Dead Horses

by David Knop

  He shot a glance at the bedside monitors, noticed I was dressed. “You blew every alarm in the building and you’re not going to get far in your condition.”

  “I got to get out.”

  “Trouble is what you got. More than you know.”

  I offered my palms. I couldn’t imagine more trouble than I was in. “Gotta hear it.”

  Oso shook his head. “Tribal Rangers of the Wildlife Advisory Board is out for yer ass.”

  “They can stand in line. What’re Wildlife Tribal Rangers, some kinda conservationist cowboys?”

  Oso’s eye widened, then narrowed. “I need to repeat myself?” He rubbed his chin, fueled a bonfire behind his eyes. “Listen, Romero. The wolves. These guys say you fucked up the prime federal grant program on the rez.”

  “Jesus, man. They attacked me.” I upped the volume.

  “Wildlife is a big deal here, Romero. Hard for me to keep you under wraps with this going on.”

  I stood tall as I could. “Under wraps? What’re you talkin” about, Oso?”

  Oso peered down, matched me mean for mean. “You got certain, let’s call them, public relations issues down in Durango. Now you’ve got the fish and game people jumping up and down.”

  The man gave off a wet animal smell. I retreated to the other side of the room and turned back to him. “What?”

  “Ya killed two of their wolves.”

  “You didn’t mention the lab work?”

  The big man said, “They didn’t give a shit. They’re going to the FWCO.” Oso had dark sweat rings under his arms. His odor saturated the room. “Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office. The feds.”

  I paced back and forth, the small room limiting my travel to a few steps. I imagined being handed over to sheriff’s men, envisioned them marching me to a hidden place and killing me. “How many times I gotta ask? Why you keepin’ me here?” My voice pitched up as my stomach tightened.

  “Grab your shit, you got an appointment.” He turned, slammed the door behind him.

  Oso’s hit-and-run tactics—run in, drop a bomb, run out—raised my blood pressure enough to pop stitches. The room grew hot and stuffy. Again, I confirmed the space had no vents big enough to crawl through and no windows to jump out of.

  The door burst open. Oso and another man a big as him barged in, grabbed my arms, and pulled me down a hallway.

  “Jesus man, what the fuck?” I said, running to stay on my feet. My strength had not returned, and my wounds stabbed like switchblades. “Slow down. I got stitches, man.”

  “Pussy,” was the reply as we pushed through a door.

  Outside, a few stars asserted themselves in the sun’s final glow. I must’ve been out of it all day. They dragged me to a Chevy pickup that hadn’t seen paint in years, then shouldered me on to a bench seat smelling of dog urine. The big man with no name equaled Oso in size, so at five-ten, I must’ve looked like a child sitting between them. No Name’s boots, railcars more like, were too fancy, horn-back alligator tail cut with inlay top, for some gorilla off the street:.

  The tires spit gravel as I asked, “Where you takin’ me?” I reconsidered why I wanted out of the hospital room in the first place.

  “This place will be jumping with feds in no time.”

  “Last time I saw a fed, he didn’t mention my notoriety,” I said.

  Oso looked at me, then back at the road. “Romero, believe me, you’re the talk of the town. More people talking about you than Rihanna. They got Be-On-the-Lookouts to every local, state and federal agency from here to St Louis. You got more BOLOs than a Montana silversmith.” He chuckled.

  No Name chuffed. “That’s good.” The man’s laconic way and thick braid to his waist pegged him as Lakota.

  “Where we goin’ in such a hurry?”

  “Tell you when we get there.” Oso clamped his jaw and produced a can’t-stop-me look. He piloted the truck like a Dale Earnhardt wannabe attacking every pothole he could find.

  The junk heap emitted a steady rattle of loose parts, springs, and tires. I noticed Oso avoided hard-surfaced highways, and from his habit of glancing side-to-side, the cops, too.

  “Where we goin’?”

  I coughed when No Name elbowed my ribs. I rubbed my chest and kept my mouth shut.

