Hidden River

6: THE DWARF

West across the park and the city — five layers of mountains and the setting sun. A halo over the foothills like an enormous chrysalis. A trap enclosing us in this town, in this state. Forever. We stood on the balcony for an amazed moment — caught in our own theologies of panic, fear, retribution. It was the longest day of the year and it wasn’t to be over for a long time yet. A dozen witnesses in the park. At least two or three had seen the whole thing.

We moved back from the edge of the balcony.

John was stunned, his eyes wide, his face white.

“W-what now?” he asked. “The police?”

“We make a run for it,” I said.

“What?”

“We’ll get twenty years for this,” I said.

“It was an accident.”

“It was goddamn manslaughter, twenty years,” I insisted.

“We won’t get out,” John said.

“We’ll try.”

I grabbed his arm and backed him off the balcony and into the apartment. I found the brandy glasses we’d drunk from, wiped them with a piece of paper towel. Tried to think of any other surfaces I’d touched, wiped them, too.

Police sirens now. John sat down on the chair, dazed.

“Oh, Jesus,” he was saying over and over.

“Get up,” I yelled at him.

He sat there, incredulous. Stunned into catalepsia. And to think I was the heroin user. I grabbed him, pulled him to the door. Wiped the handle, went out, left the apartment, closed the door behind us. Marched him to the fire escape.

“We’ll just walk out,” I said.

He nodded, I don’t think he knew what was going on. John was a peeler and back in Ireland he owned a gun but he’d never bargained on killing anyone. Out of his depth here, this whole scene wasn’t his, this whole story had turned into a bad dream. John had hitched his star to mine in the hope of getting somewhere better. Getting out of rain-swept, war-torn, depressing Ulster for America. And I should have resisted. John, the anchor dragging us down. Going to drown us both.

“Where’s your hat?” I asked.

“My what?”

“Your fucking baseball hat,” I said.

I sprinted back to the apartment.

“Where are you going?” he wailed.

“John, you better snap out of it, we’re in the shit, I’m going back to get your hat.”

“We got to get out of here,” he said, his voice quavering.

“John, shut the fuck up, stay here, I’ll be back.”

I went to the door. Pulled the sleeve of my shirt down, turned the handle, it wouldn’t open. Thoughts raced through my head. The apartment door naturally had a self-locking mechanism. I wouldn’t be able to get in. The cops would find John’s print-encrusted hat that said on it: Belfast Blues Festival. Maybe, if they were really smart, they’d cross-check the recent arrivals at DIA, to see if any had come from Belfast. Well, that would be that. Best-case scenario, we do get away from this building, out of Denver, back to the UK. They’d find our names, put two and two together. Extradite us, try us.

Had to get back into that apartment, get that goddamn hat. I looked down the corridor. Mercifully, no one had come out to see what all the bloody commotion was. A fancy building — most people on this floor probably had fancy jobs that kept them out during the day.

Arms on my back, pulling me.

I turned.

John, wild, gesticulating. Losing it.

“Alex, forget the fucking hat, we have to go.”

“John, if we don’t get the hat, we’re fucked, your prints are on it, so are mine, and since we’re peelers we’re on Interpol’s computer. We have to get back into the apartment to get it. Trust me. We gotta break the door down.”

“Can you take prints off cloth?”

“Aye and take them off the bloody peak,” I said.

“Leave it, we have to get out of here,” he said.

I grabbed his face and made him look at me. His whole body was shaking. He was drenched with sweat. This close to a nervous collapse, I could tell. No point trying to convince him, I grabbed him by the collar, dragged him over to the door.

Again I could hear sirens.

“We gotta go, Alex, they are going to nail us,” John pleaded.

“We’re going to charge the door, shoulder it, break it down,” I said.

The corridor was wide, it would give us a bit of a run at least.

“Alex, we don’t have the time,” John said.

“Now listen, you wanker, if we don’t get that hat, we are fucking going to prison, do you understand?” I said as calm as I could.

“Alex, we have to—” John began, but his voice trailed off, his eyes closed, he didn’t know what he was doing. His body slumped and I could see he was giving over his will to mine, it was the path of least resistance.

