Astride a Pink Horse (29 page)

Dressed in an ankle-length duster, F. Mantew walked the half mile from the parking lot of the Big Texan Steak Ranch and Motel just off I-40, where he’d been dropped off by a cab an hour earlier, and into a wooded area a quarter mile south of the off-ramp Silas Breen would be taking. The off-ramp merged into a country road that then paralleled the northern boundary of a two-mile-square stretch of woods. Pleased that the entire Texas Panhandle was shrouded in clouds, and with his sinuses tingling from the cold, Mantew thought about a quotation he’d always loved. Though he couldn’t remember its source, he’d long remembered its message:
The dimmer the day, the more errant man’s focus; the colder the day, the less man’s quickness
.

He didn’t expect that he’d have any difficulty spotting Breen or his shamrock-green truck, especially since Breen’s website featured a photo of him standing next to the vehicle, grinning proudly.

The treeless spot he was standing in wasn’t new to him. He’d been there before—four times, in fact, over the past six months. Each of those times, he’d checked out the wooded area’s boundaries, its fences, and the general lay of the land in order to determine
if any of the acreage could be seen from the interstate. Dozens of times he’d walked the length of a grassy strip between the leading edge of the woods and the frontage road that Breen would have to cross. He’d even brought a stopwatch during each of his earlier visits so he could determine how frequently and at what times of day vehicles favored taking exit 74, ultimately determining that on average, between the hours of seven a.m. and six p.m., the off-ramp saw a vehicle about once every seventeen minutes.

He’d never planned to have Breen drive all the way into Amarillo to make his delivery, and he would have told him that himself that morning if Breen hadn’t faxed him in the wee hours of the night, causing him to accelerate everything by eight hours and throwing a monkey wrench into his meticulous planning.

Checking one of his coat pockets to make certain that his gloves were inside, he stood rocking back and forth in the clearing at the end of a four-by-four trail. The clearing was blocked from any highway view by a clump of forty-foot-tall ponderosa pines. He was ready to do business with Silas Breen. Smiling and thinking that his long-planned mission was now in its final stages, he rubbed his hands together to warm them and waited.

Silas Breen eased his truck off the interstate and down the exit ramp’s slight grade to the sound of the Eagles singing his favorite song, “Desperado.” He’d been nervous about making his delivery to Mantew ever since the original delivery destination had been changed from Amarillo to Lubbock, and he was no less so now that his destination had been changed back to Amarillo. That was why his grandfather’s crowbar sat next to him on the seat along with a .32
Smith & Wesson. He didn’t know whether Mantew had arranged for the necessary equipment to off-load and transfer his cargo or if they’d end up driving into Amarillo to make the exchange. What he did know was that all of a sudden he’d begun to sweat.

When he saw someone dressed in an olive-green range duster, a coat that seemed to swallow the person in it whole, waving at him, arms above his head, Silas wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow and thought,
Almost home
.

As the person in the duster waved him off the roadway and toward what looked like a Jeep trail, the muscles in Silas’s stomach tightened, and when his truck momentarily sank in the soft road shoulder, he had the urge to jam it into reverse, back up, and leave. Instead he inched his hand across the seat, patted his grandfather’s crowbar and then the butt of the .32, and continued moving slowly toward what he could now see was a man wearing a watch cap nearly identical to his.

Rolling down his window, Silas stuck his head out of the cab and yelled, “I’m not moving this rig any further till I know if you’re Mantew.”

Nodding, the man said, “I am,” jogged up to the cab, and handed Silas an envelope.

Silas tore the envelope open and took his time counting the five thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills inside. “You got equipment to off-load your shipment?” he asked, stuffing the envelope into a jacket pocket.

“A Bobcat.”

Puzzled by Mantew’s clipped, two-word responses, Silas shrugged and looked around for the Bobcat.

When Mantew said, “This way,” pointing toward the Jeep trail, Silas gripped the steering wheel with one hand, patted the crowbar with the other, and inched the truck forward. Thinking as he moved deeper into the woods that he should have seen the Bobcat by now, Silas watched Mantew suddenly sprint for the rear of his truck. Grabbing the crowbar and the .32, Silas swung his door open and jumped out of the cab. He’d barely reached the rear bumper when Mantew, now just feet from him, pulled a World War II–era Japanese sword from beneath his duster, whirled in a half circle to gain momentum, and buried the razor-sharp edge in Silas’s neck.

