The Zen Man (28 page)

I stayed in the storage room and listened to it on a banged up CD player that worked just fine with some new batteries. Punched it to the slow, shuffling “Ramble on Rose.” An enigmatic Dead tune that never identifies the mysterious Rose, just that she rambled on.

I listened to it several times, my mind returning to that date. Brianna and I had been flushed with booze and need for each other. I think it was our first time in the sack. Knowing me, it wasn’t the only time we listened to the Grateful Dead while getting it on, but I clearly recalled that one time when we’d boogied to “Ramble on Rose.”

Why’d she named the baby Rose if she’d already dumped me, pretended another guy—Joe—was the father? Unless Laura was right. That Brianna still loved me. A concept that angered more than flattered me. Brianna knew damn well how much I, we, had wanted a baby.

But when the dad is a boozy, drugged-up Deadhead lawyer on the skids, who wouldn’t ramble on and lie about paternity?

About the third time I listened to the song, I focused on the line about a royal flush with aces, flashed on Brianna talking about some trip to Vegas, her winning at poker. Guess she’d been hinting about Rose then, but didn’t want to lay it all out for the jailers’ ears.

I was a dad. Well, the biological dad. The closest I’d ever been to my child was today, looking at her sleeping in the backseat. Made me feel more like a sperm donor than a father.

Did I want to visit Rose? Yes and no. In some uncomplicated corner of my mind, I wanted to show up, play with her, spoil her with gifts. But life was complicated. Too complicated. I needed to bury my paternity, let Brianna raise her child—
her
child—in a parallel universe that never touched mine.

Be the invisible father my own became. Suffer my own invisible pain.

Where the fuck was Zen when you needed it?

Do not speak—unless it improves on silence.
—Buddhist saying

A
fter dinner, Garrett drove us to a house on Garrison Street in Arvada, a Denver suburb packed with lookalike post-war ranch houses and tidy yards. Occasionally a home had matching lion statues on either side of its walkway or front door. Those solid, noble beasts symbolized strength to the Italians who migrated here in the sixties and seventies from North Denver, a place they’d grown too good for. Like North Denver cared. That neighborhood had always been like a gang-banger chick proud of her nasty rep.

No lions in front of Hughes’ house, though. Just a Land Rover in the driveway with me underneath it.

I’d put on my standard “dirty gear” ensemble, reserved for trash hits and these GPS adventures—old jeans, a stained shirt, and a torn camouflage jacket I bought at a Salvation Army for a buck. Snow still spotted the ground, but thanks to Mr. Hughes shoveling his walks and driveway, and the city snow plows clearing the streets, I’d left no footprints. I couldn’t wear thermal gloves because it took some finesse attaching these things, so my fingers tingled from the cold as I eased the GPS device from my jacket pocket with latex clad hands.

“Wow, man.” Garrett’s voice over the cell phone in my shirt pocket.

I froze, my finger clenching the device. We’d called each other, then left our phones on—mine in my jacket pocket, on low speaker—so he could warn me if anybody approached.

“What?” I whispered, staring up at the dark mass I knew to be the gas tank and the muffler.

“Just saw a fox.”

I sucked in a lungful of gas-scented air. “You’re supposed to be on look-out,” I said tightly, “not watching Animal Planet.”

“Sorry.”

With chilled fingers, I positioned the magnet on the GPS device—black, the size of an egg—on top of the metal bumper, underneath its plastic coating, where it could pick up a satellite signal. It stuck. Perfect.

“Okay,” I said toward the cell in my pocket, “check the signal.”

“Doin’ it.”

While he checked the GPS tracking program on my laptop back in the 4Runner, I attached the battery box, packed with eight double-As, to the metal frame next to the gas tank. The hefty magnet clicked in place. I felt along the wire from it to the device. Tight. Good.

“Got a signal,” said Garrett. “Dope.”

Which, in snowboarder lingo, meant awesome.

“Crap,” he added.

Took me a moment to realize he really meant
crap
. “What?”

“We got trouble.”

“What?”

“Porch light’s on. Old dude just opened the door.”

I froze, my stomach somewhere around my balls. I turned my head, my cheek stinging where it touched cold cement. I had a narrow view of the snow-patched lawn up to the front porch step, glazed in hazy yellow from the porch light. I saw dark slippers, dark slacks. Couldn’t see any higher. Had to be Hughes.

