Into Thin Air Read online

  “Let’s go watch the creek,” Lennon said, scurrying over the rocks like a ground squirrel.

  “Wait for your dad!” Kurt yelled after him.

  On the wooden footbridge over Hunter Creek they stood side by side and peered silently into the hurling snowmelt waters. Kurt had learned long ago that you could stare into moving water and get lost for hours. The roar shut out everything, forced you inward. The dancing illusions of water had a calming, hallucinogenic effect on the soul, took you to another place. Ever since he was a boy roaming these trails with his older brother, this was the sight that soothed his heated blood.

  A young hippie couple, second generation—the boy ponytailed and bare to the waist, the girl in a bikini top and cutoffs—crossed the bridge with their black Lab, a handsome animal with heaving lungs and a beautiful coat wet from a roll in the stream. Lennon patted the dog, rubbed his smooth damp hair.

  “Daddy, when can we get a dog?” he asked as they left the bridge and turned onto the next leg of the trail, the high, exposed path that rose steeply up the mountain into blistering sunshine. “Let’s go to the pet shop and get a big one like that.”

  There wasn’t a pet shop within a hundred miles, but Lennon had seen a music video about children visiting one.

  “I like the idea of having a dog,” Kurt said, “but we need to talk about it some more.”

  Lennon was probably ready for a dog, he thought. When he and Bert were young they owned a mutt named Ute that followed them everywhere. Bert named him after the Indian tribe that settlers had chased from this valley.

  “Okay,” Lennon said, “let’s talk about it.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Kurt said. “Let’s stop and eat some grub.”

  The trail was a tough negotiation from here, upward at thirty-five degrees through rocky moraine and across another bridge into tall timber and alpine meadows where a couple of dilapidated shacks marked an early miner settlement. But this was about as far as Lennon’s legs could take him. Already his fair cheeks were crimson with heat and exertion, and his lungs struggled like the panting Lab’s. Kurt spread their lunch on a flattened boulder in the sparse shade of a fir tree and handed the boy the canteen of Gatorade.

  “Here,” he said, removing Lennon’s cap. His red hair was pressed flat, soaked with sweat. Perspiration pooled in the sprinkle of freckles below each eye. He lifted Lennon’s plastic sunglasses and wiped his face with a hand towel from the backpack and tried to dry his hair.

  “Your mother would have my hide,” he said, “if she knew I’d forgotten to put on the Water Babies.”

  He squirted lotion into his palm and rubbed it gently on Lennon’s flushed cheeks, his arms and legs, the back of his tender neck. Such a beautiful child, he thought. His face in repose, a little worn from the hike, had the serenity, the flawless innocence, of a Pre-Raphaelite figure. It was easy to see why, at first glance, people sometimes mistook him for a girl.

  “Daddy,” he said, his eyes as blue as the waters of a coral grotto, “is Mommy going to get well?”

  “Yes,” Kurt said. “And when she does, she’ll come and see us.”

  “Is she almost well?”

  “She’s getting better every day.”

  Lennon was quiet for a while. “I worry about her,” he said.

  “I worry about her too.”

  “Know what, Daddy? I miss her.”

  Kurt took out the sandwiches and some cloth napkins. “I know you do, sweetheart,” he said. “But don’t worry too much. She’s going to come and see us. She just needs a little more time.”

  “At the hospital?”

  “Yes,” Kurt said, unwrapping a sandwich.

  “Why don’t we go visit her?” Lennon said. “We can take her some presents to make her feel better.”

  Kurt thought this over. “I’ll have to ask,” he said.

  “The doctor?”

  “Yeah, the doctor.”

  Lennon was a messy eater and in a very short time had separated the bread slices and was licking off the jelly.

  “Know what, Daddy?” he said with a mouthful of food, a brown smear across one cheek. “When I was a baby my mom used to read me a story every night before I went to bed.”

  “I know,” Kurt said. “And now I read them.”

  Lennon nodded, agreeing, humming with pleasure over the sandwich. “When I was a baby,” he said, “she used to watch cartoons with me.”