His right carotid artery severed, Silas dropped to one knee. The look on his face begged for explanation as blood streamed down his neck.

Aware that he’d delivered a fatal blow, Mantew walked away, blind to Silas’s struggle to breathe. Flopping in the dirt like a pithed frog, Silas tried for the better part of a minute to stand as Rikia Takata, no longer in need of an alias, stood, oblivious to him, looking back in the direction of the exit ramp. Silas curled into the fetal position and gurgled a final breath.

Moving 290 pounds of dead weight into the cargo bay of a truck turned out to be more of a struggle than Rikia had expected. But in just under twelve minutes he’d wedged Silas Breen’s body between two wooden crates and tied it down. He’d washed away most of the blood that he’d gotten on himself with water from the two sixty-four-ounce bottles he’d earlier stuffed in his range duster, changed clothes, and slipped into a shirt and the jeans he’d brought along.

There was still blood splatter on his shoes, and as he sat behind the wheel of Breen’s truck, inspecting his face for blood in the rearview mirror, he could see that tiny blood droplets still peppered his forehead and cheeks. Wiping away the droplets with a shirtsleeve and feeling a sense of relief, he sighed. He’d executed a critical part of his plan, and even though Breen’s two thirty a.m. fax had forced him to resort to what had always been an alternate piece of the plan, he now had the most important piece of what he needed to complete his task. The twenty dollars he’d nervously paid a cab driver for his eight a.m. cab ride to the motel outside Amarillo was a fading memory now, as was his red-eye bus ride from El Paso to Amarillo late the previous evening.

He glanced in the sideview mirror before backing slowly toward the highway. Thirty yards from the frontage road, he saw a lone car come off the interstate and move slowly down the exit ramp. He stopped so as to not risk being seen by the driver, then smiled as the vehicle turned left onto the frontage road and quickly disappeared. Laughing now, he found himself thinking about the imperfectness of science. His experiments to determine how frequently he could expect a vehicle to access the critical I-40 exit ramp had proven to be wrong, off by more than half. The vehicle he’d just seen was the first one to take the exit ramp during the entire forty-five minutes he’d been there.

Easing Breen’s truck onto the pavement and telling himself as the truck jiggled from front to back that all too often the most intricately designed experiments simply didn’t pan out, he headed down the frontage road for an I-40 on-ramp, aware more than most that those kinds of variations happened when it came to math and science.

The bushy-headed, overweight FBI agent searching Silas Breen’s Oklahoma City motel room hadn’t found anything out of the ordinary in the fifteen minutes he’d been there except a half-smoked joint and a six-month-old crumpled page from an over-the-road trucker’s time-and-distance log that had obviously been doctored.

Shaking his head and feeling a little put out, the agent slipped his cell phone out of a shirt pocket and dialed his longtime colleague, Thaddeus Richter. When the veteran FBI agent answered, “Richter here,” his friend said disappointedly, “Thad, it’s Ken, and I’ve got nada. A motel room full of nothing. No Breen, and nothing that looks suspicious for foul play. Are you sure the info that reporter and the OSI major gave you on Breen is correct?”

“Yes. Now what about Breen’s truck?”

“Couldn’t locate it, and the desk clerk on duty doesn’t remember seeing one. I can ask the employees who are here now if they saw a truck that matches the description of Breen’s, but I’m thinking I’ll need to talk to someone from the previous shift to cover all my bases.”

“Do that for me, Ken, okay?”

“You got it. So, what’s up next?”

“I’ll get Breen’s father on the horn and see if I can’t squeeze some answers out of him. After that I just might head down your way.”

“Sort of ugly and gray here right now. Think I should call in the locals?”

“No. They’d just get in the way. But you can do one thing for me. Call the bureau office in Lubbock and see if they have anything on either Breen or his truck.”

