Bluetick Revenge Page 23

  She was waiting outside the Federal Building when I pulled up in front of it. Actually, you can’t pull up in front of it, because the security people will assume you are a terrorist. Rather than make them nervous, I parked across the street and waited for her to cross. Sometimes it is better to be prudent than to be a gentleman.

  “Where to?” I said.

  “Pick a place,” she said. “I’m not big on lunch.”

  “Why did you invite me?”

  “Because I think you stumbled onto something.”

  I pulled into a McDonald’s about ten blocks north of downtown Denver, in what is politely called a minority neighborhood. “Come on,” I said, “they have good diet Coke here. I’ll treat.”

  Inside we ordered food and found a table. “Anvil is not an undercover agent,” she said. “No other agency is claiming credit for him.”

  “Who is he?” I said.

  “That’s where it gets interesting. All his public records refer to him as Robert Alton Pugh, but the real Robert Alton Pugh died three years ago. He was a graduate student at the University of Chicago.”

  “Anvil assumed his identity and joined the Sons of Satan?”

  “Looks that way,” she said.

  “Any idea who he really is?”

  “We’re working on it. We have to tread lightly so word doesn’t filter back to him that we’re onto him.”

  I sipped my diet Coke. “When are you going to apply for that search warrant?” I asked. The sooner, the better. Until Bugg was in prison, there would be no such thing as “normal” for me.

  “We’re not ready yet. We have to get all our ducks lined up and strike every chapter at the same time. We’re still gathering information and building an organizational chart. That’s how we do it. You know that. Karlynn’s disappearance really set us back.” “Remember when we had lunch last week?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “You said you heard I wasn’t good with rules.”

  “I remember.”

  “How are you with rules?”

  “What are we talking about?”

  “We’re talking about me giving you a lot of information about Bugg and the Sons of Satan.”

  “How did you obtain it?”

  “Some I got firsthand, like the meth lab on Bugg’s property. Some I got in other ways. It will save you months of work.”

  “What do you want in return?”

  “When the time is right, after Bugg and his friends are all in prison, I want you to quietly make the warrant for Karlynn disappear and get the indictment dismissed.”

  “Why don’t you ask me to do these things now?”

  “Because Bugg’s lawyers would have a field day with it. They’d want to know why and you wouldn’t have a good answer.”

  “I could have the U.S. attorney bring you before a grand jury right now,” she said.

  “You’d get tired of hearing me invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment. Besides, I think you feel for Karlynn. It’s the right thing to do.”

  I dropped Valeska back at the Federal Building and was headed west on the Boulder Turnpike, back to Nederland, when the Mister Ed theme song sounded. I picked up my cell phone and said hello. It was Scott and he was singing.

  “I’m a freaking gen-i-us. Doo-dah! Doo-dah! I’m a freaking gen-i-us, oh de doo-dah day.”

  Not to be outdone, I responded in song. “I win my money on the bobtail nag. Doo-dah! Doo-dah! I keep my money in an old tow-bag, oh de doo-dah day! Goin’ to run all night, goin’ to run all day; I bet my money on a bob-tail nag, somebody bet on the gray.”

  “Tell me you don’t know all the words to that song,” he said.

  “‘Camptown Races,’by Stephen C. Foster. I know every verse.”

  “You need a kid,” he said. “No creature with any purpose in life has time to memorize that stuff.”

  “You called me,” I said. “What do you want?”

  “I figured out those numbers in the back of Bugg’s address book.”

  “What are they?”

  “They’re locations. They are actually pairs of numbers, and each pair describes a longitude and a latitude.”

  “Can’t be,” I said. “There were no degrees, minutes, or seconds.”

  “That’s right. Bugg converted them to decimal form but didn’t put the decimal points in. He knew where they belonged, so he didn’t need them.”

  “Have you plotted these on a map?”

  “Yeah. Where are you?”

  “On the turnpike.”

  “Meet you at Moe’s in a half hour?”

  Now we were at Moe’s, surrounded by college kids and looking at maps Scott had spread across our table.

