“Goldy, no. It’s a total mess. I don’t know how John even finds his tools in there.”
“Please?”
Boyd’s shoulders slumped again. “All right, I’ll come with you.”
“I’d rather you stayed with Yolanda.”
“Okay. I’m going to watch you go in there, though. We’ve got more cops here than a law enforcement convention. But don’t stay long. I’m telling you, if we had hurricanes here, you’d say that garage got hit ten years ago, and nothing had been cleaned up.”
“Thanks.”
I scrambled down the rocks, huffing and puffing for the second time that day. When I stopped to catch my breath, I realized I could see down to Cottonwood Creek and the main twisting road into Aspen Meadow. I stifled a whoop when I saw Tom’s car rumbling along behind a line of traffic.
Finally, finally, I arrived back at the propane grill, which John Bertram was still trying to light. Ferdinanda, who’d just whacked John with her baton a couple of days before, showed no hint of remorse as she gave John directions on lighting the grill.
“John,” I gasped. “Ernest called you ‘Bert,’ right?”
He looked up at me. “Sure. We were Bert and Ernie. No big deal.”
“May I look around in your garage?”
His cheeks reddened. “Well, it’s kind of . . . chaotic in there. I mean, Ernest was always after me to clean it up. What are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure,” I called over my shoulder as I walked briskly down the pavement. I didn’t see Boyd anywhere and I didn’t want to wait for him. Yolanda needed him more than I did right now.
Behind me, Ferdinanda yelled, “Hey, Goldy! If this man ever gets this grill lit, we got to put the pork on. Where are you going?”
“I’ll be back shortly,” I called. “We don’t need to cook the pork for at least another hour.”
To my dismay, the sound of Ferdinanda’s wheels squeaked along behind me. She called, “Come here, Goldy! I don’t want you going anywhere without something I’m going to give you.”
I stopped. Tom would be here soon, and I wanted to look in the garage before he arrived. But I dutifully waited for Ferdinanda. Maybe she would give me a Santeria talisman, or—
“Take this,” said Ferdinanda. She reached beside her hip and pulled out the baton. “You’ve made enemies out of Humberto and, it sounds like, Sean Breckenridge, and maybe Kris, too.” She pointed to a button on the side of the baton. “You want it to extend, punch this.”
“Okay,” I said. I’d need both my hands if I was going to search through trash and who knew what all in the garage, but I did not mention this. “I’ll be right back.”
I raced off, but to my dismay I again heard Ferdinanda’s wheels squealing along slowly behind me. Maybe she would find somebody else to give advice to along the way. I certainly hoped so.
The crowd was thick, and it took me more than five minutes to thread through it. With any luck, Ferdinanda would be held up much longer, and not bother me on my quest.
The garage door was a red wooden sliding entrance, more like the type you would find on a barn. I slid it open, felt along the right wall, and switched on overhead fluorescent lights.
As promised, the place was a wreck. I counted six trucks and two cars, each in varying states of disrepair. The hoods of most of them yawned. Like many Coloradans, John Bertram cannibalized his old vehicles for parts to put in newer ones. But that wasn’t what interested me.
Which vehicle looked clean? Which one looked as if Ernest might have been in it?
It took only a minute. While the pickups were generally filled with rags, old cans, and all manner of detritus, there was one, a red one, over by the other side of the garage. I could see it well because daylight spilled in from the regular-size door on that side. The roar of traffic from the road below was clearly audible.
There was even a somewhat clear path to the red truck, as if someone—in my mind, Ernest—had tried to indicate where one should walk to get to the red truck, which looked as if it had been hastily wiped down by someone who wanted to indicate he’d been there. I walked quickly to it.
Someone—again, I was willing to bet it was Ernest—had dumped all the trash that had been in the back of the truck on the garage floor. I levered myself up to check the cab. It was empty. With my free hand, I pulled open one of the doors and felt along the floor and between the seats, but my hands came up with nothing. When I opened the glove box, a crumpled heap of old restaurant reviews spilled onto the floor. I checked through them quickly, but found not a shred of anything of interest.
Cursing, I slammed the door shut and climbed up one of the wheels, vaulted over, and landed with a soft thump in the back, which was empty . . . except for Ernest McLeod’s backpack.
“I got it!” I cried as I lifted the backpack with my free hand. But then someone—a man, moving very quickly —vaulted into the truck bed behind me. And then something very hard,
The pain made sickness shoot through my body. Then the butt of the gun hit me again.
“Did you really think you were going to steal from me?” Kris Nielsen’s menacing voice came close to my ear. His free hand grasped my neck. I stretched out my right hand, trying to find the baton. Once my fingers closed on it, I pulled it quietly toward my body. Kris said, “Did you really think you could just waltz into my house and take files, and I wouldn’t discover it? The next time you burgle someone’s house, don’t run out the back door where someone in the house can see you. What’s mine is
I let go of the backpack but pressed the baton against my thigh. “Please,” I said, “please stop—”
I torqued my head sideways and saw a glint of metal. Kris was indeed holding a gun. The whoosh in the air from his raising it again made me wince. I pressed the extension button on the baton and whacked backward with every ounce of strength I possessed.
Stunned, Kris tumbled onto the floor of the truck bed. The gun rattled away in the darkness, but Kris, using his superior strength, snatched the baton out of my hand before I could get my feet under me. He levered to a standing position while I tried to scramble away from him.
“Hey, Kris!” came Ferdinanda’s unexpected shout.
Kris turned toward the front of the garage. I grabbed the side of the truck bed and pulled myself up to a half crouch. Ferdinanda sat in her wheelchair near the red truck, her hands in her lap. Light from the big doors created an aura around her.
“I should have had Osgoode run over you twice, you old bat!” Kris yelled.
“I’m not that easy to kill,” she said, “so you better come get me now.”
Kris raised the baton, his face flushed as red as the backpack dangling from his other hand. I estimated how far it was to the open side door if I tried to vault from the truck bed. But I couldn’t just leave Ferdinanda here with Kris. What if he recovered his gun? If I screamed, would it carry to the house?
Before I could figure out what to do, I watched Ferdinanda pull something out of the recesses of her ever useful wheelchair. I had time to register that it was a gun—Tom’s .45 from our garage, I vaguely realized—and heard Kris shout something. Then the woman who had been a sniper, a
Kris Nielsen fell against me, sending us both back down to the truck floor. I wiggled out from beneath him. A cratered hole lay where his forehead had been. He wouldn’t be stalking anyone ever again.
At least twenty cops descended on the Bertrams’ garage. I didn’t see or hear much, because the sound of the shots had once again temporarily deafened me. Kris’s blood was on my face, in my eyes, and dripping into my ears. My whole body quivered uncontrollably. I wanted to get away from Kris Nielsen’s corpse as fast as humanly possible.
But of course the whole place was now a crime scene.
Tom arrived and took his gun back from Ferdinanda. She confessed immediately, saying that she’d been looking for a weapon from the first morning she’d awakened in our house. That was what she had been doing in our pantry when I’d come upon her so early. She had not been looking for cans. She’d also searched in our freezer, because she couldn’t believe a law enforcement officer wouldn’t have a weapon hidden somewhere.
