Astride a Pink Horse (5 page)

The two best friends hardly said a word to one another during the short drive back to their motel. As Cozy pulled his dually into the space next to Freddy’s Bentley, Freddy broke the silence. “Those antinuke protesters are the key to our murder, Cozy. I know it.”

Not the least bit surprised by Freddy’s cocksureness but reluctant to challenge him and start a conversation that might end like the last one, Cozy asked, “What makes you so sure?”

“Because one of those tweets I mentioned came from someone who said I should be talking to a woman named Sarah Goldbeck. Whoever it was pumped Goldbeck up like she was the Second Coming. Said if I wanted to find out who killed that sergeant, I needed to be at that press conference.”

“Second coming of what? Those worn-out protesters of yours looked like some over-the-hill gang to me, especially the redheaded guy, the one that lady air force major drop-kicked in the nuts.”

“Hell, they’re a bunch of fricking pacifists, Cozy. What would you expect? What I’m getting at is that, pacifists or not, somebody among the four who were there at the briefing, or some tweeter out there in their extended antinuke family, is linked to that Tango-11 security breach and murder. And we need to nail them.” Cozy shrugged and shook his head. “Cop talk—and risky, Freddy.” It wouldn’t be the first time Freddy Dames had lined up to play cops and robbers. The previous summer he and Cozy had brought the hammer down on a Mexico-based car-chop ring that had ended in a 110-miles-per-hour car chase on I-70. A chase that had earned them each a ten-thousand-dollar fine, four months of community service, and a warning from a disgruntled judge that they never again become involved in vigilante activities.

“So what’s the game plan?” Cozy asked, suspecting that Freddy was already three steps down the road toward doing precisely what that judge had warned him against.

Looking pleased, Freddy said, “We wait for our four protesters to post bond, which I’m guessing will be sometime tomorrow morning, and go have a talk with them. There’s no way they’ll be charged with any more than disorderly conduct, or maybe interfering with
an official police proceeding. I’m guessing they’ll all be home tie-dying shirts and smoking doobies by noon. And maybe one of them will turn out to be my Twitter friend.”

“What about that redhead who charged the major? No way in hell he’ll be able to sidestep an assault charge.”

“Maybe not, but if he ends up in jail, we’ll still have three people to talk to. Who knows, one of the women might end up being Sarah Goldbeck. Bottom line is, it’s worth sticking around this burg to see what happens.”

“Okay. I’m game.”

“Que sera, sera.” Freddy patted Cozy reassuringly on the shoulder before moving to get out of the dually.

“Que sera,” said Cozy, repeating two of the three code words he and Freddy had begun exchanging before taking the baseball diamond during their freshman year at Southeastern Oklahoma State. The words would ultimately turn into part of a baseball-tossing warm-up routine and good-luck chant, played out to the sounds of the 1950s chart hit “Whatever Will Be, Will Be” at college baseball stadiums across the West during their senior-year championship run. Suddenly Freddy was humming the tune, nudging Cozy and urging him to do the same. By the time they reached the motel’s front door, they were harmonizing perfectly.

“Let’s say we’re back up and at it by eight,” Freddy said as they walked across the motel lobby.

“Works for me.” Thinking,
Que sera, sera
, Cozy watched Freddy hurriedly take off down a hallway for his room before he limped in the opposite direction toward his.

Cozy had as fitful a night of rest as he’d suffered through in years, and as he sat on the edge of his bed, happy to see the morning sunlight, rubbing the feeling into his left leg, and staring out the window, he had the sense that he’d been on an all-night treadmill.

Just before three a.m., he’d sat straight up in bed to the sound of a semi’s air brakes being set just outside his window. Unable to get back to sleep, he’d paced the room for a while, read a brochure highlighting Wheatland’s quiet, friendly, country-living lifestyle, and puzzled over whether the Giles murder might have been racially motivated before plopping back down on the bed to stare at the ceiling for another half hour. He’d finally drifted off to sleep a little before four only to have the dream that had chased him for years thread its way through to his subconscious.

