Nothing Short of Dying (12 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

L
eadville was dirty and old, and we drove straight to the opera house, parked, and got out to admire the scenery. It was a good kind of dirty, and a good kind of old; a living ghost town. The buildings were all either massive Victorian, false-fronted wood, or impressive square blocks of brick. Most had been converted into office or apartment buildings, but you could still feel the history.

You could almost smell the gunpowder and booze wafting in the thin air, could almost hear the old miners whispering in the cool wind. Remnants of a time when thirty thousand people stumbled up and down these streets. Now there were only a couple thousand.

The town sat in a relatively low spot, surrounded in every direction by some of the state's tallest peaks. Snow still dominated the tops of the mountains, and down where Allie and I stood the grass had barely begun to sneak up between the cracks in the pavement. Most of the lots were empty, filled with nothing but sprouting wildflowers. Ours wasn't.

An old, beat-up, primer-gray pickup sat at the far end of the lot. No other cars. Out of habit I scanned the top of the
opera house and the surrounding buildings and streets for shooters. Nothing but ravens and magpies. I looked back over at the pickup, saw a cloud of smoke rising from the driver's side window, drifting slowly into the air.

Allie moved beside me as a man emerged from the pickup and walked slowly into view. He was taller than me by a few inches, pushing six foot six, wearing a large-brimmed cowboy hat. His dirty denim shirt was tucked neatly into his dirty denim pants. As he walked toward us, we could see the large drooping mustache above a tight mouth with a loosely held cigar. His face was wrinkled and tanned, one eye puckered with a wide scar starting at his brow and ending at his ear. I regretted not grabbing the pistol out of the Jeep.

“Barr,” the man said as he came over to us, stopping close enough for me to smell the horse sweat on his clothes.

“Zeke.”

He threw his fat cigar into the parking lot, locked his eyes on mine. I whispered to Allie, “Don't scream, don't yell, no matter what happens. Just get in the Jeep. Zeke has an odd way of saying hello.” She knitted her brow as if to say
Now what crazy thing are you about to do?
Then she slowly backed away toward the Jeep.

Zeke rolled up his sleeves, walked back to the middle of the lot, and stamped both booted feet hard on the ground. Then he started pawing the pavement with his right boot, snorting as he did it. The snorting quickly became throaty bellowing, and I took a step back, bracing myself. I took my hat off and put it on the Jeep's hood.

We both started running toward each other at the same time and collided hard in the middle of the lot, our combined speed and body weight making the impact substantial; it jarred every bone in my body and made my teeth rattle in
their sockets, and it felt like the muscles in my arms and legs were about to tear away from the bones.

Zeke had me in a bear hug before I could steady myself. I'm not light, but he managed to pick me up off my feet with alarming speed and ease. I got one of my arms out of his python grip and shoved my hand in his face, hoping to hit an eye with one of my fingers. He turned his face away with a chuckle. “Come on, Barr, you can do better than that.”

I kept my hand by his face and slashed that elbow at his head, connecting hard on his ear. “Oh, here we go . . .” Zeke said. His grip loosened a little, but he didn't let go. So I hit him three more times on the ear, then head-butted his head as it turned. My forehead landed on his cheek bone and he dropped me, clutching the side of his face, giving me an opening. I grabbed the front of his shirt, whipped him around, and tripped him over my foot. He hit the pavement hard, grunting, but rolled and shot up, standing in a cloud of dust.

“Been a while, Zeke, you getting rusty?” I asked. We charged at each other again but didn't collide. Zeke ran past me, somehow managing to land a good left hook that rocked me, dimming my vision and causing me to stumble. I landed on the blacktop, thumping my knee and skidding hard.

Zeke ran back over to me while I fell and kicked me hard in the gut as I was trying to get up. I acted more hurt than I was and he tried to kick me again. I rolled and grabbed his pointy boot with both hands. Twisted hard and Zeke slammed to the ground, saying, “Dammit, Barr. Okay, okay, that's enough.” I let go and started to get up, and he kicked me hard in the thigh. “Well, now it's enough,” he said, and got up slowly, dusting himself off.

I got up, too, feeling a little sore, but not bad, thanks to my old friend adrenaline. Zeke stuck his hand out and I took
it reluctantly, but he just shook it and said, “Goddamn, it's good to see you again, you crazy son of a bitch.”

“Good to see you, too.”

We walked back over to the Jeep, where Allie was sitting behind the wheel, her window down and left elbow on the door.

