Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (21 page)

I fought the skid and the urge to stomp on
the brakes. The Mustang thudded to a stop and stalled in a shallow
ditch. The hailstones, more like slabs of ice, clanged off the car
with a frightening noise and stuck to the windshield in frozen
sheets. Steam rose from under the hood. I sat there with both hands
on the wheel, my heart pounding. Then I turned to Kip and tousled
his blond hair, giving him a forced smile that said Uncle Jake had
everything under control.

Our breath and body temperature was fogging
the inside of the windshield. In front of the car, shrouded by our
man-made fog and the frozen windshield, the mountain towered over
us.

“
You okay?” I asked
Kip.

“
Sure.”

“
You’re kind of
quiet.”

“
Uh-huh.”

“
What are you thinking,
young man.”

“
Nothin’”

“
You sure?”

“
Yeah. It’s just, I
guess...”

“
Go on, Kip. Tell
me.”

“
Toto, I have a feeling
we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

***

I gave Kip his first driving lesson. It
consisted of my standing in the ditch up to my ankles in slushy
mud, bracing my arms against the trunk of the car and pushing as if
the two-ton chunk of metal were a blocking sled. All the time, Kip
was supposed to be gently giving it gas. Except he wasn’t so
gentle. The rear wheels spun and splattered me with mud. I was just
happy he didn’t throw it into reverse.

The hail stopped and was replaced by a fine
cold mist. I tried to wipe off the mud, but it was everywhere,
including in my right ear. I rested a moment and checked out the
car. There were a few dents on the right side where we’d sideswiped
a boulder shaped like a tombstone, but otherwise, we were fine. In
a few minutes, Kip got the hang of it, and together we rocked the
car out of the ditch.

Kip took a long look at me when I slid back
behind the wheel. “Yuck!”

We started down the mountain toward Aspen. I
was cold, filthy, and exhausted and now, on this narrow, slippery
road, I began to wonder again just what I was doing. I didn’t know
the territory. I didn’t know if Jo Jo wanted me to follow her. I
didn’t know how to clear my name.

I had just traveled two thousand miles, but
I didn’t have a plan. Where to begin?

With Jo Jo? With Cimarron? I decided to take
one step at a time. It’s the way you build a case in the courtroom.
The big picture is sometimes too complex, too daunting. So first,
figure what you need to prove, then take a small step in that
direction.

Kip flicked on the inside light and buried
his head in the tourist brochure.

I kept thinking. And driving. I’m not sure I
could have chewed gum too.

Inside my head I was pacing. Socolow thinks
I killed Kyle Hornback. Cimarron thinks I defrauded him. Covering
up the fraud was the motive for the murder. So, if I can prove I
didn’t defraud Cimarron…Right.

That’s thinking like a lawyer. Building my
case, chipping away at the other guy’s, proving I had no motive to
kill, maybe proving that somebody else did.

Which made me think of Kit Carson Cimarron
again, which in turn, made me flex my right hand. Clenching the
fist was fine, but spreading the fingers caused the hand to flare
with pain. If I hit anybody tougher than the Pillsbury Doughboy, it
would hurt me more than him.

Kip turned off the map light and looked
toward me. “You know why they call it the Continental Divide?”

“
Something to do with the
way the water flows,” I said, remembering a tidbit of lost
information from a long-ago geography class.

“
Right. It’s the part of
the Rockies that divides the continent, east from west. On the
Leadville side, the Arkansas River flows east. On the Aspen side,
the Roaring Fork and the Frying Pan flow west, eventually reaching
the Pacific. Do you believe that, Uncle Jake? I mean, if the wind
is blowing one way, or if the raindrop hits this rock or that one,
it determines whether the drop goes to the Atlantic or the Pacific
Ocean?”

“
Sure. It’s just like with
people. Little things push us one direction or the other. But we’re
not drops of water, Kipper. We’ve got free will, and the power to
act, to change course. Trouble comes when we see that shallow reef
dead ahead, and we plow right along, damn well knowing that any
moment we’ll hear the crunch of coral against hull.”