  “There are eight pairs of numbers,” he said.

  “Eight locations?”

  “Yeah. All in the western U.S. Three in Colorado, two in Utah, one in New Mexico, one in Wyoming, and one in Idaho.” He had marked each location on his highway map for that state.

  “All in national forests or national parks,” I said.

  “Any idea what it means?”

  I just smiled and said, “Oh de doo-dah day.”

  43

  WE FIGURED IT WOULD be best to split up. That way nobody would be able to say they had seen us together near any of the eight locations. I took southern Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico; Scott took northern Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho. Four for each of us.

  The final place on my list was in the Carson National Forest in north-central New Mexico. One and a half million acres ranging from high desert to peaks more than thirteen thousand feet above sea level. A man could easily get lost in a place like that. Fortunately, I had a Global Positioning System and a U.S. Geological Survey map. I knew exactly where I was going.

  It was Groundhog Day and I saw my shadow, as did Buck and Wheat. The sun was out, and if you looked carefully, you could see signs that spring was on its way. I had left my truck at the trail-head and was backpacking on a Forest Service trail. Buck was wearing a doggie backpack that held potatoes and duck dog chow.

  The sun made hiking enjoyable, and I even took my jacket off, but I knew that when the sun went down, its warmth would quickly disappear. I pitched my lightweight tent before the sun went down. I fed the dogs and made ramen noodles for myself on my portable backpacking stove. I had purchased the tent and stove at a railroad discount warehouse in Denver thirty years ago when I was home from college. I had a summer job as a bouncer at a place called the Grizzly Bar and was earning more money than I knew what to do with—seven dollars an hour. I bought a lot of camping gear that summer. The warehouse has since been converted into expensive lofts.

  There was not a cloud in the sky, so I did not put the rain fly on the tent. I could see the stars through the tent’s screen.

  I had the dream again. But this time it wasn’t Joy walking with me in the extravagant china shop; it was Jayne. She looked at different pieces, selected one, and we drove away in a Ford Taurus.

  The next day was easy. I hiked another two miles on the trail until the GPS told me to turn north. The dogs and I then hiked uphill through thick trees for about three-quarters of a mile. I looked at the GPS and said to the dogs, “Boys, we have arrived.” I set my backpack down, sipped some water from my canteen, and removed the collapsible camp shovel from my backpack.

  Bugg had done a good job of burying his cache of food, weapons, and money. It was at least twenty inches beneath the surface, and in the Rocky Mountains that is twenty inches of hard digging.

  This was my fourth site, so I knew what to expect. I found Ziploc bags filled with twenties and fifties, probably about twenty thousand dollars in all, based on what I’d seen at the other three sites. There was a ten-millimeter Colt semiautomatic pistol, a .22-caliber American 180 submachine gun, and plenty of ammo, all wrapped in plastic. There were cans of soup and beans as well as containers full of rice, noodles, and other dry foods.

  I put the Colt in my backpack. I unrolled my sleeping bag, then rolled
it up again with the 180 inside it so that it was largely hidden. The plastic bags of cash went into my backpack. The food went back in the hole. Then I removed a dollar bill from my wallet and watched it float down into the hole. I replaced dirt and packed it down with the heel of my hiking boot. When I was satisfied, I sprinkled some pine needles over the area where I had dug.

  The hike back to my truck was mostly downhill, and I made it back late in the day. Instead of driving back to the interstate, I took side roads and ended up in tiny Manassa, Colorado—the birthplace of Jack Dempsey. The little cabin he had been born in was now a museum, so I stopped in and looked around.

  I knew boxing history almost as well as I knew music trivia, so seeing photos and news clippings of Dempsey’s fights in the early decades of this century was a thrill. Dempsey is probably most famous for a fight he lost—he lost to Gene Tunney because, after knocking Tunney down, he failed to return to a neutral corner as instructed by the referee. The ref could not start counting Tunney out until Dempsey went to a neutral corner. Thus, the famous “long count,” which gave Tunney fourteen seconds instead often. Tunney was able to get back up and win the fight by a decision.

