‘I am on a losing streak,’ said Ren. ‘I’ve never felt less deserving of the title special … or agent. Today I have been an agent of zero. We could have our own true crime show – The After-The-Fact Files.’
‘Harsh,’ said Cliff. ‘We’re fifty miles from base camp … we’re not The Avengers.’
Ren made a face. ‘I like to think of us that way …’
‘Well, I will always assemble wherever you are,’ said Cliff.
For twenty-five years, Cliff had been with the JeffCo Sheriff’s Office, but, along with Ren and eight others, now worked for the multi-agency Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force in Denver. Cliff had a gift for making witnesses and suspects believe he was one of them: weary, disgruntled, disappointed with life, put-upon by authority figures. He once told her that sometimes he felt they revealed their secrets to him because they believed he would bury the information out of solidarity. He managed to convince even the brightest felons that he operated under duress, and really, if he could just catch a break, he’d be running free, happy and lawless. Cliff James – warm, huggable, big-bear, chuckling, family-man Cliff, who cared about justice more than most – could have missed a vocation as a Hollywood star.
‘We need to assemble where the bandits are,’ said Ren. The bandits had first drawn Safe Streets upon themselves one month earlier. This was their fourth strike; always the same M.O.: they entered the bank wearing beanies pulled down to their eyebrows and snowboarding masks pulled up to their noses – the ones with graphic prints that gave them the lower jaws of sharks. Funny for snowboarding with your buddies, not so much for bank customers confronted with a blur of sharp teeth, wild eyes and gunfire. Safe Streets could have called them the Jawsome Bandits, but that was too complimentary. They were, instead, the Shark Bait Bandits.
The first robber would spray the ceiling with bullets from a semi-automatic, then jump onto a counter or a table. He roared and growled and, as customers dropped to the floor, the second guy moved to the counter. He would show the cashier a note requesting cash, as if the gunfire was too subtle a message. The note also offered a bullet to the head in exchange for a dye pack or a tracking device.
Cliff rested his elbow on Ren’s shoulder.
‘Look,’ he said, pointing to a small little enclave of houses on the map, ‘Iroquois Heights.’
Ren had Iroquois heritage; it gave an exotic twist to looks whose ethnic origins were a mystery to many.
She smiled. ‘It’s a sign! Hey – you are too big to lean on me,’ she said, turning to look up at him.
‘I was going easy,’ said Cliff, standing up.
‘Unlike …’ said Ren. She nodded toward the corner where Gary Dettling stood with his hands on his hips, staring over at them. He was the only man she knew who could put his hands on his hips and not look ridiculous.
‘He is not a happy man today,’ said Cliff.
‘And when you say “today”, you mean “for quite some time” …’ said Ren.
‘He’s coming our way,’ said Cliff. ‘Eyes on the map.’
Jefferson County stretched westward from the city of Denver up into the mountains bordering Gilpin County, Clear Creek and Park. It was seven hundred and seventy square miles of every crime and mentality that came from spanning big cities and boondocks.
The Conifer locals unlucky enough to have been present when their Wells Fargo was hit were feeling a little plagued. It was not long ago they had been hit by a wildfire that moved as if it had plans to rescale the town and bring it back to its roots. Over the years, Conifer had been expanding slowly, adding grocery stores, gas stations and charmed out-of-towners who settled in the foothills until the snow startled them out of their mountain fantasy and into Kendall Auto Sales looking for tire chains.
But the unpredictable snowfall was nothing compared to the onslaught of the wildfire. It roared and spat at them for two weeks, darkening their skies, driving them from their beds or keeping them lying awake in them, fearing for everything. And then, it was gone. The fire died before it took away a single home. The firefighters had not performed a miracle as some people saw it. The firefighters had carefully strategized, and won a war; only the charred landscape bore the scars.
Detective Denis Kohler from the Sheriff’s Office walked over to Ren, Cliff and Gary. Kohler was tall and flat-bodied, with a lean to one side and a slight bow to his legs. His brown hair flopped across the right side of his forehead and he often ran his fingers through it, even though it was too short to get in his eyes.
‘OK, our guys followed your bandits ten miles,’ he said. ‘Looked like they were headed for Bailey, but they lost them. The car was found on a service road, torched. They made off on foot.’
‘That’s new for them …’ said Ren.
‘Well, they had the full weight of the JeffCo Sheriff’s Office bearing down on them this time,’ said Kohler, smiling.
Ren laughed. She liked Kohler. ‘Did they find anything in the car?’ she said.
‘It’s destroyed,’ said Kohler. ‘Looks like they crashed first. We’re waiting for it to be towed.’
‘And it was taken from the parking lot at the spa outside the business center …’ said Gary.
‘Yup, a lady customer came out – car was gone,’ said Kohler.
Ren shook her head. ‘I don’t know why women feel the need to go to spas, said no woman ever.’
‘What about cameras?’ said Gary.
‘We don’t have a lot to go on with this route,’ said Kohler. ‘We’ve spoken with CDOT, we’ll see what they’ve got.’
‘Gary,’ said Cliff, ‘I have that appointment, so, if you’re all OK here?’
‘Sure,’ said Gary, ‘go ahead.’
Cliff hugged Ren.
‘Bye, big guy,’ she said. ‘We shall avenge another day.’
‘Take care, Cliff,’ said Kohler.
Ren stared down at the map. ‘Is this the service road?’
Kohler looked at where she was pointing. ‘Yes.’
‘Would you mind if Gary and I swung by?’ said Ren. ‘That’s right by Pine Gulch Cemetery. They could have gone through there, come out the other side and grabbed a car from that garage.’ She pointed again. ‘If they did that, they could have driven right down Pine Valley Road. They may not have been heading for Bailey after all. Or at the very least, Pine Valley Road was a panic move …’
‘Sure, go ahead,’ said Kohler.
‘Gary?’ said Ren. Earth to Gary.
He nodded. ‘Sure. Great.’
No car had been stolen from the garage by Pine Gulch Cemetery. Gary swung back around and they drove down Pine Valley Road, past where the Sheriff’s Office detectives and crime scene investigators were waiting for a tow truck to take the charred shell of the getaway car back to the lab.
‘That’s the spa lady’s …’ said Ren. ‘She probably came out of there with her little disposable flip-flops … or flaming red upper lip … mascara under her eyes, desperate to get home before she met someone.’
Gary tuned Ren out a lot. But today, the radio wasn’t even on. She stared out the window. The road was quiet, dusty, and bordered by pines, but if you looked through them, you could see where the wildfire had taken many of them away. They drove for fifteen minutes in silence; the type that only Gary could create – a very specific and dense one.
Breathe.
They rounded