by Robert Greer
Mavis eased back in her chair and eyed the love of her life thoughtfully. “CJ, are you happy?”
CJ looked puzzled.
“Are you happy being an antiques dealer, I mean?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t think that I pushed you somewhere you didn’t want to go, do you?”
“Mavis, come on.”
Mavis took a deep breath, hesitant to ask the next question. “What triggered the money problems, CJ?”
Surprised by the question, CJ shrugged, trying his best to look and sound calm. “My eyes were just too big for my stomach, I guess. I overdid the tenant finish, and I haven’t had the sales to keep up.”
“What can I do to help?”
“You’re doing it. Hanging in there with me.”
“And you’re only going to Wyoming to gather information?” she asked, her tone almost pleading.
“And to do a little fishing.”
“Please let it stop there, CJ.”
“I will.”
“How do you plan to get out of your money jam without taking on more jobs for Flora Jean?”
“Simple. Sell more merchandise. Lenny says that once the weather breaks, things’ll pick up.”
“I hope he’s right.”
“He should be. He’s been hawking antiques and just about anything that’s collectible for years.”
Mavis nodded, unconvinced. “When do you plan to leave to meet Billy?”
“In about an hour.”
“Can I have a bit of that time?”
“All of it,” said CJ, leaning over and kissing Mavis softly on the lips.
“Tell Billy hi for me,” she said, returning the kiss and letting it linger before scooting her chair next to CJ’s and snuggling into the crook of his arm.
“I will. If I don’t start something here that keeps me stuck in Denver.”
“I’ll work on that.” Mavis eased her way over onto CJ’s lap. Wriggling herself against his incipient erection, she relaxed comfortably into his grasp.
“Mavis Sundee!” CJ feigned shock.
Mavis smiled. “You started it when you walked in the door, and it’s your job to finish it,” she said, feeling CJ harden beneath her as he gently cupped her breasts and his mouth met hers.
Billy DeLong, a five-foot-nine-inch, 150-pound coiled spring of a man, sat hunched over a frosted mug of apple juice at one end of the stale-smelling bar in the Holiday Inn at the Cheyenne I-80 exit just southwest of the city center. He was nursing the juice as if it were his last and reminiscing with the bartender, who’d been serving Billy and CJ for the past half hour.
The bartender, a onetime wrangler boss of a twenty-five-thousand-acre ranch outside Saratoga, Wyoming—a ranch whose northern border kissed the southern edge of an adjacent fifty-thousand-acre ranch Billy had been foreman of at the time—mopped up a bar spill and nodded. The now robotic nod had started in response to something Billy had said, but the bartender’s eyes were locked on CJ, whose handwoven turquoise-and-gold Chimayo vest seemed to have the man hypnotized. “Hell, Billy, I ain’t thought about that in years,” the bartender said finally. “The way them two megamillionaires was going at it over who had the responsibility for maintaining some piss-assed quarter of a mile of fence when we had seventy-five thousand goddamned acres to worry about was flat-out stupid. When you told Old Man Holcomb that you’d stick a fence post up his ass the next time you had to send your people out after two hundred head of strays ’cause of some fence break he refused to fix, that damn sure closed the door on the issue.”
“Holcomb was a toad. Had his brains up his ass.” Billy took a slow sip of apple juice. “Never treated his people right neither, and that always rubbed me.”
Nodding in agreement, the bartender said to CJ, “Billy’s always been one for straight talk.”
“I know.”
Responding to his two friends’ assessment, Billy said, “Well, then, here’s a little inside dope for you, CJ. Go light with the pressure on the Hunter woman tomorrow mornin’. We ain’t gonna be dealin’ with one of your bond skippers. Play it loose and we’ll learn a lot more.”
“I know the lay of the land, Billy.”
“I know you do. Just makin’ certain.” Billy slipped a stick of Doublemint gum out of his pocket and popped it into his mouth to freshen his ever-present wad. “Here’s one final scoop,” he said. “It’s got nothin’ to do with the Hunter woman and a lot to do with you. Know what you said to me when you first got here about someone nosin’ around in the alley behind Ike’s Spot?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you best look into why somebody’s so interested in your rear entry. Ain’t nobody with good intentions ever lookin’ for the back entrance to nothin’.” Billy finished the last of his apple juice and nudged the empty mug across the bar to the bartender. “Done for the evenin’.”
