Trapline (5 page)

nine:
monday afternoon

This time she rode
Sunny Boy all the way up the ridge. She tied him to a tree and went back to stand in the same spot where she had been with Colin the day before, when they had looked down at the half-corpse for the first time.

Indignation wasn't a mood she relished. Fused with her stubborn streak, it would be a grueling afternoon. She knew not to fight the gathering cloud. It was better to stomp through the emotional muck—muck she'd proudly produced all by herself—than ignore it.

Allison pulled her cell phone from her jean jacket pocket and dialed up the pictures she'd taken before the sheriff's men and the coroner played Pick-Up Sticks with the tinder and wood scraps that had covered the half-corpse.

Again the picture sent the same odd signals but Allison couldn't grasp the specific idea, like rain that evaporated before it hit the ground.

Three times she circled the site in concentric circles—ten, twenty, and thirty yards out from where the half-corpse had been found. No drag marks.

She walked back and forth across the slope that rose up from Lumberjack Camp—hundred-yard-long sweeps. She moved quickly, scanning for anything undisturbed, broken brush or wildflowers.

Near the northern end of her last sweep, she spotted a set of parallel and faint tracks, subtle indents about three feet long in an exposed patch of dirt. Each was slightly wider than her thumb. The two tracks were about 18 inches apart. Straight, parallel lines. The indents were carved in a layer of loose grit on top of the hard-baked dirt. Something had been rolled or dragged. No tread. The tracks followed the line she would have followed if she was walking uphill and headed to the spot where the half-corpse had been found. She followed down the slope and found another set, even more subtle and only inches long but oriented in the same direction as the first.

Again back at the first location, she snapped a photo with her cell phone from a variety of angles, but the tracks didn't have enough relief to show up on her crappy device. One good breeze or rain shower would destroy the tracks. Maybe the detail would emerge once uploaded to a computer. She stared at the tracks, felt her anger rise. From the moment she'd found Gail and the boys at Lumberjack Camp, nothing about this scene had seemed right, no matter what the houndsman claimed.

She retrieved Sunny Boy and walked him to the edge of the ridge.

“Had about enough?” she asked Sunny Boy. “Eager to get?”

Sunny Boy shook his mane.

“I know—frustrating, isn't it?” she said. “But I think what you're thinking—we've got something fishy here.”

Allison realized the earth had, in fact, maintained its rotational speed and not even this once had put her needs for a bit more daylight over its boringly predictable habits.

She walked around to Sunny Boy's uphill side—the easier to climb on—and spotted three riders on horseback heading east to west. They were on the trail that formed the spine of the valley floor far below. Sunlight caught them flush, heightened the detail. Allison dug for her binoculars. She and Sunny Boy were in the shade of the mountains and likely hard to spot. But what did it matter?

They were almost out of view, rounding a bend in the long flank of the ridge where she was perched. All three horses were nose-to-tail.

The lead rider wasn't merely tall or wide, he transformed what appeared to be a regular-size blond sorrel into the stubby runt of the litter. The way he sat on the horse—an odd, uncomfortable-to-watch melding, like he was the first man to ever try it—was painful to watch. His horse would remember this day and Allison hoped it was only one. The middle rider was on a dark bay and the third rode a brown-and-white paint. The third rider carried a rifle with the butt down on his thigh. “It's archery season, boys,” Allison said out loud. Even if the rifle was replaced by a butterfly net, their energy was dark.

Riding with a rifle out in the open meant they expected to need it in a hurry and that meant, of course, that it was loaded.

Three horses, three men, three saddles. They had two hours of daylight left. With some groups in the wilderness, you wouldn't think twice because they looked ready. That's really what the woods came down to, b
e prepared.
These three were ready for nothing but the sun to shine.

Allison went back to the middle rider—something different about him.

