“Avina, is that you? What are you doing? You will never get away with this. This isn’t how it works.”
She shoved him toward the sofa but he didn’t move. She began searching the semi dark room.
“You’re going to wake up my mother,” he said.
“That bitch is out cold and if she comes down I’ll dust her clueless ass too. Tell me where it is!”
Avina held the pistol on him as she went around the room.
“Where what is?” he said.
“The phone you use to deal dope, your VIP phone.”
“I got rid of it Avina, you know that. I don’t drink or do drugs anymore and I quit dealing. I don’t need the phone.”
“Liar!” she swept across the dark room and brought the pistol down as hard as she could onto his nose with the handle butt. It cut him across the bridge and he started to bleed from the cut and his nostrils.
“Oh bitch, you’ll pay for that.”
“Decklin, you’re the one that’s gonna pay. When they put you in prison, you’re the bitch. Do you get it?” Adrenaline coursed through her, she felt wild.
She grabbed a notebook computer off the coffee table, it fell to the floor, she tried cramming it into her backpack, but it wouldn’t fit.
“You little cunt,” he said. “I knew you were poser trash.”
She took out her smart phone, scrolled for a number, and pressed call. Hoping for a vibration from a smartphone in the room, but none came. Keeping the pistol at the back of his head, she pushed him forward and he went along.
“Where’s the phone you used to text Catherine with? We’re taking it to that woman detective.”
“Avina listen to me, don’t do something stupid. I didn’t do anything to Catherine and I wouldn’t hurt her. I was here with mom when Cat died. Let’s go upstairs and ask her.”
“You texted Catherine that night, you said you were coming to find her. You used your hustler phone. The police have the number but don’t know who owns the phone. It was you that texted her, I saw it myself. Cat thought you were picking her up but you attacked her. Where is the phone?”
“I didn’t leave the house; I stayed with my mother here. The police know that.”
Avina stood behind him and placed the muzzle of the .380 into his reddish blonde curls.
“The lady detective thinks you did it and I believe her. She showed me the number that texted Catherine that night and it is the number you use to give us drugs. It was the party number.”
“Avina listen to me. That detective was here. I already spoke to her. If I had hurt Catherine, she would’ve arrested me. The reason she hasn’t arrested me is that she knows it wasn’t me.”
“They can’t get a search warrant because your dumb bitch mother lied for you, like she always has. I didn’t want to be a rat so I disgraced myself in front of Catherine’s ghost, in front of that lady detective.”
“Avina, what are you talking about?”
“Catherine’s spirit cannot rest because I haven’t helped her the way I could’ve.”
“Oh my god Avina, you’re talking to ghosts? Listen to yourself. You’re losing your mind.”
Looking around the room frantically, she overturned a column of video games and threw the cushions off leather chairs. “Tell me where the phone is, where her backpack is. You have Catherine’s stuff.”
“No, I don’t have her stuff Avina. Maybe Helen took it.”
“What? What did you just say?”
“Helen killed Catherine. You need to understand what Helen is.”
“Liar!”
“Catherine treated Helen like shit. They hated each other. Helen couldn’t stand it anymore so she killed Catherine. It’s all over the news.”
Pacing the room in the dark, she suddenly slowed to a standstill and let her pistol hand fall to her thigh. She pulled off the black ski mask to get air, the basement closed around her.
Decklin went on, “Helen killed her just like the news has been saying. They were rivals. There can’t be two queens in a court. You’re too dumb and country to see it. They fought for control of one another. You were just a poser. A wannabe, everyone knows it.”
Transferring her weight rhythmically from foot to foot, sweat beaded on her face, and she cleared her eyes with her free palm.
“Helen loved Catherine and loves me.”
“Helen doesn’t love you. She doesn’t love anything. She killed Cat for fun. She’s a sick girl. Don’t get me started on Helen, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you about Helen. If you were smart, you’d tell them that Helen did it. That’s the only play that can save your little ass.”
