Astride a Pink Horse (19 page)

He could try to make up the time by running all night, like old-time over-the-road truckers used to do, but if he did, the
Star Wars
–looking mileage, time, and distance computer sitting just inches from his right hand, a tool that had replaced outdated handwritten truckers’ logs, could be his undoing. Especially if he were unlucky enough to have some eager port-of-entry flunky at a weigh station demand a point-to-point time, distance, and mileage printout. If he got caught cheating the system that way, he’d likely receive the kind of hefty fine that would wipe out a good portion of the trip’s profit. Shaking his head, muttering, “Shit,” and speeding down I-55 past a sign that read, “St. Louis—46,” he expected that it would be one in the morning before his head hit any pillow.

He’d talked to only three people since leaving South Bend: the young girl who’d taken his McDonald’s order just south of Chicago, the toothless old man at a gas station who’d illegally plugged his flat tire instead of breaking it down and patching it properly, and the Mexican who could barely speak English who’d fixed his radiator problem. More importantly, though, he hadn’t talked to F. Mantew all day. He’d finally decided that that was a good thing. If Mantew didn’t care about him being on time with his delivery, why the hell should he?

Holding up an arm to ward off the headlight glare from an oncoming semi whose driver had failed to dim his lights, he muttered, “Jerk,” slowed his rig, and retrieved a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich from the open cooler on the seat next to him. When
a second truck rolled by, its lights on high beam as well, he countered by flashing high beams of his own and yelling, “Asshole!” before angrily chomping into his sandwich and mumbling with his mouth full, “Fuck Mantew.”

Kimiko Takata refused to leave Heart Mountain until she’d watched the sunrise, so while Rikia sat in the backseat of the station wagon with the vehicle’s interior lights on and a flashlight in one hand, working out math calculations and putting the final polish on his paper for El Paso, Kimiko sat outside, her eyes fixed on the sun.

“Do you know how many lives were destroyed here?” she asked Rikia, breaking a fifteen-minute silence.

Repeating the number he’d heard her quote since his childhood, he said, “Thousands.”

“Thousands out of the 10,767 who were imprisoned here, to be exact.”

Rikia wanted to shout back,
But there aren’t any people here now, Kimiko. No more internment camp, no more barracks, no more barbed wire, and no more guards. Just a bleak, dusty sagebrush plain
. He knew better, however, than to challenge Kimiko when she was in one of her increasingly frequent retrospective moods. Those moods sometimes transitioned into long, blank, empty stares, and any attempt to question her would only serve to spike what he’d come to realize was creeping dementia.

Adjusting herself on her stool, Kimiko swept her right arm in a slow arc from west to east. “Barbed-wire fences surrounded this
dreadful place for as far as you could see. Guard towers equipped with high-beam searchlights surrounded the compound, and although the American government has always claimed that the guards were unarmed, they weren’t.”

Remaining silent, Rikia continued with his equations.

“The barracks were no more than tar-paper shacks.” Kimiko slammed an arthritic fist into her palm. “Barbaric! There’s no other word for it.” Pointing toward Heart Mountain Butte, she talked in a whisper as the sun peeked from behind a thin layer of clouds. “We only had a single stove for heat and one light fixture in the center of the room, and we sometimes slept ten to a room.”

Rikia barely looked up. He’d heard Kimiko’s Heart Mountain stories scores of times before. He knew all there was to know about the tragedy of her flight from Japan before the war. She had been sent by her father to America to live with relatives so she’d be out of harm’s way when the American invasion of Japan that he had long been predicting came. The invasion never came, however, only Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the bomb. Shaking his head and completing an equation that now took up the better part of three pages, Rikia jotted,
21H + 21H±X + Energy
and smiled as Kimiko continued.

“I’d only been in America for nine months when they stuck me in this awful place. Are you listening to me, Rikia?”