  We arrived at a hillside and Oso parked under a tree. “Follow me,” he said.

  Like I had a choice. We were on the Southern Ute reservation, but the moon’s failure to appear hid direction. I hadn’t been cuffed but accepted I wasn’t going anywhere by myself.

  The smell of spruce and fir flooded our path. Oso took shorter steps than he should’ve, a bad back, maybe. No Name followed. I puffed but the air drew easy, so I guessed our altitude above seven thousand feet. Broken scree in a canyon with steep sides made footing shaky and each sliding step echoed back. Cliff walls narrowed the star field to a slit. The Big Dipper could’ve led me to spot the North Star, but black walls hid the view. I was sweating despite the cold mountain night and my gut quivered as the rock closed in. I questioned what waited at the end of this trail.

  At the end of the canyon, a forty-foot trailer parked between trees. I don’t know how Oso found it in the dark. They led me to a door. I pulled back.

  “Relax. You’ll want to see who’s in here,” Oso said.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  Oso shook his head. “You’ll figure it out.”

  Red lights lit the interior, slide-outs made the compartment wider, and people with FBI stenciled on their backs populated chairs in front of monitors along the length of the vehicle. At various stations, TV talking heads mouthed in silence over breaking news banners. From the far end, voices came from a room with a table. I could see backs of heads, little else.

  “Hello, Peter,” said Jean Reel from a dark corner. “What brings y’all here?” she asked in her prep school and Okie mix.

  My stomach fluttered.

  FBI Special Agent Jean Reel wore cammies and had gathered her raven hair in a bun. Camouflage utilities were designed to disguise the human form, but in Reel’s case the task failed. Her high cheek bones highlighted a Cherokee heritage, her black eyes held me prisoner. Her lips…well.

  Yeah, I had a thing for her. We’d worked together before. We had to work close. Maybe too close. Costancia caught wind of it way back. Nothing had happened with Reel, but now, as an almost-divorced man, I wouldn’t have minded revisiting the idea.

  My disorientation gave way to awkwardness. I tried to say hello but gave up and smiled. I wanted to pull her to me, crush her in my arms, but offered a hand instead. Seeing her at work, when I really wanted to see all of her, made an already complicated situation frustrating as hell.

  She displayed an odd look, asking, Aren’t we formal? She held out her hand. Electricity shot up my arm at her touch. The spark was still there. So were the complications. She knew why I was here. I didn’t.

  Oso snickered, inspected the ceiling with hands clasped behind his back in innocence.

  “We have work to do,” she said, turned and walked off.

  To Oso, I said, “You—” I returned my eyes to Reel. She had a way of moving that a uniform couldn’t hide. The command post’s surroundings faded away. I didn’t care where we were as long as she were around.

  Oso broke the spell when he asked, “Me?”

  “You in on this?” I looked around the command center. “What’s goin’ on?” I turned to ask No Name the same question, but he’d disappeared.

  “Reel asked me to ensure your presence.” He followed me down the corridor toward the conference room. A half-dozen agents sat at folding tables along the way. The walls absorbed their voices. Tripod easels holding large paper pads leaned against walls. Some showed writing and charts, others had pictures taped to them.

  I couldn’t read the captions, partly because of the low light, mostly because a slow anger blurred my vision. I’d been set up. I’d been set up by Oso with a bullshit
story about the Ute Wildlife Tribal Rangers’ charges over the dead wolves.

  My face heated and I must’ve looked angry because agents at the conference table gathered their papers and left the room when we entered. Oso and I waited as Reel studied a stack of documents a foot high oblivious to our presence. Her dogged intensity was one of the things I admired about her.

  “How’d you find me?” I asked.

  Reel looked up. “Oh, we just followed trouble and there you were,” she said, smiling with more teeth than sincerity. “Please, sit.” She patted the adjacent chair, but I sat in the next one. No way I could maintain my self-righteous anger so close to her.

  Oso sat quietly. I could have sworn he sniffed the air.