We backed up from the door, maybe a good ten paces. I’d never broken a door down before. I had no idea how difficult it would be. Nice strong building, too, the door probably wouldn’t give like they did in cop shows and the movies. We’d try for it, anyway.

“Now,” I said.

We ran at the door and jumped into it with our shoulders. A huge crash. We bounced off, fell, without noticeable effect on the door. Shoulders killing us.

The sirens were louder now too. At least a couple of different vehicles. John looked at me. Desperate.

“We go again,” I said.

We backed up, ran at the door, shouldered it, again bounced off without any noticeable change.

“And again,” I said.

We backed up and this time as we did so, a man came out of his apartment. A very old man, in checked trousers, white shirt, slippers.

“What’s all this noise?” he said.

“We have to take him out,” John said under his breath.

“We’re police, sir,” I said in what I hoped was an American accent, “someone jumped from their balcony, suicide, we think. I’d like you to return to you apartment, we’re going to be questioning everyone.”

“A suicide, where?” the old man asked.

“In the park, the body’s right out there,” I said.

“I gotta see this,” the old geezer said and went back inside.

“Now we have to go,” John said.

“One more try,” I said.

We backed up, charged the door, bounced off.

“One more,” I said, “I felt something give.”

“You said that was the last,” John said.

“One more,” I insisted.

We rammed the door and this time the metal screws holding the lock into the wood popped out and the door gave a little. If I could smash it with something, it would go. I looked down the hall.

“The fire extinguisher,” I said.

I grabbed the fire extinguisher out of the glass case. Thumped it into the door. The lock gave. I shoved the door open.

“John, wipe my prints off the extinguisher and the handle and the case the extinguisher was in, ok?”

He looked blank. I slapped him upside the head.

“Ok?”

He nodded. I ran into the apartment, searched for the hat, saw it on the coffee table, grabbed it, ran out.

“It’s clean,” John said. I nodded. John and I bolted for the fire escape.

“Get that cap down again, real low,” I said.

He pulled down the baseball cap as low as it would go, I pulled mine down too. Not much of an aid in concealing our identities, but it would have to serve.

“When we get out of the building, we walk away calmly, and then when we’re clear, we run, ok?” I said.

“What?”

“John, you eejit, get with the fucking program, just do everything I tell you, ok?”

“Ok,” he said sullenly.

We ran down the concrete corridor of the fire escape. Came out in a side lobby. A few potted plants, green-painted concrete walls, a mirror, a notice about trash, but otherwise empty. We sprinted through a door and outside into the sunlight.

A black guy stood there blocking our way. Tall guy, shorts, sneakers, sweat-stained gray T-shirt with the words “United States Army” printed on the front. He’d been jogging, seen the whole thing, come around to the front of the building to stop the murderers or anyone else getting out.

“Por favor, señor, muy urgente, es tarde,” I explained, and went to go past him.

“No one’s leaving this building till the cops show up,” he said.

John tried to shove past him, but with a big hand the soldier pushed him to the ground. A clear violation of Posse Comitatus, but this wasn’t the time to mention that. John spun on the ground, knocking the legs from under the soldier. He went down like a ton of bricks and I kicked him in the head, knocking him out, nearly breaking his neck.

Interfering bastard. I pulled John up. We didn’t know which way to go. East into the streets, west into the park. A cop car appeared ten blocks east, heading for the building. It made up our minds. We went across the park. A crowd of about twenty people around the body.

We walked as calmly as we could muster. Got about fifty feet.

“What about those two?” someone called out.

John started to run. I ran after him.

Six years as a copper in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (which has one of the highest death rates in the Western world) and I never once fired a gun in anger and never once had a gun fired at me. My greatest danger there was from my own side, five pay grades above me. No guns. Nothing so blunt. But now…

We were halfway across the park when we heard the peelers shouting:

“Stop. Police. Stop or we’ll shoot.”

The sky swimming-pool blue. The grass a dirty copper color. The temperature 92. My lungs aching. My eyes filled with streaks of white light. The front range all across the horizon to the west. Green foothills, blue mountains behind, and then more behind that. A big one in the middle with a horn peak and a bowl of curved magenta. Beautiful. One even had a trace of snow on it from Victoria Patawasti’s storm.

