I made a show of moving my left hand, just to distract Cimarron. He saw the movement and used his right hand to pin down my left. Then he smacked me in the face again with his free hand. In that instant, I came up with the stud gun.
Heavy sucker.
It took me a long second to get it pointed at his chest.
Too long.
His hand grabbed it underneath and swung it up. It was just passing his forehead when I squeezed the trigger. At the same moment, his left fist smashed straight into my chin. I wanted so to hear the thunk of carbon steel into flesh and bone, but all I heard was a metallic click followed by the crash of surf against rocks and the volcanic roar of exploding pain.
My last conscious thoughts were merely a series of sounds.
The sounds were far away and dreamlike, echoing against the dented tinplate of my skull. The world was spinning on a wobbly axis. Everything seemed so slow, except the hot ice pick of agony that flashed from jaw to brain.
Did I really hear anything through the fog? Yes, there it was: a thud, a grunt, a muffled whomp, and as I slipped into the cool quiet darkness, a hazy image of Blinky Baroso floated high above me, laughing, calling me something, a lousy judge of character. Finally, his voice faded, and I was swept away by a feeling of ultimate and unyielding dread.
CHAPTER 20
Jail food is to food as military music is to music.
Hard biscuits and fatty bacon and greasy meats. Maybe the idea was to induce cardiac arrest and save taxpayers money. The jailer was a potbellied, slack-jawed man of sixty who looked as if he’d been eating the jail hash for thirty years. He was a football fan, and when I told him I had chased the oblong spheroid for a living, he treated me with kindness and respect and brought me pizza and beer. Then I made the mistake of telling him I was now a lawyer. He shook his head sadly, spat on the floor, and said no wonder I ended up here.
Or was I a lawyer?
The Florida Bar had begun disbarment proceedings.
Judge T. Bone Coleridge had ordered me to show cause why Kip shouldn’t be transferred to the custody of the state H.R.S., and when I didn’t appear in court (having been unavoidably detained, as they say, in Colorado), he adjudged me in contempt of court. Actually, contempt was too mild a word for how I felt about the courts.
I was under indictment in Miami for first-degree murder of Kyle Hornback, local securities dealer. Yeah, that’s what the paper called him. It sounded better than con man, flimflam artist, swindler, extortionist, or racketeer. In death, we are all judged more kindly. The crueler the death, the kinder the obit.
I was under indictment in Aspen for second-degree murder in the brutal slaying of Kit Carson Cimarron, ranch owner and civic activist, according to the local weekly.
Civic activist? I suppose they’d call Bonnie and Clyde interstate bankers.
Completing the list of my legal troubles, I was also being dunned by a record club for three CDs I had never ordered. I wrote a couple of letters telling them what they could do with The Best of Jim Nabors , but their computer kept threatening my credit rating, heaven forbid.
Okay, so I was a little bitter, sitting in the Pitkin County Jail. Florida and Colorado were drawing straws to see who had the pleasure of providing me with room and board for the next twenty-five years or so, and in Florida’s case, maybe causing a brief power shortage in the immediate vicinity of Raiford Prison. Right now, Colorado had dibs on me under the ancient legal maxim, possession is nine tenths of the law. This was a matter of great consternation to Abe Socolow, who pointed out to a Colorado judge in typical lawyerly fashion that (a) I committed my vile deed in Florida prior to coming to Colorado; (b) Florida had charged me with an even more serious crime; and (c) Florida had indicted me first.
He really said a-b-c while making his argument. Lawyers tend to argue in threes, building to dramatic conclusions. Some lawyers get confused and say a-b-3. Once in a while, just to see if a judge is listening, I’ll sing out do-re-mi.
But now, I was just a spectator, wearing jail coveralls, sitting on a hard bench in the county courthouse, trying to listen to words like venue and jurisdiction and equity and conservation of judicial resources.
Florida, said Abe Socolow, representing the people of that great state.
Colorado, said Mark McBain, prosecutor in these here parts.
Florida versus Colorado. It sounded like an old Gator Bowl between the runners-up in the SEC and Big 8. I wouldn’t have minded being sent back to Florida. After all, I hadn’t killed Hornback, and I did kill Cimarron. At least, I thought I did, though I didn’t have a recollection of actually rocketing a nail straight into his right ear and out his skull just above the left ear, spraying bone and blood and gray matter over a fine English riding saddle that was now marked state’s exhibit twenty-three. In fact, the last thing I remembered, the stud gun didn’t fire. I think.
When I woke up in the hospital with my ankle shackled to a bed, a sadist posing as a doctor was shining a light into my eyes and poking me here and there. My ears were ringing, and he was saying something about a concussion, some tenderness in the area of the liver and minor internal injuries that reminded him of a head-on car crash. In the next twenty-four hours, I discovered the rest without any help. Bruised ribs on the left side where Cimarron had hooked me, welts on my forehead, scratches and scrapes on my face where I landed squarely against the side of the barn, red blisters every place the bull whip kissed me, plus a collection of abrasions and contusions just about everywhere else.
Still, I seemed to be doing better than K. C. Cimarron. A cop whose name I didn’t catch sauntered in and told me Cimarron was dead and that anything I said might be used against me. Did I want a lawyer. Hell no, I didn’t even want to be a lawyer.
I was bleary and had a splitting headache but was semi-happy to be alive, and when local prosecutor McBain strolled into my hospital room, brown leather satchel in hand, I didn’t have the presence of mind to clam up. When he turned on his tape recorder and asked whether I wanted to make a statement about splattering Cimarron’s brains on the barn wall, I told him it was the first time I ever drove a nail straight in my life. McBain nodded appreciatively at such candor and asked how many men I had killed over the years, and I decided it might be a good idea to either get counsel or plead insanity on the spot.
Jail time.
Except for the food, it wasn’t so bad. I had my own cell, part of the status derived from being a crazed killer.
I wasn’t bored. Not with the parade of local lawyers who were itching to represent me. There was one barrister who was a part-time ski instructor, another a part-time wilderness guide, yet a third who was a part-time white-water rafter. There was a woman lawyer who piloted hot-air balloons in her spare time and another who took off Wednesdays to ride in amateur rodeos in Snowmass. I’m all for Renaissance men and women, but at the moment, I wanted a hard-boiled, do-or-die, go-for-the-jugular lawyer who would bleed for me, not leave me naked and alone in the dock on the first day of trout season.
One day, a local chap named DeWitt Duggins stopped in to see me. We sat across an old wooden table from each other in the visitors room. He was a short, trim man in his mid-thirties with shaggy brown hair and John Denver granny glasses. He had just finished a case in Mesa County in which his client pleaded guilty to killing three elk, and like lawyers everywhere, he wanted to tell war stories.