Bluetick Revenge Page 2

  “How much?” I asked as I sipped my coffee.

  “Over three hundred thousand,” he said.

  “That’s a lot of blow jobs,” I said.

  “Very funny,” he replied. “It’s drug money. As soon as the feds left, she took all the cash she could find in the house and went into hiding.”

  “Then she decided she needed an attorney?”

  “Yeah, the money is in my safe.” He swiveled in his chair and gestured to show that the safe was in the credenza behind his desk. “It’s possible she took even more and just hasn’t told me about it. I guess Bugg doesn’t like banks. Anyhow, it didn’t take long for me to realize she had a serious meth habit, and I knew the feds would consider her more credible if she got clean, so I urged her to enter a treatment program. There’s no way she can go back to Bugg, but she could still be of immense help to the feds. I told her the Witness Protection Program was her only chance, but she’d have to be drug free. She pitched a fit, so I told her to find another lawyer. She finally agreed to enter a thirty-day residential program on the condition that I get the dog for her.”

  “And recalling that I am unemployed and moderately adventurous, you hired me to snag the dog formerly known as Prince for your kinky, drug-addicted, dog-loving client?”

  “Yes,” he replied. I finished my coffee and he asked if I wanted more. I said I did, so he punched the intercom button with one of his beefy fingers and asked the receptionist to bring me a refill.

  “How is Prince?” he asked.

  “He’s fine,” I said. “His lot in life has improved greatly in the last fifteen hours. He’s asleep on the couch in my basement.”

  “You didn’t leave him outside?”

  “Can’t,” I said. “Don’t want word getting out that I recently acquired a bluetick coonhound. Dog like that would stick out in Nederland.”

  “How come?” he asked.

  “When’s the last time you saw a hippie hunting raccoons at eight thousand feet?” Nederland sits 8,236 feet above sea level. It is widely known as one of the last hippie towns in America, though it is also populated by cowboys, miners, professionals who work in Boulder, and the occasional ex-Marine JAG who just wants to live in a small mountain town and not be bothered by anyone. Ninety-nine percent of the dogs in Nederland are descended from malamutes, huskies, or wolf hybrids.

  “I get your point,” Matt said. “Does he get along with your dogs?”

  “Seems to,” I said. I have two dogs, Buck and Wheat. Buck is a cross between a Great Dane and a Rhodesian ridgeback. Wheat is purebred schipperke and resembles a black fox.

  The receptionist brought my coffee and took back the empty cup and saucer. I flashed my pearly whites and thanked her. She remained pleasant but professional. “Cold,” I said, after she had departed.

  “The coffee or Theresa?”

  “Theresa.”

  “I thought you had a girlfriend,” he said.

  “I do,” I said. “I was just making an observation.”

  “Anyhow, she’s not your type.”

  “My type is hard to find,” I replied.

  “I’ll bet,” he said. “You can get beauty and brains if you’re lucky, but beauty, brains, philosopher, and redneck is hard to come by.”

  “I’m an enlightened redneck,” I said. “I own a gun, but I vote Democratic.”

  “Getting back to the business at hand,” he said. I met his eyes to signal I was listening. “While Ms. Slade was in treatment, I worked out an agreement with the U.S. attorney. She gets immunity but has to tell all in front of a grand jury, then testify at trial. When it’s over, they’ll relocate her and give her a new life.”

  “Do the feds know she took money from Bugg?” I asked.

  “I’m sure they’ve heard she took some money,” he said, “but they haven’t really asked about it and I haven’t volunteered it. It may come up as they begin to prep her for the grand jury, but for now I think they are content to let her keep whatever she took as long as she cooperates. And they understand that I need to get paid somehow.”

  “Sounds like you earned your money,” I said. “She stays out of prison and starts life over with three hundred grand.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said, “but when I went to visit her a few days ago, she was having second thoughts. She’d been in jail when she was younger and wasn’t looking forward to being babysat by federal marshals in a Ramada for the next year or two while the feds build a case.”

  “I don’t like what I see coming,” I said.

  “It would just be for a few weeks,” he said. “I’m working on an arrangement that will enable the feds to relocate her now and just bring her back when she has to testify. That has to be approved by some deputy assistant something or other at the Justice Department, and that takes time. In the meantime, I need someone to protect her from Bugg—and from herself.” I let out a long sigh.

  “There are people more qualified than me,” I said. “Security professionals, bodyguards, retired cops.” He sat up straight and looked me right in the eyes.

  “I’ve practiced law for nearly twenty years,” he said, “and I’ve employed a lot of those types. Most of them are dumber than shit. You read Wittgenstein for fun and have more balls than anyone I know.”

  “It doesn’t sound like this is going to involve much philosophical analysis,” I said.

  “No, but you’ll be well compensated.”

  “How much did you have in mind?”

  “I was thinking two thousand a week,” he said. “And as much money as you need for expenses. She left Bugg with little more than the clothes on her back, so she’ll need some new clothes and some personal items.” He looked at me, waiting for an answer. His eyes give him only slightly less moral authority than the Uncle Sam portrayed in those wonderful World War I recruiting posters.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “When do I meet her?”

