Whack Job (12 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“Interloper”

Thursday morning.

Hornbuckle was on the road by seven. White had given his address as Fire Road 219 just north of the Joe Wright Reservoir. Harnbuckle had studied county plat maps and a satellite photo to determine which of several homesteads belonged to White. Some homes were not visible due to heavy tree cover, primarily ponderosa pine and aspen. Others were in deep shadow due to the peculiar light characteristics of the canyon. Hornbuckle had determined which homestead belonged to White by studying the infra-red photos and comparing them to those taken in daylight.

Hornbuckle’s was the only homestead with no heat signature.

The old Jeep’s radio was AM only and all Hornbuckle could find were farm reports and come to Jesus meetings. The vehicle was so old it didn’t have a CD player. Hornbuckle hoped it was up to the task. A gym bag on the seat next to him held the tools of his trade.

Traffic up the Poudre was light, a few early risers in motor homes towing 4X4s with kayaks on the roof and bicycles cantilevered over the rear bumper. Beat-up Jap econoboxes, backlights plastered with bumper stickers. Lots of pick-ups. It had been warm out on the plains but it was cooler up the canyon. Hornbuckle drove with the windows open, elbow in the wind.

Joe Wright slid by on the left, mirror surface reflecting the chill blue sky. Fire Road 219 was readily apparent due to the platoon of mailboxes standing at attention. The chain was down. Hornbuckle shifted into four wheel drive and headed up the canyon.

Twice SUVs coming down the mountain pulled over to let him pass. He waved and smiled. The old Jeep managed to jounce up the rutted road. Hornbuckle had programmed his GPS to lead him to the site. He pulled a Payday from the bag, peeled it and tossed the wrapper out the window. He passed several private drives but glimpsed no dwellings through the forest. At times the grade approached forty per cent.

The GPS settled into a flat hum as he came around a rock outcropping and saw the pole gate and the warning signs.

The steel pole gate was held shut by a massive laminated Master padlock. Hornbuckle had bolt cutters in the Jeep but he elected to work the car off the road so that it was nearly concealed in a stand of alder and juniper. He grabbed his gym bag and squeezed out, car door compressing the wiry shrubs.

He carried a John Wayne commemorative .45 that his father had given him and was the subject of much ridicule at Quantico. He hung a half gallon water bottle over his head and squeezed around the concrete-mounted pole that formed one end of the gate. Like a salesman making a call he walked up the rutted dirt road carrying his gym bag.

The bag contained micro-recorders and transmitters, a hand-held metal detector, gloves, wire-cutters, glass-cutters, evidence bags and a half pound ground beef spiked with ketamine in case there were dogs.

Hornbuckle sauntered around another giant granite molar, his ankle-over Nevados silent as he stepped from rock to rock. As he rounded the huge rock he caught his first glimpse of chez White, a dark horizontal shape beneath a red rock ridge. Hornbuckle walked toward it. The ground beneath his feet shifted.

Hornbuckle froze for an instant wondering if it were an earthquake, and then he saw a depression near his foot through which sand ran. As he watched the depression yawned into a black maw as the tarp’s supports began to give rapidly lowering Hornbuckle into the pit. Hornbuckle watched in slo-mo horror as a rusty metal spike jammed up through the tarp and seared into his right leg just above the ankle.

“SHIT!” Hornbuckle howled. The fucking spike was buried an inch deep. Slowly, painfully, Hornbuckle lifted his leg free of the spike. They were all over the bottom of the pit forming dozens of tiny tents where the tarp had settled.

What kind of lunatic built a tank trap in his driveway?

And this was the man they had chosen to head an investigation?

What if the fucking spikes were coated with human feces?

The wound throbbed and bled. Sucking air through his teeth Hornbuckle leaned against the side of the pit--how had he done it without a backhoe? Even with a backhoe? Hornbuckle raised his right leg, pulled down the sock and looked at the bloody wound. Nasty. He tried to remember the last time he had had a tetanus booster.

Naturally he’d neglected to bring a first-aid kit. Maybe there was something in the house he could use. But first he had to get out. The hole was seven feet deep. Hornbuckle ran four miles every morning. He tossed his gym bag over the edge. Using a small boulder as a base Hornbuckle boosted himself up and out of the pit.

He walked back a few paces and sat on a rock, breathing heavily. Sweat popped on his forehead and he felt damp beneath the arms. Not that cool on the mountain after all. He squeezed his wound to make the blood flow.

