“Christ!” Jesse said to himself. He came out of the car, keeping it between him and the shooter. His .45 Colt 1911 model came up and he thumbed back the hammer. There was already one fat round in the chamber and a full load of seven in the magazine. It was a long shot from where he was, but he had to take the heat off Tony.
For a fraction of a second, he considered calling a warning. To hell with it, he thought, the guy had been warned.
He slammed out three rounds from the .45, knowing he was too far away to hit anything. All he’d hoped was that he’d catch the gunman’s attention and he succeeded. The Ingram’s muzzle flash lit up again and bullets clanged off the metalwork of the Chevy, ricocheting and whining around him. There was a dull report and the car subsided suddenly to the right as the front tire blew. Jesse ducked behind the hood. It was damned unhealthy out here, he thought.
He duckwalked to the front of the car, peering around the grill. He couldn’t see Tony and the porch had gone dark again. There was no sign of the gunman but he let another two rounds go in the general direction of the porch for good luck.
“Tony?” he called. “You okay?”
Another burst from the Ingram erupted in return. The headlight a few inches away shattered, spraying broken glass onto the road. Hurriedly, he pulled back into cover.
“Jess? I’m in a bad situation here,” Vetano called. His voice was pitched higher than normal. Jesse could read a trace of panic in it. Jesus. Who wouldn’t be panicked, stuck in the open like that with a machine gun trying to chew you up? A short burst rattled out toward Tony’s position in response to his voice.
“You hit?” Jesse called. He flinched, expecting the gunner to open up on him but no shots came.
“No. But I’m pinned down. Can’t move.”
Once again the gunner opened up at Tony’s position. Jesse, peering cautiously over the top of the hood, saw strikes on the top of the house’s front wall. He realized that the low structure was shielding Tony from the gunman’s fire, providing a shallow wedge of dead ground. For the moment, his partner was safe—although safe was a relative term in this situation.
“Stay there!” he yelled. “Don’t move!”
“Jess? Get me out of here, man!” Tony was definitely on the edge of panicking, Jesse realized.
“Hang in there, Tony! You’re cool,” he replied, as another burst tore chips off the brick wall. Tony, his nose pressed to the ground, trying to force himself lower and lower behind the shallow curb, couldn’t see that he was sheltered. So far as he was concerned, the gunman was just a lousy shot to keep missing him.
Mind you, all that would change if the gunner decided to move closer and change the angle of his fire. Jesse had to stop that happening and he had to do it fast. He’d need to get closer himself. There was a Dodge cargo van next in line, then a Ford pickup. That was where he needed to be. He took a deep breath, gathered himself and launched out from behind the Chevy.
The gunman reacted a fraction too late. A burst of fire ripped the air behind Jesse, shattering another headlight and punching more holes in the Chevy’s hood. He crouched behind the van, felt it rock as more rounds impacted the far side. Then he was running for the shelter of the Ford.
More bullets whined around him but the gunner was shooting too high. The Ingram pulled up when it fired and he wasn’t allowing for the fact. If he didn’t hit Jesse with the first two shots, the others sailed harmlessly overhead.
Bent-kneed and crouching, Jesse shuffled along the side of the truck till he reached the hood. It had gone quiet now that the Ingram wasn’t shooting. The guy knew where he was. He’d be waiting this time. Jesse thumbed the magazine release, dropping the depleted magazine out of the Colt’s butt. He jammed a fresh one in and worked the action, pumping a round into the chamber.
“Jesse? I’m getting out of here, man!”
“No, Tony! Stay put! Don’t move!”
But a sudden burst from the Ingram, and a grunt of pain that accompanied it, told him that his warning had been too late. Tony had finally lost it. Jesse stood up behind the Ford’s hood, pistol gripped in both hands, feet wide apart to steady himself. He saw Tony lurching and spinning as he fell to the ground in the middle of the street. He heard him crying out in pain and fear and knew he was still alive. For the moment. But now he was helpless and exposed.
The Ingram had fallen silent. Gunner must be changing mags too, Jesse thought, and knew he had to stop him before he could reload and zero in on Tony. He could see a dark shape moving in shadows on the porch.
Jesse fired-carefully and deliberately.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
The gunman had seen him. Bullets from the Ingram slammed into the truck. The windshield shivered apart under a hail of slugs, showering him with pebbles of broken safety glass.
Four times.
Something was moving in his peripheral vision. Something between him and the porch. He ignored it, locked in a fatal duel with the machine-gunner, his upper body completely exposed. Totally outgunned.
Five times. A shape, moving, blurred, indistinct. Ignore it.
Six. A shrill scream.
Seven.
The Colt’s action slammed back and locked open, the magazine empty. Jesse stood, pistol still leveled at the porch. Vaguely, he realized he should drop back into cover, rejected the idea.
He stood, waiting for the return fire but there was none. The drug dealer was dead. Three of the heavy caliber .45 slugs had hit him.
Only one had hit Tony.
But when Jesse reached him he was just as dead as the drug dealer.
ONE
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, COLORADO
WINTER, 2006
S
heriff Lee Torrens shook her head as she gazed down at the dead body, surrounded by trash.
“How the hell did he get in there?”
It was a rhetorical question but Patrolman Paul Onorato, who’d been first on the scene with his partner, Dale Carruthers, wasn’t the sharpest chisel in the town police toolkit.
“Guess the killer put him there, Sheriff,” he said helpfully. Lee turned a baleful eye his way.
“Thank you for that,” she said coldly.
Onorato shrugged, missing the sarcasm.
