The Fourth Perspective

by Robert Greer

  Vannick’s eyes widened, his upper lip curled, and his face flushed just as a Denver Parks and Recreation truck lumbered by. As the truck’s back bumper moved past, Vannick lunged at CJ, shoving him into a fifty-gallon water container that was precariously attached to the truck’s bumper. The container toppled, sending a waterfall careening down onto CJ before it bounced into the middle of the street. “Next time I’ll shove you in front of the damn truck.” Vannick swung his car door open and slipped inside.

  Standing in the middle of the street, drenched, CJ watched the Parks and Recreation truck ease back toward him. He picked up the empty container, and called out toward the truck, “Got your container,” before slamming it into the Porsche’s door, producing a dent the diameter of a basketball. Astonished, Vannick leaned across the front seat and popped open the glove compartment, but before he could grasp the Beretta 9-millimeter inside, CJ yanked the door open, clotheslined Vannick around the neck with his right arm, and snatched him in a near clean-and-jerk through the open door and onto the street.

  He eyed the gun clearly visible in the open glove compartment, released his choke hold on Vannick, and shouted, “You better get some sense, man!”

  Vannick twisted out of CJ’s grasp, rose out of a half crouch, and let loose with a roundhouse left that caught CJ above the right eye.

  Dazed, CJ blocked Vannick’s right-hand counter with a forearm, quickly spliced both arms together with knotted fists, and took a home-run cut that connected with Vannick’s left temple and dropped him like the weight at the end of a plumb line.

  “Hot damn!” screamed a recreation worker who now stood in the middle of the street. Two other cars had stopped and the curious drivers had come out of their vehicles. The parks worker, a twenty-something black man with a head full of cornrows, sported a toothpick in one corner of his mouth. “I saw everything, brother. Dropped him like a sack of shit.” He eyed Vannick, who was sprawled unconscious in the street.

  CJ shook his head. “Don’t think you did.” Reaching back inside the Porsche, he grabbed Vannick’s 9-millimeter.

  “Shit,” said the startled city worker. “The son of a bitch could’ve shot you.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “You wanta call the cops? I’ll back you up.”

  Smiling at the man, CJ said, “You tell me, brother. Here I am with a rich white boy sprawled out in the street at my feet, his eighty-thousand-dollar car with my dent in it sitting next to me, and a gun in my hand. Would you?”

  Copying CJ’s smile, the man simply nodded as the now semiconscious Vannick let out a groan and wriggled pithed-frog-style at CJ’s feet.

  “Show’s over,” the man with the cornrows said to what was now a group of six onlookers. “Move on along.”

  As the onlookers moved away, some gawking over their shoulders toward CJ and the gun, CJ said to the young parks worker, “Appreciate your help,” and slipped Vannick’s 9-millimeter into a jacket pocket.

  Eyeing CJ with admiration, the young man asked, “Where the hell’d you learn that baseball swing of yours? Sure coldcocked the shit out of Mr. Porsche.”

  CJ grinned. “From my uncle.”

  “Ever had to use it before?”

  “A couple of times.”

  “Where?”

  “In a place you never heard of.”

  “Try me.”

  “Vietnam.”

  The young man beamed. “Have too. It’s one of them Asian places that rich folks go to for vacation.”

  CJ reached into his pocket, fingered the butt of the 9-millimeter, smiled, and watched Vannick, up on his knees, head to the ground, start to puke. Looking back at the young city worker, CJ said, “It’s a vacation spot all right; can’t argue with you there,” before glancing one last time at Vannick and walking away.

  It was windy and only a few degrees above freezing when Pinkie Niedemeyer checked in by cell phone for a briefing with Mario Satoni. “Weather’s a pisser,” said Pinkie. “One minute spring’s on the rise, the next minute, fricking winter.”

  “What have you got for me, Pinkie?” asked Mario, accustomed to Niedemeyer’s penchant for complaining.

  “Got Floyd kickin’ Arthur Vannick’s ass over in the Highlands a little earlier. Took the thick-necked shit out with one blow. Then I got him stopping by his girlfriend’s restaurant for lunch, and now I’ve got him back home.”

  “Stay glued to his rear, Pinkie.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until I tell you not to.”

  “What the hell’s Floyd got on you, Mario?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why the white-glove treatment? You’d think he’d been made.”

