Bluetick Revenge Read online

  “I’m monopolizing the conversation,” she said at last. Her tone was apologetic.

  “I was hoping if I let you talk you’d eventually find your way back to the phone-sex thing,” I said. She laughed.

  “I love you,” she said again. “Please be careful.”

  Scott McCutcheon. Unemployed astrophysicist. Former Navy SEAL. Fifth-degree black belt. One-time field goal kicker for the Colorado Buffaloes. Brad Pitt with a receding hairline. I thought about him as I sipped coffee at a small table beside the fireplace inside Nederland’s Pioneer Inn this cold Saturday morning.

  We’d known each other since before kindergarten, and he was still my best friend and spiritual cut man. I felt reassured knowing he was watching Karlynn while I sipped coffee in the mountain-rustic decor of the Pioneer, stared out at the falling snow, and waited for Thadeus Bugg.

  I picked up a spoon and studied my reflection in the convex side of the stainless steel utensil. The stripe was gone. My hair is black, but I’ve always had a small tuft of white just above my right temple. It’s a genetic fluke known as mosaicism, though some people call it a witch’s stripe. In preparing to meet Bugg it had occurred to me that I had better rid myself of this distinctive trait. Anvil had probably told Bugg of his encounter with Karlynn and me at the mall, and in describing me the stripe would have been one of the first things he mentioned.

  Bugg showed up at 8:45—fifteen minutes early. But I’d been there since 8:15 on the theory it’s always best to arrive first in these situations. I had positioned myself to have a good view of the door, and there was no mistaking the leader of the pack when he walked in. He matched the description on his criminal history, except he weighed far more than two-fifty. He was fat but also big. Like a big-time fullback who had decided to live off pizza and beer for six months.

  He walked in as if he owned the place, and looked around. His red hair was thick and scruffy. He had the massive head of a rottweiler, and the front of it revealed the red face of a man who knew how to drink. He wore jeans, a sweatshirt covered by a denim jacket, and steel-toed work boots. Because Nederland’s winter population consists largely of telecommuting yuppies, aging hippies, and unemployed snowboarders, I was the only man in the place who looked like a former Marine JAG. I wore chinos and a cowboy’s tan corduroy jacket with my Polar Bear Club patch on it. The stone fireplace provided plenty of heat, so I didn’t need the jacket, but it kept the Glock out of view. Bugg saw me and walked toward my table. “You Keane?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. I extended my hand but didn’t get up. He shook my hand and sat down to my left. A young waitress in dreadlocks approached us. Bugg ordered black coffee and a stack of hotcakes. I asked for a bagel with cream cheese. She poured his coffee right away, refilled mine while she was at it, then headed to the kitchen with our order.

  “Fuckin’ cold out,” Bugg said in a gravelly voice.

  “Yeah.”

  “This is all confidential, right?”

  “Yeah.” Strictly speaking, that’s not true. There is no privilege for statements a client makes to an investigator. Not unless the investigator works for the client’s attorney.

  “You know who I am?” Bugg asked as he laid his big forearms on the table. I noticed he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.

  “I know a little,” I said.

  “Does it bother you?”

  “Depends on what you want me to do.”

  “I want you to find my fuckin’ wife,” he said. “That bother you?” I shook my head and sipped my coffee. “What’s it gonna cost?” he asked.

  “Seven-fifty a day, plus expenses.”

  “Pretty steep,” he said. I sipped my coffee and said nothing. “How much up front?” he finally asked.

  “Depends on how difficult the job is,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “What’s going on is that I’ve been with this lady seven years and she up and disappears on me.” He had just a trace of a southern accent, and I remembered he’d grown up in Arkansas.

  “When?” I asked.

  “’Bout a month ago.”

  “Why’d you wait this long to hire an investigator?” I asked.

  “Thought I could find her on my own,” he said.

  “How’d you get my name?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “Saw your card at the store over to Ward,” he said. There is only one store in Ward. “Store” is a generous term. It’s a little place in a hundred-year-old building that sells batteries and beer. Ward is a mountain town with a population of less than two hundred. It’s where you live if Nederland isn’t eclectic enough for you. It used to be a mining town, but today the population consists mostly of bikers, survivalists, anarchists, and the Rainbow People. I guess there are still a few miners over there.

  “What’s your wife’s name?” I asked. I removed a gold-plated mechanical pencil from my pocket and turned over the paper place mat so I’d have something to write on.

  “Karlynn Slade,” he said. “K-A-R-L-Y-N-N.”

  “You know her date of birth?”

  “Yeah, lemme think-it’s June fifth, nineteen sixty-eight.” The day Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy. I remembered it. Remembered seeing it on the black-and-white Zenith TV in our southeast Denver home. Remembered staring at the same television a few days later as the funeral train rolled across America.

  “What does your wife look like?” I asked.

  “She’s about five-five or five-six. Dark hair, nice body.”

  “You have a picture of her?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He reached into one of the pockets on his denim jacket and handed me a photo of the two of them smiling in front of a motorcycle. I couldn’t miss the “SPD” tattooed on his left hand as he handed me the photo. I studied the photo, pretending I’d never before seen the woman. Karlynn’s smile was forced.