“Yes, and I know. It was a terrible time back then, and unfortunately for us Japanese, it hasn’t changed.” Rikia had his own reasons for hating the people he was now forced to call his countrymen—people who had killed his relatives and in all likelihood, as far as he was concerned, planted the seeds for Kimiko’s
dementia. Even now, in spite of his reputation as one of America’s most stellar mathematicians, his colleagues, educated people who should have known better, whispered and joked about his speech impediment and his Goodwill-bought clothes. Those things, however, amounted to no more than pinpricks to him. What infuriated Rikia most about living in a country he’d never had a choice about coming to was that, in spite of his lofty academic credentials and international reputation, his life’s work remained scoffed at, labeled by most of his American colleagues as no more than pseudoscience.

Over the years, their skepticism and lack of support had caused his National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation proposals to be denied and had delayed groundbreaking publications. If it weren’t for the backing of a few highly regarded Japanese and European mathematicians, he had every reason to believe that by now his work would have largely been dismissed.

When Kimiko announced loudly, “Sun’s almost up,” he ignored her and began putting his papers away. Unwilling to listen to any more of her Heart Mountain stories and sounding frustrated, he said, “You’ve seen your sunrise, Kimiko. I think we should go.”

Kimiko’s response, “Yes. I think we should,” surprised him. She added, “Now, when the authorities come to question me about Tango-11, I will have the resolve to stand up to them. I only needed a dose of Heart Mountain medicine to bolster my courage.”

Rikia simply answered, “Good.”

Twenty minutes later they were back on the highway, headed home for Laramie. Kimiko’s dull, accusatory monotone echoed in Rikia’s ear as she read from her father’s Hiroshima diary:
“ ‘Suffocating clouds of dust swirled around me. Thick, stifling, blackish clouds filled with everything from the tiniest of dust particles to sheets of human skin. I could see that houses had collapsed or been blasted totally apart all around me. In every direction, twenty-foot-tall telephone poles continued to ignite and explode like towering pine trees caught in some horrific forest fire.

“ ‘People meandered past me as I walked along the road. The anguished looks on their frequently skinless faces begged for explanation. As I headed along the river once again to watch a group of catatonic-looking survivors place sliced cucumbers on the soon-to-be-fatal burns of their neighbors, my thoughts drifted back to the charbroiled man astride his pink horse.’ ”

The early-morning reception Bernadette got when she called Otis Breen at his home in Kansas City was cold and clearly on the suspicious side. Breen, who admitted to having known Thurmond Giles and to have played interservice league basketball with and against him, remained evasive until she announced, stretching the truth, that she was the lead air force OSI officer in charge of investigating Sergeant Giles’s murder.

Sounding stunned, Otis Breen asked, “What did you say your name was again?”

“Major Bernadette Cameron.”

“And you work out of?”

“Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne.”

“Wyoming. Understand the wind blows a tad bit out that way. So, how did Thurmond buy it?”

“A rural-route mail carrier found him dangling by his ankles
from a chain inside the personnel-access tube to a Minuteman missile silo. He had five stab wounds in his back.”

“Can’t say I’m surprised,” Otis said after a brief silence.

“In addition to the stab wounds, the head of his penis had been cut off, wadded up in a piece of paper, and stuffed in his mouth.”

“That figures, too. Thurmond wasn’t very picky when it came to findin’ somewhere to stick his member. I wouldn’t put it past a jealous girlfriend or some jealous husband to do him in.”

Thinking suddenly about Elaine Richardson, Bernadette said, “Food for thought.”

“So, how’d you get my name?”

“By way of a man named Howard Colbain. Turns out a couple of decades back, Sergeant Giles had an affair with Colbain’s wife. Any chance you know Colbain?”

Breen took a long, deep breath before answering, “Nope. But I may have known the wife. A chunky little white girl outta Iowa. I’m thinkin’ her last name was Colbain, at least, and that she was a second lieutenant.”

“Right on both counts,” said Bernadette, who’d been able to gather several official air force photos of the late Annette Colbain.