“There” was the big rectangular container that rode the cable car down to the bottom station at the Mount Werner ski fields. It carried the trash and detritus from the restaurants up on the mountain and when the on-mountain traffic wound down at the end of each day, the operators at the top station would stop the cable car for five minutes or so while they wheeled the big steel container into position. Then they’d clamp it onto the heavy cable and start up again, sending the trash container sailing off down the valley into the gathering darkness.
When the container swooped out of the darkness into the bottom station, slowing as it detached from the main cable to the unloading circle, the bottom station attendant had noticed something odd. About two-thirds of the way up the unloading hatch, a glove was jammed between the hatch and the frame. Leastways, he’d thought it was a glove.
Right up until he’d noticed the glove had fingernails.
The container was open-topped so that trash could be dumped in from above. To unload, one of the sides was hinged at the bottom and held in place by dog clamps. As the attendant looked more closely, he realized that the upper dog clamp on the hatch hadn’t engaged properly at one end, leaving a narrow gap through which the hand was protruding.
That had been enough for the bottom station attendant, a kindly old man named John Hostetler. He’d taken one look and run for the phone, faster than he’d moved in maybe forty years. Onorato and his partner, Dale Carruthers, had been cruising in the area and they’d arrived within five minutes. It had been Onorato who had released the other clamps, despite Carruther’s warning cry not to corrupt a crime scene. The hatch had fallen open and the body had rolled clear, along with a small avalanche of Dixie cups, soda cans, wine bottles and remnants of half-eaten fast food.
Round about that stage, Onorato realized he was in over his head. The town police attended to minor crime within town limits—disturbances in Steamboat’s many bars and restaurants, arguments in the lift lines, drunks, lost children, traffic offenses, crowd control and the like. They were the equivalent of the uniformed branch in a big city police force. They weren’t expected or equipped to conduct investigations into serious matters. That was left to the sheriff’s office, which had jurisdiction over the entire county.
A dead body in the trash container was definitely a serious matter, so the two patrolmen had put in a call to Lee.
She hunkered down beside the dead body. The corpse stared up at her with sightless eyes. He was male, aged in his early thirties.
“Guess you’ll never make it to your late thirties now,” she muttered to herself.
“Say what, Sheriff?” Her deputy, Tom Legros, had stepped into the control room out of the wind to make a call and she hadn’t heard him returning. She shook her head.
“Nothing, Tom. Just talking to myself is all.”
There was a small, circular incision under the chin, and a considerable amount of blood had soaked down into the collar of his parka. A considerably greater amount had collected underneath the skin around the chin and lower part of the face, creating a huge, blue-black edema that looked incongruously like a five o’clock shadow in Lee’s flashlight beam. The eyes were wide open. They looked surprised. She guessed they had every right to be.
“Is Denny Walters on his way?” she called back over her shoulder to Tom.
He nodded. “Should be here in five, ten minutes, Lee,” he told her. “Doc Jorgensen too.”
Lee grunted. Jorgensen was the county medical examiner. Denny Walters ran a ski-photo business and doubled as a crime-scene photographer when they needed one.
Lee snapped on a pair of surgical rubber gloves and gently patted the body down. Under the parka, in the breast pocket, she could feel the bulge of what might be a wallet. Carefully, so as not to disturb the position of the body, she eased the parka’s zipper down a few inches and reached inside to claim it. Not that any disturbance would matter too much now, she thought wryly. The body’s position had been disturbed plenty when it had come rolling out of the container.
“Uh … Lee, maybe you shouldn’t do that?” Tom suggested, uncomfortable at the thought that he was criticizing his boss.
“Probably not, Tom,” Lee replied. “But it’s gone and done now.”
She flipped through the billfold.
“Well, whatever the motive was, it wasn’t robbery,” she said. “There’s more than two hundred bucks in here.”
Behind her, Patrolman Onorato was admiring the sight of Lee’s jeans stretched across her buttocks as she crouched beside the victim. It occurred to him that for a sheriff, Lee Torrens cut a fine figure. And he wasn’t the first man in Routt County to think it.
Born and raised on a ranch out beyond Hayden, Lee had grown up ranching and punching cattle from the time she was eleven. By seventeen, she could ride, rope and shoot as well as any man.
She stood five feet, nine inches in her socks. Her hand-tooled leather boots added another inch and a half. She was long legged, with the muscles smooth and sculpted from a lifetime of riding, hiking and skiing, slim-waisted and with breasts that were shapely and large enough to put a just noticeable strain on the buttons of her green uniform shirt.
No one would ever call Lee Torrens pretty. Her features were too strong for that. But she was a decidedly handsome woman, with high cheekbones, a firm jaw and deep-set gray eyes that had a slight tilt to them-maybe the result of an Arapaho ancestor sometime in the past. Her hair was sandy blond and now, in her thirty-ninth year, it had a few streaks of gray in it. Not that Lee was the sort of woman to give much of a damn about that.
She was the sort of woman you could describe as statuesque. The people of Routt County would describe her, and they often did, as a fine type of woman. And a damn good sheriff into the bargain.
She picked carefully through the billfold now, easing a Minnesota driver’s license out of one of the card slots.
“Name’s Howell. Alexander Howell,” she said. She peered into the section where notes were kept, pushing the mixed twenties, ones and fives to one side to reveal a credit card receipt. “And there’s a receipt here from the Overlook Lodge. Better get on to them and see if he has anyone down there looking for him.”
Tom turned away, heading for the phone in the gondola office. Carruthers caught Lee’s eye and tilted his head in a question.
“Need us any further, Sheriff?” he asked, adding a little apologetically, “We’re a little shorthanded this weekend.”
Lee shook her head, smiled wearily.
“Aren’t we all?” she said, rising from her position beside Alexander Howell’s body. “No. You can leave it to us, boys. Just drop in your write-up in the morning if you will.”
“Can do,” said Carruthers.