Bluetick Revenge Page 17

  “Reckon me and Prince will stay here till you get back, then head on home.”

  “If I’m not back in two hours, call Glen—the chief of police. Tell him there’s a meth lab in the cabin beside Bugg’s house. Tell him to take some sheriff’s deputies with him; everybody up there carries machine pistols.”

  I tucked my Glock into my shoulder holster, put my jacket on over it, climbed into my truck, and set out for the tiny town of Ward. I kept looking at myself in the rearview mirror to make sure the black hair dye had done its job.

  There were a few small pickup trucks and some motorcycles parked on the gravel at the end of the long dirt road leading to Bugg’s home. I carried the sack of cash up the steps to the front of the house.

  Bugg met me at the door, but a couple of his goons stepped out ahead of him. We were standing on the front deck. “Gotta frisk you,” one of them said to me. It was the man who looked like Jerry Garcia, the one I had run off the road the night I stole Prince. He started to move toward me to pat me down. I struck his chest with the heel of my palm so hard and so fast that he would have fallen on his ass if the exterior wall of the log home hadn’t been there to stop him.

  “Nobody takes my weapon,” I said.

  Jerry got up and was getting ready to charge. “Whoa,” Bugg said to him with something resembling a hearty laugh, “this here is my man. He’s a private dick. Of course he’s gonna carry a weapon.”

  I handed the paper sack full of cash to Bugg and would have been happy to leave, but he said, “C’mon in. I want to hear how you found that bitch.” Bugg led me to his living room, which had a rustic Western look punctuated by the fierce heads of a mountain lion and a black bear and the not so fierce head of a mountain goat. I took a chair against a wall that would enable me to see people coming into the room from any direction. Bugg sat down in the middle of an expensive leather-covered sofa and set the grocery sack down beside him. One of the goons sat down in a chair beside the sofa, and the other goon walked into some other part of the home.

  “Want a beer?” Bugg asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “So how’d you find her?” he said. I almost slipped. I almost told him she had ditched me at the furniture store. I almost told him that any woman looking for a ride at that location would’ve stuck out her thumb on the northbound side of the freeway.

  “You told me she wouldn’t go back to Nebraska,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “And from what you said, most of her contacts are here in the Rockies, so I plastered posters all over the West and waited for the phone to ring.”

  “Keep going.”

  “Most of the calls were worthless, but we got a call from a trucker who said he thought he’d seen her thumbing for a ride on Interstate Eighty westbound just west of Laramie, so we—”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “I’ve got a partner I work with sometimes. So we headed up to Laramie and just keep putting up posters and taking phone calls from people. Next thing you know we’re in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. So we start asking questions up there and find out she’s working as a waitress in some bar. The people at the bar tell us she’s living in a trailer. So we find her trailer, but when we get there she is gone. She left in hurry. Somebody at the bar probably told her we were in town asking about her. Anyhow, we—”

  “How do you know she left in a hurry?”

  “Neighbors told us,” I said. He said nothing, so I pressed on. “So we get into her trailer, we find the dog on the bed, then we find a ton of cash—get this—inside the freezer.”

  “In the freezer?”

  “Yeah. Now at that point I figure we’ve got the dog and the cash, and who knows where your wife took off to? So we decided to head home.”

  “You remember the name of the trailer park?”

  “Lewis and Clark Trailer Park.”

  “So tell me about these guys that attacked you.”

  “All right, we’ve got the dog and the money and we’re heading east out of Coeur d’Alene, thinking maybe we’ll take a different route home, when three rednecks in a pickup start coming up on us from behind, pointing rifles at us, and trying to run us off the road. The road is covered with ice and it’s too dangerous to try to outrun them, so I start slowing down and then come to a stop. As soon as they stop behind me, I shove it into reverse and ram them. I dive out my side and run into the woods, and my buddy rolls out his side and ducks behind a snowbank on the other side of the road. Suddenly they’re shooting at us, so we shoot back. When they realize we have them sandwiched, they get back into their truck and take off. When they’re gone we go back to my truck, which is damaged from me backing into them and is full of bullet holes, and that’s when I see that the hound is bleeding from the throat. He wasn’t going to make it, so we carried him into the woods and I shot him. Then we buried him.”