  But there is another Dempsey story that I find easier to relate to. On July 4,1919, the 187-pound Dempsey fought 245-pound heavyweight champ Jess Willard for the title. Despite being five inches shorter and fifty-eight pounds lighter than Willard, Dempsey broke Willard’s jaw with one of his first punches, a devastating left hook. He knocked Willard down seven times in the first round and walloped him for two more rounds. When Willard didn’t come out for the fourth round, he had four teeth missing, his eyes were closed, his nose was smashed, and two ribs were cracked, not to mention the broken jaw. He also suffered permanent hearing damage.

  Manassa was not far from Crazy Uncle Ray’s shack in the San Luis Valley, so I decided to swing by on my way back to Nederland. He was working on his truck, and Prince was just trotting around checking everything out. I ended up spending the night. I claimed the top bunk and Ray claimed the bottom. The three dogs shared the plywood floor.

  We talked as we lay in our bunks. I brought him up to date on the Bugg situation, but I did not tell him about the caches of weapons and cash we had looted. Somehow Ray got on the tale of how he’d spent six months in jail for the attempted murder of my uncle Jake after he’d been gutshot by my aunt Lucy. “Yessir,” he said, “six months in the Coosa County Jail. That weren’t no fun at all.”

  “Coosa County?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s where you grew up, right?”

  “Son, that’s where your mama and her whole family grew up,” he said.

  “The name Howard Biggs mean anything to you?”

  “Now, let me think. Howard Biggs. Howard Biggs. Oh, yeah, don’t that take me back a lot of years. Biggs must be older than Moses by now, but in his day he was mean as a water moccasin. Was real active with the Klan for a while. Didn’t have a decent bone in his body, I tell you. I wonder what ever happened to him. I reckon God will take him when his time finally comes.”

  44

  A WEEK LATER SCOTT and I met at my house to tally our haul. The amount of money Bugg had buried at each location had not been consistent, but between the two of us we had taken close to one hundred forty thousand dollars from Bugg’s eight caches. We also had an admirable supply of handguns as well as some illegal machine guns.

  “I felt sorry for Bugg,” I said, “so I left a dollar bill for him in each location.”

  “I left something for him, too,” Scott said, “but it wasn’t currency.” He sipped from a bottle of beer. “What should we do with these weapons?”

  “We can’t keep all of them,” I said. “Some are illegal and most are probably stolen. There are severe penalties just for possessing them.”

  “We can’t turn them in to the cops unless we want to say how we found them. And we’re really not in a position to do that.”

  “I hate to say it, but the smartest thing we could do would be to rent some welding equipment, buy some hacksaws, and mutiliate these things. Dump ’em in the reservoir near the dam.”

  “You want to keep any of them?” Scott asked.

  “I might keep that ten-millimeter Colt,” I said. “How about you?”

  “I’d love to have that One-eighty. A man needs a good machine gun.”

  “I hereby convey it to you,” I said. “Don’t tell anyone where you got it.”

  “Can I leave it here until I prepare Bobbi for it?”

  “Sure.”

  “What about the cash?” Scott said.

  “What about it?”

  “What do we do with it? You can’t just deposit that kind of money in a bank without being able to explain where it came from.”

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “People always dream about finding these large sums of cash, but there really isn’t much you can do with it. You can’t buy a new Jaguar; you can’t suddenly change your lifestyle. If you go six months without writing a check or using a credit card, the IRS might get suspicious. My advice is, keep a few thousand on you at all times, give some to charity, hide the rest. Just spend a few thousand a year; that’s the secret.”

  “Have to spend it all by two thousand twelve,” Scott said.

  “Why?”

  “That’s when the comet hits.”

  45

  I WAS IN THE FEDERAL BUILDING with Valeska and Livingston. Drinking government coffee at nine a.m. No matter who is in the White House, government coffee always tastes the same. This was worse than the coffee at the Sinclair station in Nederland. Imagine hot water, instant creamer, and brown food coloring, and you’ve got a good idea of what FBI coffee tastes like.