They were almost out of view. Their pace was steady but unhurried. They hadn't looked up or around. The middle one looked smaller, even slight. His head slumped forward and his hands grabbed the horn on the saddle. He wasn't actively riding. His posture suggested defeat and Allison had the thought, but more of a sharp sensation, like the lightning-quick pain from a mean cramp, that he was captured prey.

ten:
monday afternoon

Trudy Heath's view of
Down to Earth was probably not how they taught you to think about profit and enterprise in business school.

She cared deeply about the business. Up to a point, she wanted it to flourish. A strong regional brand would be plenty. But soon it could lose its personality and it could morph into one of those other labels that had vaulted from regional specialty to bland, ubiquitous national nothing.

For now, Down to Earth clicked along. They did well in Meeker and Craig, to the north. They were well known in Paonia, Hotchkiss, Delta, and Grand Junction in a broad arc to the south and west. Their distribution reached Eagle along the I-70 corridor to the east. She had resisted the staff's push for Montrose, Ouray, Telluride, or maybe even Durango, but she might cave. Basically, the heart of western Colorado was the market for now. She had teamed up with a local distributor—filling up space on trucks already making their rounds—so she didn't feel any less green or any less local. In fact, she pictured her business with a bit of wonder and awe. It was like trying to figure out precisely how shoveling coal into the engine of a locomotive would propel steel wheels down the tracks.

It didn't compute. She tried to imagine all the transactions that had to happen—retail transactions, cash and credit cards changing hands. Phone orders, online orders, one bank account dipping while another—Down to Earth's—rose. People must have been telling each other, because no advertising had been bought. She'd been lucky with well-placed newspaper articles, glowing ones, and that was that.

The organization mushroomed like one of those videos on the nature channel that condense three weeks' of growth for a morel into thirty seconds. She had found the sweet spot of demand and product. But it wasn't really her. She'd given the green light on a new bottling contract in Grand Junction. She had okayed a new, expansive greenhouse plan in a field halfway to Rifle. But the man behind it all, the man who had come crawling back contritely, sheepishly, sweetly, gently—he had given her a month to pause and reflect—was Jerry.

Jerry Paige.

He said all the right things, apologized from the heart and removed the pressure, said he didn't want to lose her as a friend. Of course, five minutes later, after a kiss, they were all tangled up and laughing and how could she not grant a big old governor-size pardon on the spot. His crimes had been misdemeanors of the heart, of unchecked zeal. This was after the fallout, when he had done his over-the-top and too-pushy speech in front of the school board, embarrassing the whole erstwhile band of reformers and causing the team and its agenda to implode on the launch pad.

But weeks of space and quiet was plenty of time for Trudy to realize she hated loose ends, despised grudges and loved closure. Especially closures with Jerry, who was an excellent physical companion.

As the business blossomed, Jerry had offered guidance and suggestions and before she knew it he assumed the role as the unofficial manager of Down to Earth, the new company borne out of The Growing Season, Trudy's line of pesto products and marinades. The pesto and marinades remained hot items, but now Down to Earth sold organic fresh herbs, organic produce, gardening equipment, soils, mulch, shrubs, trees, bushes, ground cover, birdhouses, and a whole line of sculptures and other outdoor decorations created by local artists. Down to Earth conducted classes for the home gardener. Down to Earth encouraged the home gardener to take care of herbs and produce them at home, so they no longer had to shop at Down to Earth. It was anti-selling and in some crazy way it worked.

Down to Earth had promoted a corporate giving campaign akin to Ben & Jerry's. They had the “we're different” vibe of Paul Newman's line of grocery items. The brand oozed organic street credibility. Shippable products danced off the shelves of Whole Foods and similar stores with barely a promotional blink. Jerry had a sixth sense for negotiations and hiring. Her staff, in fact, had grown and she had met everyone at one point or another. But she couldn't really say whether their paperwork was all in order, whether the feds wouldn't frown. Or worse.