  “You’d think,” said Mario with a smile. “Just stay on his ass, Pinkie. I’ll tell you when to let up.”

  “Okay. But I’ve got business I’ve gotta tend to, Mario, and soon. Business that’s dialed in from a couple of rungs above you. Don’t wanta get crossways with you on this.”

  “It won’t come to that. Just keep me informed.”

  “Will do,” said Pinkie. “And then maybe one day you’ll tell me the whole story on Floyd.”

  “One day,” said a stern-faced Mario, cradling the phone.

  Alexie had wanted to go with Celeste, but she’d said no. She’d had enough of delegating tasks and seeing no results. She didn’t need the Russian bear or his minions doing anything for her, she told herself as she crested I-25’s 7,300-foot-high Palmer Divide and nosed Alexie’s Range Rover toward the expanse of a broad plateau that would take her to Denver.

  What she needed now was the same thing anyone needed who was engaged in a serious competition: courage, stamina, iron will, and a little luck. In life, as in sport, the end result that really mattered was winning.

  She’d kill Floyd, whether today, tomorrow, or the day after that. She only had to wait for him to poke his nose out of his house, go for groceries, mail a letter, or perhaps even vacuum out his precious car. She’d stalked Floyd for months before buying into Alexie’s hare-brained Moradi-Nik bombing scheme. She knew his daily regimen like she knew her own. He’d be there when she needed him to be. She just had to be a little patient. She glanced over the seat back, eyed the carrying case behind her, and smiled. She had everything she needed to deal with Floyd right there in the vehicle. The kill would be swift and, as Alexie was so fond of saying, professional.

  She accelerated, nosing into a stiff twenty-mile-per-hour headwind, and briefly her thoughts turned to Bobby as she tried to imagine what their lives would have been like if he were still alive. Suddenly she was hoping and dreaming like a child, then, as quickly as the thoughts had appeared, they were gone.

  Gritting her teeth, she glanced at the speedometer and realized that she was cruising at 105. She eased off the accelerator, loosened her hand-numbing grip on the steering wheel, and again glanced toward the case. “There’s a time for us, a time and a place for us,” she mouthed before turning her attention back to the road and the task ahead.

  CHAPTER 25

  CJ walked into Flora Jean’s office carrying a shopping bag in his right arm. It was ten past six, and the city was busy spilling its workers back into the Denver neighborhoods and suburbs they had come from. The swelling over CJ’s right eye had become a plum-sized knot. Flora Jean was about to light into him for not checking in with her all day when she noticed the lump. “Looks like you’ve got yourself a reason for rollin’ in here late,” she said, eyeing CJ sympathetically from behind her desk. “What the hell happened?”

  “Had a minor disagreement with Arthur Vannick.”

  “Hope he’s got a knot or two somewhere that matches yours.”

  “Didn’t stick around to check. When I left him he was barely conscious. But I’m guessing he’s sporting a much bigger knot than me.” CJ placed the shopping bag next to him on a table and took a seat in a chair across from his old desk. Eyeing the desk with a sense of nostalgia, he slipped Vannick’s 9-millimeter out of his jacket
pocket and slid it across the desktop to Flora Jean. “Took this from Vannick. Any word yet on how Oliver Lyman bought it? I’m wondering if maybe I stumbled onto the gun that killed him.”

  Flora Jean picked up the 9-millimeter and moved it from hand to hand. “Afraid not. Vernon Lowe called from the morgue a couple of hours ago with the scoop on Lyman. Said the hole in his chest was probably from a .22 Mag. Looks like Lyman caught the same disease as Luis Del Mora.”

  “Still doesn’t eliminate Vannick,” said CJ. “It’s not against the law to own more than one gun.”

  “Or four, or five,” Flora Jean countered sarcastically. “At least we’ve got one of Vannick’s little toys, and for now we keep him on our suspects list.”

  “We sure do. Along with that museum curator Sheets, Counts, and Stafford. And, although Billy wouldn’t approve, Amanda Hunter.”

  “He sure wouldn’t. I think Billy’s found his Annie Oakley. Where is he, anyway?”

  CJ checked his watch. “He should be back in Cheyenne by now, sticking like glue to Loretta Sheets. He drove down from Amanda Hunter’s ranch first thing this morning, brought me a bag full of things he thought might be important from the scene of that break-in I told you about, and, believe it or not, handed me half-a-dozen real daguerreotypes.”

