Allison snaked her way through dense woods, picking her way up slopes packed with dead trees, soaked barkless trunks as slick as black ice. Keeping a straight line was dicey. Continually checking on her bearings, maintaining a set distance from the open valley, was exhausting. She would stick to the cover for another hour or so and then maybe risk making better time in the open, back on the trail.
Allison’s legs screamed from the uphill work and her feet, thank you very much, would rather be settled in a pair of stirrups. She didn’t take horses for granted, did she? Even at walking speed, they were faster than a human and they made the work look easy. At least, they rarely complained or balked, didn’t ask for much in return.
Allison slipped into a semi-trance. Legs moved, brain evaluated the course for the next few steps, legs moved, eyes checked the trajectory against the open field to the south, legs moved. All negative thoughts were banished, cancelled, forbidden. At the mere first syllable of mental complaint, she slashed at the body of the word with a hot sword fresh from the fire. Bad thoughts were not allowed to gain traction. Every step, in truth, was easy. Putting all the steps in a row in one compressed effort was the hard part. She could use a quart of water but she wasn’t utterly dry. She wasn’t marching off a landing craft at Omaha Beach. She wasn’t scaling K-2 without oxygen. She was walking in the Colorado woods in the rain and she’d be home, pending a random mountain lion attack, for dinner. The trance sucked her down, pulled her under into a quiet, small zone where problems were identified, run through triage for a quick and precise evaluation of their true risk factors, and just as quickly dispatched to the back of the waiting line and told to get real.
She pictured in detail, down to the order of the drawers in her dresser, her Iowa childhood bedroom. She went step by step through helping her mother prepare a Sunday roast. She saw the lumps of butter in the mashed potatoes. Allison remembered names from her senior high school class, 73 in all. She made it to 29 when the names went fuzzy and blank. She switched to working on a list of her hometown streets and then thinking with obscene clarity about her parents and the terrific gift they had offered by allowing her to disappear, essentially, into a broad and rugged landscape and step away into another world where her basic functions consisted of riding a horse in the mountain woods of Colorado, helping hunters set up camp after riding a horse in the woods of Colorado and helping hunters pack out their kills by riding a horse in the mountain woods of Colorado.
Except, of course, no horse.
Not this time.
She thought about the half-corpse, went over every detail in her mind, replayed arriving at Lumberjack Camp. She pictured the teenagers. She thought about the half-corpse and the sticks and the houndsman and the trail and then the trail vanishing. She wondered if the Lamott shooting investigation might be closer to done and would that mean they might shift their attention to the half-corpse? She wondered if they gave a shit about the half-corpse, a sad body from the woods with no name and no witnesses and no dramatic cell phone video. The half-corpse had no constituency, no advocates. She wondered if it was fair that certain celebrity shootings and celebrity attempted murders and celebrity murders drew more cop resources than others. If you are going to get murdered and you want your killer caught, she thought, make sure you’ve got some good public relations buzz before you get whacked.
The trance eased. The rain, too. Sun chewed its way through the raindrops and lit up a high ridge. The footing turned less sponge-like. Her body caved to the steady pace of work. She was so tired she might turn Colin down if he asked. But a meal by Trudy and drinks by Mr. Hornitos might put her back in the mood, as long as she wasn’t required to perform any Twister-style positions. Why shouldn’t every body part end up the day as sore and ready for rehab as all the others? As Colin liked to say, it doesn’t count unless it hurts.
Allison moved to the open valley. She had seen nobody all afternoon. It was time to declare herself, at least for the moment, un-pursued.
She allowed a ten-minute break on a high spot. She scanned the view behind the binoculars, the only useful manmade object in her possession. No elk, no deer, no mountain lions. If all went well, she figured to reach Trudy’s front door by 10 p.m., time for a fashionably late dinner in Paris or Athens, if not in the U.S.A.
She scanned ahead too—and quickly found a lone rider on horseback.
Apparition.
Mind playing tricks.
She was in the Sahara and this was a Bedouin in search of his next oasis.
Just because she had thought of Colin in the past ten minutes didn’t mean she could conjure him up. The figure was a bouncing dot on the trail, but his riding style was unmistakable, as tall as he could sit and as natural, as one-with-horse as a man could get. The combination of living things was a magical meld. He was coming down a long, straight draw. He was moving in earnest.
