Bluetick Revenge (13 page)

“What if I don’t find her until after Friday?”

“That’s a tough one,” he said. “Congress passed these damn sentencing guidelines, so she’ll be looking at some real time if
they want to play hardball. The judge has no discretion.”

“If I don’t turn her in, maybe she disappears and lives happily ever after.” I paused. “Or maybe Bugg finds her and kills
her.”

“Let’s revisit the question on Friday,” he said.

“I’m sorry about this,” I said.

“She fooled me, too,” he said. “I thought she was really ready for this.”

“Damn it,” I said.

“Berating yourself won’t help,” he said, “even though you’re good at it. Let’s start working on a plan.”

“I’ve got a plan,” I said, “but it’s gonna take money.” With apologies to George Harrison, it was going to take a whole lot
of precious money. Plenty of money.

“We’ve got nearly three hundred grand in my safe,” he said. “Are you still at the warehouse?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s just a few miles away. Why don’t you swing by and pick some up. Having it here makes me nervous.”

I
PUT THE TRUCK IN GEAR
and headed downtown to get the cash from Matt. While I was driving, I called Scott on my cell phone and explained what had
happened.

“You got a plan?” he asked.

“I’m working on one. Will Bobbi give you a week off?” Bobbi, Scott’s longtime girlfriend, is a Boulder realtor. They live
in Scott’s south Boulder home, but Bobbi still maintains her own condo. This arrangement had worked well and Scott had never
seen any reason to superimpose a marriage on it.

“She’ll be glad to get rid of me for a week. A woman can only stand so much pleasure.”

“Okay, pack whatever you need for a week of driving and eating in truck stops. I’ll pick you up in a few hours.”

I parked in a lot next to Matt’s building. It was one of those lots where you have to slide currency into a slot in a metal
box with a number that corresponds to the number of your parking place. I had used my last dollar bill to buy a diet Coke
at the furniture place. All I had were twenties, and there was nobody available to make change. For a long time I have kept
a phony million-dollar bill in my wallet and offered it now and then to convenience store clerks as a gag. It looked real
enough, so I folded it into a rectangle about the size of stick of gum and pushed it into the appropriate slot.

I walked past the receptionist into Matt’s office and closed the door. “You going to tell me what the plan is?” he said.

“No time to chat,” I said. “I’ll call you from my cell phone on my way back to Nederland. Right now I want to make tracks.
My guess is, she stuck out her thumb and took the first ride she could get out of Denver. The longer I wait, the greater the
distance she may have traveled.”

“The money’s in that box,” he said. He pointed to a cardboard box on the floor—the kind law firms use to store closed files.

“How much is in there?”

“Just about all of it,” he said. “I kept twenty thousand to cover her future legal fees. Keep track of how you spend it in
case the feds get her first and she happens to tell them she gave me three hundred thousand in drug money. I want to be able
to account fork.”

I picked up the box. “I’m going to send you an e-mail in about an hour. It would be helpful if you could put a couple of people
to work finding a fax number or e-mail address for every truck stop, greasy spoon, and low-rent motel in the mountain time
zone. Give priority to places north and west of here.”

“May the force be with you,” he said.

“McCutcheon will be with me,” I said. “That should be good enough.”

My F-150 has a shell on the back, so I slid the box as far back into the bed as I could get it, and covered it with an old
blanket.

Scott was ready when I arrived at his house, so he loaded a suitcase and backpack into the back of my truck. Then he went
back inside and came out with a pistol tucked into his belt, as well as a hunting rifle and two shotguns, which he placed
on the floor of the king cab compartment behind the front seats.

We headed up to Nederland so I could pack some things and get my dogs, which evidently now included a bluetick coonhound with
excellent tracking skills. “What’s the plan?” Scott asked.

“Remember those posters we put up all over the place to make Bugg think I’m actually doing something to earn my money?”

“Yeah. Did anyone ever call you?”

“No, but this time we’re going to add our cell phone numbers, my e-mail address, and a big reward, then e-mail it to Big Matt.
He can put his minions to work faxing the damn thing all over the western U.S.”

“Makes sense.”