  We were seated around a rectangular table in an interview room. As a defense lawyer I had always insisted that law enforcement record any interview that my client agreed to, but today there was no recorder and I didn’t want Matt Simms or any other lawyer. I was there to help them put Bugg and the Sons of Satan away. I began to tell my story.

  “You already know that Matt hired me to steal Bugg’s dog and then to guard Karlynn while she was waiting to be relocated. What you don’t know is that a few days after Karlynn started living with me, Bugg left a message on my machine. He said he wanted to hire me.”

  I spent the next hour telling them about meeting Bugg at the Pioneer Inn, going through the motions of looking for Karlynn for Bugg, then making a very real effort to find Karlynn for Matt, for the feds and for truth, justice, and the American way.

  I told them how I had lied to Bugg about finding Karlynn at the Lewis and Clark Trailer Park and having to put his dog down. I told them I had given Bugg a lot of cash to convince him that I really was on his side.

  “Where did you come up with the cash?” Livingston asked.

  “Karlynn had it and didn’t take it with her when she ditched me. She lied to you when she said she only took twenty thousand from Bugg. She took a lot more than that.”

  “What else have you got for us?” Valeska asked.

  “Your’re going to love this,” I said. “While I was giving Bugg money and telling him how close we had come to nabbing Karlynn in Idaho, I remembered that Karlynn had told you about an address book Bugg keeps in the drawer beside his refrigerator.”

  “You stole the book?” Livingston asked.

  “Sort of. I stole the book, drove like a madman to Nederland to photocopy it, then drove like a madman back to Bugg’s house to put it back.” I told them how I had purposely left my gold pen on the floor next to Bugg’s refrigerator so I would have an excuse to return.

  “So I put the address book back and I’m getting ready to leave when who walks in the door? My old friend, Anvil. Now, Anvil had seen me with Karlynn at the mall, so I figure I’m going to have to try to shoot him and the other guy, then make a run for it, but Anvil just ignores me.”

  “Did he recognize you?”

  “I think he did.

  “Here�
��s your copy,” I said as I handed Livingston his copy of Bugg’s address book. “I also made a second copy for you that has all my notes on it.” I handed that to him. “And here’s my memo summarizing everything else I was able to learn.”

  “Why did you do all this?” Valeska asked.

  “Self-preservation,” I said. “I still don’t know whether Bugg knows I double-crossed him, but I think he does. Otherwise, there would have been no reason to put a rattlesnake in my bedroom. The surest way to get my life back to normal is to help put Bugg and his pals away for good.”

  “Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?” Valeska said.

  “Yeah, but one of you has to leave the room.”

  “Why?” said Valeska.

  “I don’t want two people to be able to testify as to what I said. I have to be able to deny I ever said it.”

  “I’ll leave,” Livingston said. He left a legal pad on the table but picked his long body up and left me alone with Valeska.

  “This concerns the ATF agent, Agent Lowell.”

  “Okay.”

  “Karlynn told you she heard Mongoose tell Bugg that Skull had done a good job taking care of Lowell.”

  “Right.”

  “When Bugg gave Mongoose the order to kill Lowell, Mongoose contacted Skull. Skull’s real name is Anders Riddell. Mongoose had been at Leavenworth with Skull’s older brother, who happens to lead the Aryan Brotherhood there. Bugg never met Skull; I don’t think you’ll be able to connect them. Mongoose met Skull in Bozeman to discuss the hit and gave Skull two grand, with the promise of another three grand after the job was done. Skull killed Lowell about a month later. After he did it, he stopped in Lander to see Mongoose. To prove he had really killed Lowell, he gave Mongoose Lowell’s FBI credentials. I assume that included a leather wallet, some business cards, and a badge. Mongoose burned those things in a metal can at his locksmith shop. If you happen to search it, you may find evidence of burning in that can. You might even find microscopic particles of Lowell’s credentials that you can match to the type of paper and leather used by the Bureau.”