Astride a Pink Horse (17 page)

Decidedly nervous, Bernadette dialed Cozy’s cell-phone number. Although she’d been ordered not to talk to him, she found herself drawn to the man who’d saved her butt in Hawk Springs. Perhaps it was because, unlike the Captain Alvarezes of the world, Cozy hadn’t seemed eager to either get in her pants or use her as fodder for his own career advancement. In fact, he’d seemed quite capable of taking or leaving her, and, although she was hesitant to admit it, that intrigued her.

She wasn’t pleased, however, with what Freddy Dames had said about OSI or the air force in his two internet stories, and that was another important reason to talk to Cozy.

When Cozy hadn’t answered after six rings, she sighed, glanced across her office at the photo of her father, and found herself wondering how someone as knee-jerk as “Jackknife” Cameron would have gone about handling a tough problem like Tango-11. Thinking,
With guns a blazing
, she smiled and continued to listen to the ringing, hoping Cozy would pick up.

When Cozy finally answered, “Coseia here,” she sat straight up in her chair.

“This is Bernadette.”

“Great to hear from you, Bernadette.” Cozy set the king-sized
bag of potato chips he’d nearly devoured aside on the seat of his truck, cleared his throat, and set the truck on cruise control.

“Guess I should get straight to the point. I read Freddy Dames’s latest story, and it isn’t very flattering to the air force. You assured me that your stories wouldn’t take that tack.”

“Mine won’t. But Freddy has a tendency to put a negative spin on things.”

“I’d say it’s more of a tendency to color things yellow in a journalistic-smear sense—yellow enough, unfortunately, for Colonel DeWitt to have set his sights on him. DeWitt may be preening and up-bucking, but he’s also very cagey, and he can be vicious. He’ll end up with two, maybe even three, stars on his shoulders before his career’s end, and people like him don’t get that far in the military without a little duplicity in their hearts and a battery of important people behind them. Trust me, DeWitt’ll have someone on your boss’s tail, and maybe even yours, by the end of the day. FBI, homeland security, perhaps even someone from air force OSI who owes him a favor—but he’ll have somebody.”

“Freddy can take care of himself.”

“And you?”

“I can hold my own.”

“I hope so. Just consider what I’ve just said to be a heads-up, and don’t be surprised at being hauled off to some warehouse to have a talk with somebody from the FBI.”

“I won’t.”

Deciding not to rush into telling Cozy about her meeting with Rikia Takata, Bernadette said, “So how about a little tit for tat? What have you got for me that’s new?”

“Only this. My boss’s executive secretary stumbled onto a lead late last night that sent me running up to Buffalo today before dawn to talk to a rancher named Grant Rivers. Turns out Rivers doesn’t have much of a fondness for either our government or the air force. After the air force put two missile-silo sites on his Nebraska land back in the late ’80s, he claims the government did its best to steal his water rights and land. To pour salt on the wound, his son later got booted out of the air force academy on a cheating charge.”

“Reasons enough to carry a grudge, but how’s Rivers tie in to the Giles murder? Did he even admit to knowing Giles?”

“He told me he didn’t. He also denied knowing Sarah Goldbeck or Buford Kane. But he did admit to being in the middle of a couple of skirmishes that took place between nuclear-arms protesters and air force security personnel back in the ’80s on that property that was once his. No question, he needs to remain someone of interest.”

“Agreed. Dig anything else up?”

“No. But I’ve got something pending. Freddy wants me to check out that Cheyenne preacher, Wilson Jackson.”

“Thankfully, for the time being, the good reverend seems to be Colonel DeWitt’s cross to bear.”

“Glad to hear that DeWitt will be getting his hands a little dirty with something, too. Do you have anything else for me?”

Bernadette’s response came hesitantly. She didn’t like it that she and Cozy seemed to be trading rather than sharing information, and she didn’t relish the fact that she was disobeying a direct order by talking to him. “I’ve found out a lot more about what Sergeant
Giles did after he left the air force,” she said finally. “But I’d prefer talking to you about that in person.”

“Afraid your phone’s bugged?”

