Astride a Pink Horse (38 page)

“I’m not sure. Buford said to make certain to rent a red SUV so he’d be able to see it parked off of the U.S. 14 alternate road. He said it’s the first road north of Corbett Dam, that he’d pick us up there and take us to Heart Mountain, and that he’d make certain that Kimiko wouldn’t spot him.”

“Guess we’d better hope the rental car agency has lots of SUVs in red, then.” Shaking her head and slipping into her tennis shoes, Bernadette said, “This whole Tango-11 thing just keeps playing out stranger and stranger. We still don’t know who actually killed Sergeant Giles, and it’s cost me a career. I hope this is the end of it.”

“And it’s put you on the path to a new one.”

Bernadette frowned. “Chief corporate pilot for Digital Registry News? Cozy, come on. Freddy manufactured the title and slapped me on the payroll because money’s no object to him. Besides, with me on board as the ‘Black Amazon’ who stopped the mad bomber, Freddy’s got himself a way to add permanent sizzle to our stories.”

“See, you said ‘our.’ You should have left the air force years ago. I’ve edited all four of the stories you’ve written, remember. You know how to string words together, Bernadette. It’s as if you’ve been doing it all your life. In baseball terms, you’re a natural.”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing in the world of investigative journalism. I’ve always envisioned those kind of reporters as people who hid under rocks and only came out at night.”

“Come on, Bernadette. Play the game. If only for a little bit. You might end up liking it. You’ve got a boss who believes in you, a jet plane at your disposal, a healthy paycheck, and a gimpy former baseball player who loves your dirty drawers. At least give it a try.”

“But it’s so different. I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a reporter, Cozy.”

“No more arguing with me, please.” Cozy rose from the stool. “If we plan to hook up with Buford in time, we need to get out of here now. Just remember to keep an eye peeled for a couple of rocks we can crawl out from under once we get to Heart Mountain,” he said, laughing.

“I’ll remember that. Guess we’d better get going.”

“There you go again with the ‘we.’ ”

“Can’t help myself. I’m smitten,” Bernadette said, linking an arm in his and walking him out of the room.

Kimiko couldn’t remember the last time she’d come to Heart Mountain without Rikia, but she guessed it had been at least fifteen years. After the seven-hour drive from Laramie, she realized what a blessing it had been all those years to have had Rikia do most of the driving.

As the Volvo bumped down a rutted road toward her destination, she tried to come to grips with the fact that Rikia was dead, and by his own hand. She found herself thinking about all the
times she’d forced him to travel to a place that had meant so much to her and so little to him. She couldn’t help but think that perhaps that was one of the things that had finally pushed him over the edge. One of the things that had made him cobble together a crude nuclear weapon and ultimately, as she’d heard on her car radio on the way to Heart Mountain, kill himself.

She’d always known deep down that Rikia would one day devise a way to get even with America and the people who had for so long wronged him and dishonored his family. She also understood very well that no native-born American could possibly understand Rikia’s sense of traditional Japanese honor and justice. She’d never imagined, however, that Rikia would ultimately attempt to set off a nuclear weapon in retribution. She had cared about Rikia, understood his demons, and she knew he’d simply been a gifted math savant, adrift in an ugly, uncaring world that he’d never truly fully understood. A tongue-tied genius who, although he’d never suffered the psychological or physical pain of a Heart Mountain or a Hiroshima, had nonetheless internalized and swallowed the indignity of both places whole.

Perhaps if she’d given a little more of herself, shown Rikia more trust, offered him more affection, things might have turned out differently. But Rikia was gone, and she had to deal with her own emotional burdens alone.

She was used to drinking in Heart Mountain at either daybreak or nightfall, and it felt somehow out of sync to be paying homage to her internment camp experience in the cold, windy brightness of late afternoon. Ignoring the feeling, she parked the station wagon less than thirty yards from where she’d parked it the last time she
and Rikia had been there, got out, carefully retrieved a four-foot-long cardboard box from the backseat, and started walking toward a concrete abutment that rose a foot or so above the gumbo plain.

She’d come to a place she knew very well. The dark gray piece of pitted concrete she was looking at, which resembled a grave marker, had once housed a pump and a spigot from which she’d had to drink iron-tasting water. The three-foot-by-two-foot crumbling concrete slab was, in some twisted sense, a landmark that let her know she’d returned home.