The dream always started out the same, with him walking into a Harley-Davidson showroom and asking the only salesman there, a man dressed totally in black save for a pair of spit-shined white baseball spikes, if he could take a motorcycle for a test ride.

The salesman’s emphatic
No!
always sent him storming out of the showroom to jump on a brand-new red Harley and speed off, and the dream always ended with him barreling helmetless on the motorcycle down California’s coastal Highway 1 to ultimately be swallowed by a foggy mist. Never, in any of his thousands of dreams, had he emerged from that fog.

Still rubbing his leg and staring at the wedge of sunlight knifing its way between the room’s partially opened drapes, Cozy sighed and ran his other hand through his always unruly mop of coal-black hair. Realizing that he was badly in need of a haircut, he waited for the circulation in his leg to catch up with his scalp massage.

Missing most of the calf and without a fibula, Cozy’s left leg had been bone-grafted twice. With a third of the girth it had had during his baseball-playing days, the leg was now functional but quick to give out. A frown crossed his face as he thought about the fact that just about everything below his left knee had come from a cadaver. He stared at the leg’s puckered skin for a couple of seconds before finally rising from the edge of the bed and limping across the room to the shower.

A shave and a chin nick later, as warm water streamed over his shoulders and down the middle of his back, he found himself wondering how Freddy had slept and whether or not Freddy, a baseball natural who’d turned down the big leagues and the son of a wealthy, reclusive Oklahoma oil tycoon, ever had bad dreams.

Forty-five minutes later, Cozy sat bleary-eyed across the table from Freddy in a drafty restaurant a short drive up the street from their motel. As he listened to Freddy talk with his mouth full, he found himself wondering how on earth someone with Freddy’s silver-spoon upbringing could have developed such bad table manners.

Freddy, who’d mockingly taken to calling the four antinuke protesters from the previous evening “the Gang of Four,” took a sip of coffee and, in response to Cozy’s question about how they should proceed with their investigation, said, “So we’ll doubleteam our Gang of Four.”

“Or three if Mr. Redhead ends up behind bars.”

Freddy laughed. “I’m still thinking that OSI major somehow mistook the man’s jewels for a soccer ball. Makes you wonder
whether all the military’s female special investigation types are stone-cold ass-kickers like her.”

“You’ve got me, but I can tell you this—she hasn’t always been OSI. She was sporting pilot wings on her uniform.”

“Damn, my man. Sounds to me like you were looking pretty close. And they call me a womanizer.” Freddy forced back a chuckle. “Well, since the major seems to have caught your eye, I’m thinking you should be the one to drive down to Cheyenne and talk to her. See if she’ll give us anything newsworthy. And while you’re at it, take a look into the racial hate-crime angle. I’ll stick around here and try to finesse what I can out of our Gang of Four and Sheriff Bosack.”

Cozy looked perplexed. “You don’t think any of those warmed-over peaceniks from last night are going to implicate themselves in a murder, do you?”

“Who’s to say? Maybe their brains are a little on the overdone side after all their years of protesting. I can tell you this, though. The person I got that anonymous tweet about yesterday, Sarah Goldbeck, was one of the two women protesters last night. And believe me, she’s the thread to our story. She was the one standing to my immediate right just before she chained herself to that bench. Pulled her photo off the internet.”

“The mousy-looking woman sporting ’60s-style wire-rims? That sad, lost-looking wretch orchestrated last night’s fiasco?”

“I’m not sure whether she orchestrated it, but she got the disruptive ball rolling, didn’t she? Let’s say we quit guessing about all the whys and wherefores and who’ll talk and who won’t for the moment and head over to Sheriff Bosack’s office to find out how
far along the law is with our Gang of Four’s arraignment.” Freddy glanced at his watch. “Eight forty-five. My guess is not a whole lot moves around this burg before nine, so I’m thinking we’ve got ourselves a little time before our gang’s free and we can start with the questions.”

“Your call,” said Cozy.

“You’re damn sure agreeable this morning. You must’ve slept like a baby. Better than I did, I’m betting. Damn I-25 truck noise kept me up half the night.”