  “I’ve got something for you.” I held my temper. Always the professional, Reel had a tough side and, if approached the wrong way, could attack. I had been bitten enough in the past few days.

  She said, “We’ve uncovered groups who have their fingers in extortion, drugs, and terrorism operating out of Durango. We’re working it, hard.”

  “That gets you a dozen monitors, satellite phones, cameras, and a bunch of flat screens?”

  She rose from her chair and walked to the far side of the room. At a tripod holding large sheets of paper, she turned over the first page, then stopped. “Peter, you need to treat everything I’m going to tell you as classified.”

  “Sure you want to give me that kind of info?”

  “Meaning?”

  “You’re using me, Jean.”

  Reel glanced at Oso who then rushed out of the room.

  “You walked right into this, Officer Romero. I didn’t know you were up here until you, uh, established an impressive notoriety, let’s call it, around Durango.” She paused. “Now, I’m recruiting your help to find suspects in the case you are about to be briefed on.”

  “What? Jean, I have my own work. I’m on a retainer to find horse killers, and I’m investigating murders of two men on my pueblo. No way—”

  “Too late, Peter. You placed yourself right in the middle of this case with the murders of Clement Pokoh and the sheep herder Rafi Maestrejuan.

  “Bullshit. I reported the murders. That’s all I did.”

  “Fine, but there’s a problem. Rumors have it someone shot Deputy Frank Jones at a Durango motel. Know anything about that?”

  My head spun like I’d fallen into a deep well and treaded water understanding no help would come. They had one witness for sure, the motel clerk. They had my registration at the motel. The locals had my wrecked truck, by now, too. My anger at being roped into this situation shifted to self-preservation. “I want a lawyer.”

  “Calm down. I’m treating those rumors as just that…for the moment.”

  My heart pulsed against my ribs. She had a slam dunk case. Nothing but net. Despite our past and the life-ring she just threw, she was a federal agent. Her eyes showed stubborn determination, but they held empathy, too. I’d known her for years, seen her work, watched her clear the toughest cases and I appreciated, needed, her willingness to cut corners for me. If she was using me, our past overruled my indignation at being setup.

  Reel raised her voice above the low hum of activity in the command center.

  “Peter, I’m not the one you have to answer to. These rumors also say law enforcement officers were involved and it’s reasonable they might want to finish the job. So, I think you’ll agree your best interests include sticking close to us.” She stared her black eyes into mine. “If you believe those rumors, that is.”

  She had a point.

  “Everything depends on the locals’ investigation and we’ll be following that closely.” Her expression left no doubt in my mind that she had the ball, bat, and glove. The whole damn diamond.

  Sucking it up, I said, “Pitch.”

  Her smile was relieved. “Here’s what we’ve uncovered so far.” She pulled up a page of the tripod’s pad and revealed a bullet list handprinted in marker. She picked up a collapsible pointer, pulled it out to three feet.

  Without looking at the board, she briefed her assignment, a RICO investigation. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was designed to go after the Mafia, but in this case the FBI used it to target a local consortium engaged in police corruption, extortion, bribery, and dealing in controlled substances in Southern Colorado.

  She explained the immediate purpose of this illegal grouping was to disrupt the groundbreaking for a new hospital. Recently, the Southern Ute’s business organization, Red Pine, had donated reservation land for a hospital near Durango. The city would break ground at a ceremony in one week.

  “That gives you a RICO investigation?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, we have a full-blown conspiracy. Here is a list of players.” She flipped the chart to another item on the list written in neat block letters. She stabbed her pointer at the red bullets.

  “We have four local groups involved.

  First, traditionalist Utes oppose the construction because they feel it threatens their cultural values. As you well know, it’s not uncommon for tribe members to oppose development for traditional and spiritual reasons, but this group has resorted to violence in the past. Now, they are planning a demonstration at the groundbreaking ceremony. We’ve had difficulty identifying current participants.”