  “In about twenty minutes,” he said. “She finished treatment this morning. My paralegal is headed over there now to pick her up.”

  3

  THE DRIVE BACK to my mountain home was tense. Karlynn and I had not gotten off to a good start. After Matt had introduced us and told her I had recovered Prince, her first words had been “What kind of name is Pepper?” That was strike one.

  “It’s the name my parents gave me,” I said. She sighed, then sat down in one of the chairs opposite Matt’s desk and lit a cigarette without asking. That was strike two. Matt’s cigar was one thing, but cigarettes were another.

  Matt and I took our seats, and he explained what was happening with the feds and what my role would be. FBI agents had interviewed Karlynn at the treatment center before finalizing the immunity agreement. Those agents and federal prosecutors would question her again several times in the next few weeks, and those sessions would lay the foundation for the case against Bugg and the Sons of Satan. Her statements would provide the probable cause needed to obtain permission to install wiretaps and to subpoena bank and phone records. Then the feds would begin building a case from the bottom up. “If things go as planned,” Matt told her, “you and Prince will be living a new life before the end of the year.” That sounds like more than a few weeks, I thought. When it was time to seek indictments, Matt continued, the feds would bring her back to testify to a grand jury. Then they would make arrests. The first trials might not take place until a year later.

  As Matt began to tell her about my background and qualifications, I sized her up. She was five-five and weighed only about 115. Blue eyes. Her breasts were disproportionately large for the rest of her sleek body. Her dark, stringy hair was of medium length. She wore tight, faded jeans, a pale yellow T-shirt with the name of a bar emblazoned across it, and black boots with spiked heels. No makeup that I could detect. About thirty-two years old, I guessed. She turned and looked at me.

  “You don’t look like a bodyguard,” she said. I wore tan slacks, a blue oxford shirt, a
navy blazer, and cordovan loafers. No tie. At five-ten and 215 pounds, I was hardly small, but nobody was mistaking me for a professional wrestler.

  “Mr. Keane can handle himself,” Matt assured her, “don’t worry about that.” He paused to make sure he had her attention. “The important thing is for you to stay drug free and to cooperate with the feds. If you screw this up, Karlynn, there’s not going to be anything that I or any other attorney can do for you. Do you understand?” She nodded like a teenage girl trying to pacify her parents.

  “I mean it,” he said.

  “I heard you,” she said.

  Now, as we headed west on the Boulder Turnpike in my truck, she sat in silence and smoked a cigarette. At my insistence she’d cracked her window and was holding the cancer stick up to it. I was listening to Jim Rome’s nationally syndicated sports talk show. The show has a vernacular of its own, and regular listeners are referred to as “clones.” I suppose I’m a clone, though I’ve never called the show. Much of the show consists of clones putting down other clones, and it is often downright hilarious. Currently we were listening to Roger in Buffalo suggest that Clarence in Oakland should spend less time calling the show to explain why the Raiders would win the Super Bowl, and more time looking for a job.

  “Can we listen to something else?” Karlynn said. From her tone you’d have thought I’d been forcing her to listen to it for months. This is going to be a fun couple of weeks, I thought.

  “Sure,” I said. “Anything except rap or heavy metal.” She fiddled with the radio until she found a classic rock station. Another ten minutes passed before she said anything.

  “So you were in the army?” she said.

  “Marines,” I said.

  “Same thing,” she said. Ordinarily that would have been strike three, but for two thousand a week I could cut her some slack.

  “No, it’s not the same thing,” I said. “The army fights land wars; the Marine Corps supports naval operations.” She just stared out the window.

  We came into Boulder on Twenty-eighth Street, and I pulled into the Boulder Mall. The indoor mall, not the one on Pearl Street. It’s a dying mall, and only a few stores remain. The city of Boulder has been trying to figure out what to do with it for years, but the city council has been more concerned with human rights abuses in Tibet and making sure the rest of the world knows that Boulder is a nuclear-free zone than it has been with sales tax revenue. “What are we doing here?” she asked.

  “Shopping,” I said. “This is where you get your clothes and whatever else you need.” I found a space, put the truck in park, and cut the engine.

  “I don’t need anything,” she said.

  “Look,” I said, “I live in a house two miles out of a small town, and it’s a town a lot of your biker friends like to visit when things get a little dull back at the old amphetamine ranch. You’re not going to be able to waltz into town whenever you need a carton of cigarettes or someTampax.”

  “Fuck,” she said. She opened the door, got out, and slammed it shut. I shook my head.

  “You might want to buy some hair dye, too,” I said. “Bugg and his goons are looking for you.”

  We entered the mall through the Foley’s entrance. Foley’s is a department store once known as May D&F. I think the “D&F” stood for “dry goods and furnishings,” but that’s just a guess. It might have stood for “downtown and freakin’ expensive.” Though it was still a few days before Thanksgiving, the store had its Christmas face on. Fake pine trees adorned with bells and tinsel were strategically positioned, each with colorful packages beneath it. Karlynn went straight to the lingerie section and I followed. She began sifting through a bin of pastel panties as I stood watch. “Do you have to watch me buy underwear?” she said.

  “Part of the job.”