  Kurt reached over and brushed a strand of damp hair from his son’s forehead. He could smell the boy’s salty scalp. “I’ll ask the doctor if we can go see her,” he said.

  “Yesss!” Lennon said, gear shifting the air.

  As they ate, they watched the hot air balloons drifting leisurely above town. Lennon said he could see a unicorn painted on one canvas. From this high vantage Aspen looked so small, so contained, a place still confined to the perimeters of the old mining camp, when it was just an obscure name on a silver company’s dog-eared map. Kurt thought about Bert and how their childhood had been wedged into this remote valley like the town itself. Their parents wanted them to grow up in the rarefied mountain air, far away from the corruption of cities and a civilization doomed to war and annihilation. This was the best life the Mullers could imagine for their children, for any children. An idyllic existence, pure, untroubled, free.

  When Bert graduated from college in Boulder and was drafted, their father, an ardent pacifist, hired a prestigious Chicago attorney to help his son win a CO deferment. But Bert refused to cooperate, viewing his father’s position as one more embarrassing European eccentricity, a quaint philosophical pose, the same antiquated principle that led the man to use a straight razor with a leather strop.

  In the years after Vietnam the brothers talked from time to time about Bert’s decision and ultimately decided he’d gone in just to prove that, unlike the two foreigners who’d raised him, he was a full-blooded native son beholden to something they couldn’t understand or be part of.

  “But I wish to hell I’d listened to the old man,” Bert said on more than one occasion. “I wish I’d talked to that lawyer.”

  When Kurt dropped out of college to enlist, hoping to hitch up with his brother in Southeast Asia, their father was so distraught he couldn’t discuss the subject without becoming emotional. “Albert I understand,” he said over the phone, his voice a tremor of disappointment. “But you, my dear boy—you have more time. You have other choices.”

  Kurt watched the balloons float in the clear blue sky and thought about his son’s last birthday party, and all the birthday parties when he was growing up, the promise that innocence would never end, that someone older and wiser would always be there to serve the cake. He wondered what would have happened if he and Bert had stayed at home in this valley. If they had taken jobs as ski instructors or trail guides, as their mother had wanted, and left Boulder to the barefoot intellectuals and the U.S. Army to the bullies who enjoyed blowing up strangers in faraway places.

  He closed his eyes and remembered the Bert before Nam, the muscular, brown-skinned mountain boy who dragged him over Pearl Pass every winter on cross-country skis, who spent his summer days fly-fishing the Fryingpan River, who loved nothing more than to hammock under a shade tree reading Ian Fleming and Ray Bradbury. How did that innocent boy get from there to the bloody photographs in Neal Staggs’s file?

  He turned over in his mind those last few months before Bert’s death and thought he understood now why his brother had withdrawn from him. Bert didn’t want his little brother, the sheriff, to suffer implication in any way. He didn’t want him to get hurt by what he’d done.

  Goddammit, Bert, he thought. What happened to you?

  “Daddy,” Lennon said, “are you all right?”

  Kurt opened his eyes. “Yeah, sure,” he said.

  “Are you crying, Dad?”

  “No, sweetie,” Kurt said, wiping his face. “The sun got in my eyes for a minute.”

  He scooted over and wrapped an arm
around the boy’s narrow shoulders. If he kept him this close, he thought, and never let him go, maybe his son wouldn’t have to face the next dirty war.

  Chapter twenty-three

  In the corridor outside the sheriff’s office two dozen news reporters from around the state were clamoring about, exchanging information, complaining to the deputies posted by the door. The ESPN camera crewmen had given up for the evening and were breaking down their equipment, disgruntled that the acting sheriff refused to appear and answer questions. Kurt hadn’t seen the place this packed with reporters since the Ted Bundy escape.

  The hotshot from the Aspen Daily News saw Kurt coming down the corridor. “Sheriff Muller!” he said. “You’ve been mentioned in connection with the gunplay at the race. Were you involved?”

