Bluetick Revenge Read online

  “Okay,” she said.

  Forty-five minutes after leaving Nederland I pulled into the Colorado Furniture Warehouse parking lot. It was just after ten, but the lot was nearly full. Even in a slow economy people want furniture, and banks and credit card companies are more than happy to accommodate them. No money down, no payments for six months, blah, blah, blah.

  I found a space and parked the truck. “This will just take a few minutes,” I said. “You wait here. Keep the doors locked and just start honking the horn if there’s any trouble.”

  “Can’t I go in and look at furniture or something?”

  “That’s not a good idea,” I said. “You might run into someone you know.” Chances of that were slim, but I did not want her with me when I talked with Paul Krait.

  “Okay,” she sighed.

  “Just wait here and think about where you want to go for lunch.”

  I got out of the car and started walking toward the warehouse entrance. It was downright balmy in Denver, nearly seventy degrees. I wore khaki slacks and a green poplin jacket.

  As customers backed their vehicles into the loading area, I opened a metal door and walked inside, where more people were standing around with purchase orders in their hands, waiting for their names to be called over the PA system.

  The warehouse itself was gigantic—several football fields long and at least one hundred feet high. There were rows and rows of furniture, and each row was stacked to the ceiling. Young kids maneuvered forklifts back and forth like trained ants. A balding middle-aged man at the desk asked if I’d been helped. I told him I wanted to speak with Paul Krait.

  “You a cop?” he asked.

  “This is unofficial,” I said. “Just need to speak with him for a minute.”

  “He’s over there,” said the man. He pointed to a young kid driving one of the forklifts.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  There was a sign indicating no customers were allowed beyond a certain point. I ignored it and started walking deliberately across the concrete floor toward Krait. He was about five-eight and on the thin side. His blond hair was cropped short—still a skinhead. He wore jeans, working boots, and a black sweatshirt. He must have thought I was there for some other purpose, because he paid no mind to me until I was within a few feet of him. “Turn that thing off,” I said. “I want to talk with you.”

  “Hey, man, who the fu—” I grabbed the neck of his sweatshirt and again told him to turn the forklift off. He did. Then I yanked him from his seat and walked him to a spot behind one of the long aisles of furniture stacked to the roof. I pushed him up against a large cardboard box—hard—so that his back was to it, then let go of his sweatshirt.

  “A few years back,” I said, “the cops made you listen to a tape. You told them the voice on the tape sounded like a guy named Skull. Remember that?”

  “Hey, man, what right do—” I placed my right hand around his neck and pinned it to the cardboard box.

  “Listen,” I said, “I don’t like skinheads. I’d just as soon kill your little racist ass, but I have enough problems right now. You answer my questions, we’ll be done in three minutes. You don’t, you’re in for a bad, bad day.”

  “I’m not a racist,” he said. “I’m a member of SHARP.” He was thoroughly intimidated at this point—exactly the result I had hoped my forthright approach would produce. I loosened the pressure on his neck slightly.

  “What’s SHARP?”

  “Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice. I’m not into all that hate and violence anymore.”

  “Good,” I said, “then you won’t mind answering my questions.” I let go of his neck.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I’m just a guy who wants to find Skull,” I said. “You remember that interview with the cops?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who gave you the tape with Skull’s voice on it?”

  “Like I told the cops, I don’t know.” I backhanded him, not hard. “Jesus, man, I don’t know. We’d go to these clubs, and people would pass out shit like that all the time.”

  “Who’d you give the tape to?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He waited to see if I intended to strike him again. I didn’t.

  “You told the cops Skull talked about some kind of camp in Idaho. What do you remember about that?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “some kind of training camp where they teach you how to shoot and how to survive in the woods and shit like that.”

  “So you could kill niggers, fags, and Jews,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What else do remember about that tape? Think hard.” He looked down at the concrete floor as if to think for a moment. “What did the tape look like? Was there an address or phone number on it?”

  “There was no label on it,” he said.