  “Is this recent?” I asked.

  “This summer,” he said. “Go ahead and keep it.”

  “You have any idea why she took off?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” he replied. He rolled his head around several times as if bothered by neck pain. The dreadlocked waitress appeared with his pancakes and my bagel. He poured a generous portion of maple syrup over them and began to eat. After she’d left, he said, “Christ, I don’t understand why the girls in this town wear their hair like that.” I shrugged and spread some cream cheese over the bagel. I don’t understand dreadlocks either, but I thought it funny someone like Bugg considered it a sign of the decline of Western civilization.

  “She must’ve had a reason for leaving,” I said. “If you want me to find her, you have to be honest with me.”

  “Things ain’t been so good between us,” was all he said.

  “Then why do you want her back?” I asked. The question annoyed him.

  “We’ve got some things to settle,” he said. This time he slowly swiveled his massive head from left to right several times. Were it not for the fact that he wanted me dead, I might have given him the name of Nancy’s chiropractor boyfriend.

  “Does she have any family?” I asked.

  “She’s got a brother in prison in Nebraska. Her father lives in McCook. You know where that is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She wouldn’t go there, though.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “He molested her when she was a kid,” he said as he lifted another forkful of pancakes to his mouth. “All the fuckin’ time. That’d be the last place she’d go.”

  “She have any friends I might want to talk to?”

  “Her only friends are bikers. I’ve got that covered.”

  “Girlfriends?”

  “Just some women we ride with. They’d tell me if they’d seen her.” I didn’t necessarily buy that, but I let it go.

  “What about a rival gang?” I asked. He paused to consider it.

  “Maybe,” he said. “She likes meth.”

 
“Does she have any money?” I asked.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “A woman with money behaves differently than one without it,” I said. He nodded.

  “She’s got more than enough to get by,” he said. “She took a lot of cash when she left.”

  “I can’t make any promises,” I said.

  “Hey, look,” he said. “I understand you can’t make any promises. All’s I’m asking is that you give it your best shot.”

  “Five thousand up front,” I said.

  “That’s a lot of jack,” he said. “How you gonna earn it?”

  “I’ll talk to some friends in law enforcement, see if she’s been picked up anywhere, see if they’ve heard anything. Then I’ll circulate some posters with her picture and my phone number on them. After that I’ll look at the meth angle, see if she’s tried to score any.”

  “You best be careful if you’re gonna ask questions in those circles,” he said.

  “I can take care of myself,” I said. I said it in a way that left no doubt I was confident I could lick any man in a fifteen-mile radius, including him. He looked at me as if he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just heard, then allowed a trace of a smile and plunged his fork back into his pancakes.

  “Something else you should know,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Me and her, we had a dog. A purebred bluetick. Best hunting dog I ever had. Really good tracking dog, too.”

  “Yeah.”

  “My wife really loves this dog,” he said. “More than she loves me.” I nodded. “’Bout four days ago some fucker walks right up to my house, steals the dog. Damn near kills one of my guys.” I asked him to relate the details and he did. Fortunately for me, none of his men had gotten a good look at me or my truck.

  “You think she was behind it?” I asked.

  “Had to be,” he said. “I don’t know who she got to do it, but I’d love to get my hands on that sorry son of a bitch.” I told him that was a good lead, and promised to follow up on it. No mention was made of Anvil’s sighting of Karlynn, so I assumed Anvil hadn’t yet gotten around to telling Bugg.

  We continued eating and sipping coffee, both of us watching the snow accumulate. It was a wet snow, not typical for this time of year. When Bugg had finished his pancakes, he leaned back and said, “So how’d you get into this? Were you a cop?”

  “I was never a cop,” I said.

  “Military?”

  “Marines,” I said.

  “I was in the Corps,” he said as he sipped his coffee. “Infantry,” he added. “What did you do?”

  “Logistics,” I lied. Given that he’d ended his military career by spending six months in the brig, I felt it best not to mention I’d served three years as a JAG.

  After collecting five thousand in cash from Bugg, I drove to the post office to check my mail. There was the usual assortment of credit card offers as well as the seasonal barrage of catalogs. I put them all in the recycling bin, then headed home. Prince greeted me at the door, with Scott and Karlynn right behind him.

  “How’d it go?” Scott asked. He wore jeans, a T-shirt with Japanese characters on it, and some old running shoes. He’s a lean six-footer, weighing 170 pounds on a good day. But he doesn’t have an ounce of fat on him, and his build is impressive. That’s what happens when you begin each day with five hundred push-ups.

  “Piece of cake,” I said as I removed my jacket. “I think he likes me.” I stomped each foot into the welcome mat a few times to prevent myself from tracking snow into the house.

  “What did he want?” Karlynn asked.

  “He wants me to find you,” I said. I went into the living room and sat down in my recliner. They followed and sat on the couch.

  “Did he say why?” she asked.

  He said the two of you had some issues to settle. He mentioned that you took some cash, but didn’t say how much.” Her face showed something that wasn’t quite a smirk. I summarized my breakfast with Bugg and commented on his command of the English language.

  “Don’t let that fool you,” Karlynn said. “He’s smart. He’s a lot smarter than you think.”