We cut another fifty yards through pine trees and some kind of open-air theater. It was late afternoon and hot. Few people. A man was jogging in front of us but he had his earphones on, didn’t hear the peelers yelling.

We made it to the edge of the park.

I looked back.

Three coppers in tan uniforms. Guns out. Two fat guys and an older skinny bastard another seventy yards back but bearing down like a greyhound.

John ran up the grass slope out of the park and onto Sixth Street and I ran after him. Sirens everywhere. It registered in a second that they were all coming for us. I slipped in a pool of water from a broken sprinkler and skidded in front of a building and John, turning to see what was happening, ran into an old man with a beard who was carrying a Scottie dog. All three went sprawling. I pulled John up. The dog was biting him.

“Christ,” John screamed, and tried to shake the dog off.

The old man started yelling in Russian.

I grabbed the dog by its hind legs and threw it twenty feet away. The old man ran after it, swearing.

“Come on,” I said to John.

We darted out into the street between massive condominium buildings and a few large private houses with high, ivy-clad walls and iron railings. No way over them.

“Hey, you,” someone shouted behind us.

John turned.

“Run, you bastard,” I said. We sprinted along the sidewalk. A doorman in front of a luxury condominium complex put his arm out, whether to stop us or hail a cab or see if it was bloody raining, I don’t know.

I shouldered him and he went down.

“Fucksake, Alex, never get away from the peelers,” John said.

“Run, you eejit, and save your fucking breath.”

There were more sirens and I knew the cops running across the park would be radioing our position so they’d block our road ahead.

They knew the town, we didn’t. They were acclimatized to altitude, we weren’t. They were on local time, we were jet-lagged. They were in shape, we were a couple of druggies.

Things didn’t look good.

“Down here,” John said, and we turned at an alley.

No people. High walls between condominium complexes. Trash bins. Baking asphalt. Harsh transition from sunlight to shadow.

Cops still on our trail.

“Here,” I said. Another alley, smaller. Heading west again, view of the mountains. Lungs exploding, heart so loud in my ears I couldn’t hear anything else.

A side street: no pedestrians, concrete walls, town houses.

“I hear a helicopter,” John said.

I didn’t look up.

A big alley. North this time. Kids playing catch with huge baseball mitts. A white kid, a black kid, a Spanish kid, all in bright T-shirts, like a scene from bloody Sesame Street. We weaved through them and a few seconds later the cops came busting through as well.

Another turn. The alley ahead wide and clear. Houses and garages backing onto smooth tar macadam.

John a good ten feet ahead now. A main road seven or eight blocks ahead that looked like Colfax Avenue. Getting darker, too, and if we could just get to Colfax, where traffic was heavy and there were many people, we might just make it.

Perhaps the peelers felt the same, for at that moment they decided to shoot. They didn’t bother with a warning. Just a loud crack and then four more cracks. Bullets smattered into a trash compactor. The police are allowed to fire their weapons only if the suspect is a potential danger to the public or a potential danger to the arresting officer. I think it was reasonably clear that we were in neither category. These guys just wanted to fucking shoot us. A bullet screamed off the concrete in front of me. The cops firing wildly and the bullets skidding by. Close, though. And they weren’t shooting on the run. They were stopping to shoot, which lengthened the distance between us. I took a look back. They were about two tennis courts behind us. Strangely, not the cops from the park. Two chunky guys in blue-and-green uniforms. Hard to tell with all the sunlight glaring off the concrete walls, but they looked like older men. Maybe out of shape, but they should have known better.

And they were shooting to kill. Only on TV do coppers aim at legs or arms, real cops aim at the torso. I ran on. More bullets.

“Zigzag,” I yelled to John.

“What?”

“Zig, zag,” I said, and started running zigs. If you’re firing at a moving target with a nine-millimeter semiautomatic, you’ll miss if that target changes direction fast and unpredictably.

The peelers unloaded nearly a clip each at us. The bullets kicking up fragments of tar and concrete. Echoing horribly off the walls and the condo complexes.

They were yelling at us now, too, but you couldn’t make it out. They started up again. Bloody pigs. The same peelers whose stellar work would be highlighted in the JonBenet Ramsey murder case and the Columbine massacre. They burned off the rest of their clips, bullets tearing down the alley and carrying on for a thousand yards. Then they must have been reloading, since the shooting stopped.