“Drive down the street, out of sight,” I said at my shirt pocket, keeping my voice low, “I’ll meet up with you.”

“I don’t wanna leave you, man.”

“Do it.”

In the distance, I heard an engine growl to life, the crunch of tires rolling away, then silence.

I lay there, looking up at the dark mass overhead, hoping Hughes just wanted to step outside, look at the moon, maybe have a smoke. A few minutes, then he’d go back inside, and I’d slip out and meet Garrett down the street.

Yip yip.

I glanced toward the porch. One of those rat-on-a-chain dogs yapped and pranced around the man’s slippers. Then rat-dog grew still, stuck its little nose up into the air. Swore I could see its miniscule nostrils working, sniffing, detecting…

It looked over at the Rover.

Shit.

Yip yip yip. It scurried across the lawn toward the Land Rover, hopping over miniature piles of snow. A sudden sweat chilled my face as I wondered what to do. Space was so tight under the vehicle, it was like lying in a coffin. Couldn’t move my arms or my legs.

I was pondering the logistics of a sideways karate chop when Yippie reached the Rover and stopped, its little rear-end going airborne with every yap.

Yap yap yap.

“Shh,” I whispered.

Yap yap yap.

“What’s up, Frankie?” Hughes called out. “Ya see somethin?”

Emboldened by master’s voice, Frankie scooted under the Rover, its yaps resonating in the confined space. I lay there, staring at the ball-of-fur fucker, blowing a stream of air toward its little yapping face. It’s all I could think to do.

Grrrr.

Obviously, Frankie didn’t dig being blown at. He growled with ever fiber of his pound-plus being.

“Hey, Frankie, what’d ya find?” Hughes stepped off the porch, headed across the lawn.

As I shimmied toward the far side of the vehicle, my only viable exit, Frankie grabbed a mouthful of jacket and tugged on it, his growls muffled in the thick fabric. As I eased my way to freedom from underneath the Rover, I grabbed Frankie by the nape of the neck and clamped my hand around his muzzle mid-yelp, then rolled with him into the shadows of a monster pine tree next to the driveway.

Over the top of the Rover, Hughes’s head popped into view. “Frankie?”

A dark shadow shot from underneath the tree and zigzagged across the driveway behind the back end of Rover. Frankie, seeing it, went into an apoplectic frenzy. I released him, and he dashed after the creature, yapping like a crank-fueled mini-beast. Hughes followed, yelling for Frankie to stop.

I lay there for a moment, my pulse battering my vessels, thanking the powers that be for that fox, rabbit, whatever it was had darted from the shadows. After a few moments, I rolled onto my knees and cautiously stood. Assured that the yipping and Hughes’s entreaties were fading down the street, I slinked through the shadows down to the sidewalk while pulling the hood of my sweatshirt over my head. When I hit the sidewalk, bathed in light from a nearby street lamp, I did a leisurely-but-focused stroll down the street. One of the tricks of the trade. If you act as though you belong somewhere, people buy the act.

Three houses down, I spied Garrett’s 4Runner—its motor idling, headlights off—parked in front of a darkened house for sale. I hopped in the ajar passenger door—we’d previously turned off the dome light, so the inside was darkened—and clicked the door shut as we took off.

Garrett shot me a wide-eyed glance. “Heard some dog go bananas.”

“Yep.”

“Dude’s dog?”

“Yep.”

“See you?”

“Yep.”

“Dude saw you too, man?”

“Nope. Fortunately, some animal distracted the dog, and dude followed.”

“Wow.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Fuckin’ epic.”

“Yeah,” I muttered, “it was the dope.”

When the pupil is ready to learn, a teacher will appear
—Zen proverb

B
y Wednesday morning, Laura and I had been virtually following Hughes’s Land Rover for thirty-eight hours through the tracking software on my laptop. Sam wasn’t thrilled with my felonious act, but grudgingly agreed the data could be used to our benefit in court. We were especially interested if Hughes returned to the high plains to verify Laura’s body was still there—even seasoned criminals sometimes got a jones to return to the scene of the crime. If so, we’d have a detailed tracking report that showed the route, stops, even the speeds he drove. We also wanted to see if he visited someone of interest, like Brianna.