The horse had the muddled colors of a dirty roan, like Merlin. Horse and rider disappeared from view as the trail pulled them down out of sight through a thick stand of aspen, shimmering and drenched in the spackled bits of sunlight.
Suddenly, they were right there, the pungent sweat of a horse happy in her nose.
“What the hell—”
With the apparition taking on three-dimensional form and sounding like Colin McKee, every repressed ache came roaring to life.
“You came,” said Allison.
“Of course,” said Colin.
“How did you know?”
“How did I know what?” Colin’s embrace was the hug of the century. “Are you okay?”
“But how did you know?”
“Sunny Boy,” said Colin. “He showed up a couple hours ago, winded and worn out. Lead rope had been sliced clean. There was a group out hiking, came across him walking down the trail. Like he was out for a Sunday stroll. They couldn’t tie him up or leave him so they turned around and started heading back and when I came across them—”
Colin stopped.
“You were out,” said Allison. “Looking.”
“I’ve got some sandwiches,” he said. “And water. Plenty. The hikers took Sunny Boy back.”
These words were being said over her shoulder. She had his neck in an elbow-powered vice grip.
“Come on,” said Colin. “We can ride double.”
Inside, her body was singing or dancing. Or smiling. If non-verbal expression was possible, say, by bones.
thirty-three:
wednesday evening
Alfredo slurped tomato-basil soup with the slow appreciation of a patient monk. He let each swallow settle before taking the next. Three basil leaves floated on top of the hot, creamy slurry. A homemade cheddar scone was ready about the time he had finished half the soup. The next course was a large bowl of gluten-free rigatoni and a simple garlic sauce with chopped zucchini, eggplant, roasted red pepper, and oregano. He would apparently keep eating and drinking as long as she produced food and kept his glass full. His devotion to the task—eating every scone crumb on the plate, leaving the pasta bowl empty except for a glistening sheen of sauce—made her smile inside.
“Full?” Trudy patted her stomach. “¿Más?”
“No más,” he said with a shake of his head. “Gracias.”
“¿Café?” she said. She remembered somewhere the Mexican word sounded like the French.
“No, gracias,” he said.
She showed him the front bedroom where he would stay, handed him a fresh set of towels and clothes, selected from the small stash of Jerry’s stuff that had accumulated over time. The fit was reasonabl
e.
Alfredo nodded. Sí. Gracias. Comprendo. His nerves were obvious. He was still unsure. When he walked, he favored his tender ankle, still swollen. The weak foot’s sneaker, a brown running shoe, was loosely tied.
Trudy washed his clothes while he showered and by the time she had cleaned the kitchen, Alfredo was lying down on the couch. She poured a shot of tequila from Allison’s stash and he smiled at the smell, offered her a toast. He took a polite sip of the India Pale Ale in the brown bottle but it was not to his liking. Five minutes later, his eyes were closed and he fell asleep on the couch.
Trudy steeped a cup of chamomile spearmint tea and took it to the front porch. A late-August shower had stopped, though another might be gathering over the ridge to the west. For now, the air was refreshing. She felt as if she had snatched someone back from the brink of a black hole. She didn’t know precisely what the black hole was but it wasn’t good. Let them try to come and get him now, she thought. Let them come and explain who they were, what government organization they belonged to, or claimed to be with, and then they could have a detailed conversation about their legal basis for pulling Alfredo Loya away from his work, family, and home.
The telephone rang and she tip-toed back inside through the living room, as if footsteps would have been louder than the shrill old-school ring.
It was Jerry.
“Checking on you—and Alfredo.”
“Everything’s fine,” said Trudy. Alfredo, in fact, hadn’t moved an eyelash since he had stretched out on the couch. “All that stress. He’s sleeping it off.”
“And his first decent meal in a long time,” said Jerry. “If I know you.”
“He’s had some food,” said Trudy. “Are you coming up tonight?”
“Not at the rate I’m going,” said Jerry. “As long as you’re okay and as long as you don’t think you need me.”
There was a chipper attitude to his voice that didn’t seem right.
“You’re the one who said they might track Alfredo up here.”
“Is Allison around?” he asked. “Or any of her crew?”