  “How were people supposed to get in touch with Skull if they wanted to visit this camp?”

  “I don’t know, man; I guess you just had to head up to Idaho and ask around.”

  “Thanks for your cooperation,” I said. “Have a nice day.”

  I walked back to the warehouse entrance, put a dollar into a vending machine and bought a can of diet Coke, then walked out to the parking lot. When I got to my truck, the doors were locked, but Karlynn Slade and her purse were both gone.

  15

  AFTER I FINISHED mentally cursing myself for being so stupid, I jogged back to the store and began walking methodically up and down the aisles on the showroom floor. Past recliners, bedroom sets, dining sets, kitchen sets, sofas, coffee tables, office furniture, and home entertainment centers. Then I checked the restrooms, including the women’s room, and the warehouse. No sign of her.

  I walked back outside, climbed into my truck, and closed my eyes. I had to think. The horn had not sounded; I would have heard it, even in the warehouse. There was no sign of a struggle in or near my truck. The doors to my truck had been locked when I returned from my talk with Krait. If you were going to kidnap a woman from a truck, you probably wouldn’t bother to lock the doors after you had pulled her out of there. Suddenly, the purse made sense. Karlynn had ditched me. And by implication she had begun the process of ditching Matt Simms, the FBI, the U.S. Marshals, Thad Bugg, and the Sons of Satan. Not to mention Prince.

  I picked up my cell phone and dialed the offices of Keane, Simms & Mercante as my truck idled in the parking lot. The receptionist gave me the standard bit—Matt was in court and could she take a message or put me through to his voice mail. “Look,” I said, “this is Pepper Keane—the man who founded your law firm; my name is on the wall behind your desk. This is important. So if Matt is there, I need to speak with him ASAFP.” She put me on hold.

  “What’s up?” Matt said. “Theresa thinks you’re an asshole, by the way.”

  “Karlynn just flew the coop,” I said. “I left her in the truck while I went in to talk with a kid who works at the Colorado Furniture Warehouse. When I came out, she was gone.”

  “Any chance someone snagged her?”

  “No,” I said. I explained my answer.

  “Think you can find her?”

  “It’s a long shot.”

  “She’s supposed to report to the U.S. marshal’s office on Friday. That gives you four days to find her and talk some sense into her.”

  “What happens if I don’t find her by then?”

  “They’ll indict her and issue an arrest warrant. She’ll be fucked as far as the Witness Protection Program goes. And my credibility will probably be fucked too.”

  “What if I don’t find her until after Friday?”

  “That’s a tough one,” he said. “Congress passed these damn sentencing guidelines, so she’ll be looking at some real time if they want to play hardball. The judge has no discretion.”

  “If I don’t turn her in, maybe she disappears and lives happily ever after.” I paused. “Or maybe Bugg finds her and kills her.”

  “Let’s revisit the question on Fri
day,” he said.

  “I’m sorry about this,” I said.

  “She fooled me, too,” he said. “I thought she was really ready for this.”

  “Damn it,” I said.

  “Berating yourself won’t help,” he said, “even though you’re good at it. Let’s start working on a plan.”

  “I’ve got a plan,” I said, “but it’s gonna take money.” With apologies to George Harrison, it was going to take a whole lot of precious money. Plenty of money.

  “We’ve got nearly three hundred grand in my safe,” he said. “Are you still at the warehouse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s just a few miles away. Why don’t you swing by and pick some up. Having it here makes me nervous.”

  16

  I PUT THE TRUCK IN GEAR and headed downtown to get the cash from Matt. While I was driving, I called Scott on my cell phone and explained what had happened.

  “You got a plan?” he asked.

  “I’m working on one. Will Bobbi give you a week off?” Bobbi, Scott’s longtime girlfriend, is a Boulder realtor. They live in Scott’s south Boulder home, but Bobbi still maintains her own condo. This arrangement had worked well and Scott had never seen any reason to superimpose a marriage on it.

