Trapline (14 page)

The men didn't flinch.

Allison wanted to peek inside Tent Sing Sing but had the sensation it would be easier to penetrate Fort Knox.

“Something's moving in,” said Allison.

“Or already has,” said muttonchops. Maybe he liked good news.

Allison gave a two-finger salute from the brim of her hat and instantly felt like a dumb cliché. She turned to head back, ignoring the holes being drilled in her back by their stares. She scanned the ground before the bare dirt gave way to forest floor. There were plenty of horse tracks but there were smaller, equally distinct marks too.

Canines.

Everywhere.

twenty-eight:
wednesday, mid-day

As far as Bloom
was concerned, being inside was progress, but not enough. He sat with Trudy at the small dining table. One of two women buzzing around—Bloom wasn't clear of their relationship with Tomás—had brought him
horchata de melon.
The tasty drink had a hint of vanilla and lime but it couldn't counteract the heat of the mobile home.

Tomás played the role of shuttle diplomat, scurrying between the kitchen and the back room. Bloom had yet to see Alfredo, but the scraps of information from Tomás, doled out in bits and pieces, were plenty vivid. Bloom knew he wouldn't write a word or trust a word until he had seen Alfredo in the flesh.

But he couldn't wait all day.

Twice he had punched off his cell phone when Coogan had called.

Bloom texted his reply: “Heck of a lead. Will call soon.”

Coogan expected tight communication. Bloom was taking a gamble. If the cops had a breakthrough and were about to announce something, Coogan was screwed. His only other option would be to instantly inject Marjorie Hayes with hard news skills and hard news touch. So, really, there was no other option.

Police bulletin or not, he didn't want to stop watching Trudy. Her entire essence focused on the health of Alfredo Loya. Bloom knew the phrase “give your undivided attention” from dozens of grade school teachers, but he now knew precisely what that phrase meant. Trudy did one thing at a time. When she spoke, words flowed from a calm center. Her mood owned the room. Alfredo Loya trusted her. Tomás trusted her. Tomás' girlfriend Candy was the last to fall under her spell.

From what Bloom could gather, Tomás' girlfriend knew someone who knew someone who knew a doctor who could come to help. Tomás' girlfriend wasn't going to settle down until Alfredo was receiving medical care. Still, Trudy kept calm. She was the first visitor escorted back to see Alfredo. Maybe they thought she could sprinkle some magic dust on his wounds.

Bloom waited, wondered if he was making a mistake. Should he
call Coogan? Check in? Tell him what he'd come across? He was torn—
with the police now working every angle imaginable from every resident in Glenwood Manor, it would be easy to miss a breaking story if he stayed with this odd tangent. But Alfredo had a story. Every instinct told Bloom to stay put.

Surely how he handled this situation today could help him get invited to Trudy's kitchen again and possibly manage another encounter with the enigmatic Allison. Trudy would be his ticket. Possibly. And if nothing else he would have Trudy's friendship. He didn't want to overlook that possibility. But Allison Coil was the one he wanted to unlock.

“It's not too bad,” said Trudy. Her expression hadn't changed. She smiled like she was greeting a long lost friend. “Bruises, a sprained ankle, not severe. Exhaustion more than anything.”

Bloom nodded, made sure she was finished. “I need to talk with him directly.”

“I explained,” said Trudy. “With the girlfriend's help, of course. Right now he's scared. He feels cornered.”

“I need ten minutes,” said Bloom. “Maybe fifteen. Of course I'd like more, but that would be enough for starters.”

“He won't be here long,” said Trudy. A moment of genuine concern flashed across her face. “Tomás figures they'll know to come here, to look for Alfredo.”

“Who?” said Bloom.

“The people who picked him up,” said Trudy. “Alfredo said he was in a jail of some sort with others, too. People were giving orders. It was organized.”

“I need a few minutes,” said Bloom. Already the story was writing itself in his head.

Bloom's cell phone rang.

“We're thinking of taking him up to my place,” said Trudy.

And what if Alfredo' captors were legitimate, some official branch of ICE? Or similar? Then wouldn't Trudy be aiding and abetting?

