Endangered Species (27 page)

They were heading from the Admin Building to the northwest side of town, armed with another pocketful of photographs of Simon and King. The idea was to canvass clerks who served the late-night businesses in the area—grocery stores, gas stations, convenience stores—to see if either man had been noticed. Since neither King nor Simon nor their cars had been spotted yet, there was a chance they did their shopping late at night and on foot.

They were heading up Lawrence toward the Thirty-eighth Street bridge when Wager heard something loose rattle under the seat of the unmarked cruiser. He reached down, to find the gray canister of a smoke grenade, and he held it up for Max to see. Their eyes met. “The Blue Moon’s just around the corner,” said Max. “Not two minutes away.”

“Yeah,” said Wager. “Ain’t it, though.”

Max swung the car in a sharp turn. At this time of night, the traffic on upper Larimer was light and the sidewalks almost vacant. The neon sign for the Blue Moon Bar splashed a pale glare against the neighboring storefronts. Max let the vehicle coast while Wager scrambled into the back seat and pulled the safety pin of the smoke grenade.

“Ready?”

“Let’s do it.”

Max aimed the cruiser across the street lanes toward the bar. The blue of neon made the pavement look steely and cold, and a man leaning against the wall lifted a cigarette off his lip and stared with his mouth hanging open as the car lurched up across the curb toward him and slowed in front of the open door. Wager quickly opened the door and leaned out to lob the canister into the bar. Still unmoving, the leaning man turned his head as he watched the thing arc past him. Then Wager slammed the car door and Max stepped on the gas, tires squealing on the smooth concrete of the sidewalk. The noise seemed to wake up the openmouthed man, and he turned to sprint for safety up the empty street, cigarette left behind to bounce on the pavement in a spray of sparks.

Wager watched out the back window while the car careened into Larimer. A dim flash lit up the doorway, and just as Max heeled over in a turn toward Wyandot, a handful of figures came tumbling onto the sidewalk. Then the bar was lost to sight.

“Let old Floyd put that in his pipe.” Max grinned.

Wager slid into the front seat. A smoke grenade wasn’t all Wager would have liked to do to Floyd and the Blue Moon, but it sure made a good start.

They had reached Thirty-eighth when the district’s channel picked up the first calls: Possible bomb explosion at the Blue Moon Bar. The dispatcher asked for any available officer to report to the scene. There was a long silence.

“Any units available, please respond.”

More silence.

Max laughed. “I think everybody’s on coffee break, Gabe.”

“Two twelve, are you in the vicinity of the Blue Moon? Check in, please.”

A laconic “Two twelve … go ahead.”

The dispatcher gave the information. The responding officer, voice breaking with suddenly discovered static, asked her to repeat it—he was having radio difficulty. By the time Max and Wager reached the first 7-Eleven on West Thirty-eighth, the dispatcher had finally made herself understood and two twelve said he would get there as soon as he finished working up the traffic stop he’d made.

The clerk at the cash register in the 7-Eleven looked at the two photographs and shook her head. Wager had the feeling that it was just the first of a long series of negatives. The feeling proved right. He and Max stopped at every store and market still open along that section of Thirty-eighth. Finally, they pulled into an aging neighborhood Safeway, which, Wager had been told, stocked more Mexican foods and condiments than any other store in the city. A large sign in the window said
OPEN 24 HOURS
, and even this late, the store’s narrow aisles were dotted with shopping carts. The cash registers made a steady rustle as lines of tired-looking people fed through. Max started with the cashiers; Wager started with the butcher shop. It was closed for the evening, but the seafood counter had a sign that said
PLEASE RING FOR SERVICE
. He did, and after a while a woman whose bleached hair puffed from under a flat cap came from somewhere in the back of the store. Wager identified himself and showed her the two photographs. She frowned and held one at an angle, then used the side of her hand to block off the lower half of the face.

“This one—but he had a beard. A scrubby-looking thing, you know? Maybe four or five days old. I remember thinking he must be just growing it and wondered if it didn’t itch.” She handed back the photograph of Simon. “Made my face itch anyway. What’d he do?”

“He’s wanted for questioning. Can you remember when he came in?”