  Tim Rollins was a pleasant-looking lad, twenty-five and eager, sandy blond hair long over his ears and curling onto his collar. He wore jeans and hiking boots and a faded Western shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He looked more like an out-of-work country musician than a Dartmouth grad.

  “I saw your article about me,” Kurt said, shifting the box in his hands. “Where’d you get that mug shot? My high school year-book?”

  The other reporters smelled blood and moved quickly to surround Kurt, who pushed through their ranks to the office door.

  “Evening, Kurt,” said Dave Stuber, one of the deputies standing guard. A couple of years ago Kurt had given the young man time off, with full pay, to work through a difficult alcohol rehab. Now he was one of the department’s most reliable investigators.

  The reporters pressed in close, barraging Kurt with questions. “What’s in the box?” someone asked.

  Stuber chewed gum, casting a cynical eye over the gathering.

  “It’s your call, Stube,” Kurt said above the voices. “Fire hose or Mace?”

  “I’m thinking stun gun,” the deputy replied.

  Inside the reception area Muffin stood by the cooler drinking water from a paper cup while she conducted a somber discussion with Libbie McCullough and three other deputies. Muffin looked pale, worn, a ranch girl unaccustomed to testy college grads wielding tape recorders.

  “Jesus, Kurt,” she said, rolling her eyes, “why the hell do you keep disappearing?”

  “I went for a hike up Hunter Creek with Lennon.”

  The deputies exchanged impatient looks. No one was in a good mood. Libbie rushed back to her desk and opened two bottles of vitamins, scattering grainy pills over her blotter.

  “Who needs some a?” she asked nervously.

  Kurt could tell by the way Muffin regarded him, tense, unamused, that this wasn’t going to be a pleasant occasion. She ushered him into her office, closed the door, and extended her hand toward a large stuffed chair with patterned fabric, something that might occupy a maiden aunt’s musty reading parlor.

  “Already making home improvements, I see,” he said, shoving aside a stack of folders on the desk to make room for the small cardboard box he was carrying.

  “Kurt,” Muffin said, “you were in this office ten years and you never had a chair anybody wanted to sit on.”

  She began to pace in a wide loop around the desk, hands on her hips, trying to contain her anger. Kurt had seen her this way only once or twice.

  “Let’s cut to the chorus, shall we?” she said. “What the hell’s the matter with you, man? You left the scene of a crime. No, make that two crimes. Three, if you count endangering behavior at a bicycle race televised on a major cable network. Eight riders have gone to the hospital on stretchers. Not to mention bullets flying around people in the street, a man shot to death in a pool hall, and another body stone cold dead in your old friend’s suite.”

  “He’s not my friend,” Kurt said.

  She stopped abruptly and squared around to face him. “The mayor and the commissioners are all over my ass, Kurt,” she said. “ESPN and the distinguished gentlemen of the press are camped on my doorstep. The phone is ringing off the hook. And the guy who caused all my troubles is taking a hike in the woods. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t kick you in the nuts?”

  Kurt studied her body language, the way she shifted the weight of her hips. The last time she was this worked up she handcuffed a drunk biker to a urinal in the Conoco john on Highway 82 and left him there for two hours.

  “I needed some time,” he said. “I wanted to be with Lennon for a little while before the shit hit the fan. I didn’t know when I’d get a chance to see him again.”

  Muffin closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead with the heels of her palms. “Okay, you win the Ward Cleaver prize for father of the year,” she said in a more composed voice. “Now I want to hear the whole goddamn story from start to finish. I want to know how a guy who’s already in shit up to his chin can keep wading in deeper and deeper.”

  He glanced out the window into the softening haze of blue light. Ajax Mountain had become a dark irregular outline in the mottled dusk, more shadow than stone. He remembered this as his mother’s favorite time of the day, how she loved to walk among the trees in the quiet, fading light. Now he saw her resting in her air-conditioned bungalow, leafing through pages of the family album, her swollen feet propped up on pillows. He saw her rise slowly from the sofa to answer the door, where two men in plain gray suits produced their shields and asked to speak with her about her deceased son.