“Then we’re going to head north on I-25.” I remembered when it had been known simply as the Valley Highway. Denver is a big
city now, with skyscrapers and major league sports teams, but I liked it better when the biggest tourist attraction was the
revolving restaurant on top of the Holiday Inn, and the basketball team played with a red, white, and blue ball at the stockyards
coliseum.

“Why north?”

“I-25 passes right by the furniture place. The nearest freeway ramp would have been the one for northbound traffic. That’s
where she would have stuck out her thumb.”

“Maybe you’re not giving her enough credit,” he said. “Maybe she’d had this planned for a while and had someone ready to meet
her.”

“No way,” I said. “She didn’t even know I was going to Denver until this morning. And she didn’t know I was going to the furniture
warehouse until I pulled into the parking lot.”

When we got to Nederland, I gassed up the truck at the Sinclair, which had formerly been the Texaco. Next I went to the bank
and withdrew twenty thousand dollars I had parked in a savings account just in case all my other investments went to hell
some day.

“You’ve got three hundred grand in the back of your truck,” Scott said. “Isn’t that enough?”

I explained my logic to him, then drove to Backcountry Pizza to buy a large diet Coke from the fountain. I’m a diet Coke addict.
I used to get it at the B&F Mountain Market, but they had switched to Pepsi to cut costs, and the Sinclair/Texaco had always
been a Pepsi dealer. With fuel for the truck and a forty-eight-ounce diet Coke for me, I drove to my home.

I put the money I had withdrawn from the bank into a small safe I have that looks identical to a can of Coke, and I put that
in the refrigerator. I went to my desk and modified the Karlynn poster on my laptop, then e-mailed it to Matt with instructions
on what to do. I tried to call Bugg at his home and on his cell phone, but there was no answer. I guess being the leader of
a sadistic biker gang keeps you pretty busy.

“Hey, look at this,” Scott said from the kitchen.

I walked into the kitchen and he handed me a yellow legal pad. On it was a note, obviously written by Karlynn: “Prince is
yours now. Take good care of him. Thanks for everything. Watch out for Thad—he can hold a grudge for a long time.”

“Shit,” I said. I could be succinct when I wanted to.

I packed a small suitcase. My backpack is always ready to go, so that was no problem. I loaded both into the back of the truck,
along with a five-gallon plastic container of premium duck-and-potatoes dog chow. Wheat has a sensitive stomach and can’t
eat regular dog food. It has to be duck and potatoes.

I whistled and ushered my three dogs into the back of the truck. I went back into the house and grabbed my laptop, my medication,
my file on Karlynn and Bugg, and Bertrand Russell’s
History of Western Philosophy
in case I got any free time. Then it was back down the canyon to Boulder.

There is no cell phone service in the canyon, but as soon as we hit Boulder, I called Nancy at work and asked her for Kendra
Carlson’s phone number.

“Are you going to ask her out?” Nancy asked.

“Karlynn took off on me,” I explained. “I just need to ask Kendra if she has any thoughts on where Karlynn might have gone.
They had three sessions last week.”

“Kendra won’t reveal privileged information,” Nancy said.

“I’ll take any help she can offer,” I said.

“Here’s the number,” Nancy said. I repeated it as Nancy gave it to me, and Scott wrote it down on the back of a napkin as
I repeated it.

I called Kendra right away but was automatically dumped into voice mail. I left a message asking her to call me and said it
was important.

I stopped at the Office Depot in Boulder and had them make one thousand copies of the revised Karlynn poster. While I was
watching the kid behind the counter to make sure he understood that I wanted the copies immediately, I told Scott to buy two
good staplers and a supply of Scotch tape.

It took another thirty minutes to reach I-25 via Highway 52. There is a McDonald’s there as well as a few gas stations. I
put some posters up at the golden arches while Scott visited the gas stations and handed out posters to truckers.

We headed north on I-25 toward Fort Collins. Scott was looking at a map he had found in my glove compartment. “What are we
going to do when we hit Cheyenne?” he asked. 1-25 intersects 1-80 at Cheyenne, Wyoming. You can go north to Casper, west across
Wyoming into Utah, or east to Nebraska.

“Probably go west,” I said.

“And you know this because ¼ ?”