  “Does he have a neck problem?” I asked. “He kept rolling his head around.”

  “He does that when he can’t show anger,” she said. “He’s going to kill me. He’s not even going to try to find the money. He’s just going to kill me.” She said it as if she was resigned to it.

  “First he has to find you,” I said. “Then he has to get past me.”

  9

  MONDAY.DAY SIX with Karlynn Slade. We were seated together on a mocha leather sofa in the lobby of the downtown Denver office of the FBI. She was about to give another interview to the feds, and I was about to spend the next two hours continuing to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—one of the few philosophy books ever written that are actually enjoyable.

  It wasn’t my first time in the Federal Building. I had worked as a federal prosecutor in Denver after leaving the Marine Corps. Later, in private practice, I had occasionally taken on a case in federal court. But the caseload in federal courts consists mostly of drug cases, and I had tired of the war on drugs and eventually left the practice of law altogether.

  After my cousin’s death the feds had stepped in to assist the Denver police in investigating his death and the killing of the Nigerian immigrant. I had visited the Federal Building once or twice after Hal’s death. Though I had not been close to Hal since we were kids, I had followed the investigation into his death and had accumulated an extensive file.

  A door opened and two agents stepped out. The male stood six-two and had a good build. Not a day over thirty. He wore gray slacks, a white shirt, black wingtips, and a leather shoulder holster. A nondescript paisley tie hung loosely around his neck. His hair was sandy and cut short. He was chewing gum.

  The female had fair skin. She was slender, perhaps five-six and 125 pounds. Closer to my age. She wore black gabardine slacks and a very plain powder blue blouse with a scoop neck. Her gun was on her hip, and her hips were a bit wider than you’d expect to see on a slender woman. Her nails were not painted, but she had applied some type of high-gloss coating to them. She wore her mahogany hair in what might be called a modified bob; she’d allowed it to grow a little longer and fuller in back. Not bad-looking for a federal agent.

  “Hi, Karylnn,” she said. “How are you doing?”

  “Fine,” Karlynn said without enthusiasm as she stood up.

  “You remember Special Agent Livingston?” the female asked.

  “Yeah,” Karlynn said. They acknowledged each other with a look that told me there had been tension between them.

  “Who’s he?” Livingston asked, now looking at me. I stood up.

  “Pepper Keane,” I said. “I’m her ride.”

  “Pepper?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You a bodyguard or something?” he asked.

  “Jack of all trades,” I said.

  “Well, Jack, you’ll have to wait out here.”

  “Figured I would,” I said. “Brought a book to entertain me.” I held it up so they could see it. It was the original hardcover edition.

  “Never heard of it,” Livingston said. I nodded and refrained from suggesting that he consider reading something other than Guns & Ammo.

  Karlynn followed them into the inner sanctum of the operation, and I resumed my seat on the couch. I had the room to myself, though I could see a Hispanic female receptionist answering the phone in a work area separated from the reception area by a counter and a sheet of bulletproof glass. Aside from that, the lobby was comparable to what you might find in any upscale office building. Thick crimson carpeting covered the floor, and dark paneling adorned the walls.

  After ten minutes I felt thirsty and asked the receptionist for directions to the nearest pop machine. She told me, so I walked out past the elevators into a lounge area and bought a diet Coke, then returned to the lobby and resumed re
ading. Every so often I would see an agent enter or leave. There had been a time when I knew every agent in the Denver office, but transfers and retirements had taken their toll, and I didn’t recognize any of the agents passing through the lobby. Maybe that was a good thing. I had once prosecuted an FBI agent for beating a confession out of someone, and for quite a while thereafter I hadn’t exactly been a popular figure in the Bureau’s Denver office.

  Perhaps another twenty minutes had passed when the door opened and Karlynn came out saying, “I don’t have to put up with this shit.” Both agents were behind her.

  “Karlynn,” the female said, “he didn’t mean it that way. But we have to ask these questions.”

  I stood up and looked at Karlynn as she came toward me. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “What’s wrong is that this guy’s an asshole,” she replied. Livingston looked at the female agent and rolled his eyes. Karlynn found a cigarette in her purse and lit up, notwithstanding the brass NO SMOKING sign affixed to the wall.

  “Karlynn,” the female said, “let’s just start over, okay?”

  “I want him in there with me,” Karlynn said, referring to me.

  “We can’t do that,” Livingston said. “It’s against the rules.”

  “Then you change the fucking rules,” she shot back. “C’mon,” she said to me, “let’s get out of here.” I put my hand on her shoulder. A gentle human touch can go a long way toward calming an irate person.

  “Why don’t we call Matt?” I suggested. Karlynn sighed; the agents said nothing. “Is there a phone I can use?”

  “You can use the one on the wall,” the female said. “Dial nine to get out.” I walked to a tan phone mounted on the wall and punched in Mart’s number. He came on the line and I explained the situation in general terms.

  “Livingston can be a little overbearing,” he said.

  “Roger that,” I said.

  “Can they hear you?”

  “Yes.”

  “On a scale of one to ten, with one being unconscious and ten being nuclear, where’s Karlynn at?”