  “You have any other dogs with you?” he asked.

  “Sure. I always take my dogs with me.”

  “They hurt?”

  “Just banged up from me ramming my truck into the other truck.”

  “Any damage to your truck?”

  “Plenty. The whole back end is crushed because these guys had a big wooden bumper on the front of their truck. Some of the windows are shattered and the thing is full of bullet holes.”

  “Your truck looks to be in pretty good shape now,” he said. “How’d you get it fixed so fast?”

  “That truck outside?”

  “Yeah. You own any other truck?”

  “That’s a new truck,” I said. “There was no way I was going to try to bring all that cash back to Colorado in a truck filled with bullet holes. That would’ve been stupid. We left my truck in the woods, and I bought a new truck.”

  “With my money?”

  “I didn’t have time to shop for a loan,” I said.

  He peered into the grocery sack and looked at the cash. “How do I know this is all the cash you found in her trailer? Maybe you decided to pay yourself a commission.”

  “I’m not that dumb,” I said.

  “What I don’t get is why three guys would attack you like that.”

  “Who knows? Maybe they were drunk. Didn’t like our looks. Mistook us for someone else. With all that cash on us, it wasn’t like we could go to the police.”

  “So what do I owe you?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just let me keep the truck, and we’re even.”

  He looked at the cash again and said, “Well, I figure you earned it.” I started to stand up. “Hey, before you leave. Did you learn anything about why she left or where she might be headed?”

  “I’ve got some thoughts on that,” I said. “You mind if I get a glass of water?”

  “Help yourself,” he said.

  I walked into the kitchen, found a plastic cup in one of the cabinets, and filled it with chilled water from the refrigerator. I heard Bugg tell the goon to go check on things outside; then I heard him get up and go the bathroom. I looked around to make sure nobody else was watching, and quietly slid open the drawer to the right of the refrigerator. I removed the address book and slid it into a pocket inside my jacket. Then I gently removed the gold pen from my shirt pocket and placed it on the floor by the refrigerator.

  I took my cup of water back into the living room and resumed my seat. Bugg returned and plopped back down into the sofa. “Here’s the deal,” I said. “This is just a guess, but I think the feds backed your wife into a corner—testify against you or go to jail.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Think about it,” I said. “She’s got all this money she took from you, but instead of renting a car or buying a plane ticket, she’s catching rides with truckers. She doesn’t want to leave a paper trail, because she doesn’t want the feds to find her.”

  Bugg rolled his head a few times. “Why didn’t she take the dog when she left me?”

  “I don’t know. But at some point she decided she wanted to take the dog wi
th her, so she hired someone to steal him from you.”

  “I’d sure like to get my hands on that bastard,” he said.

  “Almost impossible to track him down,” I said. “Would cost you more than it would be worth.”

  He sighed. “Okay, any idea where my wife is headed?”

  “Only thing we know for sure is, she was headed north and west. She have any friends up there?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Coeur d’Alene is pretty close to the Canadian border,” I said.

  “Canada?”

  “Might be harder for the feds to find her if she’s living up there.”

  “Yeah.”

  I stood. He stood. We shook hands. “Sorry about your dog,” I said.

  “You did a good job. If I can send you any business, I will.”

  I climbed into my truck and headed back to Nederland. “Great,” I said to myself, “I’m the staff investigator for the Sons of Satan.”

  30

  I KNEW THERE WOULD BE no photocopier in Ward, so I drove like a bat out of hell to Nederland, parked in front of the business supply store, made a copy of every page in Bugg’s address book, bought a diet Coke at Backcountry Pizza, and drove like a bat out of hell back to Bugg’s house. The whole trip took less than forty minutes.