The day after the shooting in Glenwood Springs, the view from the highway made it look as if even more media had arrived. Trudy could only glance. Going sixty on the tight curves by the hot springs in Glenwood, she wondered if she would ever see the footbridge without thinking of Lamott and the blood. It wasn't the memories, it was also the sounds and the nausea that went with thinking about Lamott and the inconceivable anger behind whoever pulled the trigger.

Trudy steered off the highway and looped over the bridge through downtown, heading south to her headquarters in a small business park, the Valley View, seven miles south of downtown. Down to Earth was squeezed in between an electric supply company and a used car lot. The green-gray building sat up along the highway, directly across the Roaring Fork River from a sprawling golf course and down the hill from one of the Colorado Mountain College campuses, to the east. Inside were cubicles for the staff and the guts of a warehouse with all the stuff of their business—bottles, soil, herb pots, hoses, lumber, planters, shovels, rakes, fertilizer, seeds, packing materials.

Jerry sat at his desk in an open-door corner office. Trudy was surprised to see him, alone, given the number of times she had pictured the sheriff or federal immigration authorities poring through her files or lining up her workers, giving them all the third degree.

Files flopped open on Jerry's desk and steam floated up from a mug of coffee at the ready. His look was grim, but she didn't want to know. Not yet.

A kiss, a hug, and she poured herself a cup of tea in the kitchen, an unoccupied cubicle nearby.

“Bottom line,” said Trudy.

“We have issues,” said Jerry.

“I thought we confirmed every match,” said Trudy. “Or tried to.”

“We're waiting on about seven, maybe more. The socials didn't match at first. At least, the system kicked them out and now we are supposed to have the employee contact the Social Security Administration, to see if it was a typo or some other clerical error.”

“Out of how many employees now?” Trudy hadn't kept up since they passed two-dozen. Jerry knew the needs and knew how to hire.

“Thirty-nine,” said Jerry.

The number scared her—all the promises bound up in each paycheck.

“Last time I checked—” said Trudy.

“I know,” said Jerry. “New greenhouse over in West Glenwood, we bought a bottling plant in Rifle, plus running around the maintenance work. It's all labor.”

“Have we told these seven what they're supposed to do now?”

Trudy felt she had dropped a ball she didn't know she was carrying.

Jerry's prematurely gray hair was pulled back in a tight pony tail. He checked the hair tie's tightness as a security tic. He wore checked flannel shirts, favored prints in green. He was taut and lanky underneath, his yoga ritual unchanged for years. The casual appearance and physical health belied the business intensity. “They won't do it,” said Jerry. “They won't contact authorities. So why ask?”

“Because we're supposed to,” said Trudy. “At least the responsibility would shift to them, right?”

“For a while,” said Jerry. Despite being two years younger than Trudy, he came across these days like the one with the wise old head. According to the calendar, she was coming up on forty but when Jerry focused on business, he looked half way to fifty. The sparkling whites of his brown eyes, behind ever-present bifocals, revealed his inner youth. “A month or two. And then we're supposed to let them go.”

“But—”

“But what?”

“But you always have a plan.”

Jerry smiled, but it was a weak version. “You know me too well.”

Jerry tapped his pen, wobbled his head like he was weighing an offer, and held her gaze. His in-the-moment quality was one of his strengths.

“You know what we're up against,” said Jerry.

“Well, everything,” said Trudy. There was a well-respected grower in New Castle that had distributed across Colorado for years.

“The only thing we've got going for us is brand loyalty,” said Jerry. “Our products are good, but we cost more. We're up against the high-tech greenhouses in California, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Fresh herbs are being air-freighted from Peru and Israel, all that mineral-rich water for the Mediterranean herbs.”

“Ours taste better,” said Trudy.

“And we got lucky,” said Jerry. “The whole buy-America, buy-Colorado wave. We're riding it.”

“Where are you going with this?” said Trudy.

“Where I'm going is we've got to protect what we've got. You don't want to put all this at risk.” Jerry had a touch of professor in his soul. Maybe too much.