“Yesterday. Had to be night—I work the evening shift. Maybe ten or so, when it was pretty slow.” She gestured toward the
PLEASE RING
button. “He had to ring me out of the back; I was setting up for the morning shift. Half pound of halibut and a quarter pound of crab flakes, jar of Bookbinder’s sauce, two pounds of boiled shrimp—I remember the order. We don’t sell much seafood. I asked him if he was giving a party. He said he was going to pig out on seafood for a change.”

“Was he by himself?”

Her pale and bloodshot blue eyes lifted to the ceiling as she thought back. “He took everything in his hands and walked off toward aisle fourteen. He maybe left his cart over there, or maybe somebody else was pushing it, I didn’t see.”

Wager left the two photographs and gave her a business card. He asked her to call immediately if either man showed up again. At the front of the store, Max met him with a headshake. “Nothing.”

“Lady back in seafood saw Simon around this time last night. Positive ID.”

“By golly!”

It gave them a squirt of adrenaline that lasted through the final dozen or so fruitless stops and a careful tour of the neighborhood’s side streets and alleys. Occasionally, their slowly moving headlights would pick out groups of three or four figures walking on the sidewalks or crossing the dimly lit streets: kids in jackets of matching color and cut, or wearing their colors tied in a band around head or thigh: the Tapatíos or the Gallos, sifting through the neighborhood.

“They’ve got to be holed up around here. What’d the woman tell you he said? He wanted to pig out on seafood ‘for a change’?”

Wager, peering at parked cars and license plates in the dim light, nodded. It sounded that way to him too: the two men waiting for something to happen. Or working on something. They were here in Denver as of last night anyway.

“We could saturate the area, Gabe. Knock on every door, look in every garage.”

That’s what the Tapatíos and Gallos were doing right now, and the argument against having the cops do it hadn’t changed.

Which Max realized. “But they probably expect that. They probably have a plan for something like that.”

Their cruise through alleys and quiet streets was accompanied by increasingly busy radio traffic from District Two. The fire department had responded to the Blue Moon call, and the dispatcher called for more officers to handle traffic control, but many were tied up with other contacts.

“Jesus, Gabe. All that for a little bit of smoke.”

It was more than a little, Wager knew. But it would be clearing by now, and Floyd would see the canister and might even get the point. “I’d like to use a flash-bang next time.”

Max let his imagination run. “How about a grenade launcher? Make that place into a downtown firing range!”

“Let’s try this gas station up here.”

It was another wasted effort. They were turning toward a small block of stores on Tejon Street when Wager’s call number came over the radio: “That information you wanted from PD Flagstaff just arrived.”

“Right. I’m coming in.”

“Think it’s anything?” asked Max.

His guess was as good as Wager’s. The most they could do was hope. As they entered the CAP offices, the duty clerk handed him a scrolled fax sheet.

“You hear about the Blue Moon?” The woman’s round face grinned at them.

“What about it?”

“Three-alarm fire—somebody threw a grenade or a bomb in it, and the whole place went up.”

Wager and Max looked at each other. “Anybody hurt?”

“No. They all got out. But the whole place is gone. It was a firetrap anyway. And no loss to anybody, I say.”

Wager nodded. “Those things happen.”

“Sure do,” said Max. He muttered as they went down the hall to the homicide office. “I didn’t think we’d burn the place down.”

“Must have set that wooden floor on fire—spread from there,” said Wager. “Let’s hope Floyd didn’t have any insurance.”

He flattened the fax sheet and began reading.

The glossy paper held only a few lines, but Wager read them twice before he picked up the telephone and dialed Flagstaff.

“No, Detective Wager. Detective Wood’s off duty now. He’ll be on in the morning after eight.”

“Can you give me his home number? It’s very important.”

“We’re not allowed to give out that information, Detective.”

Wager tried not to sound irritated, but the Spanish lilt crept into his voice. “Can you call him at home, then? Here’s my number. Tell him to call me collect right away. Like I said, it’s very important, miss. I would wait until tomorrow if it wasn’t so important.”

A pause. “I’ll ask him, sir.”