That quieted him for a moment, but not much
longer. “Is this one of your lessons about life, Uncle Jake?”

“
Yep.”

We were slowing down again as the two lanes
seemed to narrow, and we crept along mountainside cliffs cut deep
by torrents of water that tumbled into channels alongside the
road.

“
I get it,” he said.
“That’s the reason we’re here, right?

Like you could stay in Miami and get
scorched by that goober, Mr. Socolow. But you’ve seen the reef and
decided to change course, right?”

“
Something like
that.”

“
Totally excellent. I’ll
help you steer, Uncle Jake.”

Chapter 15

Birds of Prey

An owl sat on a fence post eating a
skunk.

The owl’s legendary eyesight is apparently
keener than its sense of smell.

“
Kip, that’s a great horned
owl,” I said, with authority, having been told as much by the
fellow at the front desk of the Lazy Q ranch.

“
Yuck. I think I’m gonna
blow chunks.”

“
Whoo,” said the owl,
between bites. The skunk didn’t say a thing.

I didn’t want to stay at any of the hotels
in town. If Abe Socolow thought about it, he probably would figure
I followed Jo Jo or Cimarron, or both. So the Hotel Jerome, the
Little Nell, and the Ritz-Carlton were out, it being damn near
impossible to check into a decent hotel under a phony name these
days. Having to surrender your credit card takes care of that.

I hate credit cards. I hate leaving a trail
of where I’ve been, what I’ve eaten, how I’ve shopped. A credit
history these days is a life story. Where would divorce lawyers and
other snoops be without the computer printouts of hotel rooms,
jewelry stores, and weekend flights to Nassau when the business
meeting was in Tampa? Government at every level, companies that
employ you and companies that choose not to, every school you’ve
attended, and every liquor store you’ve frequented maintain a
cradle-to-grave digital trail of facts and figures about you. The
data—some mundane, some striking at the core of intimate privacy—is
never discarded and never fades into yellow clippings. Ask not for
whom the computer chimes. It chimes for thee.

I chose a ranch located just off Maroon
Creek Road outside Aspen. It had nine wooden cottages that were a
tad too primitive even to be called rustic. My skiing buddies and I
had stayed here once after we’d been thrown out of an Aspen condo
complex for staging diving contests into the swimming pool.

In January.

The pool was filled with five feet of
powdery snow, and nobody got hurt, but the building manager was
screaming about his insurance rates until I dragged him up the
three-meter board and tossed him in. His belly flop sounded like a
whale breaching.

The lodge of the Lazy Q was an A-frame made
of logs with a Ben Franklin stove, a moth-eaten bearskin rug, and
what I took to be the antlered head of a deer on the knotty pine
wall, but it could have been an elk or an orangutan for all I
knew.

Behind the counter was a skinny clerk in
faded jeans, scuffed boots, greasy hair with long sideburns, and a
cigarette jammed into the corner of his mouth.

“
Dork thinks he’s Harry
Dean Stanton,” Kip whispered to me.

“
Hush.” I shooed the kid
away, and he wandered around the one-room lodge, pausing in front
of a wall calendar featuring cowgirls wearing nothing but boots and
hats. When he was done with July, he studied August and September,
too.

The clerk said his name was Rusty or maybe
Dusty. He handed over a key to number seven and told me about the
great horned owl that called the fence post home.

“
Got a golden eagle, too,
in the blue spruce trees out back. Come daylight, you’ll get a
gander at him if you want. Got a set of talons could tear your head
off. Son of a gun dives after mice. Clocked that sucker with a
radar gun at a hundred fifty miles an hour in his dive. Can you
beat that?”

“
Not on my best day,” I
said.

“
Got a couple little
falcons out there, too. Called kestrels around here. They’ll eat
whatever the eagle misses. Raptors, that’s what the fellow called
them. Birds of prey, flesh eaters.” He studied me a moment. “Will
you be wanting binoculars, or you got your own?”

I didn’t know what he meant.

“
We got people come out
here to ride the horses, some to see the birds. Which is it with
you, Mr. Lassiter?”