  “You mean I finally get to see one of those pictures that all the fuss is about?”

  “Sure do,” said CJ, reaching into the shopping bag and taking out several six-and-a-half-by-eight-and-three-quarter-inch daguerreotype whole-plate photographs. He smiled and handed them to Flora Jean.

  “They okay to touch?” asked Flora Jean, picking up one by the edges.

  “Sure are. They came out of a safe in Amanda’s basement.”

  “They look awfully delicate,” said Flora Jean, scrutinizing a photograph of the Laramie Mountains. She slid that photo aside and picked up one of a bearded man in a top hat standing beside a river. “What’s the river in these two?”

  “The Laramie. It runs right through Hunter’s ranch. And believe it or not, it doesn’t look much different today than it did a hundred and twenty-five years ago when Jacob Covington took those photos.”

  “They’re a little dark for my taste, but pretty enough.”

  “Guess that’s the best you can do when you try to expose an image directly onto silver. One thing for sure, there’s a puppy just like these out there somewhere that’s worth over a million.”

  Flora Jean shook her head. “And worth killin’ for. Anything else in with the goodies that Billy brought you?”

  “Only this,” said CJ, reaching into the bottom of the bag and taking out a small piece of tissue paper that had been folded. He laid the tissue paper on the desktop, dipped into the bag once again, and took out several 1920s-vintage Cheyenne Frontier Days postcards. He handed the postcards to Flora Jean. “Handle them gently.”

  “Will do,” said Flora Jean, flipping through postcards that showed various rodeo events. Each card had been postmarked Frontier Days, Cheyenne, Wyoming, 1923. Beneath the postmark was a half-inch-by-half-inch imprint of the Triangle Bar cattle brand.

  “Billy says Amanda’s grandfather had the postcards made up to hand out as favors.”

  “They’re mighty pristine-lookin’,” said Flora Jean, setting the cards aside. “Looks like they never got distributed.”

  “Billy and Amanda found them scattered on the floor of the shed that was broken into. And they found this,” said CJ, pulling back the corners of the tissue paper. “Don’t touch,” he admonished. “What does it look like to you?”

  Flora Jean eyed the fragment of tortoiseshell plastic and said, “Looks like something that broke off a comb or maybe a piece of plastic off somebody’s glasses frames to me.”

  “Two for two,” said CJ. “Those are the same things Billy and Amanda and I came up with.”

  As if to upset the apple cart, Flora Jean said, “Or maybe a piece of plastic off a compact case.”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  Smiling, Flora Jean said, “Maybe you need to spend more time tendin’ to your woman. Anyway, now that we got all these odds and ends, where do they take us?”

  “I’m hoping the cards lead us to a set of fingerprints. Maybe Amanda’s burglar got careless. I was hoping you’d give the cards to Alden and he’d have one of his intelligence contacts check them for fingerprints.”

  “It’ll take some time.”

  “Everything does,” said CJ, rewrapping the piece of plastic in tissue paper and placing the postcards back in a pile. “Now that you’ve seen my show-and-tell, what did you dig up at Oliver Lyman’s?”

  “Strange, but would you believe more collectibles? Lots of Indian pawn, you know the stuff—bolo ties, rings, squash-blossom necklaces, some old picture frames, a couple of old road maps, and a few pieces of pottery. And, now get this, a bunch of old pawn tickets with Loretta Sheets’s name on a couple of ’em. What do you make of the connection?”

  CJ stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Well, well, well. Collectors, collectors. Lyman, Stafford, Sheets, maybe even Hunter.”

  “And Vannick and Counts in their own de facto way,” said Flora Jean. “Wonder what Alden’ll come up with when he has those postcards dusted for prints. Wanta go through the stuff I found at Lyman’s?”

  “Absolutely. Who knows, we might turn up something else,” CJ said, looking mildly puzzled.

  “The stuff’s out back on the porch. I’ll go get it. What’s got you lookin’ baffled?”

  “Just wondering, since I’m a collector myself, if we aren’t missing something.”

  “Don’t think too long, sugar, ’cause you might come up with somethin’ that’ll confuse the shit outta you.”

