Astride a Pink Horse (9 page)

Ignoring Sarah’s stare, Kimiko quickly filled three cups with tea and, without asking Rikia or Sarah if they cared for any, offered the cups to them, sat back, and adjusted herself in her seat. Plopping two cubes of sugar into her tea, she asked, “How did things go during your interrogation at Warren this morning?”

“Fine,” said Sarah, still upset that neither Kimiko nor Rikia had felt it necessary to take part in the Wheatland courthouse protest that Kimiko had helped organize. “Fine in spite of Buford’s injury, that is. Some overzealous air force officer, a woman, no less, kicked him in his privates during the protest. I was so angry about being hauled down to Warren from Wheatland and interrogated like a common criminal that I forgot to mention Buford’s injury when I called you earlier.”

“Is Buford all right?” Kimiko asked.

“He’s sore, but he is okay.”

“A woman,” Rikia said, indignantly, straining to correctly enunciate his words. “Leave it to the U.S. military to turn a ballerina into a brute.”

“You’re right there,” said Sarah.

Sensing a need to move quickly past Rikia’s upset, Kimiko said, “I didn’t think there’d be as much television coverage as there has been about the protest. Especially since all we were really hoping for was to take advantage of the events at Tango-11 and enlighten people.”

“Well, we ignited a bonfire,” said Rikia, beaming.

“I’m not sure we did,” said Sarah. “But what’s selling is a
murder, not our message. But for what it’s worth, we did have a dozen TV crews at the protest last night. Some from as far away as Denver and Salt Lake City.”

Rikia rubbed his hands together excitedly and shouted, “Good! Good! Good!” An authoritative glance from Kimiko silenced him.

“So where do we go from here?” Sarah asked, watching the rebuked-looking Rikia take a long sip of tea.

“I’m not sure that we go anywhere,” said Kimiko. “We’ve made our point. At least for the moment.”

“But there are hundreds of other missile-silo sites out there,” said Rikia, looking disappointed.

“But none I’d wager with a dead man dangling on the grounds,” said Sarah.

Rikia sat forward in his chair, prepared to offer a response, but the stern, intimidating, and unwavering look on Kimiko’s face told him that the best thing he could do right then was to remain silent. Looking pleased when he did, Kimiko smiled and offered Sarah more tea.

Sarah watched the steaming tea flow into her cup. Nodding a thank-you to Kimiko, she took a sip of the lemony tea and relaxed back in her seat to think about where the three of them were headed from there.

Muscular and clean-shaven from the crown of his head to the tips of his toes, Silas Breen was a slow-thinking, freckle-faced, six-foot-nine-inch, twenty-four-year-old giant of a black man with a strong resemblance to Howdy Doody. A Gulliver among Lilliputians, he had once been a high school basketball star, clumsy but powerful enough to overwhelm his prep school counterparts for four years and earn himself a college athletic scholarship to Kansas State. But after a year of college ball, his coaches could see that smaller, quicker, and more thoughtful players would forever run circles around the chubby-cheeked Breen.

With his scholarship gone and his academic skills weak, Breen dropped out of college after the first semester of his sophomore year to bump his way around the West for a couple of years, making stops in Santa Fe, Denver, Rapid City, and Bozeman before finding his niche.

Eleven months earlier he’d bought a used twenty-six-foot U-Haul Super Mover truck at auction; put a set of illegally recapped tires on it; reconditioned the radiator, transmission, and rear end; painted the truck shamrock green except for its white cab and cargo-bay roof, in honor of his beloved Fighting Irish of Notre Dame; stenciled “Breen’s Moving & Storage Company” on the side panels; and gone into the moving and hauling business.

Using his brawn and contacts that his father had from twenty-five years as an army supply sergeant, he’d made enough money since starting his business to think about hiring someone to help him, and maybe after that to buy a second truck.

