Astride a Pink Horse (30 page)

“Makes baseball-diamond sense, I guess, but what’s the take-home message?”

“The message, my sexy major, is time, distance, and Howard Colbain. Lubbock and Amarillo are each four-, maybe five-hour drives from Albuquerque. Which means you could drive from any one of the points of the triangle to the next in a hurry if you had to. Especially if you needed to pick up an important shipment of something. And since Albuquerque’s the only city of the three with a known Tango-11 connection, we’re back to Howard Colbain.”

Nodding, Bernadette said, “So, if you’re having some trucker deliver goods to a location you don’t really want anyone else to know about, changing the destination from Amarillo to Lubbock would keep anyone intent on any kind of intervention guessing. And you’d still be within striking distance of your real target: Albuquerque.” Winking at Cozy, she smiled and said, “By the way, air force fighter pilots and the army field artillery boys prefer to call your baseball-diamond analogy ‘target triangulation.’ So, what on earth would Silas Breen be delivering to Colbain?”

Feigning upset, Cozy said, “What’s in a name? As for what Breen’s delivering, I don’t know. What I am certain of is that Colbain’s absolutely in the Tango-11 mix and that Breen’s more than likely delivering something related to the Giles murder to Colbain.”

Looking puzzled, Bernadette slipped her headset off and down around her neck. “Wait a minute, Cozy. I think we could be moving too quickly to a conclusion here. We just might be asking ourselves the wrong question.”

“How’s that?”

“First off, I’ve spent way too much time looking for a possible connection between Tango-11 and the 999 other missile sites out there when what I probably should’ve been looking for is not any kind of connection but what on earth made Tango-11 the odd man out. Maybe it’s related to your time-and-distance thing. Suppose that while Silas Breen may indeed have been hired to deliver something to Amarillo or Lubbock, or perhaps even Albuquerque—let’s consider them geographic equivalents of my 999 silo sites—someone was planning all along to intercept him along the way, providing us with a nice little outlier just like Tango-11.”

“Damn. You know, you might be right. I knew you were more than just another pretty face,” Cozy said, smiling.

“And I fly jets, too,” Bernadette added coyly. “So given that possibility, what’s our game plan?”

“We get
Sugar
to Albuquerque as fast as we can, and then we head for Colbain’s place. In the meantime, I’ll think a little more about your odd-man-out theory. There’s something about it that’s mighty appealing.”

Wrapping a bare foot around Cozy’s spindly ankle, Bernadette said, “Sort of like you, Mr. Coseia.” They didn’t say anything to one another until Bernadette announced several minutes later, “I’m about to begin our initial approach into Albuquerque.”

Feeling relaxed and content and convinced that for the first time in years, the nearly constant tingling in his leg had at least temporarily all but disappeared, Cozy looked at her and said, “Aye, aye, Captain.”

Rikia Takata was on schedule and feeling confident that he’d left nothing behind that could derail his mission or that could be specifically traced to him. He’d paid cash for his bus ticket from El Paso to Amarillo and for his taxi ride from the bus station to a motel just off I-40 that had been within walking distance of the woods where he’d killed Silas Breen. There’d been cash payments for the World War II–era Japanese sword and the two dozen untraceable cans of spray paint he’d spent months purchasing from various stores across Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. He’d mailed the sword and the spray paint to himself at his hotel in El Paso. The paint had been exhausted when he’d spray painted the sides of
Silas Breen’s truck ruby red forty-five minutes earlier. There were no credit-card paper trails whatsoever, and although it was possible that the cab driver or bus ticket agent might remember him, it was unlikely. His one concern was that Howard Colbain had refused to help him deal with Breen or Breen’s truck when he’d called to ask for assistance. His amateurish paint job was therefore going to have to suffice.

