The Widow's Revenge (11 page)

Snicker and Snort snatched their pistols.

The snub-nosed .44 Magnums spoke simultaneously:
bam-bam!

And that was that.

Count two big holes drilled through Charlie Moon’s fine cowboy hat.

THE LONELY EMPLOYEE OF THE SMALL ESTABLISHMENT WAS STANDING
at the window, watching sleet peck at the rain-streaked glass, when over the grumbling of the thunderstorm he heard two very distinct sounds. “Hey—didn’t that sound like gunshots?” Getting no response from his customer, the assistant manager turned to repeat the question.

The smallish table for two was deserted, the triple espresso unfinished.

These Americanos are always in a big hurry
. The easygoing Salvadoran ambled over to the table, picked up a twenty-dollar bill, and rubbed it between thumb and finger as he calculated the total plus tax and how much would be left over for his tip. Nothing to write home about, but every dollar counted. He sighed and returned to the window. Almost immediately, he heard a faraway wailing sound.

Sirens.

Damn! Somebody must’ve gotten shot across the street.
He chewed on his lower lip.
The police will come around looking for witnesses, asking all kinds of personal questions.
Such as: “We’ll need your name, address, and a telephone number.”
And if you don’t look and talk just right, they’re liable to ask for papers.
The undocumented worker hurried away from the window to switch off the lights and hang a Closed sign in the front entrance. After pulling on a hooded raincoat, he evacuated the premises by the alley exit.

RESPONDING TO THE ALARM

GCPD
officers Eddie “Rocks” Knox and his partner, E. C. “Piggy” Slocum, were first on the scene, to be followed quickly by a Colorado State Police officer and GCPD Officer Alicia Martin, who escorted Mrs.
Jeppson upstairs to a small apartment formerly used by the elderly woman and her husband.

In these familiar surroundings, the spunky widow prepared herself a steaming pot of rooibos tea and opened an imported tin of yogurt-coated cherries, which treats she shared with Ms. Martin. Thus calmed and fortified, the owner of the hardware store proceeded to make her statement to the uniformed lady.

A RUDE AWAKENING

Scott Parris had been sleeping in on this rainy Sunday morning. After his Old West nightmare of being lynched by the Law, the chief of police was enjoying a pleasant dream wherein he relived a 1998 antelope hunt on the wide-open plains south of Raton, New Mexico. He had the crosshairs on a pronghorn when something jangled loudly in his left ear. Parris awakened with a grunt, grabbed the bedside telephone, and was advised by dispatcher Clara Tavishuts that Knox and Slocum had responded to a security-company alert that had turned out to be an armed robbery at ABC Hardware. The officers had arrived at the site and called in to report two men shot dead, two others seriously injured.

“Thanks, Clara, I’m on my way.” The chief of police slipped into a pair of faded jeans and a red felt shirt, pulled on his scuffed Roper boots, and donned the venerable felt hat his daddy had worn in the 1940s. As he sprinted through the front door, the cop stuffed most of his shirttail into his britches. He scooted into the aged Volvo, kicked up a spray of driveway gravel, and skidded sideways onto the street. He showed up at Jeppson’s ABC Hardware just in time to see Doc Simpson’s team arrive.

Almost an hour later, after two ambulances had hauled the injured off to Snyder Memorial Hospital, and the medical examiner had taken charge of the hardware-store office where the shooting had occurred, the chief of police took the Ute tribal investigator into a storage space in the rear of Mrs. Jeppson’s store. Scott Parris seated himself on a wooden well-pump crate and pointed his finger at a nail keg.

Charlie Moon sat on the small wooden barrel, leaned back against a stack of plywood, stretched his long legs.

“Okay,” Parris said. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight.” He held up a
meaty hand, glared at his palm, turned down the little finger. “You show up here shortly before nine this morning and spot a suspicious character in a Ford van parked by ABC Hardware’s front entrance.”

Moon nodded.

The chief of police turned down Finger Number Two. “After making him as the driver for some bad guys inside the hardware store, you drive a few blocks away and park your wheels. You strap on your pistol, walk back, let the air outta the van’s rear tires. And after you show the driver the valve stems, you break his jaw, and—”

“I didn’t have much choice. He had a bad-looking pistol in his hand.”