  The pointer again. “But, a local, right-wing cell of twenty-five, called Clear Chivington, who advocate an immediate return of all federal lands to local communities, is planning to counter the Ute demonstration. The great-grandson of one of Colonel John Chivington’s officers heads this group. He is on the Terrorist Screening Center surveillance list. This organization has a history of racial violence and we have evidence they plan an armed confrontation.”

  During the American Civil War, violence broke out in Colorado Territory. Constant tit-for-tat fighting led to the Sand Creek Massacre in November 1864. Colonel J. M. Chivington and his Colorado Militia attacked a quiet village of Arapaho and Cheyenne, killing mostly women and children. Once back home in Denver, the victors gloated. Chivington’s unprovoked Indian massacre was motivated by his need for notoriety and nothing more; a slaughter that was used by both sides as justification for violence ever since.

  “But’s that not all the players.” She continued. “The Mexican cartels have interest in this event. The Chivingtons’ weapons are funded by a clique of snowboarders from Breckenridge headed by a nephew of a high-ranking Sinaloa operative. Their motive is to create a violent distraction to their drug operations. We have them under surveillance and know they’re planning to move a large quantity of fentanyl while law enforcement is engaged at the hospital groundbreaking hostilities.”

  “Ooh. Bad stuff.” My interest grew. So, these were the assholes at the Española lowrider show. “I suspect these people are involved in two murders at my pueblo. I’d be interested in what you’ve found.”

  She paused, studied her chart, pointed to another bullet. “The reason this investigation has such high interest in the Bureau is we’ve identified a cluster of law enforcement officers also involved within the La Plata County Sherriff’s Office in Durango, formerly headed by a Deputy Jones, who is now deceased.” She looked at me, made a big deal of marking an X over his name with her pointer.

  “We believe these deputies are in the pocket of the snowboarders and act as security for guns and drug-running. They are not above murder to protect their interests. Your own experience may be an example of that.”

  An image of my own attempted assassination and near death at the hand of Deputy Jones flashed before me. I changed the subject. “Chivs, punks, cops, and Utes,” I said.

  She paused, looked puzzled. “What?”

  “Chivs, punks, cops, and Utes. Got a ring to it. Sounds like the name of a law firm.”

  Reel gave me an eye-roll and a half-grin.

  It seemed improbable extremists, cops, and drug dealers could work in concert. Regardless, somewhere in
this collection of thugs were leads into my own investigations. “What more can you tell me?”

  She nodded. “We think it’s going to go down this way; after the land and hospital donation was announced, a consortium formed due to their perceived common interests.”

  She flipped a page on her chart, pointed to a line titled Scenario. “On the day of the groundbreaking ceremony, the Utes plan to picket. They’ve already announced that fact. The Chivingtons will counter-protest. Each of these factions have access to firearms provided by the snowboarders’ money. Tempers and firearms. You know what’ll happen.”

  “And the sheriff?”

  She pointed to a bullet paragraph. “They may be conspicuously absent or conveniently late to the action. Some of them will be off running escort for the movement of the fentanyl.”

  “Escort? Why not just look the other way?” I asked.

  “We hear another cartel is planning to highjack the cargo. We’re talking an impressive amount of drugs, here,” she said. “Potential for many casualties.”

  “A lot of players,” I said.

  “Yes and a lot of money and tight lips. We don’t suspect the sheriff himself but he’s blind, deaf, and dumb to what’s going on under him. Been in office too long, if you ask me.”

  She collapsed her pointer to the size of a pencil. “Once again Peter, I need to emphasize the secrecy required. No one outside of this RV has knowledge of the nature of this investigation.”

  “Oso and No Name?”

  “Both men are on my staff.”

  “Sweet operation, but where do I come in? You got a connection to my horse killer case or the murders at my pueblo?”

  “For now, I want you work with me undercover and identify the Utes who are involved in this conspiracy.”

  Reel had no authority over me, and I had no legal obligation to her. I straightened in my chair. “You don’t have any Indian agents who can do that?”

  “I have access to as many Native American agents as I need.” She walked over to her chair and sat down.