But those were matters he planned to look into after he finished his current job, a long-haul trip that would earn him big dollars. He wasn’t sure why he’d ended up landing the plum of hauling old hospital equipment from Ottawa, Ontario, to Amarillo, Texas, especially since he was being paid 20 percent over scale, but he was happy he had.

There were a few oddball things about the gig besides the fact that it had materialized out of the blue, the most glaring one being the fact that he didn’t know for certain who’d hired him. But when it came to the sort of money he was getting, Silas didn’t much care.

What he did know about the person who’d hired him was that only their first communication had been by phone. Every contact since then had been by fax, including the one telling him he’d been hired. He’d been paid half down for his services: $3,100 in cash that had arrived at his apartment in Buffalo, New York, in a padded, heavily taped ten-by-thirteen-inch manila envelope one day before he was to start the job. The envelope had borne a Las Vegas postmark and no return address. The only other things he knew for certain were that the name F. MANTEW always appeared in capital letters on his correspondent’s faxes and that F. Mantew wanted his shipment delivered within three days.

When he’d picked up his load three hours earlier from a warehouse in Ottawa, most of the seven-ton shipment had been crated. He hadn’t paid serious attention to his primary cargo, twenty
heavily banded eight-by-four-by-four-foot crates, other than to marvel at their stoutness, and since he wasn’t about to look his gift horse in the mouth, he’d attributed that stoutness to OSHA shipping regs.

The combination of his cash down payment and F. Mantew’s secrecy had, nonetheless, put him in an inquisitive mood, and he’d made certain that the twenty crates matched up exactly with what was printed on his shipping documents and bill of lading. He’d also decided to take a more thorough look at his cargo when he stopped for the night in South Bend, Indiana, to pay homage to the Notre Dame campus and the Fighting Irish.

Now on the outskirts of Syracuse and cruising along comfortably at sixty-five after a forgettable trip down I-81 from Ottawa, Silas had a feeling that although he wasn’t necessarily headed for trouble, he might be headed for a surprise. Trying his best to convince himself that concern about his shipment was unwarranted and that he had three full days ahead of him to ride his current wave, he slipped a Muddy Waters disc into his grease-stained dashboard CD player and began humming along to the old blues master’s four-minute-long lost-love lament. Reminding himself that he, not F. Mantew, was in the driver’s seat for now, he hummed a little louder.

He had half the money due him in his pocket, and, more importantly, he was in possession of F. Mantew’s goods. Leaning down and feeling beneath his seat for the crowbar that had once belonged to his grandfather, he forced a smile. He’d never liked surprises, even as a child. So if any surprises were in store, he might as well be ready with a surprise of his own. And if Granddad’s crowbar
wasn’t enough to handle that surprise, the .32 in his glove compartment certainly was. His reluctant smile turned into a grin as he sat back up to focus on the road. The grin became broader as he hummed along with Muddy and fantasized about what would be his first trip ever to Notre Dame.

Bernadette left Cheyenne for Hawk Springs, Wyoming, an hour and a half ahead of Cozy’s departure for the same windswept community. She’d stopped outside the tiny community of LaGrange to have a look at two decommissioned missile sites, Bravo-10 and Bravo-11, a little before four p.m., hoping to see for herself just how secure the sites were. She also hoped to ferret out any possible link between those two sites and the murder that had occurred at Tango-11. A rainstorm had followed her most of the way from Cheyenne, petering out just before LaGrange and leaving behind a massive arching rainbow.

After rummaging around the abandoned Bravo-10 and -11 sites for fifteen minutes each, looking for linkages and clues to the Giles murder, she decided that, aside from the lingering post-thunderstorm wind howl and the half rainbow that remained, there was little to suggest that she wasn’t traipsing around some barren moonscape in search of nonexistent clues.