  CJ sifted through the things Flora Jean had brought from Lyman’s without discovering anything else of interest, and Flora Jean had been gone for twenty minutes when, from his apartment, CJ called Morgan Williams to find out that Morgan and Dittier’s stakeout of Alexie Borg’s place in LoDo had so far produced nothing.

  CJ now found himself holding on the “insurance problem hotline” of his insurance company, hoping to get a progress report on his claim. He glanced at his kitchen clock and, realizing he’d been on hold for almost fifteen minutes, slammed his open palm down on the kitchen table in frustration.

  Caught between a disingenuous insurance company and Lenny McCabe’s need to extract the monetary equivalent of a pound of flesh from their misfortune, CJ had the sense that things were only going to get bleaker.

  He hung up the phone, pushed aside the beer he’d been nursing, muttered, “To hell with it,” grabbed his jacket from a hook next to the kitchen door, and stepped outside onto the fire-escape balcony. Still calming down, he glanced past the wrought-iron stairway that spiraled up from the driveway to his apartment and toward the Bel Air parked in the driveway. Caught in the glow of a corner streetlight, the vintage machine seemed to shimmer.

  A brief wind gust reminded him that it was thirty-five degrees and still very much springtime in Denver. He zipped his jacket, realized Arthur Vannick’s gun was still in the left pocket, and started down the stairs, knowing that in a few minutes he’d be enjoying a meal of fried chicken, coleslaw, butter beans, and biscuits at Mavis’s.

  He was halfway down the steps when he remembered the swelling over his right eye. Mavis was certain to ask about the knot, and he needed an answer. A small, well-intentioned fabrication that would serve as a salve to her worries. He’d think of something, he told himself, pausing momentarily on the steps. After all, he had a full ten minutes to dredge up an explanation.

  Outfitted in black and lying flat on her belly on the catwalk of an unlit billboard thirty yards from where CJ stood, Celeste Deepstream had been waiting patiently. A mechanically assisted fifty-pound compound bow and the arrow she planned to slam into the chest of the man who had killed her twin brother rested at her side. Cupping her hands to her mouth and warming them with two puffs of breath, she cocked her best winners’-
podium smile.

  Bobby had been the one who’d taught her to use a crossbow, how to shoot with precision and to be consistent. How to forge a stream in the heat of the hunt and not be swept away, how to use a spotting scope, even what kind of clothes to wear in order to compromise an animal’s ability to catch her scent.

  It had been Bobby who had taught her about quad limbs and riser locks and arm butts until she knew the mechanics of archery like the back of her hand. Most importantly for the killing business at hand, he’d taught her how to operate and shoot for accuracy when there was only the barest hint of light.

  A Super Carbon Magnum arrow, machined for straightness and a smooth, quiet launch, rested just inches away.

  While serving her sentence for manslaughter and looking for ways to fill the idle hours, she’d learned all she could about compound bows and arrowheads. That knowledge would now serve her well. The broad head beside her, capable of downing a 250-pound animal in the wild, could easily fell a 235-pound man. The mechanical blades were designed to lock in for flight until the instant the tip touched animal hide or human skin, producing an on-contact spiral wound that wouldn’t clot. She smiled at the image, knowing that in the end Floyd’s very essence would ooze from him like that of a trophy elk.

  Her plan called for two shooting opportunities, an early one at twilight and a second one just before midnight. She preferred the hour at hand because the light was better, but she would take what came.

  Most of what she carried with her, including her crossbow case, the compound bow, and her triple-red-dot scope, was black. Only the silver broad heads themselves, and the vanes on her arrows, had any hint of color. She’d spent two hour-long dress-rehearsal sessions on the catwalk, and she was certain she hadn’t been seen either time. The toughest parts of any hunt, the stalking and the sighting, were behind her now.

  She wouldn’t have the luxury of checking on her kill, which meant that her first shot had to be perfect—a vital-organ shot that would silence Floyd and afford her time to escape. She had clocked how long it would take after the kill shot to vanish into the darkness and had calculated the time at just under two minutes. One minute would be spent assessing Floyd through binoculars to make certain he was dead. She’d need another half minute to pack up her things, safely clear the catwalk, and descend the billboard’s ladder to the parking lot. Finally, it would take another twenty to thirty seconds to stow her gear in the Range Rover and vanish.