“I’m surrendering,” John said.

“They’ll give you the fucking chair, you asshole.”

“They’re going to kill us.”

“Run, you big shite, they’re reloading, we’ll make it,” I said.

John started running. And the heroin hurt and helped. Crippled my running but eased my mind. Stringing out the ketch from this morning so that I saw myself from way above. Me: calm, in slow motion, fleeing from peeler Pete through wide alleys, in the golden hour, with the sun behind the mountains and the sky crimson and the brilliant white cirrus clouds in lines between the buildings. Almost a moment of transcendence. The two of us running between piles of tires and wooden pallets, cardboard boxes, bins, machinery, car parts, garbage. And shadows across the alley and our reflections back at us off black-glass apartment windows.

“Nearly there,” I said.

One of the cops fired twice more. Bullets flying past us, hitting nothing. Well, hitting many things, but not us. How were they going to explain this in their log? Probably say we were carrying sawed-off shotguns or Armalites or something.

Colfax closer and closer.

And the ketch lets you exist outside of time, outside of place, as if you are a being seeing yourself from above. Can’t get caught up in that. Disembodied. Running.

Hubris, saying they were hitting nothing.

A bullet nicked a soda can, then clattered sideways in front of me, I fell, spun, smashed my shoulder into the ground.

“I’m hit,” I said to John in a panic.

This time it was John who had his shit together. He pulled me up with one arm.

“You’re not hit, you’re ok,” he said.

Quick look at my shoulder. A slice through the sweat-drenched jacket and T-shirt and a nasty cut on my shoulder. But I was ok. I had been lucky. He looked at me for another quarter of a second and then we both gazed back. Only one cop, staring at us, frustrated. We were too near Colfax, he couldn’t risk a shot now. He had that much sense, at least.

“Let’s go,” John said.

We cut down the first alley on our left and dodged back up, running north to Colfax Avenue.

Seven at night. The main strip of Denver, busy, packed. This part of Colfax was like all those main streets in Westerns: wide avenues, big store-fronts, low-rise buildings. But past its peak, run-down, decaying, dirty. Prostitutes everywhere. Scores of them. Same as yesterday. Black and Latina girls in short skirts and tank tops, pimps, men cruising the drag, checking out the talent, looking for regulars. Pushers, users, hangers-on. No cops.

“You ok?” John asked.

I looked at my shoulder, it was bleeding, but not deep.

“I’m ok,” I said.

We caught our breaths. The sidewalks were thronged and it was easy for us to blend into the masses of people.

“Just walk, don’t run, don’t run, I think we’re safe,” I gasped.

My shoulder was stiffening up but already the bleeding was less. No one was looking at us. No one paid us any attention at all.

After about five blocks we juked behind a car and took a check back. Peeler Pete scoping for us, inventive — standing on top of a parked car, looking everywhere, speaking into a radio. We were lost in the sidewalk crowd and backlit against the sunset.

“No chance, peeler,” John said with satisfaction.

“Yeah.”

“What now?” John asked.

“Hotel, get our stuff, leave town,” I said.

“Forget Victoria?”

I looked at him to see if he was fucking insane.

“Of course, forget Victoria,” I barked.

We walked all the way to the state capitol and downtown. We got back to our hotel. Desk clerk watching a game show. Ignoring us.

We entered the room. It hadn’t been cleaned. Our stuff was all still there. The beds hadn’t been slept in. We packed quickly, saying nothing. At one point John went to the bathroom and threw up.

“Ok, now, John, listen to me and listen good, you’re going to cut your hair short, just do the best you can, and I’m going to shave my beard off, ok?” I said gently.

He nodded.

I got my razor and clippers and trimmed the beard and then shaved the bastard. I had a quick shower and looked for something to use as a bandage on my shoulder. There wasn’t anything, so instead I stuck on four or five Band-Aids. When I came out, John had done a reasonable job on his hair. It didn’t look crazy, at least.

“John, you got any aspirin or anything?”

“No. How’s your shoulder?”

“Ok.”

“You took a spill.”

“I know.”