  Jerry Garcia was standing on the front deck with a machine pistol when I parked my truck. He saw me heading for the front door and said, “Forget something?” I didn’t see Bugg around, and I was worried that fat Jerry might want a little payback.

  “Yeah, I did. My gold pen. It must’ve fallen out of my pocket. You guys find one?”

  “Not that I know of. But come on in and look around if you like. I don’t guess Bugg would care.”

  I followed him in and then made a show of searching all around the area in the living room where I had been sitting. “Shit,” I said, “it has to be here somewhere. Where else did I go? Maybe I lost it in the kitchen.”

  I walked into the kitchen. Jerry didn’t follow me, but he could still see me. I stopped by the refrigerator. “Here it is,” I said. “What an idiot I am.” I bent down, picked up the pen, and put it in my shirt pocket. But how was I going to put the address book back in the drawer without Jerry seeing me do it? “Hey,” I said, “mind if I help myself to some water?”

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  I found a clean glass and filled it with chilled water from the refrigerator. Then I pushed my glass up against the device that is supposed to dispense ice cubes, but I jammed the ice up in there with my palm so it wouldn’t come out and I held it that way for a few seconds so that the grinding sound of the jammed ice dispenser was obvious. Then, pretending to be frustrated because of the jammed ice dispenser, I opened the freezer door to grab some ice from the ice holder. Using the open freezer door to shield myself from view, I used my right hand to open the top drawer nearest to the refrigerator and I slipped the address book into it.

  I walked back out to the living room, carrying my glass of water, and there he was in all his splendor. Anvil.

  I set my water down on an antique hutch and slowly started raising my right hand to reach inside my jacket for my Glock. Anvil looked at me, then looked at Jerry and said, “Who’s this guy?”

  “He’s a private eye Bugg hired to find Karlynn. Take your coat off; I’ll tell you all about it. I guess we don’t have to worry about that bitch anymore.”

  31

  LATER THAT MORNING I said good-bye to crazy Uncle Ray and Prince. As long as Ray didn’t start drinking again, Prince would be in good hands. He’d eat what Ray ate, sleep when Ray slept, and always have a roof over his head. And he’d have miles and miles of land in southern Colorado to call his own.

  Feeling lonely and more than a little lucky, I drove down to Wanda’s bakery.

  “Where did your stripe go?” Wanda said.

  “Long story,” I said.

  I gave Wanda’s black Lab, Zeke, a pat on the head, then bought a few donuts and some coffee. A tradition at Wanda’s is that each customer supplies his own special coffee mug. She washes them each night and hangs each one on a peg until that customer comes in again. Sadly, the Foghorn Leghorn mug I had used for years had broken recently, so I had replaced it with a mug featuring the face of Mr. T and the words “Don’t Be a Fool; Stay in School.”

  Mr. T, for those who don’t know, played the role of B. A. Baracus in a TV show called The A-Team, which was popular in the 1980s. I’m an educated man, but I am not ashamed to say that I believe The A-Team was one of the greatest television programs ever. The good guys always won, the bad guys always got what was coming to them, nobody ever got seriously hurt, and the four members of the A-Team always accomplished their mission with pizzazz. At the end of each episode, the A-Team’s leader, Colonel “Hannibal” Smith, played by George Peppard, would light a cigar, flash a big grin, and say, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

  My heart was still beating faster than it should have been. I needed to put Anvil out of my mind for a few minutes, so I started reading the paper. I was pleased to see that mine was not one of the names on the obituary page.

  Scott walked in and sat down across from me. It was the first time I had seen him since our return from Vegas. Immediately upon saying good-bye to Uncle Ray and Prince I had phoned Scott and asked him to meet me at Wanda’s.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  I told him the whole story, starting with the tale I had told Bugg about tracking Karlynn down to the Lewis and Clark Trailer Park and how we had just missed nabbing her. I told him about my having to put a bullet into Prince’s head and how we had conducted a nice Protestant ceremony for him in the Idaho pines. I told him that I kept about a hundred thousand dollars and gave the rest back to Bugg.