“Who killed Lara Mazer? Why is Lara dead?”
He laughed. “Some lowlife from her white trash life fucked her to death. Garbage in is garbage out.”
She lurched forward to swing the pistol down on his head but lost her nerve. Confused now, weak, options rolled through her mind against one another, finally, she said, “You’re coming with me. You’re gonna tell that detective lady what you did.”
She pushed him through the rooms by his hands bound behind his back, levering him toward a door. He bent forward as they went up white stone steps into dry night air.
42.
On a narrow dirt road cut into the side of Blacktail Butte, Brouwer leaned against her Jeep. The forested rise allowed her a view of the flat expanse of sage land below. With field glasses, she scanned the valley floor from one mountain range to another. Pyramid Peak and Mount Leidy stood in the thin dry air while campers and motorhomes speckled white along the Gros Ventre River far below. Vehicles left the wilderness and entered the valley.
An hour later, driving the highway trailing the Gros Ventre River, she read the face of any motorist who met her.
She turned off the secondary highway and drew the Jeep toward the Gros Ventre range. Bare rock held the deep forest back from the thin road. While she ascended the pass into the wilderness, the truck appeared—a four-wheel drive with off-road tires and a roof rack. It left an abandoned mining road and disappeared over a crest into the pass. She stomped on the accelerator and flipped on her patrol lights.
At high speed, she took the first hill and gained on the truck only to lose sight of it as she went down a hollow.
The truck was traveling fast but not fleeing. It simply had a lead. Knowing the road into the mountain pass would fork, she crested the next rise at speed, and the Jeep came down into the loose gravel, lost traction and fishtailed. She gained control as the truck disappeared into the forest further up the mountain.
She cut through dust drifting above the treetops and down the ledge. As she came over a crest, the truck was sitting, parked in a hollow. She slammed on the breaks and plowed to a stop, the grill of the Jeep toward the rock ledge above her, her passenger door between her and the truck. She cut the siren. The head of a man was motionless in the driver’s seat twenty feet in front of her.
Holding her door open with a boot, she radioed dispatch to run the truck’s Colorado plates. A youthful woman responded from the highway patrol center in Laramie and called the plates as that of a 1989 GMC Suburban registered to Donald David Swain of Platteville, Co. The man she had been searching for finally sat before her.
As a convicted state and federal felon, Swain could not possess a firearm. If he had one within view, she could arrest him on the spot and hold him for as long as she needed to question him. His parole conditions allowed him to leave Colorado. She needed a suspicious activity to hold him, or he could simply drive away. The dispatcher’s soft voice on the radio said, “Mr. Swain has a federal conviction for trafficking over state lines. That was Methamphetamine, no violent priors. He served time at Canon City then was transferred to Florence ADX Super Maximum in Colorado.”
The back of the man’s head, obscured by the headrest and dirty windows of the long off road vehicle, was still. She couldn’t see his eyes in his rear-view mirror.
“I have nothing else on him ma’am.”
She had studied his file when she first got the list of patrons who were at the Nite Ride during Lara’s shift. Swain entered Colorado Department of Corrections with a stretch at Canon City but didn’t stay long. His prompt transfer to the federal administrative maximum facility at Florence, the ADX Super Maximum, was a problem in his file. It was illogical. His crime was common in the Rocky Mountain States. Yet on his first offense, with no violent priors, they moved him to the hardest core prison in the United States. Overcrowding in the vast prison complex that blotched the country meant that a convict would not always end up where they should; nevertheless, Swain’s fate was inexplicable. There were more sensible, more humane places to send him than ADX. The infamous super-maximum security prison was a black hole for both prisoners and information about them. Twenty-three hours a day of solitary confinement where an inmate never interacts with another inmate, not even to eat or exercise. The ADX was a hell on earth reserved for jihadists and mass murderers. Even the Jackals dismissed this minor crook as a lackey. His records offered no answer to why they sent him there. If Swain was a snitch, a federal informant sent to ADX for his own safety, they hadn’t done him any favors for his service. What of value he could possibly know? He’d been nobody.
