Into Thin Air Read online

  Kurt knew that sooner or later Cecilia would run out of coke and have to come back down to score. And that meant going to her source.

  “Take care now, Harley,” he said, slipping the Jeep into reverse.

  “You gonna be at the game on Tuesday?”

  “If I’m not in jail.”

  Kurt drove down to the county road and parked in a stand of trees with a clear view of the Starwood turnoff. It was eleven o’clock. The Milky Way looked as vast and clear and awesome as he’d ever seen it. Crickets sang in the prairie stillness. He stretched his legs onto the passenger seat and began his long wait, listening to the rustle of small nocturnal animals in the brush. Every now and then a car would pass by, and once someone slowed for the exit to Starwood. The night grew colder and he took out the safety blanket and covered himself, settling in, fighting sleep. He remembered his first campout, seven years old, huddled inside a rain-battered tent with Bert and Jake, wind flapping the canvas, water soaking up through the ground sheet. The thunder and rain frightened him and Bert put his arm around his shoulders, telling him to hang tough, that everything would be all right. He remembered the flashlight beams dancing on the canvas and his father’s voice in the storm, and Mr. Pfeil calling out their names. And later, the laughter in the house as everyone sat by the fire drinking Ovaltine and drying off under army blankets. Those last precious days of peace between the Mullers and the Pfeils.

  He didn’t realize he’d gone to sleep until the birds began their daybreak chatter. Smoky blue light surrounded him, the air crisp in his lungs. He sat up and worked his stiff neck, then got out of the Jeep to bend and crack his sore ski knees. It was cold enough to see his breath and he longed for a thermos of good strong coffee. He relieved himself against a cottonwood tree and jogged in place to stir up some body warmth. He dropped down and did his forty pushups. An hour later, sitting behind the wheel and watching the morning take shape around him, a doe nibbling near the trees, magpies hopping in the dirt across the road, he finally admitted to himself that this was a stupid idea. He was ready to crank the engine and leave when he heard the Miata buzzing down the mountain. She ignored the stop sign and screeched onto the county road, searching for the right gear, her motor revving obnoxiously in the dewy quiet.

  He gave her a little road and followed her to Highway 82 and then northward toward Glenwood Springs. Traffic was already beginning to clog the other lane, backing up past the airport, the worker bees traveling to their service jobs in Aspen. There was no one going north except him and the sports car. In a few miles the valley floor dropped away and he could see the river glinting in the morning sunlight.

  In the rearview mirror he noticed a car approaching quickly, someone in a hurry. The gray Mercedes pulled up close behind him and nudged out against the yellow stripe, then swerved back. The driver flashed his lights impatiently, nudged out again. It was an unsafe place to pass, the highway curving sharply along the terrace, a steep rock wall on the left, a drop-off on the right where Chip Bodine had tumbled to his death. Kurt realized that the crazy fool didn’t know the road and refused to let him pass until they came to a pullout, then slowed and let the man go around him. The driver hunched over the wheel, his eyes focused straight ahead. My god, Kurt thought for an instant. It’s Panzeca.

  Near Snowmass the highway leveled out and he could see the sports car far ahead and the Mercedes between them, now maintaining a steady speed, keeping a measured distance from her.

  If this is Panzeca, he thought, be has the same idea. Kurt reached over and popped open the glove compartment. The new .45 rested on a stack of repair receipts. He took it out and placed it on the seat beside him.

  The road made a humpy descent from the high wall of the valley and flattened out alongside the river, following the shimmering course. In a few miles, to Kurt’s surprise, the sports car turned off into the small town of Basalt. The streets were narrow and split into a maze of lanes. He lost her in the busy workday traffic leaving the big supermarket, then caught sight of the sleek shape jetting off down the main drag toward the east end of town. He hadn’t seen the gray Mercedes since they’d left the highway.

  At the far boundary of the business district, where the strip of Old West saloons ended abruptly and the road led onward toward the Fryingpan River, the Miata swerved around a tow truck at work and disappeared into the distance. By the time Kurt got there, the truck and its hitched-up Club Wagon were blocking the street. He didn’t have to read the DWIGHT’S I TOW ’EM painted on the cab door to recognize Dwight’s idiot brother Clifford fiddling with the hydraulic winch.