“You boys have fun?” she asked.

“Well, well, well, Barr. Who's this little piece of ass?”

“Careful,” I growled.

“Sorry, who is this little lady?”

“This is Allie. Allie, Zeke.”

Allie smiled her best man-melting smile, said, “Pleased to meet you, Zeke. You gonna help us find Jen?”

I hadn't mentioned Jen's name previously. Zeke stroked his chin, winked at me. “So it's Jen our boy wants to help. Sure. What you gonna do for me?”

He walked up close to the Jeep's driver-side panel and leered at Allie through the window. I grabbed him by the back of his collar, yanked him away, and whispered in his ear, “Leave it alone. She's with me.” Zeke swatted my hand away, smiling. “Sure, sure, just kiddin' with the girl. Let's get going. You got gas?” I nodded. “Good,” he said. “I live way up there.” He pointed toward the looming peaks in the distance.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I
motioned Allie back into the passenger seat and we followed Zeke's pickup, quickly leaving the town and the pavement behind us and heading up into the skinny forest of pines and aspens. Zeke drove like he did everything else, fast and wild. I had to push the Jeep hard to keep up and was worried we'd break down again.

“How do you know Zeke?” Allie asked.

“We were friends,” I said. I didn't tell her about prison.

“Did you meet him in an insane asylum or something?”

“Something like that.”

“What does he do? Does he know where Jen is?”

“He prospects. Lives in a cabin and looks for gold in the streams, sometimes digs a little in all of the abandoned mines around here. In the fall he guides hunters, and occasionally he does some other, shadier stuff. He might not know exactly where Jen is, but he knows these mountains, and if Lance is cooking somewhere up here, Zeke can tell us where to look.”

I didn't tell her what Zeke
used
to do. How he used to run drugs out of Mexico, hidden in the floorboards of stock trailers full of Mexican cattle that he sold in the states for triple what he paid. Or how he screwed a bunch of cartel
guys out of a lot of money and then ran and hid in Arizona. Until a little guy found him and Zeke shot him, way out in the Cabeza Prieta. Zeke buried the body, and then, ironically, got popped back in Mexico for speeding. He beat the tar out of the traffic guy, knocking out an eye. No one ever connected him to the Arizona body, but he was given ten years in a Mexican border prison for the cop.

“What happens if Lance isn't at the cook house? What if Jeff's guys were lying?”

I looked over, tried to hide my worry. “I doubt they were lying,” I said. “They were planning on killing you, after all.”

Allie chose not to say anything after that. She rubbed her temples and put her seat back, her eyelids falling low.

Zeke's pickup wandered up the little gravel road, then turned off onto an unmarked two-track and continued farther up, past little crystal-clear ponds, streams, and creeks. I spotted two beavers swimming in one of the ponds. My mind started to wander, although I knew I should be paying closer attention to the route. I couldn't stop trying to figure why I continued to push Allie's and my luck with the search for a sister I hadn't seen in years.

It really came down to selfishness. At some level we're all selfish. It's a survival mechanism, meant to propagate the species by keeping individuals alive long enough to mate. But there are layers of selfishness. Food, clothing, and shelter is the base layer, the only real selfishness that is necessary for survival. After that we need social mechanisms to thrive as a group. I say that helping family is for
them
, that I care for my family and if they need help, I give it. The truth was, I was helping Jen mostly out of guilt. I felt guilty for not being there in the past when she really needed me.

I saw two red eyes ahead of me and my mind was jerked
into the present, just before almost crashing into Zeke as he slammed on the brakes. He'd jerked his rig to the left and into a narrow open lane between clumps of aspens. I followed, almost rolling the top-heavy Jeep. The short lane led us past a barbed wire gate with a cattle guard and into a glade filled with horses and wooden buildings.

I nudged Allie, told her we'd arrived.

“Where?” she asked, slowly shaking off the excessive sleep.

“Zeke's spread.”

“They still say
spread
nowadays?”

“Zeke does. Be careful around him. Hand me my bag.”

She tossed it to me as we parked next to his truck in front of a large, rebuilt log cabin that sat nestled against the mountain to the north. It must be the main house, I thought, since it was the largest building in the compound and the only one with windows. There were old barns, corrals, tack and grain sheds, all surrounded by three strands of barbed wire fencing that sagged in places between rotting fence posts. Horses grazed in a far meadow on the short grass in between snow patches. I grabbed my knife out of the bag and handed it to Allie. “Take this. Hide it on you. Use it on Zeke if he gets frisky. Don't threaten him with it, just stab. Like this.” I jerked my arm, mimicking a stabbing motion. “Got it?”