“Please don’t interrupt me, Charlie.”

The Ute shrugged.

Parris turned down Finger Number Three. “After you take the van driver’s .44 Magnum revolver, you go around back of the store, punch the daylights out of another guy who sticks his head outta a rear door—and you also take his .44 Mag, which is identical to the van driver’s pistol.”

Moon was wearing his poker face.

“Then,” Parris growled, “you march into Mrs. Jeppson’s office, where she’s being threatened by two more bad guys—also armed with .44 Mag revolvers—and you shoot both of ’em dead!”

Moon shook his head.

The chief of police arched both of his bushy red eyebrows. “What?”

“You forgot something.”

“What?”

The Indian pointed at the white man’s hand.

Big smart Aleck.
His face glowing pink, Parris pressed the fourth finger down. “And then . . . and then.”
Dammit, Charlie made me forget where I was.
He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. “You’ve been a law-enforcement officer for a long time, Charlie. Long enough to know how the game is played.”

The accused showed no sign that he disagreed with that statement.

“This ain’t the Southern Ute res, Charlie.”

By a faint nod, the tribal investigator allowed as how this was so.

Not sure where he was going with all this, Parris went for the ad-lib. “And you don’t have a half ounce of jurisdiction in Granite Creek.”

Moon begged to disagree. “Actually, pard—about two years ago, during that nasty business over at the Yellow Pines Ranch, you swore me in as your deputy. And even though I wouldn’t want to embarrass you by mentioning that I’m still waiting for about nine hundred and ninety-eight dollars of back pay, I’m bound to tell you that I don’t recall that you ever unswore me. So, unless I’m disremembering, I’m still a sworn deputy to the chief of police of Granite Creek.”

Parris’s face deepened to beet red. Veins in his thick neck started to throb. “I don’t care if you’re a U.S. deputy marshal and your territory is every square foot of Colorado this side of the Front Range!” He unfolded all four digits and wagged his pointing finger at Moon. “Point is, you should’ve put in a 911 call. If you had, my officers would’ve come out here and took care of business. But no, you had to do the job all by yourself.” He paused before hitting his friend below the belt: “It ain’t enough that you shoot these guys with the pistols you took off their buddies. No—you had to go for head shots—and
through your hat
.” Parris’s thin grin was sharp as a knife. “Some folks might figure you wanted to play the hot-shot, shoot-’em-up, two-gun movie-star cowboy.”

That hurt enough to make Charlie Moon flinch. The groundless charge also set his teeth on edge. “Maybe I should’ve waited for your uniformed cops to get here.” The tribal investigator’s follow-up was icy. “But if I had, Mrs. Jeppson might be dead now.”

Parris glared at the cheeky Ute.

Charlie Moon stared back.

Finally, the chief of police averted his gaze to his boots. “I guess it was lucky that you showed up just in time to prevent a killing.”
Too damn lucky.
“But tell me just one thing.” He cleared his throat. “Strictly off the record.” Parris looked up at his friend. “How’d you happen to be in this particular neighborhood on a rainy Sunday morning? I mean—what brought you here?”

The Indian had seen this arrow coming. “I came to check on Mrs. Jeppson. Wanted to make sure she was okay.”

Parris was goggled-eyed with surprise. “You had a reason to believe she was in danger?”

“Mmm-hmm.” Moon eased his lanky frame up from the uncomfortable
nail keg. “When you check out these bad guys, you’ll find out they’re connected to the death of Mrs. Loyola Montoya.”

Parris cocked his head. “That Apache woman down in La Plata County?”
I thought that was some kind of accident.
“Didn’t she knock over a coal-oil lamp and set herself on fire?”

“That’s what the medical examiner believes.”

“But you don’t?”

Moon shook his head.

“So how’d you come to expect these boys would hold up ABC Hardware—and on this particular morning?”

“I wasn’t sure of the exact day, much less the hour.”

“Okay.” Parris got up with a grunt. “So tell me something you was sure of.”

“When I talked to Loyola on the phone—that was on the day before she died—the poor old soul told me she’d heard these ‘witches’ planning something nasty. But not in La Plata County—it’d happen here in Granite Creek.”

Parris’s normally expressive face went dangerously blank. He responded in a monotone, “And you didn’t bother to tell me?”