“Will do. And Thad, if you do head this way, how about bringing me a box of Rocky Mountain oysters from the Buckhorn Exchange there in Denver? The ones they sell down here always turn out as hard as rocks when you fry ’em up.”

“Damn it, Ken. You’re the only person I know in the world who actually likes the taste of bull nuts. What’s with the obsession anyway?”

“Guess I like my food chewy, that’s all.”

Richter shook his head. “I’ll round you up some of the little nuggets if I head your way.”

“You’re the man, Thad.”

“Yeah,” Richter said, snapping his cell phone shut and wondering how on earth a man and a twenty-six-foot-long, shamrock-green truck could so easily have vanished into thin air.

Barefoot, as usual, listening to the second of the Gulfstream’s engines power up, and staring at a cockpit computer screen, Bernadette flipped a toggle switch to her right and said to Cozy, “I still don’t fully understand why we’re flying to Albuquerque instead of Amarillo.”

“Like I’ve been trying to explain since before we left the hotel, because of your maps.”

Concentrating on the task at hand, Bernadette said, “I’m afraid you’ll have to explain your reasoning a little better once we’re in the air, and this time, no baseball analogies, okay?” Staring at the plane’s instrument panel and looking for all the world like a kid in a candy store, she reached up, flipped several additional overhead toggle switches, adjusted her seat, and smiled.

“If I didn’t know better, Major Cameron, I’d think you were more interested in playing with this here aeroplane of Freddy’s than in what I’m saying,” said Cozy.

“Sorry.”

Staring at the serious-faced woman next to him and thinking that she seemed nothing like the playful, perhaps even a little vulnerable, woman he’d made love to and held in his arms the previous night, Cozy smiled. When Bernadette slipped on her headphones and motioned for him to follow suit, he had the sense that
he was looking at someone whose birthright had somehow been taken away.

Feeling Cozy’s stare, Bernadette said, “Can’t talk until this bird’s in the air, okay?”

“You’re the captain,” he said, flashing her a thumbs-up as she turned the plane in a broad half arc toward a taxiway. The contagiousness of the back-in-the-saddle look on her face had him smiling and suddenly thinking about fastballs, pickoffs, and headfirst slides into home.

They’d cleared the cloud layer and leveled off at eighteen thousand feet when Bernadette, who’d barely said a word during their climb, adjusted her headset and, staring out at the azure sky, said, “Feels good.”

“Looks like you’re back on your bicycle,” Cozy said, squeezing her thigh affectionately before placing several of her silo-site maps on the console between them.

“Don’t get fresh, Mr. Coseia,” Bernadette said, trying to keep a straight face and playfully slapping his hand. “I can have you escorted off this ship, in handcuffs if necessary, when we land.” Turning to face him, she gave Cozy a sensual, openmouthed kiss. The second their lips parted, she was all business again. “We’ve got a fifty-knot tailwind. That’ll put us into Albuquerque a good fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. Let me take this bird on up to our final cruising altitude, and then I’ll let the computers Freddy overpaid for do the flying for a while.”

Four minutes later, after leveling off again, she turned to Cozy and said, “Now, would you like to explain, so it makes some kind
of sense to me, why on earth we’re headed for New Mexico instead of Texas, Mr. Baseball Hotshot?”

“Do I have to?” Cozy asked, toying with her earlobe.

“Yes, Cozy, you do. I Googled you and Freddy last night, after we had dinner, by the way. Division II college baseball championship co-MVPs, career batting averages of .338 and .333, five Gold Glove awards between the two of you. Gadzooks, Batman, you two were bigger than big.”

Looking reflective, Cozy said, “All things pass,” eased forward in his seat, and pointed to the top map in his stack. “So here’s the deal on Albuquerque.” He eyed Bernadette’s maps. “Nothing clicked with your maps here until I started thinking in baseball-diamond, shortest-distance-between-two-points terms. When I realized that if I drew lines connecting Amarillo, Lubbock, and Albuquerque, I had myself that triangle we talked about, I knew I had something. My imperfect triangle was squeezed down and flattened out a bit, but it was a triangle nonetheless. One with I-25 as a side, U.S. 60 and U.S. 84 as another, and I-40 as an almost perfect straight line from Amarillo to Albuquerque as the base.”