“Then yeah, I knew her, and I’m pretty sure she ended up killin’ herself. Thurmond mentioned that to me once.”

“She did.”

“Means she couldn’t have killed Thurmond, then.”

“No. But from what you’re confirming about Sergeant Giles, there may have been more jealous husbands or spurned women out there. Can you think of any other reasons why someone might’ve wanted to kill him?”

“Yeah, money. That and the brother’s over-the-top ego. They both tended to keep him in hot water.”

“Can you give me a for-instance?”

“Sure. Back in the early 1980s we had a pretty high-flyin’ interservice all-star basketball team. One that would’ve matched up pretty well with some NBA squads. I was twenty-five at the time. Could’ve jumped outta the gym back then,” Breen said proudly. “Thurmond was a year or so older. We ended up playin’ just about everywhere on the planet for a couple of years. Here in the U.S., Asia, Europe, you name it—real easy duty. Anyway, somewhere along the line Thurmond got it in his head that we should set up a wagerin’ system that would allow folks to bet on our games. Nothin’ involvin’ point-shaving or shenanigans like that. Just good old-fashioned illegal bookmaking on the side. Thurmond worked out a system that eventually had him and a couple of other guys on the team makin’ serious money. A grand or so a game, it came out later.”

“And you weren’t involved?”

“I ain’t that stupid. We were in the military, remember? No need riskin’ time in the brig over a game meant to be played by children. Anyway, like always, Thurmond ended up with his tit in the wringer. And just like always, he skirted the problem because of his connections. A couple of high-muckety-muck generals who I was later told were in on the bettin’ scam with him got him off with just a hand slap.”

“And nothing of consequence ever came of it?”

“Not a damn thing but a bunch of military gossip. Thurmond was charmed like that. The only time I ever saw the spell broken
was when the air force ended up sending him off to some Mojave Desert no-man’s-land of a base in California as punishment for his over-the-top workplace womanizing. It was a shame, really, especially for somebody with Thurmond’s talent. I expect you already know that that squirrelly lookin’ SOB was one of the top warhead maintenance men and troubleshooters in the business. It was common knowledge even among us army types that if the air force had a problem with a nuke back then, anything from a wiring problem to missile transport issues to a loose-fittin’ bolt, they called Thurmond.”

“And he’d fix it?”

“Absolutely, and because of those skills, unlike most senior enlisted guys, he spent a hell of a lot of his time winin’ and dinin’ with the brass. A habit that along with his womanizin’ cost him in the end. But it’s always that way when someone higher up the food chain is lookin’ to take the glory, right, Major?”

Ignoring the bait, Bernadette said, “And did someone higher up the chain end up with what should have been Sergeant Giles’s glory?”

“You got that straight. Wouldn’t have, though, except for Thurmond’s big mouth. Told me so himself. Turns out that when those disarmament treaties with the Russkies started taking shape in the late ’80s and the air force was told to downsize its nuclear arsenal, Thurmond’s the one who got the assignment to straw-boss the crews who were deactivatin’ those puppies. And wouldn’t you know it, that slick-assed beanpole of an egomaniac figured out how he could stand down those missiles in half the time the brass was thinkin’ it would take, and with half the manpower. Problem is, braggart that he was, Thurmond shared his plan with one of his
superiors. Some kiss-ass light colonel who ended up implementin’ the deal and takin’ all the credit. Thurmond was bitter for the rest of the time I knew him over the fact that some up-buckin’ officer stole his idea and his glory.”

“When’s the last time you talked to Giles?”

“Six months or so back, or thereabouts. He was livin’ in Canada, workin’ for some medical equipment company. Seemed to be doin’ okay, as far as I could tell. We talked about the old days, and about some of the twists and turns life always seems to take. And we spent a little time talkin’ about my kid, who’d been a college basketball bust. I remember tellin’ Thurmond that the boy seemed to have finally found himself and that he’d started his own business. Never talked to him again after that. Guess I should have, given the way things have worked out.”