Mountain Rampage (25 page)

“What's this?” Clarence asked.

Chuck aimed a finger west, at the mountains and the mine, high above town. “There's gold in them there hills.”

He described his retrieval of the black material from the shaft and explained what Elaine had said.

“You've got to be kidding,” Clarence said when Chuck finished. “We're rich!”

“Sorry. Rocky Mountain National Park is rich. Not that anything will happen. There's no mining allowed within park boundaries.”

Clarence stared at Chuck in disbelief. “You're going to tell them?”

“Of course.”

Clarence lifted the baggie. “You say it's ten percent gold. A few loads of this…” His voice died away in wonderment.

“Not gonna happen.”

“So what
will
happen?”

“It'll be pretty big news at first, I imagine. They'll have to plug the tunnel with concrete or something to keep out treasure hunters like you.”

“You're nuts, man.”

“It's not ours to take.”

Clarence tossed the baggie back to Chuck. “I'm telling you, you're an idiot.”

Chuck returned the plastic bag to the van and motioned Clarence to his side. “There's something else you should see.”

With Clarence at his shoulder, he unzipped his pack and took out the skull. “Somebody already died because of the gold in the mine,” he said, handing the skull to Clarence. “I don't want you or anyone else to be next.”

Clarence touched the bullet hole in the forehead. “
Jesucristo
,” he breathed. He looked over his shoulder to be sure Parker was still occupied on the phone. “You found this in there, too?”

“In the bottom of the shaft, along with the rest of the skeleton.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I have no idea.” He took the skull back from Clarence. “See how small it is? It must have been one of the miners. It'll be up to the rangers to figure out, if they ever can.” He returned the skull to his pack.

“I can't believe you, of all people, are gonna turn that thing in—the gold, too—and just walk away.”

“I admit I'm tempted. But, at this point, I just want to get us out of here.”

Clarence groaned. “I almost forgot about all that for a minute.” He tore his eyes away from Chuck's pack. “Guess I ought to get packed up—and hope they let me leave with everybody else tomorrow morning.”

Clarence disappeared inside Raven House. Parker ended his call, climbed into his truck, and drove back around the fields. Chuck stowed his pack out of the way against a far wall of the Raven House common room, then returned to the van and busied himself emptying trash from it and sweeping out its floor with a whisk broom while awaiting Jake's arrival.

Thirty minutes after Parker's call, the long, black flatbed wrecker bounced through the front entrance to the resort and headed around the fields to the dorms. Parker followed in his pickup.

Chuck closed the rear doors of the van as the wrecker pulled
to a stop behind Nicoleta's sedan. He walked toward the tow truck as the driver descended the ladder-like steps from the cab, grasping the handles on either side of the door. The driver hopped to the gravel lot, pulled a baseball cap from the back pocket of his grease-stained coveralls, and tugged it over his close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair. He looked to be in his late fifties, lean and fit, his face browned by the sun. His green eyes sat close on either side of a long nose. The collar of a white T-shirt showed in the V of his coveralls. He wore leather work boots, the treads of which Chuck wanted badly to see.

“You must be Jake,” Chuck said to him.

“That'd be me.” Jake's voice was reedy and high-pitched.

“I'm an old friend of Parker's,” Chuck said. “Nice truck you got.” He took in the wrecker with an admiring gaze. “Diesel?”

“Gas. Got the V-10 in her.”

“Ford's best.”

“Step on her, she'll bark,” Jake agreed.

“I'll leave you to your work,” Chuck said, addressing both Jake and Parker as the resort manager approached from his pickup. Chuck let his eyes rove over the flatbed a second time and asked Jake, “Mind if I have a look?”

“Be my guest.”

Chuck set out around the wrecker. He checked the front tire first. Its lightning-bolt-shaped tread matched the marks in the dirt of the Fall River Road pullout. Of course, the tire's sidewall featured the logo for Goodyear, the most popular truck-tire manufacturer in the country.

While Jake and Parker knelt at the back of Nicoleta's car, surveying its undercarriage, Chuck made his way around to the driver's side of the tow truck. A large, rectangular toolbox, painted black to match the rest of the truck, was bolted to the vehicle's frame just behind the cab, beneath the flatbed. The box was a foot and a half wide, two feet tall, and nearly five feet
long—easily long enough to contain a rifle.

Chuck looked across the top of the flatbed. Jake and Parker still crouched behind Nicoleta's car. Keeping his eyes on the two men, Chuck gave the handle inset beneath the lid of the toolbox a stiff pull. The handle was locked. It didn't move. He yanked upward on the lid, but it held fast, too.

His fingertips came away from the toolbox covered with dry, black flakes. He put his fingers to his nose and sniffed. Nothing. He studied the toolbox. More of the flaky material, rough and textured in contrast to the box's smooth, shiny black paint, clung to the front wall of the steel box just below the lid.

Jake rose from the back of Nicoleta's car and made his way along the driver's side of the wrecker. Chuck stepped backward with a good-natured wave. He angled across the parking lot to a metal trash can next to the sidewalk. Using the body of the van as a shield between the trash can and Jake and Parker, Chuck retrieved one of the students' discarded sack-lunch bags he'd gathered while cleaning out the van. He rummaged inside the brown paper bag until his fingers closed around an empty sandwich bag. He folded the small plastic bag into the palm of his hand and hurried back around the van as Jake maneuvered the wrecker, its reverse signal beeping, until its tail end nearly touched the rear of the sedan.

Leaving the engine running, Jake climbed down from the driver's seat and worked a set of controls behind the cab, tilting the flatbed to the ground with a loud grinding noise. When he'd seated the end of the flatbed on the gravel behind Nicoleta's sedan, he slid beneath the car to attach chains from the wrecker to its frame.

