Astride a Pink Horse (14 page)

“I’m thinking you made the right choice with your move. Beautiful country you’ve got here,” Cozy said.

“Forty thousand acres of paradise, to be sure,” Rivers said proudly. “Not as big as my Nebraska spread, but it’s a lot more peaceful, there’s not a damn missile silo in sight, and there aren’t any air force MPs, high-tech nuke jockeys, or stringy-haired hippies traipsin’ across my land!” Looking pleased, he went on, “So to net it all out, it’s entirely possible that your dead man could’ve been out there at my place in Nebraska. Maybe he even manned a silo back on the land the government snookered me out of durin’ them protest years, but like I said earlier, if he was there, I damn sure didn’t know him. Got any kind of better description on him besides the fact that he was black?”

“Not too much more, really. He was six-one or -two, skinny, and when they found him he had five stab wounds in his back, and the head of his penis and a wad of paper had been stuffed in his mouth.”

“Sounds like somebody was lookin’ for revenge. But I ain’t the guy,” Rivers said dismissively.

“Do the names Sarah Goldbeck or Buford Kane ring a bell?”

Rivers glanced skyward thoughtfully before responding. “Can’t say that they do. Who are they?”

“A couple of longtime antinuclear folks. What about Kimiko or Rikia Takata? Know them?”

“Nope.” Rivers’s response was immediate and emphatic, so much so that Cozy found himself wondering why. Thinking that he’d need to dig a little deeper into the life and times of Mr. Grant Rivers, he said, “Any other gripes or insights you’d like to share with me?”

“Just one.” Rivers’s face turned almost salmon pink. “You might as well know about it because you’re a reporter, and we all know that what reporters do for a living is dig up dirt. Anyway, those air force jack-offs, the ones the government sent out to my ranch in Nebraska to deal with them protesters? The brass who hold themselves up as bein’ so God-fearin’, country-lovin’, and high and mighty? Well, they’re all a bunch of lyin’ bastards.”

“Why so?”

“Because they kicked my boy outta that blessed U.S. Air Force Academy of theirs down in Colorado Springs, that’s why. Claimed he was caught cheatin’.” Rivers glanced toward his landing strip. “And that’s after I spent years teachin’ the boy to fly. Fuckin’ liars. Cost me a bundle in attorneys’ fees to fight that battle, too.”

“Did you win?”

“Nope. But the whole deal let me know once and for all to never get involved with anything that has to do with the goddamn government. Best thing is, my boy, Logan, found out what kinda bastards they are as well.”

“So what’s Logan do now?”

“Helps me run this place. It’s a better deal for the both of us.” Rivers looked across the field to where the other tractor was now slowly pulling a brush chopper along a heavily weeded fence line. When the driver leaned out of the cab and waved their way, Cozy asked, “Logan?”

“You bet,” Rivers said proudly. “We done here for the day?”

Thinking that the opinionated, right-leaning old rancher had been quite cooperative, maybe even a little too much so, Cozy said, “Yes.”

“Good. ’Cause I need to get back to that tractor tire and my hayin’.”

“I may need to talk to you again, and maybe to your son as well.”

“I’m always here for the askin’. As for Logan, he ain’t. He’s part owner of a farm implements store down in Cheyenne. Spends a good deal of his time down there. He flies up here to help me when he can.”

Glancing across the field toward the tractor and recognizing that he was outnumbered, Cozy decided that right then wasn’t the time to go toe to toe with Rivers and son. He instead slipped his wallet out of a back pocket, teased out a business card, and handed it to Rivers. “Call me if something comes up related to the Giles murder that you may have forgotten to mention.”

“Nothin’ comes up much out here, friend, except alfalfa and the wind.” Rivers slipped the card into his shirt pocket. “Gonna mention me in what you’re plannin’ to write?”

“Probably.”

“Well, be sure and get the name right. It’s Rivers with an
s
.”

“I’ll make certain I do. And it’s Logan with an
L
, I presume.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d leave my boy outta this,” Rivers said, clearly annoyed.

“I’m afraid I can’t.”