I might have been bleary-eyed and
muscle-cramped from the trip. I might have had jet lag and a sour
stomach, but I knew the answer. “The raptors,” I said. “I came for
the birds of prey.”

***

“
I’m ow-dee,” Kip
said.

“
Huh?”

“
Ow-dee, like outta here.”
Kip gestured around the small cottage. “What’s missing from this
picture?”

I looked around. Two single beds whose
springs had sprung. A nightstand with a two-bulb reading lamp. A
couple of ersatz Frederic Remington prints of cowboys busting
broncos and branding steers. A porcelain sink stained
orangish-brown under the faucet, a shower and toilet tucked behind
a partition.

“
I don’t know, Kip. I’m
going to sleep.”

“
A TV! Uncle Jake, there’s
no TV!”

I was already peeled down to my Jockey
shorts and was stripping a paper-thin brown blanket off the bed.
“We’ve had enough entertainment for one day. Lights out, Kip. Go to
bed.”

“
Without a TV! Without
dinner! I’m hungry, Uncle Jake. We haven’t eaten anything since the
pork rinds and root beer at the gas station.”

“
There’s a machine with
peanut butter crackers at the lodge. If that’s not enough, ask the
horned owl to share his dinner with you.”

He said something to me, probably some
eleven-year-old sassified backtalk, but I was falling toward the
squashed pillow, already drifting off to dreams of mice and
falcons, wondering which I was.

***

The Pitkin County Courthouse is a
hundred-year-old red-brick building that sits formidably on Main
Street. Courthouse architecture is intended to represent strength
and permanence and a certain majesty of the law that mortar and
stone can convey better than the weak-willed Homo sapiens who ply
their trade therein. This one was a solid building that would be
considered squat, if not for a faintly baroque tower that might
have been the battlement of a castle. The American and Colorado
flags flew atop the tower, crackling in the early-morning
breeze.

Rosebushes crept up a knee-high iron fence
that surrounded the building, and spruce and aspen trees provided a
measure of shade. On the lawn was the obligatory statue honoring
local lads who died in various wars, and above the entrance was
Lady Justice.

Inside were plaques naming 4-H champions,
old black-and-white photos of cowboys, miners, and farmers at work.
The local police and county sheriff s offices were in the basement,
the county treasurer, the county commission, and tax assessor’s
offices were on the first floor. Hardwood stairs with a polished
balustraded railing led to the courtroom on the second floor, but
my business wasn’t there.

I went into the tax assessor’s office where
a pleasant young woman in jeans and a cotton sweater hoisted a
ledger book off a shelf for me. The book had the musty smell of age
and the heft of a decent-sized barbell. The walls were decorated
with framed deeds from the 1800s, plat maps, and the other official
memorabilia of the town.

Before opening the book, I studied a framed
map of what looked like the town maybe a hundred years ago. There
was the courthouse, just where it is now, at the corner of Main and
Galena. But there was something odd.

“
What are those lines going
through the streets?” I asked the woman, who sat nearby, using a
fountain pen to make entries in another ledger.

She followed my gaze to the framed map.
“Mines.”

I read some of the names aloud. “‘Durant,
Little Nell, Enterprise, Little Mack, Pride of the Hills, Mollie
Gibson, Copperopolis, Esperanza.’ I thought the mines were in the
mountains, but some of the tunnels go right under Main Street.”

“
That’s right,” she said.
“The shafts generally were up on the slopes of the mountains, but
once they got as deep as they were going to go, the tunnels started
branching in all directions, like the streets of a town that hasn’t
been planned too well. We’ve got some right below the courthouse
here. Some old-timers say you could get from Smuggler Mountain over
to Aspen Mountain and never see the light of day. Just go down the
Mollie Gibson shaft, take the right tunnels and come up the
Compromise. The skiers on Aspen Mountain don’t know it, but
underneath all that snow are dozens of shafts and tunnels. They’re
still there, maybe some filled with water, some with rotting
timbers, but there are locals hereabouts who own the claims and are
just waiting for the price of silver to rise.”