While Jake lay beneath the sedan and Parker looked on, Chuck rounded the far side of the truck and crouched beside the black metal toolbox. He held the lip of the open sandwich bag to the side of the box and scraped with his fingernails at the
black material. Tiny flakes fell from the metal box into the clear plastic bag. When he held up the bag, however, he found he had far less than he needed.

He put the open bag back to the toolbox and scraped harder. Even so, little of the black material fell from the box into the baggie. He slid a credit card from his wallet and used it to scrape at the side of the toolbox. The plastic card bent as he worked it back and forth, but the material still clung to the metal. Growing desperate, he eyed the parking lot, spotting small bits of broken glass and a discarded beer-bottle cap, flattened into the gravel by passing vehicles.

He grabbed the bottle cap and used it to scrape at the toolbox, counting on the idling engine and Jake's work with the chains to cover the noise he made. This time, sizeable flakes of the black material cascaded into the sandwich bag.

Chuck crouched to peer beneath the flatbed in time to see Jake wriggling out from under the sedan. Parker extended a hand and pulled the wrecker owner to his feet. Chuck sealed the plastic bag, stowed it in his pocket, and made his way back around the front of the truck to the two men, calming his breathing as he approached.

Across the parking lot, Clarence reemerged from Raven House and stood glaring at Jake.

Chuck caught Parker's eye. “I take it Hemphill gave you his okay?”

The resort manager nodded. “As long as we don't tamper with the inside.”

Jake announced, “Its brakes are set. We'll have to drag it up onto the bed.”

Chuck asked him, “Been doing this a long time?”

“Too long. Can't say as I ever towed a murder victim's car, though.” Jake turned to Parker. “I heard lots of people liked her.”

“She liked lots of people,” Parker said. “That might be a better way to put it.”

“Hormones,” Chuck commented.

Jake spat on the ground. “Tell me about it. I got a couple of girls in college. Private schools, expensive as all get out. They're good girls, mind you. But I swear, the things they tell their mother, it's enough to turn me three shades of green.” He waggled his hands over his ears. “I've got to the point now where I don't even listen. I just write the checks and stay out of it all.”

“You have to tow a lot of cars to put two kids through college,” Chuck observed, keeping his tone light. “Especially private schools.”

The wrecker owner dipped his head in agreement. “Seven days a week, all summer, every summer.”

“I've got two daughters of my own. Youngsters. But I'm already dreading the tuition payments.”

“You just gotta make sure they don't do too good in school,” Jake said. “My wife, she pushed my girls hard. Straight A's for the both of them, which gave them these ideas of how they had to go way far away to these fancy schools back east.” He popped his tongue off the roof of his mouth. “Me, I'm just along for the ride.”

“Bad grades,” Chuck said with a definitive nod. “Got it. Maybe I can even convince my girls to drop out before they finish high school.”

Jake's face cracked into a tight-lipped smile. “There's your ticket.” He made his way to the control station at the side of the truck, put his leather-gloved hands to the levers, and called to Parker, standing beside the sedan, “Holler if she starts sliding off line, would you?”

Jake depressed a metal handle, engaging the winch with an angry whine. Chuck put his fingers to his ears and backed away.
He crossed the parking lot and stopped on the far side of the van, where Clarence joined him.

“Learn anything?” Clarence asked.

“The tire treads on the wrecker match the ones in the pullout—same as half the truck tires sold in America over the last five years. As for his boots, I haven't gotten a good look yet.” Chuck pulled the sandwich bag from his pocket and displayed the dry, black flecks nestled at its bottom. “But I've got this.”

He and Clarence went around to the back of Raven House, out of sight of the parking lot. Chuck dribbled a few drops of water from an outside spigot into the sandwich bag and worked the bottom of the bag between his thumb and forefinger until the flakes dissolved in the water. He raised the bag. The solution in it was bright pink, almost red.

F
ORTY
-T
WO

Chuck opened the bag and sniffed at the few drops of solution inside. He held the bag out to Clarence, who took a noseful.

“Anything?” Chuck asked.

Clarence shook his head.

“Me neither. I was hoping for the scent of something, maybe the sheep carcasses, from the meadow.”

“Doesn't matter though, does it?” Clarence pointed at the bag. “It's blood, from the wrecker,
verdad
?”

Chuck nodded. “It was smeared and dried on the side of a toolbox behind the driver's compartment.”

Clarence's eyes glowed with grim satisfaction. “You've got him, then.”

“But what do I do with him?”

“Tell the rangers. Show them what you found.”

“He'll just deny everything. He's a local. He'll get off, no question.”

“He won't dare do any more killing, though.”

“That's not good enough.”

“You could confront him.”

“Like in the movies?”

“Ask him some questions. You'll see it in his eyes.”

“Then what?”

“Then you can—” Clarence stopped as the loud whine of the winch and clanking noise of the flatbed lowering into place ended. Seconds later, the wrecker door slammed.

Chuck and Clarence poked their heads around the corner of Raven House and watched as Jake fired up the engine and rumbled away with Nicoleta's sedan atop the flatbed.

“Too late,” Clarence said.

Over the next forty-five minutes, Chuck made his way from room to room along the first-floor hallway in Raven House,
checking in with the students as they packed. Despite—or perhaps, in some odd way, because of—Nicoleta's murder, the students rode a wave of energy, flitting from room to room and hurrying up and down the stairs and in and out of the bathrooms at the end of each hall.

Only a few of the students planned to travel back to Durango in the van the next morning. The rest, driving their own cars or having arranged rides from Estes Park, would spend the two weeks between the end of the field school and the start of the fall semester with family or friends.