Bluetick Revenge (21 page)

While Ray was recounting the story of his six months in jail— which I had heard many times—I thought about my options with
regard to Bugg. Ray was probably right; I could probably kill Bugg, claim self-defense, and walk. There were only two problems
with that plan. First, I did not believe myself to be capable of killing another man in cold blood. Second, “probably” wasn’t
good enough. Some years ago a biker named Melvin Dawson had attacked me with a knife, and I had deflected the knife into his
abdomen. Melvin bled to death. Because I had been a vocal critic of the DA, I suddenly found myself charged with manslaughter.
The jury acquitted me, but I feared I’d used up my one free shot at the self-defense argument; it seldom works twice for the
same man.

“There might be another way out,” I said to Ray.

“What’s that?”

“The only evidence he has against me is the fact that his guys saw me with his dog up in Idaho. I’ll call him, tell him I
have good news. I tracked Karlynn down to a place in Idaho. She heard I was in town, and took off before I could get to her,
but I recovered the dog and lots of Bugg’s cash. I give him the money and the dog; he thanks me for my services; the end.”

“Don’t hardly seem fair to ole Prince,” Ray said. I nodded.

“Okay, I tell him Karlynn and the dog got away, but I recovered most of his money. I give him two hundred grand, he thanks
me, and I can stop looking over my shoulder.”

“Won’t work,” Ray said. “His buddies up there saw you with the dog. You gotta be able to explain that.”

“Try this,” I said. “I recovered the cash and the dog, but some drunk rednecks attacked us and Prince was badly injured by
a stray bullet. I put a bullet in his head to end his misery.” Just then, as if on cue, Prince raised his head and looked
up at me with his big brown eyes.

“The first time Bugg sees you running around town with ole Prince, he’ll kill you.”

“You take Prince back to Blanca with you,” I said. “A dog like that needs lots of space anyhow.”

“You’re forgetting about dis Anvil fella. What if he finally got around to telling Bugg T?out seeing you and the chickadee
enjoying some of that food court cuisine?”

“Then as soon as I give Bugg the cash, he’ll kill me.”

“That about sizes it up,” Ray said.

“But Anvil saw me when I had my stripe. Bugg’s never seen me with my stripe. If we make sure Anvil isn’t around when I meet
with Bugg, it might work.”

“I think I’ll check on them pot pies,” Ray said.

B
UGG,”HE SAID.

“Pepper Keane,” I said. It was early Tuesday morning.

“Ain’t heard from you in a while,” he said. “You got me on a speaker phone?”

“I’ve got good news,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“I found your wife. I tracked her down to a place up in Idaho. She was living in a trailer. She made tracks when she heard
I was in town, but I found a shitload of cash in her trailer.”

“You got the money?”

“Right here.”

“What about the dog? Did she have the dog with her?”

“The dog’s dead,” I said.

“You sure?”

“I was there when it happened. He’s dead.”

“How’d he die?”

“Some assholes attacked us. There was a gunfight. The dog got hit by a stray bullet.” There was a brief pause.

“How long you been back in town?” he asked.

“I don’t know, a few days.”

“How come you didn’t call sooner?”

“I had a lady friend visiting. You want me to bring the money over? Having this much cash around makes me nervous.”

“Sure, bring it over.”

“I need directions,” I lied.

When Bugg finished telling me how to get to his home, I dialed Scott’s cell phone. “What’s Anvil up to?” I said.

“Just playing pool.”

“I’m getting ready to head over to Bugg’s house. Should take me a half hour to get there. Maybe another half hour or hour
to conduct business, depending on how talkative Bugg is. You need to make sure Anvil doesn’t head up this way in the next
hour.”

“I know.”

I kept about a hundred thousand dollars and put the rest in a brown paper sack from the B&F. Bugg would still get close to
two hundred grand.

“You want me to go with you?” Ray asked.

“No, it can’t look like I’m scared. I did exactly what he asked me to, so I have no reason to be afraid of him and no reason
to take backup.” I reached into the grocery sack, grabbed a wad of cash, and handed it to Ray. “For dog food and vet bills,”
I said.