“Same,” said CJ. The bartender hooked the handles of the two empty mugs with a pinkie and headed for the sink.
“Wonder who’s casing my place?” asked CJ, knowing that Billy, who’d obviously been considering the issue for over an hour, would methodically zero in on one answer.
“Could be the same person who took out Luis Del Mora,” Billy said, stroking his chin.
CJ shook his head. “Don’t think so. I don’t even have the books Del Mora stole anymore.”
“A burglar, then,” said Billy, working his way down a well-thought-out list.
“Could be. But why try and finesse your way past built-in security like Morgan and Dittier when there are easier pickings to be had?”
“Enemies from your bail-bonding days, then?” asked Billy, headed for closure.
“Possibly. But why?”
Billy wanted to say, You know why. Instead he said, “To even things up, maybe settle a score.”
CJ shook his head. “Most of my enemies have turned halfway straight, or they’re over the hill or in jail.”
“Don’t con yourself, CJ. It’s bad for your health. You know what I’m drivin’ at.”
CJ looked Billy straight in the eye. “There’s no way, Billy. She disappeared nine months ago down the mouth of a dried-up creek bed in the Taos Mountains.”
“Yeah, man, I know. I was there.” Billy sat up straight, grinned at CJ, and said, “Let me tell you a story. When I was in the service, I had an old sergeant who’d served in the Korean War. He had a name for people like Celeste Deepstream. Called ’em walkin’ ghosts. Said that sometimes after he thought he’d killed a man, the man would come back at him, risin’ straight up from death, aimin’ to even the score right on the spot.” Billy nodded and smacked his gum wad. “A walkin’ ghost, yeah, that’s pretty much what I’d call her.”
CJ eyed his old friend pensively, thinking, No way. Celeste Deepstream wouldn’t come after him again. She’d failed too many times, and if she wasn’t crippled or paralyzed from the blast from his 30.06 that had sent her scurrying into the Taos Mountains, she was still a fugitive on the run. He’d checked. She was most-wanted material in at least three Western states, a dangerous felon in violation of her patrol. It couldn’t be Celeste, he told himself. There is no way she’d come back after me again. CJ patted his vest pocket for his cheroots. The carton he pulled out was empty. He eyed the box, shook his head, and tossed the box onto the bar. “Let’s go,” he said to Billy as he turned to head for the door. “A walkin’ ghost,” CJ said, moving toward the exit. “Must be a hell of an image to try and get a fix on.”
“Sure is,” said Billy. “And if I was you, I’d start my triangulatin’ right now.”
CHAPTER 11
The terrorist bombs that killed 191 people on four commuter trains in Madrid in the spring of 2004 consisted of 220 pounds of explosives in ten backpacks. Timothy McVeigh packed a rental truck with 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, oil, and commercial explosives in his quest to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in the spring of 1995, killing 168 people. The multiple terrorist
s’ bombs that destroyed three London Underground train cars and a double-decker bus during the summer of 2005, killing more than fifty, weighed less than ten pounds each.
Nasar Moradi-Nik, his project much less ambitious, used just under twenty pounds of black-market plastic explosives from the Czech Republic to construct the unsophisticated bomb he planned to use to blow up Ike’s Spot. The device, set to go off with a command from a doctored TV channel changer, was one of the smallest he had ever cobbled together and far more bang for the buck than he thought necessary to take out a simple two-by-four-framed duplex. But Alexie Borg, who was footing the bill for his services, had insisted on a device that would be certain to level the building, including the store next door, and kill any unlucky occupants. “I don’t want any comebacks,” Alexie had insisted when he’d dropped by Moradi-Nik’s garage and bomb-making shop just before midnight to inspect his accomplice’s handiwork. “Send the bail bondsman’s worthless trinkets flying to the sky,” he’d told his bomber encouragingly, handing a perspiring and twitching Moradi-Nik an envelope that contained half of the $5,000 he’d demanded for the job.