Clutching the cardboard box tightly under her left arm, she turned to face a stiff twenty-miles-per-hour breeze. Staring up at the sun and listening to the wind whistle, she thought about all that had happened in her life since her days at Heart Mountain. Looking somehow relieved, she laid the box on the ground, opened the lid, took out one of seven of Rikia’s model airplanes that she’d brought along, cocked her arm, and tossed the plane into the wind. She grabbed another toy plane from the box and tossed it into the wind as well, then another plane, and still another until, as she reached into the box to retrieve the fifth plane, she heard the rustle of something behind her. Until then the wind noise and her single-minded purpose had caused her to ignore anything but the box at her feet, the glorious brightness of the sun, and Rikia’s toys.

As she looked around to determine the source of the noise, she saw three people approaching. They were only a few yards beyond the bumper of Buford’s truck, walking toward her in a single line. Buford Kane she recognized immediately. It took her a bit longer to realize that the woman and the man with him were the much-photographed
and much-written-about air force major and newspaperman who’d stopped Rikia from setting off his bomb.

As they came toward her across the stunted sagebrush, she looked down at her box to realize that only two of Rikia’s toy airplanes remained. Buford asked, “What are you doing, Kimiko?”

“I’m tossing away the past,” she said, now face to face with Buford.

“That can be a difficult thing to do,” Bernadette said, staring down at the box.

“One can only try, Major.” Kimiko forced a smile. “Your newspaper photos don’t really capture you, Major. Nor you, Mr. Coseia. You’re both so much taller and younger-looking than I would’ve expected.”

Bernadette stepped closer to the box and knelt beside it. Kimiko made no effort to stop her as Bernadette reached inside the box. “Just two planes left.” Bernadette handed both model airplanes to Kimiko before lifting a sawed-off shotgun from the box.

“The planes were Rikia’s,” Kimiko said, tossing an American Corsair into the wind.

“And the shotgun?” Bernadette asked.

“It once belonged to Thurmond Giles. He gave it to me a long time ago. For protection, he said. I should’ve used it on him back then.”

“You killed my Sarah!” Buford yelled as Cozy restrained him by wrapping his arms around the other man’s waist. “Killed her in cold blood with that shotgun. Why?”

Kimiko hesitated briefly before responding. “It was the only solution to a theft,” she said, sounding and looking finally absolved.
“The absolute and only one. Thurmond Giles stole something from me. The same thing he stole from Sarah and Howard Colbain’s wife and Sarah’s mother. It was time he paid.”

“So you, Howard Colbain, Grant Rivers, Rikia, and Sarah stabbed him to death and dropped him down a hole in the earth at Tango-11,” said Bernadette. “And you killed Sarah because her guilt had gotten the best of her and she was going to tell the world what the five of you had done.”

Kimiko didn’t answer. Instead she turned away from Bernadette, cocked her left arm, and tossed the last Japanese Zero into the wind. The plane floated on a ribbon of air, briefly gaining altitude before stalling and plummeting nose-first to the ground.

The government’s case against Rikia Takata ended with his death, and although there was muted sympathy for what had been America’s plight, some in the world continued to whisper,
You almost got what you deserved
. Only Japanese and British responses to the events at Los Alamos remained overwhelmingly supportive, and while most Americans polled had wanted to see Rikia Takata swiftly executed, 15 percent, when asked whether a deranged person with a perceived and perhaps justified lifelong vendetta against America deserved to have his life spared, said yes.

The results of that polling had so infuriated Freddy Dames that, red-faced and with arms flailing, he’d just knocked over the can of Coke he’d been drinking to flood the top of the 150-year-old, walnut-inlaid French partner’s desk that had belonged to his Union Army captain and Indian-fighting great-grandfather.

“Idiots!” he screamed so loudly that the word seemed to echo off every shelf in the library of his Cherry Hills, Colorado, home. Grabbing a handful of tissues from a box on the desktop, he looked across the room at Cozy and Bernadette and began mopping up the spill. “Full-fledged cuckoos,” he muttered, tossing the sopping-wet tissues into a nearby trash can and nudging a linen-covered piece of artwork lying on the desktop out of harm’s way.

“You can’t control people’s thinking, Freddy,” Cozy said, shaking his head.