  “She’ll be glad to get rid of me for a week. A woman can only stand so much pleasure.”

  “Okay, pack whatever you need for a week of driving and eating in truck stops. I’ll pick you up in a few hours.”

  I parked in a lot next to Matt’s building. It was one of those lots where you have to slide currency into a slot in a metal box with a number that corresponds to the number of your parking place. I had used my last dollar bill to buy a diet Coke at the furniture place. All I had were twenties, and there was nobody available to make change. For a long time I have kept a phony million-dollar bill in my wallet and offered it now and then to convenience store clerks as a gag. It looked real enough, so I folded it into a rectangle about the size of stick of gum and pushed it into the appropriate slot.

  I walked past the receptionist into Matt’s office and closed the door. “You going to tell me what the plan is?” he said.

  “No time to chat,” I said. “I’ll call you from my cell phone on my way back to Nederland. Right now I want to make tracks. My guess is, she stuck out her thumb and took the first ride she could get out of Denver. The longer I wait, the greater the distance she may have traveled.”

  “The money’s in that box,” he said. He pointed to a cardboard box on the floor—the kind law firms use to store closed files.

  “How much is in there?”

  “Just about all of it,” he said. “I kept twenty thousand to cover her future legal fees. Keep track of how you spend it in case the feds get her first and she happens to tell them she gave me three hundred thousand in drug money. I want to be able to account fork.”

  I picked up the box. “I’m going to send you an e-mail in about an hour. It would be helpful if you could put a couple of people to work finding a fax number or e-mail address for every truck stop, greasy spoon, and low-rent motel in the mountain time zone. Give priority to places north and west of here.”

  “May the force be with you,” he said.

  “McCutcheon will be with me,” I said. “That should be good enough.”

  My F-150 has a shell on the back, so I slid the box as far back into the bed as I could get it, and covered it with an old blanket.

  Scott was ready when I arrived at his house, so he loaded a suitcase and backpack into the back of my truck. Then he went back inside and came out with a pistol tucked into his belt, as well as a hunting rifle and two shotguns, which he placed on the floor of the king cab compartment behind the front seats.

  We headed up to Nederland so I could pack some things and get my dogs, which evidently now included a bluetick coonhound with excellent tracking skills. “What’s the plan?” Scott asked.

  “Remember those posters we put up all over the place to make Bugg think I’m actually doing something to earn my money?”

  “Yeah. Did anyone ever call you?”

  “No, but this time we’re going to add our cell phone numbers, my e-mail address, and a big reward, then e-mail it to Big Matt. He can put his minions to work faxing the damn thing all over the western U.S.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Then we’re going to head north on I-25.” I remembered when it had been known simply as the Valley Highway. Denver is a big city now, with skyscrapers and major league sports teams, but I liked it better when the biggest tourist attraction was the revolving restaurant on top of the Holiday Inn, and the basketball team played with a red, white, and blue ball at the stockyards coliseum.

  “Why north?”

  “I-25 passes right by the furniture place. The nearest freeway ramp would have been the one for northbound traffic. That’s where she would have stuck out her thumb.”

  “Maybe you’re not giving her enough credit,” he said. “Maybe she’d had this planned for a while and had someone ready to meet her.”

  “No way,” I said. “She didn’t even know I was going to Denver until this morning. And she didn’t know I was going to the furniture warehouse until I pulled into the parking lot.”

  When we got to Nederland, I gassed up the truck at the Sinclair, which had formerly been the Texaco. Next I went to the bank and withdrew twenty thousand dollars I had parked in a savings account just in case all my other investments went to hell some day.

  “You’ve got three hundred grand in the back of your truck,” Scott said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  I explained my logic to him, then drove to Backcountry Pizza to buy a large diet Coke from the fountain. I’m a diet Coke addict. I used to get it at the B&F Mountain Market, but they had switched to Pepsi to cut costs, and the Sinclair/Texaco had always been a Pepsi dealer. With fuel for the truck and a forty-eight-ounce diet Coke for me, I drove to my home.