Now, as Moradi-Nik lay prone in the alley just south of the garage behind Ike’s Spot, sweating profusely in the three a.m. chill, he began to shake. He’d watched the building for an hour, looking for activity on the back porch. After concluding that no one was inside the building, he’d decided to place the bomb behind the failing latticework that covered the crawl space beneath the duplex’s back porch. He’d detonate the bomb from a spot fifty yards down the alley.
As a rule he didn’t take jobs where he received only half of his money up front, but he had known Alexie since their youthful days as Olympians, and he’d done jobs for the big Russian’s handlers and had always been paid, so he’d made an exception. Besides, he preferred assignments where the risk of blowing yourself up or being caught were minimal. Twitching and sweating like an overworked beast of burden, he crawled through an opening in the picket fence that rimmed the backyard with his bomb in his backpack and his TV remote tucked safely in his shirt pocket. Moradi-Nik was ready to begin the final leg of his assignment.
Since midnight Morgan and Dittier had been out scavenging, rummaging through the Dumpsters and trash cans in search of aluminum cans. As they pushed their shopping carts down the alley that led back home, both men were all smiles. In three hours they had loaded their carts six times, pushed each load to a convenient self-serve twenty-four-hour can crusher less than a mile from home, and garnered $18 each, enough for Morgan to get the expensive run-over Luchesse boots he’d once rodeoed in a new set of heels and to afford Dittier a new chambray shirt.
Lagging behind Dittier, Morgan stopped to glance up toward a white-hot-looking full moon. “Damn near as bright as day out here,” he muttered, surprised that with all the moonlight they hadn’t once been spotted or run off by some overeager security guard or paranoid homeowner. Thirty yards from Ike’s Spot, Morgan stopped to check his watch. The glow-in-the-dark dial of the sixty-year-old Bulova he’d found five years earlier at the bottom of a trash bag read 3:20. As he moved to catch up with Dittier, Dittier stopped and abruptly spun his shopping cart on one of its rear wheels to face him. It was a sign the streetwise former rodeo clown and Morgan used to signal to one another that there might be trouble ahead.
Morgan tiptoed his way up to Dittier. “Whattaya see?” he said slowly, watching Dittier read his lips.
“Somebody’s outside the back of the store,” Dittier signed, taking a knee. “I can feel the movement.”
Morgan brought an index finger to his lips and said, “Quiet,” as he slipped the lariat he’d used during his rodeo days from the strip of rawhide securing it to the handle of his shopping cart. He tapped the cart’s handle, a signal for Dittier to stay put. Leaning against the cart for support, he removed his boots and moved cautiously up the alley.
A streetlight on the opposite side of the alley flickered on and off as Morgan closed in on the duplex. He spotted the outline of a lone figure near a hole in the backyard fence that he and Dittier used to roll their shopping carts through. In the same instant a quivering, perspiring Moradi-Nik spotted him.
“Hey, what the hell are you doin’?” Morgan shouted as Moradi-Nik bolted, racing for the narrow strip of space that separated the duplex from the neighboring building to the south and exiting onto Broadway as he headed for the safety of his pickup.
Morgan, who’d begun his rodeo career as a steer roper, had no trouble looping the business end of his lariat around Moradi-Nik’s left foot. He gave the lariat a yank, and as Moradi-Nik, sweating, twitching, and screaming profanities, reached out to break his fall, his TV remote slipped out of his shirt pocket. The remote took a single skip along the ground face up before Moradi-Nik’s elbow came crashing down on it, triggering the bomb and a freight train—like explosion that rocked the building’s foundation. The back porch of Ike’s Spot disintegrated instantly, sending roof tile, drywall, aluminum siding, wood splinters, and chunks of cinder block and mortar flying in every direction as Morgan and Dittier hit the ground spread-eagled.
Trapped between ground zero and the building next door, Moradi-Nik stood no chance. The rocket-propelled scythe of galvanized downspout metal that slammed into his neck severed his carotid artery and stopped his twitching for good.
CJ and Billy DeLong reached Wheatland, a small Wyoming prairie town seventy-five miles north of Cheyenne, at sunrise. They’d left Cheyenne in darkness, their fishing gear snuggled tightly against the back door of the Jeep, grabbed coffee and what turned out to be four stale donuts at a 7-11, and headed north for the Laramie Mountains and the Triangle Bar Ranch.