Hornbuckle rummaged around in the gym bag and found a bandana that he used to stanch the blood. He drew the sock up over the wound and wrapped duct tape around it to hold it in place. Now he had to re-rig the tarp to hide any evidence of his visit. Hornbuckle stripped off his sweat shirt and went to work. It took forty-five minutes to restore the tank trap to its previous condition, by which time it was past two. He covered the hole the spike had made with dried leaves and sprinkled dust on it.

Sweating and covered with dust, ankle throbbing, Hornbuckle limped up the trail to the long-low structure built of native rock and mortar with a green metal roof hunkered beneath a massive red rock overhang. Hornbuckle paused ten meters from the sturdy oak door.

White was an explosives expert. Any man who would build a tank trap in his front yard wouldn’t stop there. Hornbuckle used his eyes. He couldn’t see any cameras or obvious alarms but that meant nothing. Cautiously he approached the house. He ignored the front door and did a three-sixty counter-clockwise, examining the windows for wires or tape. There was a propane tank at the north end. The house stretched back beneath the overhang but stopped short of the cliff leaving a six foot wide alleyway in perpetual twilight. Here there was door off the kitchen and a hot tub. Hornbuckle lifted the lid. It was turned off--the water was cold. Hornbuckle peered through the windows at the still interior. The back door provided ingress and egress in complete privacy.

A single power line entered the house on the south side, descending from a series of poles.

Hornbuckle emerged from the gloom at the south end of the house behind the massive 4X4 covered with a tarp. Bungee cords extended from grommets in the tarp to steel rings sunk in the rock. Big winds up here.

Using a flashlight Hornbuckle shimmied under the tarp. There was enough ground clearance beneath the old Dodge power wagon to race a go-cart. Hauling the gym bag beneath the tarp, he selected a motion-activated Honeywell GPS transmitter the size of a playing card, which he epoxied to the inside of the frame and smeared with axle grease.

A breeze stirred the tarp refreshing Hornbuckle. He crawled out from under the truck, grabbed his gym bag and walked around to the front of the house. He put on latex gloves and examined the lock. Schlage deadbolt. He tried the door.

It was open.

***

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“Allergies”

The heavy oak door swung silently inward on oiled hinges. Hornbuckle threw a handful of talcum powder over the frame to check for lasers. He stepped into the house. It was cool inside with a faint aroma of sage. Within seconds Hornbuckle began sneezing. He pulled out a bandana and fired off sneeze after sneeze until he jammed a forefinger up beneath his nostrils and held it there for thirty seconds.

He was allergic to dogs.

Hornbuckle quietly closed the door behind him and stood just inside the entrance allowing his senses to adjust. First impression: hand-made sailing ship. The way the tongue and groove wooden floor was put together, the walnut cabinets and bookshelves built into the back wall, all very compact and ship-shape.

Hornbuckle admired White’s carpentry. The man knew his way around a hammer. If only he’d pursued carpentry as a career.

Hornbuckle set his gym bag down on the sofa lofting a puff of dog hair into the air. Dog hair swirled with every step, attaching itself to his khakis. Hornbuckle’s sinuses backed up for a full-frontal assault. Tufts of dog hair stuck to the walls

A portrait of Jesus, one of the Madonna and Child and a wall crucifix confirmed what Hornbuckle had suspected, that White was a mackerel snapper. Man cannot serve his country and the Pope too. The U.S. should have learned that lesson after the election of Moscow’s puppet Kennedy.

Hornbuckle was too young to remember, but his father, a minor official at State, taught him well. Religion was for suckers. Religion was the oldest scam in the world after “I love you.” His father taught him that you could learn a lot about a person if you look at what he reads. Hornbuckle padded over to the built-in bookshelves, every step sending tiny puffs of dog hair scurrying.

The Bible
.
The Federalist Papers
. A bunch of sci-fi shit. The freakin’
Boy Scout Handbook
.
Satan is Real
by Charlie Louvin. Hornbuckle pulled it out and looked at the cover: two country singers in white suits shuckin’ and jivin’ before a lurid red image of Satan as flames consume the cover. He put it back.

Most shelf space was taken up with stacks of magazines:
Road & Track
,
Field & Stream
,
Guns & Hunting
.