She said into the radio, “Please tell Sheriff Hargrove that I am approximately three miles north of Kelly, out on Lower Slide Lake Road and I am approaching a vehicle and a person of interest in the Lara Mazer Homicide.” She took a moment and then added, “Please call Sheriff Hargrove himself, and tell him I am out here.”
The dispatcher said, “There’s a highway patrol unit I can send to back you up. It will take some time. Please wait.”
“Negative. I’m approaching the vehicle.”
She swung out of her truck and clipped the handheld radio into her belt.
He was gone. The head of hair was no longer in the driver seat waiting for her.
She pulled her government .45 with her right hand and crouched to see beneath the long truck. She stood, the back seats were removed; he may have slid into the back for a weapon.
Cupping her left hand around the butt of her pistol as she approached, in the back of the vehicle, blood had pooled and soaked into the upholstery. Wine dark red consumed the cloth. The severed head appeared as she moved along the truck, covered by a portion of blue tarpaulin, the black nose of an elk soft in the blanket of its own blood. Its vacant eye stared at her.
Swain lay across the bench seat of the truck with his feet up and his hands folded behind his head. The stench of the Elk’s rich decay reached her through the open driver window.
“Sit up and put your hands on the wheel,” she said.
He did as she told him. His face had grown sallow and his neck was lumped with mosquito bites.
“You were taking so long I thought I’d have a rest,” Swain said.
“You have a tag for that elk?”
“I have a tag for the Elk ma’am.”
“Is the rifle in the back?”
“The beast was felled on a bow permit.”
Blood soaked into the truck’s carpet but no firearms were visible. She couldn’t bring him into custody for a bow.
“Keep your damn hands on the wheel where I can see them.”
“Yes ma’am.”
A wind lifted through the ledge and blew her light hair loosely around her face as she walked around the front of the truck; its grill at her chest. A heavy cable winch was underneath the front bumper between heavy, coarsely treaded tires. The tires were brand new.
She glanced up at him and he returned her gaze her with warm eyes. He was relaxed. She’d been in front of the truck grill for too long.
“You sit still,” she said. “You make no fast movements do you understand me?” Sliding her pistol into its holster, she came to his driver window. “Aside from that bow, are there any other weapons on you or in this truck?”
“No ma’am.”
“I’ll take your driver’s license and the truck registration.”
He handed it though the open window.
“Are you Donald Swain?”
“I am.”
“Are you of Colorado? Your accent isn’t saying you’re from Colorado, not to me anyway.”
“Well, you’ve got a good ear ma’am. I’m the Oklahoma brand of trash, born and raised. But I’ve been in Colorado as of late.”
“Where do you stay?”
“I’m not required to provide you with a place of residence. I gave you my license as it’s a permit to drive this truck, that’s all you’re entitled to.”
“I’ll decide what I need and don’t need. What’s your destination?”
“Before we get too familiar it’s my duty to inform y’all that I have a criminal record. I was convicted of a federal crime and served a sentence in United States Penitentiary at Florence, Colorado, and I been in Colorado ever since, until just lately here.”
She met his eyes, and he was at ease, comfortable.
“I asked you where you stay.”
“I don’t have to provide you with a residence. It ain’t a law that a man needs a home address. There’s no crime in being homeless, not yet. But you could say that I’m up here now.”
“You live in Wyoming? Do you have a home or residence?”
“Not quite exactly. I traveled around for a spell. I went without a residence for some time. But I’m settled now. You could say I’m as solid as the North Star, fixed in the firmament.”
“Are you camped out in the forest?”
“I sleep beneath the stars from time to time. I sleep in this here truck some cold nights.”
“The Penitentiary at Florence, the ADX super max, is very hard time Donald.”