“This exit’s a bugger,” Billy said, smacking on a fresh four-stick wad of Doublemint as CJ slowed the Jeep to take the second Wheatland exit. “Gets one or two real bad semi rollovers every few months.”
The Jeep fishtailed momentarily the instant CJ tapped his brakes.
“Told you.”
CJ nodded, his eyes locked on the mountains to the west. The narrow rising sweep of the chip-sealed secondary road he’d turned onto now afforded him an unobstructed view of the snow-capped 10,272-foot Laramie Peak to the northwest. As the entire panorama of the Laramie Mountains unfolded before them, Billy said, “Prettier than a picture.”
“And then some. How much farther do you figure, Billy?”
“Ten, twelve miles at the most.”
CJ checked his watch. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a little time to spare.” He slowed the Jeep to take in the view.
“High, wide, and handsome,” said Billy as the two men drank in the landscape where the myth of the American cowboy was born.
The Denver bomb-squad lieutenant had been floating on a cushion of beer-induced sleep when he’d gotten word that there had been an apparent bombing on South Broadway. He’d climbed out of bed, rinsed the stale taste of weak poker-party beer and Tostitos out of his mouth, and called his onetime police academy classmate, Fritz Commons, who several hours earlier had scored the smallest pot of the night, to tell him well in advance of foot-dragging police procedural protocol that he had a homicide on his plate.
As the sun tightened its grip on the day, Commons sat on a trash can taking Morgan and Dittier’s statement in the alley behind what was left of Ike’s Spot as Rosie Weeks looked on. Morgan had considered calling Mavis with the news that Ike’s Spot had been bombed, but he’d called Rosie instead. Neither of them could understand why Rosie’s half-dozen frantic calls to CJ’s cell phone had gone unanswered.
The rear third of the duplex that CJ and Lenny McCabe shared was scattered up and down the alley. Two cinder blocks from the foundation still mortared together and the twisted metal framework of Morgan’s army cot rested inches from Dittier and Morgan’s feet. A gaggle of neighbors stood in a yard across the alley, some still dressed in pajamas and bathrobes, drinking in the carnage.
Missing, however, from the cordoned-off war zone–like area was much of the
infrastructure of Ike’s Spot itself. Lenny McCabe’s half of the duplex had suffered all the serious damage, probably largely because, according to what the bomb-squad lieutenant had told Commons, Ike’s Spot’s back porch had been filled with Morgan and Dittier’s stash of salvaged wicker furniture and bedding, bedrolls, cots, mattresses, and a storehouse of clothing. The porch had served as a buffer zone with sheets and blankets draping the windows along with two blast-stopping refrigerators that Morgan and Dittier used to store their beer, bologna, fresh fruit, and bread. Both appliances now sat in the middle of the backyard, their doors blown off, kissing one another, head to toe. CJ’s office had suffered minor damage, his partner’s desk being the biggest loss, but his safe and the rest of the store’s contents remained pretty much intact.
Lenny McCabe’s back porch, with no more than a lounge chair and a wrought-iron table to absorb the blast, had served as a conduit to his store, leaving most of it a shambles and turning his nineteenth-century glassware collection and his storehouse of Rocky Mountain National Park ephemera into a crazy quilt of glass and pulp.
McCabe sat across the yard talking to the bomb-squad lieutenant. Dressed in shorts and sandals, his ponytail drooping, McCabe looked utterly exhausted. When a rangy, beak-nosed bomb-squad technician jogged up and interrupted the conversation, McCabe looked relieved. “Macy found a fragment of plastic he thinks you should have a look at, Lieutenant,” the technician said excitedly.
The veteran bomb-squad officer, suspicious of building owners who had just seen their building snuffed out by an explosion or fire, said, “Okay,” to the technician and turned back to McCabe. “Gonna pass you off to the homicide officer in charge, Sergeant Commons. He tells me he’s visited your little establishment before. Should be a great homecoming.” The lieutenant glanced down at the field tarp that covered the remains of Moradi-Nik and shook his head. As he walked away, eyes bloodshot, his breath stale with beer and with the eager-beaver technician trailing him, he smiled at an approaching Fritz Commons. “Hell of a way to start the morning, Fritzie.”