“You never know.”

“Fine. I’m on I-25 and headed back your way from Grant Rivers’s ranch right now.”

“Is ten this evening too late?”

“Works for me. I’m going to grab a bite to eat, then take my time getting back to Cheyenne.”

“Where do you want to meet?”

“The Cheyenne airport. And I’ll pick you up.”

“That’s an odd place to meet.”

“Not if your conference room’s the main cabin of a Gulfstream. Freddy Dames called me a little bit ago. He talked to a guy named Howard Colbain today. Colbain’s a potential suspect. Freddy’s going to fly into Cheyenne from Albuquerque a little later this evening and he wants me to meet him at the airport so we can compare notes. Three heads might well be better than two. You still game?”

“Yes,” said Bernadette, feeling a bit guilty about never having mentioned Colbain to Cozy.

“Fine. I’ll call you when I’m a half hour out of Cheyenne, and you can tell me then where to pick you up.”

“Your boss owns his own jet?”

Cozy chuckled. “A Gulfstream 150 with the cabin configured so that Freddy has space for his motorcycle, a pull-down bed, and a full bar. Sort of puts the two of you on common ground, don’t you think?”

“Not really,” said Bernadette, still upset over Freddy’s critical internet piece. “Besides,” she said proudly, “I flew government-owned fighters, not corporate toys.”

Aware that Freddy had plunked down $18 million for
Sugar
, Cozy said, “I’m willing to bet that Freddy’s accountants have Uncle Sam somehow paying for his toy, too. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Okay,” said Bernadette, wondering as she hung up how two men who were obviously as decidedly different from one another as Cozy and Freddy Dames could be friends.

For Rikia Takata, the trip from Laramie to Heart Mountain had been predictable and boring, and now, as his aging station wagon bumped across an eroded sagebrush flat toward the gathering twilight and onto Heart Mountain property, he knew he wouldn’t enjoy the next twelve hours.

Shifting her weight in the Volvo’s front seat, Kimiko, who’d driven during the second leg of the trip, stared out at the russet-colored sky. “It’s time to read the passage,” she said softly. “And in English, please, Rikia.”

Knowing that the English translation of what his grandfather had written sixty-seven years earlier always seemed to fill Kimiko with a deeper anger than the same passage in its original Japanese, Rikia looked out on the orange-and-purple glow of the sunset. Aware that Kimiko would continue her ritualistic Heart Mountain agenda no matter what until sunrise the next morning, he opened his grandfather’s leather-bound diary and began reading aloud from it: “ ’I was working as a news photographer outside the city of Hiroshima’s water plant when I heard a loud explosion
and almost instantly felt a searing rush of heat. My first thought was that a nearby army base’s gas tanks had exploded, but sadly the thought soon disappeared. I knew in my heart what the flash of light that I had seen to the north represented because for more than two months Japanese newspapers, including my own, had been printing stories warning everyone that a new type of bomb would soon be used by the Americans on the Japanese people. The stories claimed that the bomb had the capability of wiping out an entire city. However, even as a newsperson, I had no reason to believe that the stories were any more than propaganda published by fainthearted men like the editor of the
Nippon Times
.

“ ‘But as I stood there in the suffocating heat, panting like a dog, realizing that the hair on my arms had disappeared as I’d listened to the rumbling explosion of thunder from another world, I knew the special bomb that the newspapers had spoken of had been dropped on our city.

“ ‘Out of reflex, I suspect, I decided that what I needed to do was take pictures of what was occurring, so I headed in the direction the explosion had come from. When I reached a collapsed army warehouse that had been flattened like a cardboard box, I stopped to watch a white column of smoke that soon turned to pink rise in the sky. Eventually the top of the column began to swell until after twenty minutes or so the entire ungodly-looking thing had the appearance of a saucer on a stick. I took picture after picture of the strange-looking column with the saucer on top, never knowing whether or not the pictures would come out.

