Denver Strike (6 page)

“They'd know,” the man said anxiously. “They got all kinds of ways of knowing. That's why I can't tell you nothin', mister. I just can't—”

“Oh, you'll talk,” Hawker said easily. “By the time I get done with you, you'll tell me more than I want to know. In fact, I've just thought of a way to soften you up.”

Quickly, Hawker pulled two lengths of rope from his backpack. He used the shortest section to bind the man's hands and arms behind his back. Then he took the hundred-foot length and tied a rescuer's bowline around the man's chest. He tied the other end securely to a tree.

“Let's go,” Hawker said, pushing him roughly out of sight of the children and toward the precipice where the logging trail dropped off several hundred feet to rocks below.

“What are you going to do?” the man yelled. “My god, you're not going to push me off—”

“I want to make sure you're here when I get back, sport,” Hawker said, shoving him along. “Dangling over the gorge might help convince you that I mean business.”

The man was almost crying now. “Okay, okay, I'll talk, just don't make me—”

“I've got to take the kids back, friend. Do you know what I think the lowest thing in this world is? It's an adult who would intentionally hurt a child. That's just what you've done, sport. Now you're going to hang over this ledge until I get back and haul your ass up.”

Hawker gave him a light shove, and the man screamed as Hawker began to lower him down over the gorge. “I'm afraid of heights, for Christ's sake!”

“No kidding,” said Hawker peering down over the ledge as the man swung back and forth like a pendulum. “You're not going to like this at all then, are you?”

Hawker fired off the four-shot signal, then drove the Wagoneer back along the logging trail until he saw Lomela hurrying along the path toward them. The reunion between the mother and her two children was joyful. Hawker felt as if he really had done some good. He gave the woman the keys to the Jeep and told her to drive back to the cabin and get packed. He'd pick up the Appaloosa, question the man, then meet them on the logging trail for the trip back to Denver.

There was only one hitch in the plan.

When Hawker, now on horseback, returned to the precipice, he found that the man was gone.

At first, he couldn't believe it.

But then he saw that someone had cut the rope.

six

Tom Dulles was a lanky, lean, rank-haired man in his mid-thirties who had been a Denver cop for ten years. He had grown up on a scraggly cattle ranch on the Utah side of Rangely, Colorado, a sagebrush town dotted with bars and oil rigs. He had attended the junior college at Rangely, played baseball under Paul “Snuffy” Conrad, then gone on to major in law enforcement at the University of Denver. When his alcoholic father died, he returned to Rangely, sold the family holdings for next to nothing—which was what the family holdings were worth—then went back to the Mile High City to seek a new life.

That was during what was known as the Hippie Era in Denver. The long-haired children of America's affluent roamed the streets begging for dimes, planning revolts, cheering Tom Hayden's support of North Vietnam's systematic slaughter of American “war criminals,” dropping acid, doing group sex, and tripping their brains out during demonstrations in Washington Park.

Dulles, who had grown up as a rangehand shitkicker, had no politics, but he was smart enough to know that he could get into the pants of most of the blond-haired hippie debutantes for the price of an anti-Nixon remark. His sexual activity increased in direct proportion to his political activism. He began a marathon sampler of white girls, black girls, teeny-boppers, Eastern intellectuals, and California beauties who loved herbal shampoos and synthetic drugs. Only a really virulent case of the clap kept him from running for public office.

It was while recovering that Dulles began to understand some of the political horseshit he had been spouting. Within a week, he had joined the Marines. He was shipped to Nam, spent a month scared shitless that he was going to be killed, spent another ten months scared he
wasn't
going to be killed, then two more months in Saigon recovering from a case of Asiatic clap that made the American version seem uninteresting.

When he returned to the world, he joined the Denver P.D. He became a happily married, happily settled citizen of Colorado. But then his young wife had slumped over one afternoon at the dinner table, and he spent the next three years in and out of hospitals. He had the affair with Lomela, broke off the affair with Lomela, and now was tending to his convalescing wife and his job as a police lieutenant.