He’d made a fifteen-minute stop just outside the town of Santa Rosa at a junkyard ninety-five miles east of Albuquerque to pick up the final two things he needed to complete the mission. The rough-looking, Vandyke-bearded man he’d met there, whom he’d talked to three weeks earlier on a phone he’d stolen from a student, had supplied him with those things, but not without scrutinizing the truck and its poorly done paint job with obvious suspicion. However, since the man, a Mexican illegal and a longtime supplier of stolen heavy-equipment parts to Howard Colbain, spoke English that was barely understandable, dealt only in cash, and had a Quonset hut filled with everything from stolen AK-47s to Mexican porn, Rikia knew he would keep his mouth shut.

He’d loaded the three microwave-sized cardboard boxes the man had packed for him onto the truck’s front seat, hitched a rusted-out beater of a ’72 Volkswagen beetle that the man had sold him to the rear bumper, thanked the man in Spanish, handed him five thousand dollars in cash, and driven off.

Now, as he sat parked on an abandoned stretch of cracking asphalt that had once been old U.S. Highway 40, twenty miles west of where he’d picked up the boxes and the VW, he had the sense that destiny was truly on his side. Stepping from the cab, he walked
to the rear of the truck, peered into the more than 115-degree heat of the truck’s cargo hold, and wrinkled his nose. The rank smell of feces and urine emanating from Silas Breen’s body caused him to take a step back. Not having anticipated how overpowering the smell of death could be, he took a deep breath, pinched his nostrils together, and stepped up into the cargo bay. Everything inside was just as it had been in Amarillo. Breen’s body hadn’t moved. When he heard what sounded like a twig snapping outside the truck, he pulled the cargo-bay door closed. Spotting a jackrabbit running through the sage, he let out a sigh.

Satisfied that everything he needed and had been promised by Thurmond Giles was in the truck, he stepped back from the rear bumper and, gagging from the smell, threw up the bananas and cereal he’d had for breakfast. Five minutes later, he was back on I-40 headed west for Albuquerque and the U.S. 285 bypass that would skirt him around the city.

The SUV that Cozy rented at the Albuquerque airport had that fresh-off-the-assembly-line new-car smell and less than two hundred miles on the odometer. Cozy was busy adjusting an uncooperative side mirror when Bernadette, who’d been rummaging around in the vehicle’s trunk, got in next to him and casually slipped the lug wrench beneath the front seat. “Just for good measure,” she said, smiling.

Cozy’s response was an understanding nod.

As they sped east on I-40 toward Howard Colbain’s office, Bernadette looked up from the silo-site map of Colorado she’d been studying and glanced at the SUV’s speedometer to realize
that they were doing ninety-five. “Would you please slow this thing down, Cozy?”

Cozy eased his foot off the accelerator. “Thought you liked speed.”

“I do. But only when I’m at the controls.” She juggled the order of the maps in her lap and began scrutinizing the silo-site map of Wyoming. Looking both exasperated and puzzled, as if she’d reached the end of the road with her maps, she said, “Remember that wad of paper they found jammed in Sergeant Giles’s mouth along with the head of his penis?”

“Yes,” Cozy said, thinking,
Where the heck did that come from?

“Well, it’s a peculiar combination that’s never made a lot of sense to me.”

“It’s a combination that screams revenge, Bernadette.”

“The amputated penis head, yes, but what about the paper?”

“The killer used it to shut Giles up.”

Bernadette teased a tracing of a map from the middle of her stack. “Somehow, I don’t think so. I was there when the coroner found the wad. It was too small to have shut Sergeant Giles up. Bosack faxed me a flattened-out copy of it the day after we found Giles’s body. I made this tracing of it. Want to see?”

“Sure.” Cozy glanced briefly at the five-by-six-inch tracing. “Looks like a piece that’s been torn from one of your silo maps to me, and it’s got one of those missile-silo dots on it. So, what’s the point?”

“I don’t really know,” Bernadette said, overlaying the tracing with its single dot and two barely visible lines that clearly represented borders of some state onto the Wyoming map in her lap. “Except that the one dot on my tracing doesn’t match
up with the dot that should be Tango-11 when I overlay it on the Wyoming silo-site map. Not by a long shot. The dot ends up being too far north and way too far west of where Tango-11 and the town of Wheatland should be. I’ve overlaid the tracing on silo-site maps of the Dakotas, Montana, Nebraska, Missouri, and Colorado—dozens of times, in fact—and no matter how I turn or adjust the tracing, it doesn’t match up with a single silo site in any of those states.”