With the vein that ran along his left temple suddenly pulsating, and without so much as a parting word, Rivers turned and took two giant steps toward his tractor. In a couple of seconds and with the agility of a gymnast, the sixty-one-year-old cattle rancher was up in the cab. A plume of black smoke rose skyward as he cranked the engine and took off across the alfalfa field toward the second tractor, the slow leak in his tire seemingly now of little concern to him.

Silas Breen had been to his mountaintop. He’d walked the Notre Dame campus, seen the golden dome, tiptoed onto the grass of the hallowed Notre Dame football field, and admired the mural of Touchdown Jesus. His sightseeing journey, however, had put him a little behind schedule with his delivery, and just before two p.m. he decided it might be best to call the Amarillo, Texas, number he’d been given to check in with F. Mantew in case of an emergency.

The squeaky-voiced woman who answered, “Amarillo Secretarial Temps,” told him that no one named Mantew was at that number but that she had received a fax from an F. Mantew instructing her to tell a Mr. Breen if he called that the final destination for delivery of his goods was now Lubbock rather than Amarillo. She didn’t mention that she’d been promised two hundred dollars in cash to go beyond her normal job duties, which entailed simply receiving a fax and holding it for the recipient, not passing along messages.

“Where’d the fax come from?” Silas asked, upset that he would now have to drive 120 miles beyond his original destination. Sitting in the cab of his truck in the parking lot of the motel where he’d spent the night, with his lower lip poked out in protest, his legs stretched out on the front seat, and his cell phone pressed firmly to one ear, he waited for an answer.

“I’m not certain, but the area code’s a Mexico one.”

“Mexico?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“And you’re sure the fax is from someone named F. Mantew?”

“That’s the name on the document, sir.”

“Okay,” Silas said with a sigh. “Can I get your name?”

“It’s Doris.”

“And the name of your company again?”

“Amarillo Secretarial Temporary Office Services.”

“So where am I supposed to go in Lubbock?”

Thinking that she was earning every cent of her potential two-hundred-dollar bonus, Doris said, “The fax says your delivery destination is 181 East Clarkson, sir.”

“And there’s nothing else with the fax? No other instructions? No explanation as to why the change in cities?”

“No.”

After a lengthy, jaw-clenched pause, Silas said, “Thanks,” hung up, and set his cell phone aside. He stepped down from the cab onto the recently tarred, nearly empty parking lot of the Motel 6 where he’d slept so well. Looking around and listening to the rumble of traffic speeding by on nearby I-90, he walked to the back of his truck, unlocked the padlocked rear cargo door, and shoved the door up with a grunt.

He stared into the semidarkness for a few seconds to let his eyes adjust, then unclipped a flashlight from a mount just inside the door, snapped the beam on, and shone it into the cargo hold. Every one of the twenty crates he’d left Ottawa with was there, tied down and undisturbed, exactly as they’d been when he left.

Looking puzzled, he climbed up into the cargo bay, walked between the crates, and counted each one. The identical wooden crates were stacked in twos, atop one another, upright-freezer-style. A three-foot-wide, cargo-free center aisle separated the two rows of ten crates each. Two toolboxes, the kind designed to straddle a pickup bed, sat on either side of the cargo door. Fighting the urge to uncrate one of the boxes or look inside the padlocked toolboxes, Silas looked baffled. He poked, prodded, and sniffed his way around a half-dozen eight-by-four-by-four-foot crates for the next several minutes, deciding finally that the crates looked no different from the hundreds of other crates he’d hauled hither and yon since starting his moving business. The wood was cheap but sturdy, and the crates had been professionally assembled. There was no smell coming from them, no bugs escaping from or crawling around on them, no leaking chemicals, and, most importantly, no hazardous-cargo markings, the very last thing he’d double-checked for before signing the shipment manifest in Ottawa. Even so, there was something strange, even a little foreboding, about his cargo.

Mystified and wondering if he’d been snookered into hauling unmarked chemical waste, stolen goods, or maybe even drugs, Silas backed his way out of the truck, reclamped his flashlight in place, closed the cargo door, and made a mental note to call Ottawa later in the day to see if he couldn’t get a better line on what he might be hauling besides “hospital equipment.”