“I killed a man, Jesus Christ, Alex, I fucking killed somebody. Oh my God, oh my God, I can’t believe it.”

John put his head in his hands. He sat on the edge of the bed and started to cry. I let him get on with it for a minute or two. Good thing. Let him cry it out.

“Listen, John, he went for you, it was an accident. It was like a car accident. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. He wasn’t Mother Teresa, either. Remember, he was a bad man, he was an accessory after the fact to a murder, withholding evidence,” I said softly.

It wasn’t true, Klimmer was just scared and we really might have talked him into going to the peelers. John had fucked up big time.

“Yeah, I suppose,” John said.

“Ok, we have to get out of town.”

“How?”

“Greyhound bus, anywhere, now.”

We went downstairs and left the desk clerk our keys.

“Checking out?” he asked.

“Aye.”

“Ok.”

He didn’t seem a bit interested, so I didn’t spin him any kind of story. We walked out onto Broadway. Dark now. We asked the way to the bus station and someone told us it was downtown, but there was a free shuttle bus that took you there.

The outdoor Sixteenth Street Mall was stuffed with people. The Colorado Rockies were playing a baseball game. People kept bumping into our luggage on the free mall bus, giving us dirty looks. Final stop. Two coppers standing outside the bus station. Could have been there because of the baseball game, they could have always been stationed there. But we couldn’t take the chance that they had our descriptions. It had been well over an hour since Klimmer’s fall, plenty of time to get the word out.

“Fuck,” John muttered. “What now?”

We were concealed by the crowds going to the game but we couldn’t wait out here forever.

“Walk with the crowd,” I said, “follow them away from the cops.”

A lucky break. We walked nearly all the way to Coors Field and when we were close we saw a train waiting in Union Station.

“The train, John, we’ll get the train,” I said.

“Aye.”

We tried to cross the street with our backpacks, but traffic was again heavy because of the baseball game.

A loud air horn, a pause, and the massive train began to move.

“Holy shit, it’s leaving,” I said. When I’d come to America before, I’d traveled on Amtrak. I knew that the east-west trains were very infrequent. This might be the only train leaving Denver’s Union Station that day.

“John, we gotta get this train,” I said.

John nodded.

We ran across the street, dodging the traffic. Brakes squealing, people honking, swearing. We sprinted up the wheelchair ramp and onto the platform. The train was moving very slowly, but it’s hard to get onto any kind of moving thing with a backpack on your back and your shoulder hurting and exhaustion and jet lag eating at your coordination.

A really little guy in front of us hopped on one carriage down. John found an open door and jumped in. He put out his hand and pulled me on too.

Darkness. The train shunting out of Denver in big curves. It took me a while to realize we were heading west. I went to the bathroom and looked at my shoulder. There was a nasty scrape where the bone met the skin, the whole area an ugly scab of blood. The Band-Aids had fallen off. It didn’t hurt much, but there was always the possibility of infection. I stripped, scooped water from the sink, and bathed it. I cleaned the wound with soap and water and bandaged it with paper towels. Changed my T-shirt, put my jacket back on. We found a couple of seats in the bar car and ordered beers and a sandwich. We asked the barman what train it was and he was used to dealing with stupid questions and said it was the California Zephyr going to San Francisco — which suited us just fine. California was ok. We could fly from San Francisco to London or Frankfurt or anywhere, really, just as long as it was bloody miles from here.

The train climbed up into the mountains and the track went through tunnels and curved back on itself. On those big bends you could see the whole of Denver in lights all the way up to Boulder and down to Castle Rock. We had just finished our beer when the ticket lady came up to us. An Afro stood eight inches from her short frame and thick neck. Long lacquered nails — painted with the stars and stripes — were pointing at us.

“Where you sitting?” she asked.

“Here,” John said, not trying to be funny.

She took it the wrong way.

“Where are you sitting on the train?” she asked a little more sharply.

“We just got on, we’re not sitting anywhere.”

“Let me see your tickets,” she said, glaring at John.

“We don’t have any tickets,” John said.

“The train was just pulling out and they told us we could buy tickets on board, we’re tourists,” I said quickly and gave her a big smile.

“Who told you that?” she asked me.

“Uh, the man at the station,” I said.

“What man?”