“I'll take my chances,” said Trudy, who must have read Bloom's mind. “Something isn't right.”

“I want to talk with him before you move him,” said Bloom, ignoring the phone. “I can't come to your place. Not today or tonight, anyway.”

“Let me ask him,” said Trudy.

Bloom glanced at his Caller ID. Coogan.

“Yes,” said Bloom, standing and letting himself out of the mobile home. He stepped down three metal steps to the street and the heat. Two boys kicked around a soccer ball, taking aim at imaginary goals on the asphalt.

“Cops are holding a big-deal news conference right now on the steps of City Hall. How far away are you?”

Five minutes, thought Bloom. If he had a bridge or a zip line straight across the river, even less.

“I'll swing by there as soon as I'm finished,” said Bloom.

“Where are you?” Coogan's voice snapped with authority, a certain
pissed-offness.

“I'm outside the door of a guy who was picked up by ICE or by someone and tossed into a holding cell,” said Bloom. “He's illegal—undocumented, anyway. And he escaped. He's going to tell me the whole story here in two minutes.”

“Cops have a person of interest,” said Coogan. “We need all the details on the website eight seconds after the news conference ends.”

Maybe Kerry London would let Bloom view the whole raw footage from whatever the cops had to announce. Maybe DiMarco would tell him if this was a genuine lead or pure smokescreen. Maybe his ass was in a sling or halfway out the door and he didn't know it.

“I'm on it,” said Bloom.

“
The
Denver Post
has already sent out a news alert and the
New York Times
has a teaser on their site,” said Coogan. “I will not be the caboose on this fucking train.”

Coogan was ramped up, but he said it with all the matter-of-fact narration of a civil war documentary on public television.

The line went dead.

twenty-nine:
wednesday afternoon

Turned toward the barn,
Sunny Boy perked up.

Sunny Boy was about to be seriously disappointed.

Allison made it look good. In case she was being followed or watched, she did everything by the book for a quarter mile, then stopped and went through a long exercise of pretending to adjust the fit on Sunny Boy's saddle, all while catching glimpses back the way she had come, to see if she had company.

Nobody.

An Engelmann spruce made for good cover and provided a post for Sunny Boy deep under a broad canopy.

“Looks like rain, big fella,” she told him. “Maybe worse.”

She tied a halter hitch, sure that the sight of it was giving Sunny Boy the lone horse blues. The sky scowled.

The wind at ground level was steady. It was cooler, stiffer. August in the Flat Tops was only August when it wasn't performing dynamite impersonations of September or October. On the Flat Tops, the season blender was set to puree.

The key was to maintain a bearing. She had kept careful track of distance. She needed to cruise along a parallel track in the woods back to asshole muttonchops and his buddy and get the real story. Allison had seen a hundred hunter camps and met hundreds of hunters. She had never met a twosome as dripping with secrets.

The woods were clean and open, as if the forest floor enjoyed regular maid service, all swept and tidy. No blow-down timber to hurdle, no creeks to cross, only serene stretches of well-spaced spruce and fir, a soft carpet of pine needle droppings and mulched-up tree detritus. The smell was seductive.

The first rain drops suggested it was best to stay focused. The drops were cold and intermittent. They exploded around her feet like sniper fire. Her jean jacket took a couple of hits, her hat took a dull, wet
thwack.
The water bullets bordered on hail. As soon as she thought the word, pea-size marshmallows started dancing off the forest floor and pinged her hat with purpose.

Hang tight, Sunny Boy
, she thought.
Hang tight.

She slowed. Her internal GPS suggested she was getting close. Something about the change of the slope, the mix of trees. She was nearing the place where Sunny Boy had been abandoned the first time. Open valley to her left. She found herself crouched as she ran, head low like she was bracing to bash a brick wall. The hail spat thicker and she told herself she'd take no more than twenty minutes. More than that would be unfair to all horses everywhere.