“Have you tried New Mexico?”

Bernadette shook her head. “There weren’t ever any missile silos in New Mexico,” she said, still adjusting her tracing. Seconds later, her eyes widened, and she screamed, “Damn! No—make that double damn!”

“Something click?”

“Yes, something loud and clear—and strangely horrific.” Sounding desperate, she said, “Cozy, I need a map of New Mexico right now.”

“There’s one in the glove compartment with the rental agreement. Mind telling me what’s got you so spooked?”

“In a second.” She slipped the New Mexico map out of the glove compartment, unfolded it, and then folded the edges in to get rid of the advertisements and state history summary running along the sides until she had a map of the state that showed its border with Colorado. “Not quite as square as either Colorado or Wyoming, as Western states go, but square enough.” There was a look of trepidation on her face as she overlaid the tracing of the map fragment that had been found in Giles’s mouth onto the map of New Mexico. “How could I have missed it?” she said, adjusting
the tracing into place. “How on earth! I should have seen it long before now.”

“Would you please clue me in, Bernadette?” Cozy said, his voice rising.

“Okay, okay,” she said, staring down at the tracing overlay. “The distance from the lone dot on that wadded paper fragment the coroner found in Sergeant Giles’s mouth to the barely visible line that would clearly have to represent some state’s border—Colorado’s, for instance—is pretty much the same as the distance from the southern border of Colorado to the north-central part of New Mexico on the map beneath it. Have a look and remember where the dot is, okay?” Bernadette held the map and tracing up for Cozy to see.

Cozy glanced at the tracing with its underlying map of New Mexico and said, “It looks like the dot on your tracing is pretty much sitting on top of a good-sized New Mexico city. The city name’s too small for me to read. It’s too far north to be Albuquerque, so I’d say it’s probably Santa Fe.”

“Close but no cigar,” Bernadette said, shaking her head. “If you look real close you can see that the dot on the tracing is farther north and a little west of where Santa Fe should be. Look, right near the end of my fingernail.”

“I can’t read the map and drive, Bernadette.”

“Then let me spell it out for you. The edge of my fingernail’s sitting directly on Los Alamos.”

Cozy frowned. “Los Alamos? The place where they built the first atomic bomb?”

Bernadette nodded.

“What the heck would anybody involved in this whole crazy-assed Tango-11 fiasco want to do there?”

“Make another bomb, perhaps?”

“That’s nuts, Bernadette. There has to be a better explanation than that.”

Bernadette swallowed hard and set her maps aside. Her cinnamon-colored skin now had an adrenaline-charged pink cast. Staring across the median into the oncoming traffic, as if hypnotized, she said, “Okay, instead of making a bomb, maybe somebody plans to set one off there instead.”

A sudden windstorm had just sent trash and tumbleweeds spiraling into the fence that separated Howard Colbain’s property from a 160-acre parcel of Bureau of Land Management ground to the east.

The microburst proved powerful enough to sail a stray truck tire through the fence, knocking a gaping, four-foot-wide hole in it and ripping out a half-dozen steel support posts. Colbain and Jerico Mimms, his six-foot-seven-inch lot man, were inspecting the damage when Cozy pulled off the highway and stopped a few feet from them.

Mimms, accustomed to travelers stopping to ask for directions, watched the SUV’s front windows roll down before walking over to Bernadette’s side, stooping, and asking, “Help you?”

“We’re looking for Howard Colbain,” Bernadette said, eye to eye with the lot man.

Mimms glanced in his boss’s direction before straightening up to lean two massive forearms against the SUV’s rain gutter. The SUV shook when he took a half step back. “That’s him over there,” he said, pointing toward a man standing about twenty yards away.

Thinking that the blockheaded Mimms reminded her of someone, Bernadette said, “Thanks,” and moved to get out of the SUV.
She’d barely opened her door when Mimms jammed a knee into it. “This is private property, miss. Why don’t you just stay in your vehicle. I’ll go get Mr. Colbain.”