A 1/25th scale model of White’s monster truck on the shelf. Hornbuckle examined the exquisitely detailed model up close. Everything was perfect down to the valve stems, brake lines and tiny Colorado license plates spattered with mud. He checked the numbers on the plate just in case. He withdrew a tiny spiral note pad and wrote them down. They did not match any of the numbers he’d obtained in Libya. The patience and craft that had gone into the model reinforced Hornbuckle’s image of White as obsessive/compulsive.

Obviously that did not apply to his housekeeping.

On another shelf Hornbuckle found a Mason jar stuffed with feathers. He was pretty sure they were eagle feathers, possession of which was a federal crime. There were enough that Hornbuckle took a chance on sealing one in an evidence bag. Next to the feathers were several flint arrowheads and carving tools, also federally protected artifacts that belonged in no private collection. Hornbuckle photographed everything with his Ocelot.

A bonsai tree on the window ledge.

Hornbuckle went into the kitchen. White wasn’t completely irrational. He had electricity. Hornbuckle checked the refrigerator. Moldy cheese, a six-pack of Fat Tire, an open box of baking soda and some summer sausage. He opened the freezer. Five frozen pizzas and some ice trays. Hornbuckle removed the pizzas but there was nothing hidden in the freezer. He replaced everything exactly as he’d found it.

Down the hall to the bathroom, flurries of dog hair hovering around his ankles. The bathroom was big enough to contain a shower, a Jacuzzi, a clothes washer and drier and the Rinnai tankless hot water system. Horizontal east facing window, tiny potted cacti on the sill. A cardboard box next to the toilet overflowed with magazines, mostly cars, guns and nature.

Hornbuckle checked the medicine cabinet. Aspirin, Right Guard, Axe Body Spray, toothbrush, floss, toothpaste, and little amber bottles containing paroxetine, clonazepam, and trazodone. Each had more than three refills on the scrip and had been issued six months ago. The doctor’s and pharmacy names did not appear on the generic labels.

Hornbuckle lifted the lid off the top of the old-fashioned five gallon flush tank. Nothing. Opposite the bath was more shelving built into the wall containing neatly folded ranks of towels and wash cloths. The next door opened on a small dark bedroom backed under the cliff. Hornbuckle found the switch and turned on a table lamp on a slab of wood resting on two three drawer file cabinets that White used for a desk.

A half-built model truck lay on the desk next to modeler tools, tubes of glue, filler, sandpaper and a French curve.

No computer.

No television.

No numbers.

How the
fuck
did anyone hope to go through life without a friggin’ computer?

This alone disqualified White in Hornbuckle’s eyes.

One wall was entirely covered in shelving made of pine boards resting on red bricks. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn. No fiction, lots of magazines. Again, nothing out of the ordinary. Hornbuckle checked the closet and found a Patriot gun safe with a combination lock.

Fuggedaboudit.

Finally only the master bedroom at the end of the hall remained. No ceiling mirrors for White. A simple king-sized futon rested on a plywood frame, which in turn sat on cinder blocks. A discarded cable company wooden spool served as a nightstand on which sat a cordless alarm clock/radio, a hairbrush, another Bible, and a photograph in a frame that had been placed face down.

Hornbuckle knew there’d be another Jesus on the wall before he looked. The bed was made and covered with a gray wool blanket that was rife with dog fur. Hornbuckle whipped the bandanna out of his pocket and let fly.

He went around to the side table, sat on the bed and picked up the photo. It showed White and a good-looking blond in a bikini leaning back grinning in a catamaran with blue ocean, white beach and palm trees in the background.

Stella Darling.

But White was no careerist! From what Hornbuckle understood, White wanted only to be left alone. Only the entreaties of his one true love could bring him back.

Hornbuckle searched the closet and the home-made five-drawer dresser. He found a stack of
Penthouses
and a jar of Vaseline. So White was normal after all. More significantly, Hornbuckle found nothing on spontaneous human combustion. Wherever White kept his notes it wasn’t here.

Hornbuckle put a voice-activated recorder inside the center cinderblock beneath the bed. He put one in the living room underneath the sofa. From the looks of things the man never swept up. He put one in the kitchen behind the refrigerator. Hornbuckle would have preferred transmitters but they were too easy to locate with a simple tracking device.

From the looks of things White was still living in the 19th century but Hornbuckle couldn’t take the chance. Retracing his footsteps he looked to see that everything was as he’d found it.

As quietly as he came he let himself out the front door.

***