“ ‘After another ten minutes or so, rain began to fall, rain that was at first dirty brown and then smoky black. The rain seemed
to release a kind of poisonous gel that stuck like glue to my skin. Shivering in disbelief, I put my camera away and headed toward the city. I walked for nearly an hour, making my way into and through clouds of dust. I walked along the edge of a foggy yellow drizzle that hugged the river. I walked for a good twenty minutes without seeing anyone until, out of nowhere and directly in my path, I saw a cavalry horse standing alone in front of a clump of leafless trees that had been scorched to their roots. The horse was salmon pink. The blast from the bomb had seared off all its hide. As the pitiful-looking beast approached me, faltering with each step, I realized that it was carrying a rider who was charred almost black from head to toe. I watched for a few moments as animal and rider, unaware of my presence, veered to my left and walked toward the river to disappear into the yellow haze. Thoughts of my wife and children, coworkers and countrymen, worked their way through my head, but it was the image of the charbroiled rider astride a pink horse that stayed with me the rest of the day.’ ”

Rikia stopped reading and looked at Kimiko, who’d pulled the station wagon to a stop. He knew that she expected him to read for the next five pages, on to a point where his grandfather borrowed a bicycle from a local doctor only to realize as the doctor handed the bike over to him that the doctor’s fingers had been fused to the handlebars. But he didn’t. Perhaps it was because everything around him seemed so suddenly peaceful. Or maybe it was because, for a change, Kimiko wasn’t urging him to read on. Whatever had sparked the change in her ritual was known to her alone. A minute or so later, when she moved to get out of the station wagon, he knew that she was back on track. Once she was out
of the vehicle, he knew she would perch herself on the three-legged stool she’d brought and stare trance-like toward Heart Mountain Butte, and remain there mumbling to herself, sometimes in Japanese, sometimes in English, until he’d set up their campsite.

He’d often wondered why Kimiko insisted that their visits to Heart Mountain remain such a raw, primitive experience. Why after so many years couldn’t they at least bring modern camping equipment or, even better, stay in a motel? He’d asked her once when he was a college student, after two hellish rainstorm-filled days at Heart Mountain, why they had to endure such god-awful conditions. She’d simply replied, “Because it tests our courage, our commitment, and our sanity. Things you’ll surely need in abundance one day, Rikia.” He’d never forgotten that comment even though their trips to the remote, 740-acre patch of nowhere named after nearby Heart Mountain Butte now numbered in the sixties, and the internment center’s military-style barracks and ancillary buildings, which had once sat a mere sixty miles east of Yellowstone National Park, had either been sold to local residents or allowed to decay.

It wasn’t until 2007 that 124 acres of the internment camp became a national historic landmark. Somehow Kimiko had learned that the barrack she had lived in had been on a fifty-acre parcel carved from the original Heart Mountain acreage and purchased by the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation in the late 1990s. On one of their trips to Heart Mountain, she’d even been able to pinpoint the barrack’s exact location, pointing out a rusting water spigot and a granite building foundation corner in which she’d once carved her initials. Now, whenever they made a trip to Heart
Mountain, she made a point of turning over a spadeful of dirt at that site. Burying the past, Kimiko called it.

Rikia had just finished preparing their campsite when Kimiko finally rose from her stool and turned her gaze away from Heart Mountain. Knowing better than to engage her while she was still so focused, he remained silent and watched her walk away from the mountain into what had become darkness.

Following Cozy’s introduction moments earlier, Bernadette and Freddy Dames had circled one another like determined heavyweights, Bernadette looking incensed and Freddy not at all apologetic. Deciding to save her grievances until later, however, Bernadette had tempered her upset and now sat at the controls of Freddy’s Gulfstream 150, surveying the cockpit and thinking that for $18 million the plane should have had more legroom.

The flight deck was clearly more posh, user-friendly, and inviting than the utilitarian, space capsule–like, black-on-black, instrument-filled cockpit of an A-10, a space she would’ve given anything to be cramped inside right then. But it was a flight deck, and it was the first time she’d set foot in an aircraft cockpit for over a year. All but salivating, she found herself excitedly fiddling with every switch, button, and toggle in sight as Cozy looked on, smiling.