“Reckon me and Prince will stay here till you get back, then head on home.”

“If I’m not back in two hours, call Glen—the chief of police. Tell him there’s a meth lab in the cabin beside Bugg’s house.
Tell him to take some sheriff’s deputies with him; everybody up there carries machine pistols.”

I tucked my Glock into my shoulder holster, put my jacket on over it, climbed into my truck, and set out for the tiny town
of Ward. I kept looking at myself in the rearview mirror to make sure the black hair dye had done its job.

There were a few small pickup trucks and some motorcycles parked on the gravel at the end of the long dirt road leading to
Bugg’s home. I carried the sack of cash up the steps to the front of the house.

Bugg met me at the door, but a couple of his goons stepped out ahead of him. We were standing on the front deck. “Gotta frisk
you,” one of them said to me. It was the man who looked like Jerry Garcia, the one I had run off the road the night I stole
Prince. He started to move toward me to pat me down. I struck his chest with the heel of my palm so hard and so fast that
he would have fallen on his ass if the exterior wall of the log home hadn’t been there to stop him.

“Nobody takes my weapon,” I said.

Jerry got up and was getting ready to charge. “Whoa,” Bugg said to him with something resembling a hearty laugh, “this here
is my man. He’s a private dick. Of course he’s gonna carry a weapon.”

I handed the paper sack full of cash to Bugg and would have been happy to leave, but he said, “C’mon in. I want to hear how
you found that bitch.” Bugg led me to his living room, which had a rustic Western look punctuated by the fierce heads of a
mountain lion and a black bear and the not so fierce head of a mountain goat. I took a chair against a wall that would enable
me to see people coming into the room from any direction. Bugg sat down in the middle of an expensive leather-covered sofa
and set the grocery sack down beside him. One of the goons sat down in a chair beside the sofa, and the other goon walked
into some other part of the home.

“Want a beer?” Bugg asked.

“No, thanks.”

“So how’d you find her?” he said. I almost slipped. I almost told him she had ditched me at the furniture store. I almost
told him that any woman looking for a ride at that location would’ve stuck out her thumb on the northbound side of the freeway.

“You told me she wouldn’t go back to Nebraska,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“And from what you said, most of her contacts are here in the Rockies, so I plastered posters all over the West and waited
for the phone to ring.”

“Keep going.”

“Most of the calls were worthless, but we got a call from a trucker who said he thought he’d seen her thumbing for a ride
on Interstate Eighty westbound just west of Laramie, so we—”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“I’ve got a partner I work with sometimes. So we headed up to Laramie and just keep putting up posters and taking phone calls
from people. Next thing you know we’re in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. So we start asking questions up there and find out she’s working
as a waitress in some bar. The people at the bar tell us she’s living in a trailer. So we find her trailer, but when we get
there she is gone. She left in hurry. Somebody at the bar probably told her we were in town asking about her. Anyhow, we—”

“How do you know she left in a hurry?”

“Neighbors told us,” I said. He said nothing, so I pressed on. “So we get into her trailer, we find the dog on the bed, then
we find a ton of cash—get this—inside the freezer.”

“In the freezer?”

“Yeah. Now at that point I figure we’ve got the dog and the cash, and who knows where your wife took off to? So we decided
to head home.”

“You remember the name of the trailer park?”

“Lewis and Clark Trailer Park.”

“So tell me about these guys that attacked you.”

“All right, we’ve got the dog and the money and we’re heading east out of Coeur d’Alene, thinking maybe we’ll take a different
route home, when three rednecks in a pickup start coming up on us from behind, pointing rifles at us, and trying to run us
off the road. The road is covered with ice and it’s too dangerous to try to outrun them, so I start slowing down and then
come to a stop. As soon as they stop behind me, I shove it into reverse and ram them. I dive out my side and run into the
woods, and my buddy rolls out his side and ducks behind a snowbank on the other side of the road. Suddenly they’re shooting
at us, so we shoot back. When they realize we have them sandwiched, they get back into their truck and take off. When they’re
gone we go back to my truck, which is damaged from me backing into them and is full of bullet holes, and that’s when I see
that the hound is bleeding from the throat. He wasn’t going to make it, so we carried him into the woods and I shot him. Then
we buried him.”