It was this man whom James Hawker now sat across the table from in a ritzy San Francisco—style bar in downtown Denver, a man Hawker liked instinctively. Within a few minutes, each man trusted the other without reservation. Dulles wore a conservative gray suit and blue tie, and he was drinking Scotch, neat. Hawker was munching fried potato skins and sipping at his tankard of Coors.

“I really appreciate what you did for Lomela,” Dulles was saying. “That business with the goons who kidnapped her kids sounded pretty hairy. She told me all about it.”

Hawker raised his eyebrows. “She told you everything?”

A mild smile crossed Dulles's face. “What she didn't tell me, she implied. I like that woman; I like her a lot. For a while, I thought I loved her. God knows, she sure helped me when I was down. She's that rare breed: simple, tough, hardworking, and she takes a lot of enjoyment in being a woman.”

“A rare breed,” Hawker agreed.

“If you two have something going, I'm all for it.”

“It was more like first aid,” the vigilante replied. “But I'm glad you're not upset. She still cares about you, and I don't want to get caught in the middle of anything.”

“You won't. I'm just happy as hell that you were there to help. Look, you don't have to tell me, but I'd like to know. What did you do to scare off Nek's gunmen? I mean, I know some of those assholes. They're drug-blitzed. They have no minds anymore. They'll do absolutely anything that Nek tells them to do. It's not that they're fearless as much as that they're too burned out to know what fear is. So if you've got a way of scaring them, I'd really like to know it.”

Hawker looked at him blankly. “Scare them? I didn't scare them.”

“But Lomela said—”

“Lomela lied because she didn't want me to get into trouble.”

Dulles's dark eyes narrowed in reappraisal. “Then how did you get rid of them?”

Hawker finished his beer and held the pewter mug up as a signal to the waitress. The waitress wore a scarlet dance-hall dress and feathers in her hair. “Tom,” the vigilante said easily, “you're a bright guy. The reason you happened to know about me was because I've built a reputation for solving problems that regular law-enforcement agencies can't touch. I didn't build that reputation because I'm a better cop than the average municipal cop. I built it because I go ahead and do what no other cop can legally do. It's the only real advantage I have. Several years ago, I decided I'd had enough of the bureaucratic bullshit. I decided that this nation had a real need for someone trained in law enforcement who wasn't afraid to cut corners, someone who wasn't afraid to play judge, jury, and executioner. But when I made that decision, I also knew that anyone who knew the details of my missions could, in a legal sense, become an accomplice.” Hawker took the tankard of beer from the waitress, exchanging a dollar tip for her warm smile. “So now I'm going to ask you again. Do you really want to know what I did to scare those guys off, Tom?”

Dulles nodded. “Like you said, I've been around, Hawk. I don't mind taking a few chances myself. So tell me before I threaten to turn you in to the
Post.”

Hawker shrugged. “I killed them.”

“What?”

“I killed them—all of them except one, that is. Someone else killed that one, but I have no idea who.”

Dulles gave a low whistle. “You actually greased the dinks who came after Lomela? How many?”

“Six in all; five by my hand.”

Dulles took a long drink of his Scotch. “You know, the guys down at the P.D. used to talk about you, in the gym or the steam room—you know, bullshit talk. They had heard rumors like you'd blown away fifteen or twenty street punks in L.A., or a dozen New York hoods, or an army of revolutionaries. Stuff like that. I never believed it because who in the hell could get away with stuff like that? They said your trick was to never ever waste anybody who didn't deserve it. They said if we got a scramble call on some dude who has greased Denver's three biggest heroin pushers, how fast are we really going to scramble? After we shake his hand and buy him a few beers, we might tell him to get his ass in gear before someone from the ACLU comes along and nails us all.” Dulles smiled a crooked, Gary Cooper kind of smile. “So now I find out the rumors weren't all bullshit. I learn you really do pack the terrible swift sword.”

