Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice (22 page)

“
And if it
does?”

“
Well, wouldn’t it be
interesting if the ski companies could make more money leasing the
land to miners, instead of hitting up tourists for fifty bucks a
day for the lift?”

While I pondered that, I opened the plat
book and thumbed some pages until I found K. C. Cimarron’s parcel,
all properly described in the arcane language of metes and bounds
and “running thence” of the property rolls. This little side
excursion might not have been necessary if I hadn’t botched it with
the clerk at the ranch this morning. While Kip was eating some dry
corn flakes from the box, I asked the skinny clerk, who must have
worked all night, if he’d ever run across my buddy, Kit Carson
Cimarron.

“
You a friend of that big
ole hoss?” he asked, dropping ashes from his cigarette onto the
scarred counter.

His tone was neutral, giving nothing away.
Cimarron could have been his cousin or someone he hated, or
both.

I put on my amiable, out-of-towner face.
“Yeah, I met him back in my skiing days.”

He exhaled a puff of smoke at me. “Never
heard of him skiing. Horses, sure. ‘Course, ole Kit needs one about
the size of an elephant.”

Ole Kit. Maybe these two guys skinned mules
together, whatever the hell mule skinning was.

“
No, I was skiing. He was
ranching and, as I recall it, always talking about buried treasure,
or some such stuff.”

That loosened up his face a bit. “Yeah,
that’s ole Kit. The dreamer, that’s what we call him. Spent a
fortune, hell two fortunes, on wild-goose chases. Years ago, I
remember the town offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for anyone
who could find the Silver Queen. Ole Kit musta spent a hundred
thousand hunting for her, but the damn thing hadn’t been seen since
the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. I could understand it if ole Kit
could profit from it, but hell, she would have gone to the
town.”

“
The Silver Queen,” I said.
It was more of a question, but what I was really thinking about was
the clanging dissonance of Kit Carson Cimarron, the civic booster
and historical preservationist, and Kit Carson Cimarron, the coldly
efficient mugger and partner of Blinky Baroso.

“
A statue made of silver
from the biggest damn nugget ever found,” the clerk continued,
“more than a ton, damn near a hundred percent pure. The mining
folks got together and made this silver lady, had some gold and
diamonds in her too, and some crystals and precious stones for her
eyes, the way I hear tell. Anyway, they took her to the World’s
Fair, but she disappeared, and ever since, the town wants her
back.”

“
Sounds like some wise guys
may have melted her down for the metals and stones.”

“
Sure does, and everybody
in these parts knows it, except ole Kit. That’s what I mean, a
dreamer.”

“
Yeah, that’s him,” I
agreed. “Anyway, I don’t see his name in the phone book, and I was
wondering where I could find him.”

The clerk squinted at me. If Kip hadn’t been
scarfing down a second box of corn flakes, he would have said ole
Rusty / Dusty was into his Clint Eastwood mode. “Same place as
always,” the clerk allowed.

“
Same place as always,” I
repeated, as if savoring rich memories. “The old ranch, I
suppose.”

“
Well, not the old ranch
off Frying Pan Road just over the Eagle County line. That was Kit’s
daddy’s, and they lost that, oh hell, thirty years ago.”

“
Well, the new ranch,
then,” I said.

“
It ain’t hardly new,” he
corrected me.

“
Not hardly,” I
acknowledged.

“
Nice piece of property
though, what with Woody Creek and all.”

“
Mighty nice,” I
concurred.

I stopped asking questions, and he stopped
not answering them, and then I came to the courthouse, dropping off
Kip in a video arcade in the middle of the town. I had checked a
map and found Woody Creek, the town, plus Woody Creek, the creek,
plus two other streams, Little Woody Creek and Dry Woody Creek.
Which is why I needed to see the property records.

And there it was. K. C. Cimarron, the fee
simple owner of the Red Canyon Ranch, about six hundred acres not
far from where Woody Creek and the Roaring Fork River meet. He was
up to date on his taxes, and checking the lien ledgers, I saw he
owned the land free and clear. In another office, I found he was a
registered voter, independent, and hadn’t missed an election in
over ten years.