  Kurt leapt from the Jeep. “Pull this goddamned thing out of the way, Clifford!” he shouted.

  “You’re gonna have to wait a few minutes,” Clifford said, flashing his missing tooth, “till I git this rig straightened out.”

  Kurt grabbed him by his oily ears. “Back this thing up right now, hoss,” he said, “or I’m gonna feed your ears to the pigeons.”

  Once the truck gave him room he floor-boarded the Jeep down the two-lane county road, his worn tires squealing around rocky bends. Furious with himself, he pounded the steering wheel. The Miata was nowhere in sight.

  A forest of spruce rose along the hills to the north. Off in the river, fishermen stood in hip boots, casting flies. He saw a mother and her son rummaging through their camper on the side of the road and stopped to ask if they’d seen a little green sports car.

  “Yeah.” The boy glowed. “Going thataway a hundred miles an hour!”

  He drove on till he reached the promontory overlooking Ruedi Reservoir, a long finger lake where windsurfers skimmed across the blue water. He took out his binoculars and searched the campground at the shoreline. VW microbuses, Winnebagos, pickup trucks, Wagoneers, but no Miata. He scanned back across the picnic blankets and upward past a grassy meadow to where the county road trailed on, a ribbon of asphalt curling against the fir-shaded cliffs high above. Then he saw something. A flash of chrome and brakelights, a puff of dust over someone’s private drive. It had to be her.

  Adjusting the binoculars’ focus, he spotted an elegant gray car, perhaps a Mercedes, disappearing around a cliff. Kurt looked up, then back into the binoculars. Could it be?

  He hopped in the Jeep, checked the clip on his .45, and sped off up the road, a tricky incline that hewed close to the mountain as it looped higher and higher above the reservoir. After three miles of grinding the old Jeep engine, the temperature needle hovering near the H, he discovered the turnoff. Tire tracks led the way down a soft dirt trail cut through Douglas firs, a rough passage between huge outcroppings of rock. He saw the house in a clearing ahead, a large new redwood A-frame, its triangle of glass glistening in the sun. Two vehicles were parked out front, the Miata and Jake Pfeil’s four-wheel Suburban.

  Kurt hid the Jeep in the trees and circled on foot through the woods until he reached the rear of the A-frame. Two umbrella tables and assorted lawn furniture were arranged on the sun deck.

  There were no sounds from the house, no signs of habitation.

  The .45 held chest high, he raced across the stubbled clearing, twenty yards or so, and dropped down at the blind side of the structure, where the roof touched ground. He struggled to catch his breath, listening for voices. The silence was unnerving. He slipped under the wood railing and crawled along the deck till he came to the glass louvers. The back room was a plant-filled solarium with wicker chairs. Empty. He stood up and quietly slid open the glass door and made his way into the house.

  He found them in a living room with a pyramidal ceiling and a magnificent glass view of the forest. Cecilia was on her knees in front of Jake, head down, thick dark hair obscuring her face. At first Kurt thought it was sex, then he noticed the rails of coke on the coffee table.

  Jake looked up and saw Kurt approaching quietly with a gun in his hand. “Hello, little brother,” he said, showing no surprise. “Did you come to join our going-away party?”

  Kurt aimed the .45 at Jake’s
face. He held the gun with a cold unflinching rage, his finger poised on the trigger. He wondered if he was going to feel bad about this after it was over.

  Cecilia raised her head. “I know this man,” she said, pinching her nose. “Is he going to kill us, Jake?”

  “It’s okay, kitten,” Jake said. “He’s an old friend of mine. We go way back, don’t we, little brother?”

  Kurt thumbed back the hammer, a loud click. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you,” he said.

  Jake’s eyes danced, his cheekbones grew hard. He studied Kurt’s hand, the .45.

  “You ruined my brother’s life,” Kurt said. “You chased my wife off from her son. Tell me one good reason why I shouldn’t splatter your ugly face all over the paneling.”

  Jake crafted a careful smile. He seemed to admire Kurt for getting this far.

  “Because if you don’t put down that gun, little brother,” he said calmly, “my friend Rusty is going to leave a big piece of lead in that thick skull of yours.”