She had received one piece of additional information about Thurmond Giles before leaving Warren that she thought might ultimately prove helpful. The information had come by way of the pesky, persistent, never-take-no-for-an-answer Sergeant Milliken, who’d told her that Giles had been an interservice league basketball star for at least five of his twenty years in the air force
and that he’d had friends in high places who’d used his hardwood skills to wave the air force flag. She planned to follow up on that information once she returned to Warren. Now, with her clothes sticking to her, her hair curling up from the humidity, and not one shred of helpful information gleaned from Bravo-10 or -11, she slipped back into the comfort of her air-conditioned air force–blue Jeep and headed for Hawk Springs. As she gained speed, she thought that although it was unlikely, it was entirely possible that Sergeant Giles’s death and the security breach at Tango-11 had nothing to do with Giles’s ethnicity, with nuclear missiles, or with revenge, and she wondered what she might be overlooking.

The trail of dust rising from behind Bernadette’s Jeep caused Buford Kane to get up from his chair on the front porch of the log home he’d built almost single-handedly and mutter, “Who the hell?”

As he stood clutching the ice pack that had been resting in his lap, he spotted the air force emblem on the Jeep’s door, shouted, “Damn it!” and slammed the ice pack to the porch floor. Mumbling, “Shit,” he stroked his ratty-looking beard; stared down the winding gravel road leading uphill to his house; and hobbled, testicles throbbing, into the house to return with a Remington 12-gauge, pump-action shotgun. He aimed the gun squarely at the nose of the approaching Jeep, following it with the barrel as it snaked its way toward him. Less than a minute later, Bernadette stopped the Jeep twenty yards from Buford’s front porch, slipped out of the vehicle, and walked cautiously toward him, stopping at the foot of the porch steps.

Recognizing her, with his shotgun still aimed at the Jeep, he
thought about the pain and humiliation she’d caused him. “Can’t you read, lady? There’re no-trespassin’ signs tacked to every damn fence on this place. And just for the record, just so I don’t say somethin’ politically incorrect, mind tellin’ me if you’re one of them don’t-ask, don’t-tell lesbians the military seems intent on recruitin’ these days?” Buford snickered for a second before the look on his face turned deadly serious. “Why in the hell are you here, Major?”

Sounding and looking unintimidated, Bernadette said, “I’m hoping you might help me a little more with my Tango-11 investigation by answering a few follow-up questions. I’d like to get more information on any other antinuclear people who might not have been with you last night, and I’d appreciate what you can tell me about Reverend Wilson Jackson. I’d also like it if you’d set that shotgun you’re holding aside. I’ll only take a few minutes of your time, and Ms. Goldbeck’s, of course. Is she home?”

“No, she ain’t. As for me, I’ll give you your frickin’ few minutes.” Aiming his shotgun at the nose of the Jeep, he squeezed off two rounds. Moments later, lime-green antifreeze started dripping onto the ground. “Think you’re gonna need a tow,” Buford said, grinning.

“You’re using very poor judgment, Mr. Kane,” Bernadette said, unflinching.

“You’re the one using poor judgment, lady. Let me share a little somethin’ with you. Twenty-five years ago, before I hooked up with Sarah, I was a biker. And not just any old kinda biker, either. You ever heard of the Outlaws?”

Bernadette nodded, aware from years of living in the Golden
State that the California-based Outlaws had once battled the Hells Angels for American biker-gang supremacy.

Still grinning, Buford said, “Bet you thought that since my old lady’s a pacifist, I’m one, too. Well, I ain’t, sweetie, and her bein’ antinuclear sure as hell don’t translate into me bein’ antigun.”

Eyeing the porch steps and suspecting that in three to four quick strides she could be on top of him, Bernadette said, “Why don’t you put the shotgun down, Mr. Kane.”

“And if I don’t? What then? You got the balls to disarm me?”

“I won’t be leaving until we talk, sir.”

Looking suddenly less sure of himself, Buford took a long, deep breath. “Okay, then. You can stand there in the sun and sweat because we won’t be talkin’ about nothin’ anytime soon.”

“Then we can both sweat,” Bernadette said, smiling and relaxing into a parade-rest stance.