An upstanding citizen, this K. C. Cimarron.
At least in these parts. But we know differently, don’t we, ole
Kit? I forced myself to remember everything about him. I didn’t get
a good look at Cimarron on that dark, dreadful night, but I
remembered the mass of him, the sheer raw tonnage. And I remembered
his voice.

“
Where is he? Where’s
Baroso?” That’s what he said first, and I remembered the deep,
gravelly tone of a big man with a deep chest. It was a voice that
demanded attention, and attention was surely paid to such a
man.

I had answered that I didn’t know, and then
he had asked Jo Jo the same question. Which meant Socolow was right
about something. Either Cimarron didn’t kill Blinky, or he was
going to a lot of trouble to make it look like he didn’t.

Then, just before he stomped my hand, he
said something that wasn’t a question at all. “Stay out of my
affairs, lawyer! Stay out of my affairs, or you’re a dead man.”

Just like in school, my memory was pretty
good, but I wasn’t great at following instructions.

***

It was a five-minute walk from the
courthouse to the arcade, where I picked up a juvenile delinquent
who was banging away at a video game where steroid-pumped wrestlers
removed each other’s spines. I dragged him out, and he responded by
saying I was a “goober-throwing major tude,” which I took as a
compliment and thanked him.

“
Where we going?” Kip
asked. “I was just about to pin the Mountain Man.”

“
We’re going to visit a
cowboy.”

“
Oh, the one who stole your
babe.”

“
I beg your
pardon.”

“
Granny told me. When you
were spaced out on the medicine, Granny told me about the lady
lawyer you’ve got the hots for, but this dude swooped her away. So,
when you said we were coming out here and you were going to switch
courses, I knew the babe figured into it.”

“
You’re a pretty bright
kid, aren’t you?” I asked, as we reached our car, parked in front
of a shop where mannequins in mink coats smiled regally at us from
the display window.

“
It runs in the family,” he
said.

No wonder I liked this kid.

We got in, and I aimed the rental
convertible northwest on Route 82. The air was cool and dry. The
sun was shining, plump white clouds were scudding by, and the
meadows were filled with bright wildflowers. It seemed like a fine
day to see if Mr. K.C. Cimarron was as good as his word.

CHAPTER 16

FOOL ME TWICE

There were red bluffs along the winding dirt
road that led ^k from the entrance to the ranch house. There were
rolling fields of scrawny cattle. Along the road, a narrow stream
gurgled and tumbled over black and brown boulders. But as far as I
could tell, there was no canyon at the Red Canyon Ranch.

A short, swarthy woman in a
starched white dress and a red apron opened the door. She was
wiping flour from her hands onto the apron.
“¿Lo puedo ajudar?”

“
Por favor se encuentra el Se
ñ
or Cimarron
,” I said, exhausting my extensive Spanish
vocabulary.

Behind her, I could see a foyer of red
Mexican tile. A buffalo head was mounted on the far wall, and
beneath it, two crossed rifles with a vaguely antique look were
enclosed in a glass case. Just off the foyer was a living room with
a brick fireplace and a bearskin rug in front of a sofa carved from
heavy logs. A nice place if you’re into southwestern postmodern
macho.

“
Se
ñ
or Cimarron, esta en el
establo,
” she said, indicating the
direction with a tilt of the head.

She spoke deliberately, either because she
figured me for the gringo I was, or because Mexican Spanish is
slower than what I’m used to in Little Havana.

I gave her my best
gracias
, then Kip and I
walked along a flagstone path from the main house to the barn, a
huge weathered structure up a small incline. Twenty yards away, I
heard what sounded at first like a muffled gunshot. Instinctively,
I moved in front of Kip, shielding him with my body. “Get real,
Uncle Jake,” he said, darting by me.

Another muffled
whomp
, and then two more
at regular intervals, maybe three seconds apart. A whinnying horse,
then another
whomp, whomp.