“On that we can agree. They say it is the prison to end all prisons. I often wondered who they had in mind when they built it.”
“What put you there?”
“They say I was transporting federally controlled substances, but that’s a matter of public record. I am thinking y’all know this by now.”
“Since when do they send first time drug traffickers to the ADX?”
“Hell girl, I asked them the very same thing. They told me I had potential.”
“Potential for what?” she asked.
“I wonder at that myself.”
He had changed since she first laid eyes on him outside the Nite Ride Saloon. He had seemed unremarkable then, a passing detail, a wannabe biker, a gangly Jackal prospect, nobody. With his head lowered on his shoulders and his chin slightly tucked, he was thin but strong. The rich scent of campfire smoke wafted from his heavy wool lumberjack coat.
“I’ve been looking for you. You’re no longer staying at the Rocky Mountain Truck Service garage and I told you to stay close. I asked you for an interview two full days ago. You didn’t cooperate with me, and I haven’t been able to find you.”
“You have nothing to talk to me about.”
“Where are you staying Mr. Swain? You’re camped in the forest, searching the woods, aren’t you?”
“I stay where I please. It’s no business of the state government where I lay my head.”
“You don’t think so?”
Sitting with his hands together looking down the road, she tried to envision him peering into her cabin window, pacing the antique shop on film. He seemed unfamiliar.
“You’re living out in the trees, hiking through the night. Aren’t you?”
“I’m minding my own business is what I’m doing. You need to tell me why you pulled me over. It’s your duty to explain, not mine.”
She leaned in toward the window and he held her eyes.
She said, “I’m talking to anyone with a vehicle that fits this description. Can you tell me when and where you bought these tires?”
Swain faced the road, then the pale sky. He breathed in deeply and then sighed.
“Lady, you know everything you need to know about me. I was in Montana on Friday and the bookkeeper Swindle vouched for my whereabouts Satur
day night. I’m sure you already talked to the man we bought the truck off in Great Falls to verify that I was not even in Wyoming when that girl went up the mountain. What else can you need to know?”
She studied him, “I’ve talked to the fella they call “swindle” he has no problem making himself available to help the investigation. He hasn’t been able to locate you either. Is he paying you to hunt Elk?”
His head low, he looked up at her. “What do they pay you to do, harass anyone from out of town? I read about what you did to that poor sonofabitch Nathanial Petrie back in town. He had a record for fighting with his wife so you caved the poor bastard’s head in. You see someone with a record and you want to send ‘em back. That’s how you serve your system.”
He smiled to himself and then said, “You oughtta stick to what you’re good at girl: wearing blue jeans.”
She rested her right hand on the handle of the .45. But he wasn’t nervous.
“You don’t want to cooperate with me?” she said. “You can’t sit down and go over a few things. We could’ve done this the easy way. It could’ve been simple. I think you know how your lack of cooperation looks. Well, it doesn’t look very good. You come in and talk to me, and I’ll get you a soup and sandwich. We’ll talk, and you won’t be bothered again.”
He smiled by raising the lips on his wide mouth.
“That’s not how your system works. You’re only just a girl-child yourself, hardly different from them girls that went missing. I take no offense that you don’t know a damn thing about the very system you serve. But I can give you a lesson in it. That I can do. The first thing you should know is that once you’re in their system they don’t let you out. You take me in there and you won’t let me go. You can never allow that I be free.”
“You follow me into town,” she said. “Sit down with me and go over a few things and you have my word that I won’t bother you again. As for the system that I serve, that system is justice for those women, unless you’re calling me a liar. Is that what you’re calling me?” If she can provoke him, he may threaten her, and she can hold him.
He said, “Your system is a nightmare of trapped servants and empty processes, choking anything that lives and would otherwise be free. Yours is a government blackening the sky with drones. You’re a dog in a pack of dogs, and dogs hunt in packs to tire out the deer. Y’all will follow me forever.”
Dream of the Wolf Page 20