  Kurt heard the step behind him. He turned slightly, angled his eyes, and felt the shadow of a man in the doorway.

  “Don’t be a hero,” Jake said. “You don’t want your little boy to wonder why his daddy never came home today.”

  The bodyguard named Rusty moved toward him with a stealthy grace and in another second the gun was gone from Kurt’s hand.

  “Does this change our plans, Jake?” Cecilia asked.

  “No, kitten, our ride will be here any minute,” he said, taking her arm and helping her to her feet. “Come sit over here while I have a little tête-à-tête with my old buddy.”

  He escorted her to a cushioned chair near the picture window and then turned to peer out the bright panel of glass, looking upward for something in the sky.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, little brother,” he said, his hands locked behind his back. “I really don’t want to kill you. Do you need more money? Is that the problem here? As you’ve probably figured out by now, your investigative services are no longer required. My friend Cecilia has helped me understand who’s been trashing me to the Feds. But if you and your son could use more cash,” he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Kurt watched Cecilia light a cigarette. “Is that how you worked it with my brother?” he said. “Kept loaning him money till he owed you so big he had to do your killing for you?”

  When Jake turned around, his eyes showed how truly used up he was.

  “You shouldn’t insult your brother like that,” he said. “He wasn’t for sale. You know that.”

  He sounded angered by his own explanation.

  “Yeah, sure, he was on my payroll. Like I told you, he was tired of being poor. Tired of seeing the split-levels go up with somebody else’s name on the mailbox. So I offered him an opportunity—strictly small-time transportation work—and he did a good job. I trusted him, little brother. I always trusted him.”

  Kurt began to understand something for the first time. He began to understand that Jake needed a brother as much as he did.

  “So how did you get him to kill somebody for you, Jake?”

  Jake regarded him for a long time. Sunlight reflected on his hair, revealing hidden strands of gray.

  “I don’t think you want to hear it,” he said finally.

  “Try me,” Kurt said.

  Jake waited. He seemed to be rehearsing sentences in his mind.

  “He came to me with a personal problem,” he said in a flat voice. “He thought his old lady was running around on him.”

  Kurt suddenly felt sick.

  “I’m not sure how he knew. Little clues, the way you can always tell,” he said, his hollow eyes fixed on Kurt. “He asked me to find out who she was sleeping with.”

  Cecilia shifted in the chair, crossed her bare legs. She blew smoke and watched Kurt without interest. This could have been the opera, as far as she was concerned.

  “So I hired a private dick from L.A., a guy I use in real estate there. He produced some very entertaining photographs. Before I saw the pictures, I never realized what a sweet time a guy can have at the Redstone Inn.”

  Kurt closed his eyes. Jesus Christ.

  “He wanted to know who was sleeping with his old lady, little brother, so I found out and I told him.”

  Kurt thought he could hear the distant thunder of a helicopter. In the end there would always be a helicopter. Rotor noise, cold wind, the smell of scorched oil. A body borne home.

  “I told him it was Chad Erickson.”

  Kurt felt like somebody had taken him down at the knees.

  “It was an easy make,” Jake said. “Erickson had been around a long time, everybody’s friend, their dime-bag connection. Mr. Boogie Down, the ladies’ man. We all went to the same parties, right? The same tight crowd. It was an easy make, little brother.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Kurt said.

  “Erickson was an asshole. A mindless party boy,” Jake said. “The Feds had his fingers jammed in a desk drawer and his only way out was to hand them my balls on a stick. I had no choice, Kurt. It was best for all of us.”

  For a brief moment Jake let go of that arrogance in his bearing that betrayed how soggy rotten his soul had become and he showed something of his old self, the simple small-town boy they all had been before the gradual corruptions. Kurt realized now that in spite of how sick and misguided Jake had become, he had tried to save Kurt from himself. The way Meg had tried to save Bert. They had all tried to hold on to the only thing that remained of their vanishing world. Each other.

  “Staggs says the Feds were going to pull Bert in,” Kurt said. “The day he died, they were coming after him. Did you know that, Jake?”

  Jake looked puzzled.

  “He thinks you might have taken Bert for a long walk up the Bells.”

  Jake’s face ignited. “That lying bastard,” he said.