Allison slowed to a careful walk. A patch of aspen felt familiar. The view through the woods clouded up in a wet, white misty gauze. A tank crashing through the woods at full torque probably wouldn't be heard amid the pounding shrapnel from the sky. By comparison to the heavy artillery, her footsteps were like a squirrel doing a grand plié. She couldn't hear her own footfalls amid the ground level thunder.

Hail—good for sound-proofing her approach, bad for boosting the chances that muttonchops and his sidekick would be outside doing much of anything.

The camp popped into view. Had the men been standing around the fire, which was struggling to retain its dignity, she would have been easily spotted. But the camp was empty, the formerly dirt hard pack apron around the fire pit now layered in white like an oversized doily.

The hail relented. For a moment, at least, calm was restored. The outer ring of the storm had passed, but there was more to come. She stepped back into the woods and found cover, laying low behind a lodge pole with Sumo-respectable girth.

Rain replaced the hail. Steady, but not as threatening.

Fifteen minutes more in this spot, ten back to Sunny Boy.

Home for a late dinner and then raid her stash of tequila and she'd thank the crew for their hard work and no doubt on the return trip she would spot fresh elk trails or maybe the real thing and no doubt her day would feel like a complete success, including the part where she figured out what these backwoods assholes had in mind and including the part where there was a speedy report back from the cops about the half-corpse and all would be revealed.

“It's over.”

The voice was male and the words were uttered simultaneously as its owner stepped from the tent.

New guy.

He was dressed for a U.S. Marine assault of Corregidor and vastly overdressed for a hunt—or any camping activity—in Colorado in August. Complete fatigues, head to toe. Baseball-style cap with a long camo brim. Black boots.

“Ten minutes of bluster,” he said for the benefit of others inside the tent. “We're fine.”

Allison brought up the binoculars. The hat bore the same insignia as what she'd seen earlier. This guy had a solid nose familiar to a dozen Mediterranean countries but the first one that came to mind was Greece. A proud nose. His skin was dark. He wore sunglasses that fit tight to his face, narrow strips of lenses no wider than fat Band-Aids but green-black and shiny. With her high school trigonometry and a wild-ass guess, Allison put him at six-two and 225 pounds. Fit, not fat.

“Let's wait. No rush.” Not every word was crisply enunciated, but that was the gist of what Allison had heard. And her sense of it was confirmed by the retort from the man who had come out to check the weather.

“Come on, Dillard, get your ass out here. It's over and done. Like springtime all over again out here.”

The man took three steps to the fire and gave it a sideways karate kick, stirring up the struggling embers in a hornet's nest of swirling red flecks. One fact couldn't be disputed—the camp was well-established. Undergrowth doesn't get obliterated in one week or two of trampling around. The camp was neatly hidden, too. It was deep enough within the forest to be hard to be spot by the occasional passerby. Then, why the fire? Maybe they'd gotten cocky.

“Just a passing little hail deal, Dillard. Let's get a move on.”

Dillard was muttonchops. “Thought the world was ending there for a minute or two,” he said.

“Fuck it, man, it's only hail. Always sounds like hell. It's over.”

Allison didn't have to look to know the sky was still cast-iron black. She doubted the man's primary occupation was meteorology.

Allison dropped the binoculars. Dillard carried a bow in his left hand. It was camo green and gray. It was one of those compound bows that looked fiendish and overly complicated.
Dillard strapped on a pack and a quiver that appeared full.

Where was Mr. American Fat dude? How come he hadn't come out to join the weather forecasting? He couldn't have gone far.

Five more minutes…from now, she told herself.

Horses were good at waiting. Boyfriends, too. Could she step away from the camp as easily as she arrived? A minute ago, it was as loud as a jet engine, not that she cared to think about jets. Now it was as quiet as a country road at dawn. Her exit would have to be a model of stealth.

“Go check and see if they're close,” said not-Dillard. “Bring the binos.”

Allison couldn't see any eye-rolling, but she could feel Dillard's reluctance to take orders. The first man kicked the fire while Dillard went back inside the tent and, a minute later, returned and headed straight out of the camp on the opposite side from where Allison watched.