“Just playing the probabilities,” I said. “She’s from Nebraska and doesn’t have fond memories of it, so I don’t think she’d
head in that direction. The largest city north of Cheyenne is Casper, which isn’t exactly a crossroads of commerce. I figure
most of the northbound traffic on 25 out of Denver heads west on I-80 toward Salt Lake, Vegas, and L.A.” We were coming up
on another truck stop in a place called Johnson’s Corner. “Plus, she’s thumbing it in December. I’d be wanting to get my ass
to a warmer climate.”

“It pains me to say this,” Scott said, “but everything you just said makes perfect sense. Maybe that year you spent in graduate
school did some good.” I had spent a year studying philosophy and logic in graduate school early in my legal career, but had
quit after one year because practicing law paid more. Also, to be honest, I had already finished my three years as a JAG and
wasn’t good at taking orders from young graduate assistants who had never set foot off a college campus.

Scott and I did our thing with the Karlynn posters in Johnson’s Corner, then got back on the Interstate and headed north.
The sun was getting low on the western horizon, and I turned on my headlights. My cell phone rang. Or, more precisely, my
cell phone began to sound its digital rendition of the theme song from
Mister Ed
. It was Kendra.

I explained the situation and asked if she had any thoughts on where Karlynn might be headed or what might be going on in
her mind now that she was no longer chemically dependent.

“You’ve put me in a difficult position,” she said. “You’ve given me information that causes me some concern, but I am bound
by the doctor-patient privilege, and I take that seriously.”

“I know all about the privilege,” I said, “but if the feds find her before I do, they’ll put her in prison. And if Bugg finds
her before I do, he’ll kill her. If you know anything that might help me find her, now would be the time to tell me.”

“I’m not sure I want you to find her,” she said. “Even if you locate her and bring her back against her will, she wants no
part of the Witness Protection Program, and I don’t think she will testify against her husband. She’s just too afraid. It’s
common with abused women.”

“If she doesn’t testify, they’ll put her in prison,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“Not a pleasant alternative.”

“Karlynn would agree with you.”

“She doesn’t have the skills to disappear on her own,” I said.

“Do you have the skills to help her?”

“Maybe.” I had about three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of skills in the back of my truck.

“I don’t know where Karlynn might be headed,” she said, “but I’m not surprised she took off. In some ways she’s only recently
become an adult. She’s starting to see how events that took place when she was young skewed her worldview. She’s accepting
more responsibility for her problems, and she’s just now discovering the possibilities that are open to her. She’d love to
put her past behind her and start over, and this is her attempt to do that.”

“Did she talk about what kind of life she would live if she could start over?”

“You must have made an impression on her,” Kendra said. “She was making a list—one like you evidently made—of one hundred
things she’d like to do in her life.”

“Any idea what was on her list?”

“She didn’t show it to me, but she talked about traveling. She wanted to try skydiving; I remember that because it didn’t
fit with my picture of her. Was that on your list?”

“My brother and I used to skydive,” I said, “but we gave it up when he slammed into a cornfield at thirty-five miles per hour.”

“Did he survive?”

“Yeah, he owns a gym in Denver.”

“Troy Keane, that’s your brother?” Everybody in the metro area knows who my brother is because his muscleman photo, complete
with computer-enhanced teeth, is on half the buses in Denver.

“Yup, that’s my brother. The accident is what started him on his fitness career.”

“You took Karlynn to your brother’s gym, didn’t you?”

“Just once. I was getting cabin fever. I think we went last Saturday. Why? Did she mention it?”

“She said she hated gym class when she was in high school, and skipped class a lot, but going to the gym with you was different
because she wasn’t competing against anyone and nobody was telling her what to do.”

“I thought exercise might be a healthier addiction for her than meth.”

“I’ve worked with many chemically dependent people. I don’t think Karlynn will fall back into that.”

“What about her dog?” I asked. “She seemed attached to him. I’m surprised she left him.” I did not mention that the only reason
for my involvement in the whole affair was that one of the best lawyers in Denver, Matt Simms, had hired me to steal Prince
from Bugg so Karlynn and Prince could go into the Witness Protection Program together.