“So how?”

“Subcontracting,” said Jerry.

“I've seen them go over this on television. It's not right.”

“I know,” said Jerry. “And I know what every other business does—
but have the subcontractor set up first.”

Between Officer Lemke's warning and this shaky plan, Trudy felt oddly trapped. Every thought was woven like a braid with the dread born yesterday at the base of the footbridge.

“A subcontractor buys us arm's length,” said Jerry. “Separation.”

Jerry paused. He knew he was gaining headway.

“You look like you've got one more thing to say,” said Jerry.

If there was a scale for measuring inscrutability, Jerry was a lightweight—an open book.

“Why do we have to do their job for them?”

“Whose?” said Trudy.

“The
government's
,” he said with some snap. “They're the ones not protecting our borders. Why should we have to play defense for them?”

For the first time since her seizures stopped, following the successful temporal lobectomy that had ended her days as an epileptic, Trudy had the sensation of fog and floating, of seeing everything through a thick mist. It wasn't hard to imagine the whole business going
poof
like a gust from a hurricane doing its thing on a birthday cake candle. But these weren't seizures. Those had been fixed through surgery after George's exit to state prison.

“You should have seen the look on the cop's face,” said Trudy.

“He was reacting to the moment,” said Jerry. “Cops think they know how to fix everything. Part of their nature.”

“But if we go to a subcontractor, or try to set one up, that will be so obvious. They would all be working for us one day and then working for somebody else the next and still doing all the same stuff in the same places.”

“It might have to be done gradually—start with the maintenance crew first.”

“And let them go?”

Jerry gave a shrug. “What's the difference if we make the move or if ICE forces the issue?”

Trudy pictured the conversations with the employees—breaking all the bad news, how the word would spread. “They depend on us,” she said.

Jerry shrugged. “A job is not a lifetime guarantee.”

“You've already decided,” said Trudy.

“I'm suggesting,” said Jerry. “But you have to figure they all know each other, passing tips around. Not often you get a heads-up. We got lucky again.”

“I wouldn't even know where to start,” said Trudy.

She had slowly given over control to Jerry. He knew the books, the online banking, the passwords, the cash flow, the payroll, the contracts, the debt. She signed papers as he explained. There was good communication and everything checked out. Things they ordered showed up. Except for the wonderful, lounging sex—Jerry didn't care for quickies, preferred to relax naked or with few clothes on and talk for a while, see what developed and repeat—Jerry could have been her most trusted brother. She had turned into another chapter of herself and how she had behaved around George. She demurred. She wasn't evaluating hidden dangers or preparing for them. She played second fiddle. Or played for another band. It was hard to admit. Allison would never have lost control.

Maybe it was the shock from yesterday's event, being right
there
, but she realized suddenly that she was about to tear up.

“They're so loyal,” said Trudy.

“Most,” said Jerry. “We've had turnover. It's not like old company towns where you see them at Little League and the grocery store and church. We don't know them, not really.”

Jerry took off his wire-rims, wiped the lenses with a tissue.

“We didn't promise them anything except pay,” he said. “Work comes and goes; they come and go.”

Jerry put his glasses back on.

“However, there's a situation going on now. Alfredo Loya. Usually when someone slips back into the twilight, it's not too big a deal. They seem worried this time. Someone called back to Gua
ń
ajato where he's from and he hasn't turned up.”

“Where did he work?”

“Wherever we needed him. He could fix anything—pumps, mechanical stuff—and he can do it fast. A real knack.”

“How long has it been?”

“Last day here was two weeks ago, but it's not like I can go poke around and try to pick up his trail. He's just gone.”

Now the tears came, trailing down her cheek. A couple. She had so much to do, so much she would do. She didn't wipe them away.

“Is he one of the ones, one of the ones without a matched social?”

“Yeah,” said Jerry. “He's one of the seven.”