“I know how to use a knife. And I won't have a problem using it. This dude gives me the creeps.”

I nodded and grabbed the pistol out of my bag, shoving it in the front pocket of my Carhartt jacket. “You have no idea,” I said. We watched Zeke get out of his truck; then we followed behind as he led us up onto the wooden porch and into the cabin.

The place was a simple two-room affair. The main room was spacious, containing a large, square wooden table and
a few chairs. There was an old wood stove in the corner, a cabinet containing dishes and cookware, and a wash basin next to it. An overloaded bookshelf sat at the far wall next to a dusty, holey recliner. To the right was a narrow opening that led into a room with a single bed and a trunk. The only modern things visible in the house were the cell phone lying in the middle of the table and the scoped rifles in a rack by the door.

Zeke pulled out two chairs from the table and said, “Sit down, take a load off. Goddamn, Barr, you know how long it's been since I've had visitors? Hell, I ain't seen no one except in town for more than a year. Sit down, shoot the breeze with me. We can't do nothin' till tomorrow anyway. Be getting dark pretty soon. Those big-boy mountains hide the sun pretty good and we got months until real summer.”

The whole situation made my heart rate go from a trot to a gallop; every rational, wary bone in my body screamed to get out of the cabin, but I sat down, keeping my right hand in my pocket. Allie sat down next to me. She smiled up at us both and kept her hands under the table.

I stared out of the western window, saw the immense forest surrounding the cabin, watched the sun slowly touch the top of what I guessed was Mount Massive. I should have paid better attention on the drive. Thousands of acres of wilderness between us and Lance, and I wasn't sure where either was.

“So,” Zeke said, leaning back in his chair, “where you two lovebirds first meet?” I hadn't thought of Allie and me as that, not really—more as the jackass and his sidekick, or the idiot and his accomplice.

“He helped me out of a jam,” Allie said, derailing my train of thought.

Zeke laughed. “Damn, Barr. How much trouble you gonna get yourself in helpin' people? But I got to say, you picked a really fine one to help.” He smirked at Allie. She smiled back, her hands working under the table.

“One more, Zeke. One more. After that . . .” I let my voice trail off and put up my hands in a
who knows?
gesture.

“Sure, sure. Just foolin', Barr. Damn, you always were the sensitive one. Carin' about people's feelings. And always the one to look after the little guy or girl. Defender of the helpless. Read a lot about people like you since I been out.” He pointed at the bookshelf. “Yup, knights, cowboys in them Westerns, lotsa people who look after others. Funny thing is, you know what always happens to those guys in the end?”

“I have a feeling you're going to tell us,” I said.

“They end up dead. It makes for a better story. Martyrs and such—readers like those kinds of heroes, folks who give up their own life for someone else. People like me? There ­aren't as many stories about us. 'Cause we look after ourselves and prosper. We're the majority, Barr. You guys will die off.” He chuckled again and got up; came back with a bottle of rye and three glasses. “You have to. There ain't no living heroes. The best ones are buried.” He poured the whiskey into the glasses, mirth showing in his eyes. “Not insultin', don't get me wrong. Just the way the world works. You know that. Otherwise you wouldn't have called me. Wouldn't have needed my help. Our kind has its place.”

I sipped my rye slowly. I'd heard this speech every day when we were inside. Zeke was one of the rare sociopaths who could defend his malady and he did it well. Allie drank her glass fast, then sucked air quickly through her teeth.

“So, back to business,” I said. “You know this Alvis guy?”

Zeke refilled his glass. “Don't know him, no. I don't
know
all that many people. Rub them the wrong way, I guess.” He took another sip. “Heard of him, though. Cookin' and runnin' crystal out of my mountains. Didn't ask for my permission to move in, either. Heard he's a ruthless son of a bitch. There's a story that a dealer shorted him once, some guy out in Kansas. Mr. Alvis drove over there himself and used a spoon to pop the dealer's eyes out.”

Jesus. “How hard will it be to find him?”

“Oh, easy. These are my mountains. Pretty sure I know where he is already. Maybe twenty miles from here. Up in a little canyon, there's a new place. It smells like they're burning bodies. The crank smells so bad it scares my horses. It's a pretty big operation. They're runnin' the stuff out in big trucks. I've seen a few guys up there drivin' fancy SUVs and one guy in a big ol' Land Rover. Sound like your guy?”