A door wide enough to accommodate a tractor
trailer was open, and we walked in. Smells of moist hay and
creosote, the tang of molasses feed mixed with manure. A buzz of
horseflies, a bank of stalls, horses pawing the dirt floor, tails
swishing. Weathered saddles, harnesses, and saddlebags hung from
wooden pegs in the walls. Blankets and feed bags were stacked in
neat piles. A ladder led to a loft sagging with bales of hay. And
on a wooden stepladder against one wall, a man with his back to me,
a man in boots, dirt-stained jeans, a wide leather belt, a red
plaid shirt with sleeves rolled up the elbows. A man who, on the
third step of the ladder, looked about ten feet tall and as
wide…well, as wide as the broad side of a barn.

With his left hand, he was
bracing a four-by-eight-foot piece of three-quarter-inch plywood
against a window frame. With his right hand, he was holding a stud
gun. Maybe it wasn’t as impressive a feat as say, tossing a shotput
with one hand and dunking a basketball with another, but it showed
strength and a certain agility.
Whomp
. Another nail jolted into the
plywood and wall beneath. The stud gun did not seem to recoil, but
stayed firmly planted in his meaty right hand.

With his back still to me, he said, “You’re
Lassiter, aren’t you?”

“
Guilty as charged,” I
said.

He turned around and we studied each other.
He had a bushy mustache that reminded me of Buck Buchanan, an old
defensive lineman for Kansas City. His hair was long and gray and
swept straight back, falling over his ears, and curling up slightly
at the nape of his neck. The overall impression was of a gunfighter
from the old West, Kirk Douglas maybe, but twice as big.

Our chemistry was as immediate as the
mongoose and the snake. We hated each other. He had inflicted a
great deal of pain on me. This morning, in the early chill, my hand
had been stiff, a reminder as sure as a dueling scar of the searing
eternity of personal violence. This man, this towering menace of a
man, had bruised and dented me.

Which was also why I was here, I now knew.
Sure, clearing my name had something to do with it, and so did
coming after Jo Jo. But there was something else too. I needed to
prove to myself that he hadn’t broken me. So I stood there in khaki
slacks and Top-Siders without socks and an old Penn State
sweatshirt looking at this big galoot who happened to be holding a
lethal weapon, making me wonder why I chose a day when he was
nailing instead of painting.

“
Ever use a stud gun,
Lassiter?”

“
Nah. I usually just drive
nails with my forehead.”

“
I don’t doubt it.” He
turned away and resumed working, but it didn’t keep him from
talking. “When my daddy built this barn, he framed the first floor
with concrete beams. Not concrete blocks, mind you, but solid
poured concrete. That’s how my daddy was, and that’s how I am. Do
you follow me?”

“
Sure, some guys got shit
for brains. You got concrete.”

“
You trying to rile
me?”

“
No, I’m trying to insult
your intelligence, but it’s a daunting task.”

He was still on the ladder, so I couldn’t
get a precise idea of his height, but he had to go six seven, maybe
six eight. As for his weight, it probably wasn’t more than your
average side of beef. If you want to judge a man’s mass, look at
his wrists or ankles. It’ll tell you the size of the frame. I
couldn’t see his ankles, but the wrists were telephone poles
attached to forearms cabled with veins, forearms bigger than most
men’s biceps. The shoulders were no larger than a double-wide
mobile home, the chest a rain barrel. He had the look of brawny
muscle built by hard work, not by pumping iron. The only thing that
detracted from the look of complete physicality was his belly. It
had grown over the top of his silver-and-turquoise belt buckle.
Grown big, not soft. There is a difference.

If I were to guess, I would say that ten
years ago, he was an extremely fit and dangerous two hundred eighty
pounds, and now he was about three ten, and still dangerous.

Whomp
.

“
Damn,” he muttered. “Out
of bullets. Now, you got your stud guns that work off an air
compressor and a clip that holds forty or fifty nails. But like I
said, this is solid concrete, so I use the gun powered by
,27-caliber bullets. Clip only holds ten bullets, and you got to
put each nail in separately, but I don’t mind. Whatever it takes,
however long it takes, do the job right. That’s how I live my life,
Lassiter. How do you live yours?”