Wager read over the fax sheet one more time: King’s residence had been vacant, but armed with a search warrant requested by the FBI, Detective Wood had searched the premises. A brief list of the items secured named clothes, correspondence, books, computer and printer with disks, and, in the garage, a disassembled practice round from a rocket launcher. The telephone rang; Detective Wood asked for Wager.

“Can you tell me if the papers or computer disks held any diagrams?” Wager asked the man.

“I didn’t go through them, Detective Wager. I don’t know shit about working computers.”

“Do you have them in your evidence locker?”

“Yeah. We took the whole setup back for the FBI to look at. One of our officers said the computer had a hard disk or something like that. He said there would be all sorts of stuff inside it that wasn’t on the floppies.”

“Thanks.”

Wager hung up and quickly dialed the number Mallory had given him. The measured voice of an operator answered and said thank you, Mr. Mallory will get right back to you. A couple of minutes later, Wager’s phone rang.

But it wasn’t Mallory. “Gabe, thank God!” Elizabeth’s usually husky voice had a rough, strained note in it, and she took a deep breath before speaking more calmly. “I’ve heard something—I’ve heard something horrible!”

“Like what?”

“About some terrorist planning to blow up Rocky Flats! Is it true?”

“Where’d you hear that, Liz?”

“The mayor’s office—I can’t tell you who. After last night, I started asking around today. One of the people I talked to called me a little while ago and said they’re having an emergency meeting. The mayor and the chief of police and the emergency response directors. For God’s sake, Gabe, is it really true?”

“I didn’t know last night that it was Rocky Flats, Liz.”

“But you knew it was something like this.”

“And it was confidential. I promised the FBI.”

“Well, it’s not confidential now. The person who told me said she lives out in Arvada, near the Flats. She’s on her way home now to grab her children and run, Gabe!”

The person wasn’t wrong to do that. “They have a lot of defenses out there, Liz. And we’re combing the area for the people involved.”

“So it is true.”

“Yeah. But I’m just a small wheel in this. The FBI, the chief, I guess the mayor too, it sounds like—they’re on it now. All I’m trying to do is find the guy for a murder.”

She finally asked, “I heard there was a shooting too. You were in a shooting?”

“Yeah. But that one had nothing to do with Rocky Flats. It was Max’s case.”

“You’re all right, aren’t you?”

“Oh, sure!” He blinked and saw again the spurt of yellow light spearing toward him and knew that, in coming moments on the threshold of sleep, the scene would come back, teasing him in its dreamy slowness and starting a scream from his throat as the bullet grew out of the flame toward his frozen eyes. That’s what fear did: ambushed you when your guard was down. “Guy was a marshmallow. The paperwork is tougher than he was.”

“Thank God. I figured if you … if an officer had been hurt, the news would be broadcast, as it was for those two poor policemen. But still. …”

He tried not to let impatience slip into his voice; being shot at was something he didn’t want to talk about or magnify with war stories. And the fear that had been ignored in the heat and action of the moment wasn’t something he wanted to admit to, even to Elizabeth. Especially to her. “I’m all right, Liz. Not a scratch.”

But she heard it, and an ironic note came into her own voice. “All right, tough guy. I won’t congratulate you anymore on still being alive. But what about this other thing, Gabe—the terrorist? What can I do? Who should I talk to?”

Wager didn’t think talk would do much for anybody now, but maybe it would be therapeutic for Liz. After all, she was a politician, even though Wager didn’t often describe her that way to himself. “Maybe the mayor. I don’t know what to tell you, Liz. I’m looking for the guy. I’m working with the FBI, and we’re doing all we can to locate him without spooking him into doing something stupid. That’s all I know right now.”

A long silence, and Wager could picture Elizabeth nibbling at the outside edge of her little finger, as she did when she was puzzled or thinking deeply. “Gabe—I love you.”

Where the hell did that fit in? But he said, “I love you too, Liz.” And he realized that he did.

As soon as he hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was Mallory. “What’s up?”

Wager told him what the Flagstaff police had reported.

Mallory was silent a moment. In the background, a jingle of telephones and the occasional murmur of voices told Wager that Mallory had set up some kind of crisis center. “We just had the information from those disks come in from our agent in Flagstaff, Gabe. I haven’t had time to look at all of it yet.”