Bluetick Revenge (7 page)

“Me too,” I said, “but I’m meeting someone in a few hours and the stripe has to be gone.”

“Why?”

“Because Anvil knows what I look like, and he probably told Bugg.”

“Tell me you’re making this up.”

“It’s simple,” I said. “Anvil’s a big goon I ran into the other day at the food court after I helped Karlynn buy lingerie.
He threatened to kill me with a knife and I threatened to put seventeen rounds into his—”

“Who’s Karlynn?” she demanded.

“Karlynn is Bugg’s common-law wife. She’s sleeping in my guest room as we speak.” Stone silence. “Bugg is the leader of the
Sons of Satan motorcycle gang,” I continued. “Karlynn stole three hundred grand from him and I’m supposed to babysit her until
the feds are ready for her to enter the Witness Protection Program.”

“Is there anyone else sleeping in your house I ought to know about?”

“Not unless you count Prince.”

“Who’s Prince?”

“Prince is a bluetick coonhound I liberated from Bugg. I’m told he has excellent tracking skills. Karlynn won’t enter the
Witness Protection Program without him.”

“Who are you meeting this morning?”

“Bugg.”

“Why?”

“Not sure,” I said. “My guess is he wants to hire me to find Karlynn.”

“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed.

“But he might want me to find the person that stole his dog,” I added. “ According to Anvil, Bugg will pay ‘five large’ to
whoever ‘ices’ the dog thief.”

“Jesus,” she muttered.

“I miss you,” I said softly. There was a brief pause.

“I miss you, too,” she said. “I’m worried about you.”

“Let’s have phone sex,” I said. “That’ll take your mind off of it.”

“It’s not funny,” she scolded. I knew better than to say anything. She was genuinely concerned and felt I wasn’t taking her
concern seriously. Five very long seconds of silence passed before she said, “What did you do for Thanksgiving?”

“Took Karlynn to Nancy’s house, drank rum and organic cola, ate like a pig, and fell asleep watching football.”

“Did she have other people over?”

“A few, but nobody I knew,” I said.

“Anyone interesting?”

“Not really,” I said. “How was your Thanksgiving?”

“It was wonderful,” she said. “A friend invited me to join her and we had dinner with a French couple who live in a nice home
near the American Embassy. They had the cutest little girl. They adopted her from China.”

“Prince is kind of cute,” I said. “For a hound.”

“I’m sure he is,” she replied. “Is Karlynn?” This was not a direction I wanted the conversation to take.

“She’s a biker chick,” I said. “ ‘Cute’ is not a word you would use to describe her.”

“How would you describe her?”

“She’s six feet tall, weighs about two hundred pounds, no teeth,” I said. Jayne laughed.

“Does she have a hump on her back?” she asked.

“Two humps,” I said. “Her friends call her ‘camel. ’” There was another short pause.

“It’s cold here,” she said.

“Fifteen degrees here,” I said. “And windy.”

“Sometimes I fear we’re growing apart,” she said.

“I’m here; you’re there,” I said. “We’re doing the best we can.”

“We’re talking about the weather,” she pointed out.

“I’m sure even Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir talked about the weather on occasion,” I said.

“They never married, did they?”

“They felt it was bourgeois,” I said, “but you’re missing the point.”

“Which is?”

“Even the strongest relationships have ups and downs, and the fact that you’re on the other side of the planet doesn’t help.”

“Are you mad at me for leaving?”

“Maybe a little,” I admitted, “but when I look at it objectively, I realize I’m being selfish.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” I replied. “You’re doing something you have always wanted to do.” I paused, then added, “Hell, I’d love to live
in China for a year too, but I don’t speak Mandarin, and even if I did, I doubt the university offers any courses I’m qualified
to teach. Imagine the things I could teach those kids in a week. The poor bastards probably don’t even know who Jerry Jeff
Walker is or how to throw a nice spiral.”

“It’s a frightening thought,” she said. “I do love you,” she added.

“I know,” I said. “Enjoy your time there and don’t worry about us. You’ll come home for Christmas and things will be fine.”

We talked another five minutes and she became more chipper as she told me about her classes, her research, and her faculty
colleagues. Jayne is one of the nation’s leading experts in a field known as fractal geometry—the study of irregular patterns.
She loves her work. And I suppose that is one of the things I love about her.

I had met Jayne Smyers more than a year ago when she had hired me to look into the mysterious deaths of three math professors—all
specialists in fractal geometry. That case, which came to be known as “the Fractal Murders,” had lifted me into the upper
echelon of private investigators in the region, but during the course of working for Jayne I had fallen in love with her.
And being an expert in geometry, she saw the need for symmetry and so fell in love with me.

“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.