  I put the money I had withdrawn from the bank into a small safe I have that looks identical to a can of Coke, and I put that in the refrigerator. I went to my desk and modified the Karlynn poster on my laptop, then e-mailed it to Matt with instructions on what to do. I tried to call Bugg at his home and on his cell phone, but there was no answer. I guess being the leader of a sadistic biker gang keeps you pretty busy.

  “Hey, look at this,” Scott said from the kitchen.

  I walked into the kitchen and he handed me a yellow legal pad. On it was a note, obviously written by Karlynn: “Prince is yours now. Take good care of him. Thanks for everything. Watch out for Thad—he can hold a grudge for a long time.”

  “Shit,” I said. I could be succinct when I wanted to.

  I packed a small suitcase. My backpack is always ready to go, so that was no problem. I loaded both into the back of the truck, along with a five-gallon plastic container of premium duck-and-potatoes dog chow. Wheat has a sensitive stomach and can’t eat regular dog food. It has to be duck and potatoes.

  I whistled and ushered my three dogs into the back of the truck. I went back into the house and grabbed my laptop, my medication, my file on Karlynn and Bugg, and Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy in case I got any free time. Then it was back down the canyon to Boulder.

  There is no cell phone service in the canyon, but as soon as we hit Boulder, I called Nancy at work and asked her for Kendra Carlson’s phone number.

  “Are you going to ask her out?” Nancy asked.

  “Karlynn took off on me,” I explained. “I just need to ask Kendra if she has any thoughts on where Karlynn might have gone. They had three sessions last week.”

  “Kendra won’t reveal privileged information,” Nancy said.

  “I’ll take any help she can offer,” I said.

  “Here’s the number,” Nancy said. I repeated it as Nancy gave it to me, and Scott wrote it down on the back of a napkin as I repeated it.

  I called Kendra right away but was automatically dumped into voice mail. I left a me
ssage asking her to call me and said it was important.

  I stopped at the Office Depot in Boulder and had them make one thousand copies of the revised Karlynn poster. While I was watching the kid behind the counter to make sure he understood that I wanted the copies immediately, I told Scott to buy two good staplers and a supply of Scotch tape.

  It took another thirty minutes to reach I-25 via Highway 52. There is a McDonald’s there as well as a few gas stations. I put some posters up at the golden arches while Scott visited the gas stations and handed out posters to truckers.

  We headed north on I-25 toward Fort Collins. Scott was looking at a map he had found in my glove compartment. “What are we going to do when we hit Cheyenne?” he asked. 1-25 intersects 1-80 at Cheyenne, Wyoming. You can go north to Casper, west across Wyoming into Utah, or east to Nebraska.

  “Probably go west,” I said.

  “And you know this because ¼ ?”

  “Just playing the probabilities,” I said. “She’s from Nebraska and doesn’t have fond memories of it, so I don’t think she’d head in that direction. The largest city north of Cheyenne is Casper, which isn’t exactly a crossroads of commerce. I figure most of the northbound traffic on 25 out of Denver heads west on I-80 toward Salt Lake, Vegas, and L.A.” We were coming up on another truck stop in a place called Johnson’s Corner. “Plus, she’s thumbing it in December. I’d be wanting to get my ass to a warmer climate.”

  “It pains me to say this,” Scott said, “but everything you just said makes perfect sense. Maybe that year you spent in graduate school did some good.” I had spent a year studying philosophy and logic in graduate school early in my legal career, but had quit after one year because practicing law paid more. Also, to be honest, I had already finished my three years as a JAG and wasn’t good at taking orders from young graduate assistants who had never set foot off a college campus.

  Scott and I did our thing with the Karlynn posters in Johnson’s Corner, then got back on the Interstate and headed north. The sun was getting low on the western horizon, and I turned on my headlights. My cell phone rang. Or, more precisely, my cell phone began to sound its digital rendition of the theme song from Mister Ed. It was Kendra.