Laura and I planned to lunch at Kate Mullen’s because I was getting my own jones to nail a few on-the-fly interviews with CrimDefs who frequented the place. My goal was to gauge reactions about “Santa” and the name Hughes. We took the laptop so Laura could continue monitoring the tracking software.

Although Hughes had rarely left his home in Arvada, Walt Dixon had faded away like an inconvenient decimal point in a spreadsheet. In pretext calls to Walt’s office, Cathy Jessup had said in a baby-doll voice that Mr. Dixon would be back in the office January ten. Laura’s theory was that Cathy was clueless and believed her boss was actually coming back.

We arrived at Kate Mullen’s shortly after it opened at eleven and chose a table against the back wall where Laura could surreptitiously observe the tracking software. The location gave me a wide view of the room, including the main entrance.

I ordered a tuna melt, Laura a Tipperary burger, and we settled into our mutual surveillances.

“By the way,” I said, watching the door, “I sent that screensaver picture of the boat to my nerd pal.” Because it wasn’t one of the files on the hard-drive, we’d figured it wouldn’t self-destruct when opened.

“The guy with the pixel software algorithm?”

“The pixel whatever, yeah, to him.”

“Did you ask him about geotagging?”

Laura had lectured me about geotagging, but I’d gotten a brain freeze somewhere between geospatial metadata and longitude coordinates. “Yeah, I mentioned it, but he said the camera would’ve required a GPS chip. His algorithm, however, works on any camera.”

“But such pixel algorithms only indicate
where
the camera was purchased.”

“But people often make such purchases in places they’ve stayed.”

“And you think Walt has returned to that place.”

“My personal philosophy is that our boy’s swilling rum in Venezuela which had no extradition treaty with the U.S., but I still haven’t dismissed the theory he’s hiding out in whatever port that boat’s in.” I straightened. “Well, well. Guess who’s coming to lunch.”

“When did they become BFFs?” whispered Laura, watching a waitress usher Justin and Iris to a table across the room.

“Maybe after a certain CrimDef retreat?” I pushed back my chair. “Think I’ll drop by their table, make their day…”

Justin gave me a surly double-take upon my arrival, while Iris managed a stiff smile. It’s not easy being a popular guy.

“Get my message?” I asked Iris.

“Have no idea who Hughes is,” she snapped. “By the way, this is a business lunch and we’d like our privacy.”

“Great. Hey, I believe a defense attorney hired a former client to intimidate me. Hispanic dude, possibly a Mexican National, willing to work off a debt for a hit?”

Justin began reading his menu as though I didn’t exist. Iris’s lips pulsed as though she might actually laugh.

“Solicitation to injure or kill is a guaranteed disbarment,” she said, “but I’m sure you know all about disbarment.”

“Actually suspension. I wasn’t disbarred. And I only said he’d
intimidated
me, not tried to injure or tried to kill. Amazing you guessed that.”

“You said
hired
, which connotes—” She stopped herself. “Good day.”

“How’d it go?” asked Laura as I sat back down at our table.

“Better than I expected. Neither of them called 911.”

She lowered her voice. “I’m not getting a signal from the GPS.”

I glanced at the screen, hidden from view from the rest of the room. The time-stamp was ten minutes ago. “Could be he’s parked the Rover in his garage, or the positioning of the satellites has temporarily lost the signal. Common occurrences—it’ll be sync’d up again shortly.”

“Or maybe Hughes found it.”

“Seriously doubt he’d crawl under his vehicle to look for it unless he suspected he’d been tagged.”

“But you told me that dog Frankie kept barking at you. Maybe he crawled under the Rover to check.”

“Doubt it. Hughes would spend half his days crawling if he followed every yap.”

“What would he do if he found it?”

“Destroy it. Not in his best interest to go to the cops with it.”

“Would he know it’s yours?”

“If he has connections, yes.”

“Cheery thought.”

Throughout lunch, I dropped by several other tables inhabited by noshing CrimDefs, got no real answers. I’d noticed Sam dining with a curvaceous redhead in a blue double-breasted suit. Probably a client, another of his conquests, or both, so I politely stayed away.

After they were finished eating, Red left ahead of him. On his way out, he dropped by our table, gave me a friendly if somewhat pitying look.