Hawker chuckled. “I've heard those same rumors, and I can tell you right now that a lot of them are bullshit. They make me out to be stronger than a locomotive and faster than a speeding bullet.” He motioned to his stiff left arm. “But I almost got wasted two nights ago because I was dumb and didn't keep track of some asshole with a knife in the dark. I've had my butt kicked more than once, and all too often I'd like to kick my own butt for being just plain stupid. But you don't hear the stories about my screw-ups”—Hawker smiled wryly—“and I guess I'm glad. Any well-trained cop could do what I do if he had the weaponry and the financial backing and the go-for-broke attitude. That's the real difference: the go-for-broke attitude. The killers and the rapists and the crooks don't expect it. I mean, who in the hell can really chase them like they deserve to be chased? An honest cop can't. The courts wouldn't let him even if his work schedule allowed it. So when someone finally does, it shocks the hell out of them. They get real nervous. They make stupid mistakes. And with me, they don't get a chance to be a repeat offender.”

“So you really did waste six of Big Bill Nek's gunmen,” Dulles said in a tone of amused wonderment. “Boy, is he going to be pissed.”

“I eliminated five,” Hawker corrected. “I tied the sixth one to a rope and dropped him over a cliff—”

“You what?”

“I didn't let him hit the ground. I just dropped him part of the way. I wanted information from him. I wanted him to know I meant business.”

“That would certainly convince me you meant business.”

“I was gone for about half an hour,” Hawker said, “and when I got back I found that somebody had cut the rope.”

“Who in the hell could have done that? Do you think maybe he climbed back up, cut the rope, and split?”

Hawker shook his head. “He split, all right. I could see him lying on the rocks below. Somebody came by and decided he needed the Isaac Newton cure for insomnia. I have no idea who. But whoever did it was bleeding. There was blood on the rope. He must have cut himself. I'm not worried about that now, though. Now I need to find Nek's mountain hideaway. Where is he keeping Jimmy Estes and Chuck Phillips hostage?”

“Well, you know the official line is that Estes and Phillips were up in the mountains and just disappeared. We have absolutely no proof that they were kidnapped. The P.D. doesn't even have anyone working on the case; in fact, there is no case. But if I were looking for Estes and Phillips, I'd get old Robert Carthay to try to lead me back to that abandoned mine. I know it was dark when he escaped, and I know he was half-crazy, but that man knows the Colorado Rockies better than anyone I've ever met, and I think the route is stuck somewhere in his subconscious. Hell, I'd bet on it.”

Hawker thought for a moment, shaking his head slowly. “But Nek probably had Estes and Phillips moved to a different location after Carthay escaped,” he said. “I think Carthay is better off hidden in the mountains. No, we have to think of some other way to find out.”

“We could get topographical maps, pick out the most likely areas, then get a chopper to fly us around,” said Dulles.

“It may come to that. But I have something I'd like to try first. You said Nek has a big place here in Denver, didn't you?”

“He's the richest man in town, and he has the biggest estate. It's just outside Englewood.”

Hawker finished his beer. “Why don't we drive there right now and ask Nek where he's keeping them?”

Dulles laughed, but his laughter slowly faded when he noticed the look in the vigilante's gray eyes. “You're serious, aren't you?”

Hawker dropped a ten-dollar bill onto the table. “Don't worry. This will be a friendly visit.”

seven

Bill Nek didn't live on an estate. He lived in a fortress that was built on a park grounds that ended abruptly at the edge of a cliff that towered over the Denver skyline.

Because Tom Dulles drove, it was Dulles who talked to the armed guard at the black wrought-iron gate.

Leaning into the window, the guard asked, “Do you have an appointment to see Mr. Nek?”

“I don't think he's expecting us,” Dulles said, looking at Hawker for confirmation.

“Then could you kindly state your business,” said the guard with an imperious air.

Hawker leaned toward the window. “Get on the phone and tell Nek we're here to talk about the sale of the Chicquita Silver Mine.” The sharpness of Hawker's tone set the guard back a step.

“Silver mine, sir,” he said. “Yes, sir. I'll be right back, sir.”

The guard stepped through the pedestrian gate and disappeared into a small stone house. A few minutes later, he reappeared. “Mr. Nek will send a car for you,” the guard said.