  “Sounds like everything went well,” he said. “Bugg thinks you’re a hero and you’re a hundred thousand dollars ahead.”

  “That’s not the end of the story,” I said.

  “I’d better get some coffee,” he said. Scott does not maintain a special mug at Wanda’s, so he had his coffee in a Styrofoam cup.

  I told him about stealing Bugg’s address book, speeding down to Nederland to copy it, then hightailing it back to Bugg’s place to return it under the pretense of searching for my gold pen.

  “Jesus H. W. Christ,” Scott said. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I don’t know. Put that out of your mind for a minute, because here’s where the story gets interesting.” He just looked at me. “As I am coming back into the living room from the kitchen, getting ready to get the hell out of there, who do you think walks in?”

  “Karylnn?”

  “Anvil.”

  “Anvil? I did what you told me to. I kept an eye on him for two hours. How was I supposed to know you were going to steal Bugg’s address book and go back to his house a second time?”

  “I’m not mad at you,” I said. “You did your job.”

  “What happened?”

  “Anvil and I make eye contact, and I’m getting ready to shoot both him and the other goon before I make a beeline for my truck, but Anvil just looks at the goon and asks who I am. The goon tells him I’m a private eye Bugg hired. I say adios and walk briskly to my truck.”

  “Anvil didn’t recognize you?”

  “I don’t know. The only other time he ever saw me was when I had my stripe.”

  “What’s your gut?”

  “He recognized me. He was within two feet of me at the food court. How could he not recognize me?”

  “Why didn’t he take you out or say something to the other goon?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I wanted to brainstorm with you.”

  “Maybe he wanted direction from Bugg before doing anything. Some organizations are managed from the top down. Maybe the Sons of Satan is one of them.”

  “There’s been a bounty on my head since I took the dog. Anvil saw me with Karlynn, so he should’ve known I took the dog. He doesn’t need
Bugg’s permission to take me out.”

  “Maybe he figured Bugg wants you alive so you can explain what you and Karlynn were doing together and where the rest of his money is.”

  “I don’t think Anvil ever told Bugg about seeing Karlynn with me. If he had, Bugg would have shared that with me to help in my search for Karlynn. Bugg never mentioned it.”

  “Maybe Bugg’s been onto you since he first hired you, and he’s just waiting for the right moment.”

  “Maybe Anvil isn’t Anvil.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if Anvil is undercover? That would explain why he didn’t push things too far when he saw me with Karlynn.”

  “He was just maintaining his cover for Karlynn’s benefit?”

  “Yeah. And he never told Bugg about seeing Karlynn with me, because he doesn’t give a shit about what Karlynn did to Bugg.”

  “When I talked with him in that bar in Longmont, he said he hadn’t seen Karlynn for a couple of months, and we know that’s a lie because he had just seen you and Karlynn at the mall.”

  “He doesn’t want Bugg to kill me. Or Karlynn.”

  “Okay,” said Scott. “If Anvil’s undercover, why does the FBI need Karlynn’s help in the first damned place? Anvil has been with Bugg for a few years; he knows the operation inside and out. You put him in front of a grand jury, and it’s ‘so long, Sons of Satan.’”

  “That’s a good point,” I said. “I thought about it. The only answer I can come up with is that maybe it’s one of those situations where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”

  “Anvil’s working for some other agency?”

  “It’s happened before,” I said.

  “What other agency would be interested in Bugg?”

  “DEA, ATF—who knows? Could be the Forest Service for all we know.”

  Scott shook his head from side to side. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves here. We don’t even know if Anvil recognized you.”

  “I’m not willing to gamble,” I said. “The safe approach is to assume that he did.”