  “I went to see Jake,” he began, calculating how to phrase the story, what to leave out. “The door was open and there was a body in the bedroom and a Hispanic male standing there with a gun. He lifted my piece and walked me down the stairs. When we got outside I tried to take him but the guy was a lot better than I thought. We wrestled around on the sidewalk and I got away and ran across the street and he started firing at me and that’s when the rider went down, and then all the others. I ran to the pool hall because Thurman keeps a gun behind the bar. The guy followed me down there and we exchanged fire and I killed him with Thurman’s .38. That’s about the size of it.” He shrugged. “I’m sure Thurman told you how he saw it. I stand by whatever he says.”

  Muffin’s eyes darted toward the box on her desk. “Thurman said when the shooting started, the place was full of Mexican workers. When I got there nobody was around but Thurman and two very scared drunks,” she said. “Any idea what happened to the other witnesses?”

  “Cops make them nervous,” he said. “They have jobs to keep.”

  She blinked, her voice finding that metallic deadpan they’d taught her at the police academy in Casper. “Ever see the shooter before?”

  “I’ve seen him hanging around the pool hall.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What do you suppose he was doing at Jake Pfeil’s? He didn’t murder the girl. Louvier’s prelim says drug overdose.”

  “I have no idea, Sheriff,” Kurt said. “Speculation is not my line of work anymore.”

  His remark annoyed her. “He didn’t happen to be one of the Mexicans who took you for a ride up Independence Pass, did he, Kurt?”

  He could see where this was going. She thought he’d tracked down one of the assailants and decided to take him out.

  “No, Muffin. I didn’t set out to kill the guy. He was at Jake’s place and he had a gun.”

  “Why were you going to see Jake Pfeil? You just said he wasn’t your friend.”

  “A while back he left a hang-glider at my house. Lennon keeps bugging me to show him how to use it, and I don’t want it around anymore. I’ve been trying to get Jake to come pick it up, but he never answers my phone calls.”

  She looked over at the box again, lost in some momentary rumination. “It’s statistically amazing, Kurt,” she said, “how much trouble you manage to walk into right out of the blue.”

  “I’m thinking about contacting the Guinness people,” he said.

  Her eyes remained diverted on the box. “Staggs came in this morning and I showed him the body,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do about him
now, Kurt. I expect he’ll send a couple of agents to pick you up.”

  Then her voice softened, losing its edge. “Don’t worry about Lennon,” she said. She was his old partner again, his friend. “I’ll take good care of him till we can straighten this thing out.”

  “Staggs isn’t going to arrest me.”

  She came closer and examined his face, holding his chin, moving his head from side to side. She seemed enthralled by the little cuts and bruises, the puffy ridge that would leave a permanent scar. He wondered if she wanted her turn to pluck out one of his stitches.

  “I got a call from her husband,” she said. “He’ll be here tomorrow morning to claim the body.”

  He jerked his chin away.

  “Do you want to talk to him?” she asked.

  He imagined what the man looked like. Tall, dark haired, fastidious in a suit and tie, handsome. He imagined that they had met through their cause, their love of children. And now he would have to take his wife’s mutilated body back home to her daughters.

  “No.” He shook his head.

  “He’ll want to know what happened.”

  “He can read the report.”

  She nodded, chewed at her lip. “Okay,” she said. “I can’t force you.”

  Kurt knew that Hans Gitter would tell the husband everything he needed to know.

  “But there’s something I want you to give him. I found this under the passenger seat in my Jeep.” He opened the cardboard box and took out the handbag. “It’s Graciela’s. She stashed it there when we went to the Grottos.”

  “What’s in it?” she asked, raising a suspicious eyebrow.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t feel like going through it. Women’s purses make me crazy.”

  Muffin smirked. She had never owned a purse in her life.

  “Louvier’s report says no bullet entry, no stab wounds, no blunt instruments, no drugs. But he can’t rule out that somebody might’ve bashed her with a rock,” she said, reaching for the bag. “Or pushed her off a cliff.”