As he padlocked the cargo door, he glanced nervously around the parking lot. He saw half-a-dozen randomly spaced cars, a single pickup, and two idling tractor-trailer rigs. As he walked back to his cab, he realized that his hands were shaking. He
decided that during one of his next road breaks, he’d call his father, Otis, in Kansas City, and discuss the whole strange situation with him.

For too long, racing off to Heart Mountain had been Kimiko Takata’s answer to far too many things. Dropping everything to drive four hundred miles from Laramie across Wyoming to a place that had caused her so much pain had always seemed ludicrous to Rikia, but he’d known from the moment the news about the murder at Tango-11 first aired that a trip to Heart Mountain was imminent. Kimiko referred to her trips to what remained of the World War II–era relocation camp as “pilgrimages.” She claimed these pilgrimages helped to cleanse her soul.

She’d lived at Heart Mountain for two months in 1943 and all of 1944, and Rikia had come to understand that Kimiko’s soul had been permanently tarnished during her fourteen-month internment in that dusty, treeless, high-desert world.

He couldn’t help but think that if he’d kept his meeting with Major Cameron to himself instead of running home at noon to tell Kimiko about it, he might not have ended up losing what would amount to two half-days of work. He’d still be polishing up the paper his grad student would deliver for him in El Paso, and he wouldn’t be packing up his ten-year-old Volvo station wagon for a trip to a place he detested. It hadn’t helped that Sarah Goldbeck had called Kimiko early that morning to tell her about Major Cameron’s visit to Hawk Springs, infusing Kimiko with a sense of purpose that had made her all the more eager to make the seven-hour trip to Heart Mountain.

Now, as he tossed his sleeping bag into the back of the station wagon, Rikia found himself hoping that Kimiko might for once at least decide to stay at a motel in either Powell or Cody instead of trespassing onto an off-limits section of what was now Heart Mountain Memorial Park to spend the night camping illegally.

It was hard for him to understand why, at seventy-six and with worsening arthritis and what he suspected was creeping dementia, Kimiko continued to make her pilgrimages. But she did, always returning to Laramie seemingly reenergized. If he’d been in her shoes, he would have long ago burned every square acre of the god-awful former internment camp, but Heart Mountain was Kimiko’s cross to bear, not his. It had also been her own choice several years earlier to accept a twenty-thousand-dollar reparation handout designed by the U.S. government to wash away the sins of Heart Mountain and hopefully gain the silence of the internment camp survivors. He saw Kimiko’s choice to take the money as a form of dishonorable acquiescence, something he never would have been party to.

When Kimiko called to him from the back porch, “Are you finished packing the car, Rikia?” he muttered a disconsolate “Yes,” stuffed a pair of hiking boots in next to his sleeping bag, and shut the Volvo’s tailgate.

“Did you remember to pack plenty of water?” she asked, headed down their Russian-olive-tree-lined driveway toward him.

“Yes,” he said, his response barely audible.

“And you brought along your grandfather’s diary, of course?”

“It’s on the front seat.”

Kimiko’s eyes lit up. “Good. It would be a tragedy to forget that.”

“Yes, I know. We’d be forced to turn around and come back,” Rikia grunted.

Frowning and eyeing him sternly, Kimiko said, “I’ll have none of your insolence, Rikia.”

Knowing that Kimiko could never again lock him in the basement, a linen closet, or the pantry and feed him only rice and water for days or beat him with a razor strap, as she’d done when he’d crossed her as a child, Rikia nonetheless took her warnings seriously, aware that she might instead choose not to speak to him for weeks.

His childhood disobedience, driven by the taunts he constantly had to endure at school because of his speech problem, had been addressed with punishment, but Kimiko had not sought medical attention for the real problem until he was in his teens. By then he’d already suffered through periods of depression after having been forced to come live with her following the death of his parents in a mid-1970s San Francisco car crash. The crash had occurred only a year after his father had come with his wife and son from Japan to teach physics at San Francisco State University. Frail, retiring, and tongue-tied, Rikia hadn’t as yet adjusted to his new Bay Area environment before he’d had to move to a strange, desolate place called Wyoming.