Her heart thudded. Her lips and tongue dried at the same rate as a snowflake in the Sahara. Not-Dillard stared at the fire, didn't bother to look at the sky above, which had the same patina as, say, coal. She should slip away now and spend the rest of the night admonishing her paranoid brain.

Or not. What could be observed so far wasn't illegal, bad or in any way reportable. The way her alarms raged, like fireworks, was a different story

Dillard wasn't gone long. He was trailed by two drenched cowboys on horseback in full body slickers. They dripped water and their horses looked like they they'd come through a car wash. On a long tether behind the horses were four dogs on a group harness. All muzzled. And all equally soaked. All the dogs were a breed, or mix, that Allison didn't recognize. Maybe a bit of Bloodhound in their droopy ears and wrinkled snouts. Maybe a bit of Walker in their determined, eager looks.

If there was anything sinister going on, the dogs were the only indication. Dogs don't hunt without snow and tracks. Dogs don't come with hunters in archery season. Dogs are unpredictable, make noise. They aren't necessary. They don't help. The dogs added to the bizarre platter of issues that turned Allison's stomach sour.

Five minutes more? From now?

It wasn't likely they were about to stand around the fire and discuss the rest of the day's planned activities for her benefit.

The two new men were cut from the same stock as the fatigue-clad nameless dude. One was white and he had the pink-pale complexion of a purebred Scandinavian, complete with diamond-blue eyes visible only with the aid of the binoculars. The second man was as brown as the first man was white. Allison raised the binos again to double-check the Hispanic features—a broad, round face with full cheeks, black eyes and thick dark eyebrows like two fuzzy caterpillars. Allison guessed he was fifty; a bit of gray dabbed his hair below the wet cowboy hat. The new white guy mumbled something Allison couldn't hear, although the general tone berated the others. Something about complaining about the storm.

It started to rain again—a solid shower—and a fresh round of squawks erupted from the foursome. Dillard headed to the tent and the others weren't far behind. Dogs, too. That made four grown wet men and four wet dogs in one medium-size canvas wall tent. Allison could only imagine the disarray and the stench, particularly after one or two inevitable cigars were torched.

The show was over. Allison stayed low as she backed away from the camp, but didn't wait long to stand up and start heading back, picking up her pace in the pouring rain. She chose her return route by feel. She ran to make up time or at least create a good impression for Sunny Boy when she arrived. Surely being out of breath would show she cared. She didn't want him to think she'd been dawdling.

The spot where she thought she'd left Sunny Boy must have had an identical twin, although it was odd that the exact match would exist so close—almost as if an adult had his doppelganger living next door. There was the same indent. There was the same pattern of trees. She was expecting to see a large brown mammal—and thinking about how to respond to his recriminations—that at first she didn't see the stub of cotton rope, dangling there as if the tree had a white, braided and flaccid penis. The rope had been neatly chopped, perhaps the work of a hatchet. As quickly as she processed the fact that the Sunny Boy was gone, she realized they might be watching and waiting for her, too. She flinched and ducked, quickly darted back into deep cover.

No shot came.

Allison slowed to a walk and waited, turned and looked again.

Nothing.

She sat in the woods, stared out at the broad and empty valley in the distance.

She waited, watched. Waited some more. Listened. Stared. Took a breath. When nothing moved, she slipped back to the spot where Sunny Boy had waited, studied the grasses and occasional bare patches, thinking a print might show what direction he had headed.

The soaked grasses yielded nothing.

Inventory didn't take long.

Binos, jean jacket, blue jeans, hat, bra, underwear, socks and boots. There might be a Fig Newton tucked in a stray pocket, but she didn't want to look. Not yet. She found Colin's atlatl tucked in an inside pocket, didn't realize she'd been carrying it.

And no arrows.

Water? Real food? Horse? None of the above.

Cell phone? In Sunny Boy's saddlebag.

Miles to cover? Seven or eight.

Hours of daylight left? Three at the most.

Rain re-doubled its lashing, added weight to her hat and dripping onto the back of her jacket.

The moment was tailor made for one of Colin's favorite lines.

Welcome to the suck.