“You have any other dogs with you?” he asked.

“Sure. I always take my dogs with me.”

“They hurt?”

“Just banged up from me ramming my truck into the other truck.”

“Any damage to your truck?”

“Plenty. The whole back end is crushed because these guys had a big wooden bumper on the front of their truck. Some of the
windows are shattered and the thing is full of bullet holes.”

“Your truck looks to be in pretty good shape now,” he said. “How’d you get it fixed so fast?”

“That truck outside?”

“Yeah. You own any other truck?”

“That’s a new truck,” I said. “There was no way I was going to try to bring all that cash back to Colorado in a truck filled
with bullet holes. That would’ve been stupid. We left my truck in the woods, and I bought a new truck.”

“With my money?”

“I didn’t have time to shop for a loan,” I said.

He peered into the grocery sack and looked at the cash. “How do I know this is all the cash you found in her trailer? Maybe
you decided to pay yourself a commission.”

“I’m not that dumb,” I said.

“What I don’t get is why three guys would attack you like that.”

“Who knows? Maybe they were drunk. Didn’t like our looks. Mistook us for someone else. With all that cash on us, it wasn’t
like we could go to the police.”

“So what do I owe you?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just let me keep the truck, and we’re even.”

He looked at the cash again and said, “Well, I figure you earned it.” I started to stand up. “Hey, before you leave. Did you
learn anything about why she left or where she might be headed?”

“I’ve got some thoughts on that,” I said. “You mind if I get a glass of water?”

“Help yourself,” he said.

I walked into the kitchen, found a plastic cup in one of the cabinets, and filled it with chilled water from the refrigerator.
I heard Bugg tell the goon to go check on things outside; then I heard him get up and go the bathroom. I looked around to
make sure nobody else was watching, and quietly slid open the drawer to the right of the refrigerator. I removed the address
book and slid it into a pocket inside my jacket. Then I gently removed the gold pen from my shirt pocket and placed it on
the floor by the refrigerator.

I took my cup of water back into the living room and resumed my seat. Bugg returned and plopped back down into the sofa. “Here’s
the deal,” I said. “This is just a guess, but I think the feds backed your wife into a corner—testify against you or go to
jail.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Think about it,” I said. “She’s got all this money she took from you, but instead of renting a car or buying a plane ticket,
she’s catching rides with truckers. She doesn’t want to leave a paper trail, because she doesn’t want the feds to find her.”

Bugg rolled his head a few times. “Why didn’t she take the dog when she left me?”

“I don’t know. But at some point she decided she wanted to take the dog with her, so she hired someone to steal him from you.”

“I’d sure like to get my hands on that bastard,” he said.

“Almost impossible to track him down,” I said. “Would cost you more than it would be worth.”

He sighed. “Okay, any idea where my wife is headed?”

“Only thing we know for sure is, she was headed north and west. She have any friends up there?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Coeur d’Alene is pretty close to the Canadian border,” I said.

“Canada?”

“Might be harder for the feds to find her if she’s living up there.”

“Yeah.”

I stood. He stood. We shook hands. “Sorry about your dog,” I said.

“You did a good job. If I can send you any business, I will.”

I climbed into my truck and headed back to Nederland. “Great,” I said to myself, “I’m the staff investigator for the Sons
of Satan.”

I
KNEW THERE WOULD BE
no photocopier in Ward, so I drove like a bat out of hell to Nederland, parked in front of the business supply store, made
a copy of every page in Bugg’s address book, bought a diet Coke at Backcountry Pizza, and drove like a bat out of hell back
to Bugg’s house. The whole trip took less than forty minutes.

Jerry Garcia was standing on the front deck with a machine pistol when I parked my truck. He saw me heading for the front
door and said, “Forget something?” I didn’t see Bugg around, and I was worried that fat Jerry might want a little payback.

“Yeah, I did. My gold pen. It must’ve fallen out of my pocket. You guys find one?”

“Not that I know of. But come on in and look around if you like. I don’t guess Bugg would care.”