Cozy smiled and winked at his friend. “It’s a natural Caribbean siesta kind of thing, mon,” he said, deciding to keep his restless nightmare of a night to himself.

“Must be genetic for damn sure, since your lanky butt grew up in Pueblo, Colorado.” Freddy stood and eased his way from behind the table.

Cozy nodded as he thought briefly about the blue-collar southern Colorado steel town he’d grown up in after moving to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic at the age of six to be raised by his maternal grandmother, dead two years now. Iron-willed but loving, Andrea Delaney had come to the States with her husband, an American sailor she’d met while he’d been on leave in Bermuda and she’d been on vacation there. They’d ended up in Colorado when he’d left the navy to take a better-paying job as a steel worker in Pueblo, only to die in a mill accident a couple of years later.

“Must be,” Cozy said, tossing a twenty onto the table, rising, and thinking as they left that, unlike the extravagance of Freddy’s fifty the previous night, there’d be just enough change left to make a decent tip.

A few minutes later, with Cozy standing at his side ready to restrain him, Freddy Dames stood in the waiting room outside Sheriff Bosack’s office, fuming. “What the shit do you mean they left for Cheyenne!” he said to Wally Sykes.

“I told you, the judge arraigned them a little after eight this morning. We don’t like to let our problems fester around here.” Tiny droplets of spittle accompanied the deputy’s response. “The arraignees paid their disorderly conduct fines, or arranged to have them paid, and an air force van shuttled all four of them down to Warren Air Force Base a little over twenty minutes ago.”

Freddy eyed Cozy, then Sykes, and finally the wall in front of him as if he were looking for something or somebody to blame. “So where the hell’s the sheriff?”

“He won’t be here till around ten.” Freddy took two steps backward and plopped down on a narrow bench that hugged a wall in the windowless room. “I’ll wait.”

“Suit yourself,” said Sykes, stepping back from what had been a nearly toe-to-toe stance with Freddy.

Two of a kind
, Cozy thought, shaking his head.

Adjusting himself on the bench and looking as if he were prepared for a long siege, Freddy looked up at Cozy. “I want you to get on down to Warren and start digging. I’ll deal with the lunkheads here in Wheatland.” He glanced back at Sykes. “What a fuck-up!”

“Watch your language, Dames, or you’ll do your waiting outside.” Sykes eased his left hand toward the butt of his gun. Thinking,
Uh-oh
, Cozy stepped over to Freddy, grasped him firmly by the right arm, and walked him through the front door and out onto
the sidewalk. “You need to stand out here for a while and calm the hell down, Freddy.”

Upset by Cozy’s intervention, Freddy said, “And you need to head down the road to Cheyenne, Elgin.”

“Stay out here or go back to the motel, but don’t take your stupid-acting ass back into that office until the sheriff arrives. Do you hear me, Freddy?”

After several seconds of silence, Freddy leaned back against the whitewashed clapboard building and said to the only person in the world besides his father who could get away with calling him stupid, “I’ll try.”

Satisfied that Freddy would do as he’d asked, Cozy turned to leave. “I’ll call you from Warren,” he said, heading for his truck.

As he limped toward the dually, he suddenly realized that he was leaving Freddy without any means of transportation. “How’ll you get back to the motel?” he asked, turning back to Freddy.

“Walk.”

“That’ll work,” Cozy said, thinking that after Freddy talked to Sheriff Bosack, a two-mile cooling-off walk might be just what the doctor called for.

Cozy’s job generally required him to pack around a laptop, cell phone, and voice-activated recorder. But unlike Freddy, who always traveled with half-a-dozen new age electronic devices, Cozy, old school to the core and suspicious of gadgets, preferred a spiral-bound notebook and a fountain pen. He’d been ordered by Freddy six months earlier to get an iPhone, but he’d ignored the request.

When he made a nine thirty a.m. call to Bernadette Cameron, told her who he was, and asked if he could drop by for an interview later that morning, he was surprised that his temperamental, call-dropping cell phone operated perfectly for once. Bernadette was professional and polite, suggesting that eleven thirty would work for a meeting.