Moon shook his head. “I hate to admit it, but I didn’t believe a word she said.” Without any allusion to his peculiar experience during Holy Mass, the tribal investigator explained how some of the things from the elderly lady’s disjointed testimony had “kind of come together in my mind” right after he’d left St. Anthony’s that morning.

The chief of police listened to every word, without interrupting.

Buckets and nails equals hardware store.

Alphabet soup suggested ABC.

Jefferson sounds like Jeppson.

Scott Parris thought that made sense. Sort of. He even bought the part about White Shell Woman rubbing her face with mud, suggesting a new moon as the time for the crime. But the white cop had a hunch that his Ute friend was holding something back.

WHICH IS A MIGHTY FINE TIME TO BE THERE WITH CHARLIE MOON AND
his family and friends—which on this evening includes the Ute’s aunt Daisy, his ardent admirer Sarah Frank, and the tribal investigator’s closest friend—Chief of Police Scott Parris. Not to mention Sidewinder, the official Columbine hound dog, and Mr. Zig-Zag, Sarah’s aging cat, who are at present curled up on the west porch, watching the nearest star settle into a rosy slumber. All very comfy and cozy. But are these furry creatures as happy as the human beings inside the ranch headquarters, who are anticipating a sumptuous feast? It is hard to say with certainty, but both canine and feline nostrils are finely attuned to those scents that hint of meaty beef bones from locally grown Hereford stock, and thinly sliced ham imported from Virginia.

Mr. Moon is in the headquarters kitchen, preparing the meal.

While watching Charlie work, Scott Parris offers helpful advice.

Little Miss Sarah is setting the dining-room table with bowls, cups, plates, and stainless flatware. It is also her privilege to light the tall, yellow tallow candles. All six of them.

Tribal Elder Daisy Perika is in the headquarters parlor, fiddling with her nephew’s rarely used television. What manner of cultural enlightenment does the inscrutable old woman search for?
Wheel of Fortune.
Will she find her favorite game show? Stay tuned.

Happily, within the confines of Charlie Moon’s little slice of Rocky Mountain paradise, about nine evenings out of ten turn out to be this good, and the tenth is likely to be even better. Every once in a while, there is an exception.

The chief of police was helping himself to a pre-supper cookie when the phone in his shirt pocket vibrated. He pressed the instrument to his
ear and barked, “Parris here.” The lawman listened to a report from the GCPD dispatcher until it was time to say, “Thanks, Clara.” The smug cop returned the phone to his pocket and grinned at his best friend. “You’re gonna love this, Charlie.”

The Ute was stirring an extra dash of black pepper into a gallon pot of pinto beans. “Whenever you say that, I don’t.”

“Oh no, this is great! Get this—while you were facing the last two bad guys down, Mrs. Jeppson switched on the automated alarm that forwards an alert to SUPD, and—”

“I already heard about that.”

“Well if you’d let me slip a word in edgewise, you’d find out what you
didn’t
hear—activating the ABC Hardware silent alarm also turns on a closed-circuit TV. The security company has a black-and-white video of the shoot-out. With a sound track.”

Ceasing his stirring, Moon frowned at the beans.

“Hey, don’t worry about seeing yourself on the tube.” Parris assumed the reassuring tone he used when advising worried wives that a husband who’d been missing for a week would turn up sooner or later. “That recording is evidence in a crime. It won’t be shown except in a court of law, when the two bad guys you beat up go to trial.”

“Yeah. I guess you’re right.” Moon added a half dash of turmeric, just a tad of garlic salt, and commenced stirring the pinto beans.

What neither the tribal investigator nor Granite Creek’s top cop realized was that only minutes after the robbery, a part-time employee of the security firm had downloaded the lurid video onto a five-hundred-gigabyte flash memory stick, which he promptly concealed in his vest pocket. The young man had complained of a brain-splitting migraine and left for the day. Within forty-five minutes, he had sold the video file to a Denver broadcasting conglomerate that was affiliated with a major network. Honoring his verbal agreement, the thief would wait until one minute after midnight (Mountain Time) before posting the video on the Internet for the whole world to see. In the meantime, the network would broadcast the hot property across the lower forty-eight and every province in Canada.