  “Try not to enjoy it too much,” she said.

  When she’d finished in lingerie, I followed her through the store as she selected jeans, shirts, and a few personal items. I paid for everything. Matt had given me ten thousand in cash. When we finally went to pay for her purchases, the cashier thought we were married and told me I would receive a free set of perfume and lotion for my wife if I opened a charge account. “We won’t be together much longer,” I said.

  By the time she had finished shopping, it was nearly one and I was hungry. “Want something to eat?” I asked.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  “Mind if I hit the food court?”

  “Whatever,” she said. I started walking in that direction. She waited a moment, then ran as best she could in her boots until she was beside me. I carried several shopping bags in my left hand, leaving my right hand free in case I needed my Glock. She carried the third bag. The food court was surprisingly busy given that few stores remained at the mall, but I found an empty booth and placed the bags on one of the benches. She followed suit.

  The rectangular food court had once boasted a dozen vendors, but competition from a newer mall in nearby Broomfield had taken its toll. The Broomfield City Council does not care about Tibet or nuclear weapons. There were now only three vendors, the other spaces boarded up. I handed Karlynn a twenty and told her to get whatever she wanted. I got in the pizza line, ordered two slices with mushrooms and a large diet Coke. When I returned to our table, she was not there. I slowly scanned the area until I’d turned 360 degrees, but she was nowhere to be seen. Damn, I thought, I’m going to have to be more careful.

  I set my food down and began walking the perimeter of the food court. I checked all three establishments. Just when I was really starting to worry, I saw her walking down a long passageway toward me. She’d been using the restroom. She saw the look on my face.

  “You think I took off on you?” she asked. I studied her face and manner, but she showed no signs of drug use.

  “That crossed my mind,” I said. “I told you to get some food; I didn’t tell you to go to the bathroom.”

  “I don’t need your permission to take a piss,” she said.

  “No, but you need me to protect you from Bugg and his scumbag friends, and I can’t do it if I don’t know where you are.” We started walking toward our table. She stopped at the Greek place, purchased a gyro and an orange soda.

  We sat across from each other, not saying much. “You married?” she finally said.

  “No.”

  “Kids?”

  “No.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “More or less.”

  “She live with you?”

  “No.”

  “How’s she gonna feel about me staying at your place?”

  “That’s a damn good question,” I said. Fortunately, Jayne Smyers, PhD, associate professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado, was in the middle of a nine-month stint teaching fractal geometry at Peking University and wouldn’t be returning until Christmas, at which time we hoped to share ten wonderful days with each other. Peking University is in Beijing, which was known as Peking until the 1980s, when translators began using the pinyin system of romanization of Chinese. For reasons unknown they still call it Peking University rather than Beijing University. Maybe the person in charge of the university was a 270-pound cigar-smoking Chinese man who didn’t want to have to pay some fucker to design a new logo.

  “What about you?” I said to Karlynn. “What’s your story?” She said nothing, didn’t even look at me. “I was just making conversation,” I said. “If you don’t want to talk, that’s fine.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” she said. “I left McCook, Nebraska, the day I graduated from high school, and took the bus to Omaha. I met Thad in Sturgis seven years ago and I’ve been with him ever since. Then the feds came after me, and you know the rest of the story.”

  “You left him after one visit from the FBI,” I said. “I think you already had one foot out the door.” She lit a cigarette, then pursed her lips and released a stream of smoke with the expertise of a woman who’d been smoking a long time.

  “He
’s a prick,” she said. “I loved him once, or thought I did, but the gang is everything to him now.” I nodded. “He drinks too much. Stays out for weeks. Treats me like shit.”

  “He beat you?” I asked. In the light of the food court I had noticed some faint yellow discoloration beside her left eye. She ignored the question, and I went back to work on one of my pizza slices.

  “He didn’t used to,” she finally said. I sensed she felt shame for letting him treat her that way.

  “He beat you a lot?” I asked.

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Sure,” I said. “You have any family?”

  “There’s another great topic,” she said. She took a drag on her cigarette, this time releasing the smoke more slowly. “My brother Lyle is doing twenty to life in Lincoln for second-degree murder.” She put the cigarette down and resumed eating.

  “That’s it?”

  “Christ,” she said, “you’re as bad as the feds. My mom was a drunk and died of cirrhosis. My dad still lives in McCook, I guess, but I haven’t seen him in years and I hope I never see his sorry ass again.” I took the hint, finished my second slice of pizza, and began getting ready to leave.

  “Oh, shit,” she said. She turned her head away from the food court entrance so that she was facing the wall on the closed side of our booth.

  “What?”

  “That man over there. That’s Anvil. He’s one of Thad’s enforcers.” I looked toward the entrance and saw a bearish man. He stood six-four and must’ve weighed 260. His complexion was ruddy and pockmarked. About thirty years old. His scraggly red-blond hair reached nearly to his shoulders. He wore black boots and a black leather jacket with the Sons of Satan emblem across the back. He had a slight beer belly, but a belt made of bicycle chain prevented his tattered jeans from slipping too far down.

  “Did he see you?” I asked.

  “I think so,” she said. She was using her soft drink cup to shield her face from him.