Inside my head I was pacing. Socolow thinks I killed Kyle Hornback. Cimarron thinks I defrauded him. Covering up the fraud was the motive for the murder. So, if I can prove I didn’t defraud Cimarron…Right.
That’s thinking like a lawyer. Building my case, chipping away at the other guy’s, proving I had no motive to kill, maybe proving that somebody else did.
Which made me think of Kit Carson Cimarron again, which in turn, made me flex my right hand. Clenching the fist was fine, but spreading the fingers caused the hand to flare with pain. If I hit anybody tougher than the Pillsbury Doughboy, it would hurt me more than him.
Kip turned off the map light and looked toward me. “You know why they call it the Continental Divide?”
“ Something to do with the way the water flows,” I said, remembering a tidbit of lost information from a long-ago geography class.
“ Right. It’s the part of the Rockies that divides the continent, east from west. On the Leadville side, the Arkansas River flows east. On the Aspen side, the Roaring Fork and the Frying Pan flow west, eventually reaching the Pacific. Do you believe that, Uncle Jake? I mean, if the wind is blowing one way, or if the raindrop hits this rock or that one, it determines whether the drop goes to the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean?”
“ Sure. It’s just like with people. Little things push us one direction or the other. But we’re not drops of water, Kipper. We’ve got free will, and the power to act, to change course. Trouble comes when we see that shallow reef dead ahead, and we plow right along, damn well knowing that any moment we’ll hear the crunch of coral against hull.”
That quieted him for a moment, but not much longer. “Is this one of your lessons about life, Uncle Jake?”
“ Yep.”
We were slowing down again as the two lanes seemed to narrow, and we crept along mountainside cliffs cut deep by torrents of water that tumbled into channels alongside the road.
“ I get it,” he said. “That’s the reason we’re here, right?
Like you could stay in Miami and get scorched by that goober, Mr. Socolow. But you’ve seen the reef and decided to change course, right?”
“ Something like that.”
“ Totally excellent. I’ll help you steer, Uncle Jake.”
Chapter 15
An owl sat on a fence post eating a skunk.
The owl’s legendary eyesight is apparently keener than its sense of smell.
“ Kip, that’s a great horned owl,” I said, with authority, having been told as much by the fellow at the front desk of the Lazy Q ranch.
“ Yuck. I think I’m gonna blow chunks.”
“ Whoo,” said the owl, between bites. The skunk didn’t say a thing.
I didn’t want to stay at any of the hotels in town. If Abe Socolow thought about it, he probably would figure I followed Jo Jo or Cimarron, or both. So the Hotel Jerome, the Little Nell, and the Ritz-Carlton were out, it being damn near impossible to check into a decent hotel under a phony name these days. Having to surrender your credit card takes care of that.
I hate credit cards. I hate leaving a trail of where I’ve been, what I’ve eaten, how I’ve shopped. A credit history these days is a life story. Where would divorce lawyers and other snoops be without the computer printouts of hotel rooms, jewelry stores, and weekend flights to Nassau when the business meeting was in Tampa? Government at every level, companies that employ you and companies that choose not to, every school you’ve attended, and every liquor store you’ve frequented maintain a cradle-to-grave digital trail of facts and figures about you. The data-some mundane, some striking at the core of intimate privacy-is never discarded and never fades into yellow clippings. Ask not for whom the computer chimes. It chimes for thee.
I chose a ranch located just off Maroon Creek Road outside Aspen. It had nine wooden cottages that were a tad too primitive even to be called rustic. My skiing buddies and I had stayed here once after we’d been thrown out of an Aspen condo complex for staging diving contests into the swimming pool.
In January.
The pool was filled with five feet of powdery snow, and nobody got hurt, but the building manager was screaming about his insurance rates until I dragged him up the three-meter board and tossed him in. His belly flop sounded like a whale breaching.
The lodge of the Lazy Q was an A-frame made of logs with a Ben Franklin stove, a moth-eaten bearskin rug, and what I took to be the antlered head of a deer on the knotty pine wall, but it could have been an elk or an orangutan for all I knew.
Behind the counter was a skinny clerk in faded jeans, scuffed boots, greasy hair with long sideburns, and a cigarette jammed into the corner of his mouth.
“ Dork thinks he’s Harry Dean Stanton,” Kip whispered to me.
“ Hush.” I shooed the kid away, and he wandered around the one-room lodge, pausing in front of a wall calendar featuring cowgirls wearing nothing but boots and hats. When he was done with July, he studied August and September, too.
The clerk said his name was Rusty or maybe Dusty. He handed over a key to number seven and told me about the great horned owl that called the fence post home.
“ Got a golden eagle, too, in the blue spruce trees out back. Come daylight, you’ll get a gander at him if you want. Got a set of talons could tear your head off. Son of a gun dives after mice. Clocked that sucker with a radar gun at a hundred fifty miles an hour in his dive. Can you beat that?”
“ Not on my best day,” I said.
“ Got a couple little falcons out there, too. Called kestrels around here. They’ll eat whatever the eagle misses. Raptors, that’s what the fellow called them. Birds of prey, flesh eaters.” He studied me a moment. “Will you be wanting binoculars, or you got your own?”
I didn’t know what he meant.
“ We got people come out here to ride the horses, some to see the birds. Which is it with you, Mr. Lassiter?”
I might have been bleary-eyed and muscle-cramped from the trip. I might have had jet lag and a sour stomach, but I knew the answer. “The raptors,” I said. “I came for the birds of prey.”
“ I’m ow-dee,” Kip said.
“ Huh?”
“ Ow-dee, like outta here.” Kip gestured around the small cottage. “What’s missing from this picture?”
I looked around. Two single beds whose springs had sprung. A nightstand with a two-bulb reading lamp. A couple of ersatz Frederic Remington prints of cowboys busting broncos and branding steers. A porcelain sink stained orangish-brown under the faucet, a shower and toilet tucked behind a partition.
“ I don’t know, Kip. I’m going to sleep.”
“ A TV! Uncle Jake, there’s no TV!”
I was already peeled down to my Jockey shorts and was stripping a paper-thin brown blanket off the bed. “We’ve had enough entertainment for one day. Lights out, Kip. Go to bed.”
“ Without a TV! Without dinner! I’m hungry, Uncle Jake. We haven’t eaten anything since the pork rinds and root beer at the gas station.”
“ There’s a machine with peanut butter crackers at the lodge. If that’s not enough, ask the horned owl to share his dinner with you.”
He said something to me, probably some eleven-year-old sassified backtalk, but I was falling toward the squashed pillow, already drifting off to dreams of mice and falcons, wondering which I was.
The Pitkin County Courthouse is a hundred-year-old red-brick building that sits formidably on Main Street. Courthouse architecture is intended to represent strength and permanence and a certain majesty of the law that mortar and stone can convey better than the weak-willed Homo sapiens who ply their trade therein. This one was a solid building that would be considered squat, if not for a faintly baroque tower that might have been the battlement of a castle. The American and Colorado flags flew atop the tower, crackling in the early-morning breeze.