  Kurt knew Jake wouldn’t do something like that to family. But he wanted to hear it from Jake’s own lips. “Maya thinks he jumped,” he said, his voice constricting.

  “I’m sorry, Kurt,” Jake said, his tall lean frame washed in magnified light. “I thought he could handle it. He’d done that business in Nam.”

  The sound of the helicopter drew closer. Jake turned again to look beyond the glass, moving his head from side to side, searching for the incoming flight.

  Cecilia sat forward in the chair and gazed out the window. “Is it for us, Jake?” she asked.

  “Yes, kitten, it’s for us.”

  Kurt turned, too, but it wasn’t a helicopter blade he saw glinting from the tower of boulders forty yards away. Sunlight flashed across a rifle scope.

  “Get down, Jake!” he shouted, diving for the floor.

  The bullet exploded against the glass and Cecilia screamed. The large triangle collapsed, jagged sheets dropping from high above like the thawing walls of an iceberg. Kurt covered his head with his arms and felt the glass hurl over him, a thousand needles pricking his back and legs. He thought the noise would never end. For a moment he lost consciousness, then startled when three pistol rounds went off by the window. He peered up to see Rusty kneeling at the shattered glass wall, firing three more rounds into the woods.

  “Bastards!” he yelled. Blood was dripping onto the shoulders of his sport jacket from a nasty gash in his scalp.

  Kurt rose to his knees, splinters of glass crinkling from his clothes like fine sand. He looked over at Jake. His old friend lay crumpled in a heap next to a knocked-over lamp.

  “Boss, are you hit?” The bodyguard was shaking Jake’s arm.

  Jake flopped onto his back, moaned, and struggled to sit up. “It’s gotta be the Feds,” he said, broken glass tinkling all around him. “The fuckers missed me.”

  “Oh, my god,” the bodyguard said. “Jesus.”

  Kurt saw her then, sprawled on the carpet. Blood gushed from a massive hole in her neck; pieces of glass punctured her body like darts. Her eyes were still open but sh
e wasn’t moving.

  “Cecilia,” Jake said, crawling toward her.

  “Come on, boss!” Rusty begged, dragging him away from the body. “The chopper’s on the ground out back. Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

  He stayed low, pulling Jake along. “Come on,” he said, yanking him. “She’s dead.”

  When they reached Kurt, Jake stopped to throw his arm around the bodyguard’s bloody shoulder. “You all right?” he asked, his eyes wide with panic.

  Kurt nodded. His shirt was wet with blood and his skin stung as though he’d backed into a hornets’ nest. A long sliver of glass was lodged like an ice pick in his calf. He was fighting hard to stay conscious.

  “Better come with us, little brother,” Jake said. There was a deep cut under one eye and his face was smeared with blood. Glass glittered in his hair. “They’re going to shoot this place to pieces.”

  But Kurt knew it wasn’t the Feds.

  “Jake,” he said, “don’t ever mess with my family again. Do you hear me?”

  Jake could see that Kurt was having trouble holding focus. “Give him his gun,” he told the bodyguard.

  “Are you crazy, boss? Let’s get out of here!”

  “He’s going to need a gun,” Jake said. “Give it to him.”

  Reluctantly the bodyguard tossed the weapon onto the floor in front of Kurt.

  “Do you hear me, Jake?” Kurt said, staring at the gun. “Stay away from my family or I’ll kill you.”

  “I’m sorry, man,” Jake said. He gave Kurt one final look of regret. “Take good care of your little boy.”

  The bodyguard hoisted Jake onto his back and trotted toward the rear of the house, to the solarium and deck and out to the rocky field where the helicopter had touched down, waiting, its engine roaring. Kurt knew he would never see Jake Pfeil again.

  When he turned and looked out the broken picture window he saw a man emerging from the woods, approaching the house with a rifle tucked under one arm. Kurt picked up the .45, stuck it in the waist of his jeans, and crawled over to Cecilia Rostagno. She was dead all right. Blood soaked her dress, flowed from her long bare legs. When he looked out the window again he saw the man throw down the rifle and make his way slowly up the steps to the house. He was weeping, his face glazed with tears. Kurt glanced back at the body. He thought about closing her eyes but decided that the man should see her this way. Her eyes like milky white glass.