“I know that. But you’d think that our own goddamn citizens would’ve wanted to see the crazy-assed bastard shot at sunrise.
Especially with Howard Colbain out there now yapping like a scalded dog about how he and four other lunatics, including a loose cannon bent on detonating a dirty nuclear weapon, plotted to each have their own special kind of revenge on poor old Thurmond Giles. Hell, I’m willing to bet the four of them knew what Rikia was up to from the start.”

“Maybe not,” said Bernadette. “Things aren’t always what they seem.”

“Yeah. Maybe you should go reread
Alice in Wonderland
, Freddy,” said Cozy.

“And discover that the Mad Hatter wasn’t crazy after all? No way. It might make me start to believe Colbain, Rivers, and Kimiko when they say they didn’t know what Rikia was up to.”

“They may be telling the truth,” said Cozy. “I’ve spent the last two and a half months tracking Silas Breen’s every move from the time he left Ottawa until Rikia killed him in Amarillo, and I haven’t found anything that ties Colbain, Kimiko, or Rivers to Rikia’s bomb plot. I’m thinking they each wanted a different kind of revenge from the kind Rikia was looking for, and that along with Sarah Goldbeck, when Rikia conveniently served them up the lecherous former sergeant in the flesh, they each simply got in their licks.”

“Rikia
purportedly
killed Breen,” Bernadette interjected.

“Okay, purportedly,” said Cozy.

“Purportedly, allegedly, supposedly. What the shit are we having here, a fool’s debate for frickin’ lawyers? Rikia killed Silas Breen. No ifs, ands, or buts. Just turns out we’ve got two levels of revenge at work here. We’ve got Kimiko’s, Colbain’s, Rivers’s, and Sarah’s,
revenge aimed at a single person, and then we’ve got Rikia’s retribution—which, it turns out, was simply aimed a little higher.”

“No question there,” said Cozy.

“It’s still hard for me to believe that Kimiko wouldn’t have known what the hell Rikia was up to, though,” said Freddy.

“I’m with Cozy,” said Bernadette. “I don’t think she did. I think she was simply looking to get back at Giles.”

“For soiling her? Bernadette, come on. That’s so old-school Victorian—straight out of the 1890s.”

“Like I said, things aren’t necessarily always what they seem, and soiling her would certainly help to explain Giles’s genital mutilation.”

“You could make the same case for Sarah Goldbeck or for the cuckolded Howard Colbain,” said Freddy.

“I could,” said Bernadette. “But I still believe that the essence of Kimiko’s revenge is that of a woman scorned. And I’ve done some homework to back it up.”

“Uh-oh,” Freddy said, looking at Cozy. “I think we may have created ourselves an investigative-reporter monster here.”

Ignoring him, Bernadette said, “I’ve dug up dozens of photos from thirty to thirty-five years ago that show Kimiko and Sergeant Giles holding hands and playing kissy-face with one another at antinuclear protests at missile-silo sites in four different states, including one of them arm in arm at Tango-11. Kimiko’s even quoted in a Yankton, South Dakota, newspaper article from 1979 as saying that her NukeWatch organization had people on the inside, air force people she was terribly fond of, who were helping her in her efforts to get nuclear missiles removed from the heartland.”

“So! Giles was stringing her along and feeding her inside information for sex. Hell, politicians and Hollywood directors do the same damn thing every day without ever getting murdered, and never thirty years after the fact. So whatta you think, Cozy?” Freddy asked, rising from his chair and walking over to the window to look out on the season’s first snowfall.

“I think Bernadette’s right.”

“Okay. Let’s say she’s right. Kimiko still may have simply been along for the ride when it came to actually murdering Giles. Maybe all she did was whack off his johnson after he was dead. What I want to know is which one of the five of them delivered the fatal stab wound.”

“Can’t answer that,” said Cozy.

“Bernadette?”

“Me, either,” Bernadette said with a shrug. “But at least, according to Colbain, we do know one thing after all these months. All five of them stabbed Giles, including Kimiko, the demented spiritualist, and Sarah Goldbeck, the self-avowed pacifist. Which means the three who are still standing are pretty much equally guilty in the eyes of the law.”

“Colbain—what a joke,” Freddy said, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t put a dime’s worth of faith in what he says. Singing like a canary in order to save his own butt. That’s what he’s doing. Hell, his comments are worthless.”