“Could be,” I said. I took another sip of the rye. It was pretty tasty and getting better. “So you've been close to this place?”

“Hell yes. Come on, Barr. You think I'm making this up to make you happy? I was just up there not more than a week ago. Flippin' rocks and diggin' in a hole maybe a mile up the mountain from their compound. And it
is
a compound. Ten-foot fence, wire, one main gate on the south side. They have two roads to the main gate, kind of a loop road, one comin' up the mountain and one going down. But”—he finished his glass and reached for the now half-empty bottle—“they don't have much security to speak of. Just some tweakers at the gate and a few wandering the grounds with guns. The whole backside of the place is open, and it butts up to the forest on that side.” He smiled. “Easy.”

“So,” I said. “Our plan is to go over on horseback, keep away from the roads. They probably have security on the
roads, especially close to town. We spend one night up in the hills, hit the place early. Sound about right?” Zeke nodded. “Do you know if my sister is there? Alvis could have a place in town.”

Zeke shrugged. “All depends. You said your sister's not with Alvis of her own accord, right? She's some kind of prisoner or something? If that's the case, I doubt Alvis would be hiding her from the housekeepers at whatever fancy place he has. Come to think of it, there's a big trailer in the compound—­I've seen the Rover parked next to it a few times. Your sister could be there. But who the hell knows.”

It sounded sketchy to me. She
could
be there. But maybe not. Was it worth busting through whatever security existed to find out? I wrestled with whether this whole operation made sense, but my gut said that whatever I found in the compound was likely to move me closer to finding Jen.

I finished my glass and said, “I think it's worth a shot. We hit them hard, look for Jen, and ride out.”

Zeke smiled. “And don't forget, I get paid for services rendered. You think ol' Alvis is keeping a pile of cash there?”

“Either that or a lot of product. Same thing.” Just what the world needed, I thought: Zeke with a couple hundred doses of crank to lure desperate women with. I had no intention of paying him, but I'd cross that bridge when we came to it.

Zeke's smile widened as he noticed Allie's eyelids drooping. “If you're getting sleepy, baby doll, you can go ahead and crash on that bed in the back. I'll meet you there later.” He winked at her, and she looked at me.

I launched out of the chair and backhanded Zeke, trying to wipe his smile off. The force was enough to knock him backward, chair and all, and he crashed hard on the wooden floor against the wall. The smile didn't disappear, though. He
sprang up, grinning, walked toward me, then stopped suddenly when he saw my pistol.

“Good boy, Barr,” he said, still smiling. His eyes flickered toward the gun pointed at his belly, then met mine. There was mirth in his look, but also menace. It said he'd eventually get his payback, whatever it took. “Glad you came with a leadslinger. Mind putting it away?”

“Sure,” I said. I placed the gun back in my pocket. “You keep pushing me, though, and I'll put you down.” I sat back down and sipped the rye, my hands a little shaky. “I think we all should be getting to bed. Big day tomorrow. The bed's all yours, Zeke. Allie and I will sleep outside.”

Zeke nodded, pulled his chair off the floor, and settled into it. Poured himself another drink as we went out the door.

INSIDE OUR TENT, NESTLED INTO
layers of double-zipped sleeping bags, Allie asked, “Were you serious in there? You'd kill Zeke?”

The bags were warm, made warmer by Allie's clothed body next to mine. “If he makes me do it, yeah, I will. He wouldn't hesitate to kill either of us, wouldn't lose any sleep. The man's a complete sociopath, but we need him and his horses. He knows these mountains better than anyone, and the horses will take us where we can be sure we won't run into any of Alvis's boys.”

“I think you might
have
to kill him,” Allie said, snuggling closer. “The guy really scares me.”

“Me too,” I said, inching closer to her warmth.

We'd set up the tent between the cabin and the barn in a grassy spot surrounded by rabbit brush and dry thistle stalks that rattled in the evening breeze. Allie helped, and it went up quickly. She glared at me when I'd asked if she'd prefer to
sleep in the Jeep, so I zipped our two sleeping bags together and both of us settled into the tent, pulling most of our new gear in with us, just in case. The dry thistles would shake an early warning if Zeke came too close. And if I heard that, I'd be ready. I kept the loaded pistol by my pillow; Allie kept the knife by hers. I also had the loaded .375 by my side.