“I don’t know, just the man, he was in a uniform, I don’t know,” I said placatingly.

“Well, I don’t know why he told you that because no one is allowed on the train without a ticket, this isn’t a commuter train, this is a transcontinental Amtrak, you’re going to have to get off at the next stop and buy a ticket at the station and then get back on again.”

“Ok,” I said.

“Ok,” John said.

“The next stop is Fraser, Colorado, get off there and buy your ticket,” the woman said curtly.

“Ok,” we both said again, smiling.

She wandered off down the car.

“Fucking bitch,” John muttered. “Bet she could have sold us a ticket if she’d wanted.”

“Aye, but it won’t make any difference,” I said. “We’ll just get it at the station.”

“Yes,” John agreed.

“No difference,” I said again, and we drank our beers in agreement. Two people who couldn’t have been more wrong, since getting off the train at Fraser, Colorado, was to make all the difference in the world. Our fates weren’t taking us to California, to the Golden Gate Park, to Chinatown, to the airport and a ten-hour flight to Europe. No, the center of gravity in our story, the one dragging us like a black hole, was the one who had cast the first stone, the one who had killed Victoria Patawasti. We were going back to Denver, but we didn’t know it yet.

When Vishnu came to the Earth as a midget, he called himself Vamana. He stopped the demon Bali from destroying the planet. He tricked Bali with his diminutive size and sent him to the Underworld, telling him that appearances can be deceiving and that you should always watch out for the little guy.

I thought of this as John and I stared angrily at the midget. We weren’t upset at him. It wasn’t his fault that the ticket office had been closed, that a sign said “Buy rail tickets at the Continental Divide Saloon,” that the saloon was a quarter of a mile into the town of Fraser, that the Amtrak train was late leaving Denver and had to make up time by departing Fraser earlier than planned, that we had heard the air horn too late, and that the train had left without us.

The next westbound train was coming this time tomorrow but there was a train going to Chicago in half an hour, the man selling the tickets had explained. John and I had decided Chicago would do just fine without, of course, considering that the Chicago train would have to go back through Denver.

The midget had gotten off the train at Fraser too, but he hadn’t gone to the ticket office. Instead, he’d gone to a bar for a while and now he was standing a little down the platform from us. It made me a bit nervous.

Especially since the Chicago train was late.

It hadn’t come in half an hour. It hadn’t come in an hour.

It hadn’t come by midnight.

When you called up Amtrak’s toll-free number, an undead voice told you that the train was just arriving in Fraser. The voice had been claiming this for several hours….

Birds. The air. The moon so bright you could see vapor trails. The cold. Snow on the mountains circling the little half-assed ski town. The steel train tracks going nineteenth-century straight into the mountain.

John waxing philosophical:

“Waiting’s good for you. You notice things. You slow time down into its components. Too often we put our consciousness on cruise control. You autopilot your way through the day, the week, your existence in this world….”

Pop psychology from that motorcycle book, I imagined, but I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. It was very cold. You wouldn’t have thought it was the summer. Much chillier than those mountains behind Boulder.

I looked up the long platform. The midget was smoking. We had no smokes, I considered going up and asking him for one to keep out the cold.

“Look at all those stars,” John said.

He was annoying me and I purposely did not look up.

“I should have done astronomy. I should have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I didn’t have the A levels. You had, Alex, you should have gone. But I suppose you needed to be near your ma.”

I gave him a look that he didn’t see.

“Terrible business, your ma. I was very close to her too, you know. You know, I agreed with their decision. Your da and ma,” John said.

Never a good time for this topic and especially not when John had bloody killed someone and I’d been shot at and the cops were after us and I hadn’t had a hit of heroin after a long, stressful day that still was not coming to a fucking end.

“What decision was that?” I said coldly.

“You know, not to do the chemotherapy,” John said almost breezily. I could have punched the bastard.

“You supported their embrace of death,” I said incredulously.

“Now, Alex, that’s not fair. Homeopathy could have worked, those alternative treatments are not nonsense, there’s more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy and all that. You’re awful hard on your dad, Alex. It was your ma’s decision too.”

John had no idea how close he was to having the shit beaten out of him. I was seething. This, he well knew, was a subject we did not ever talk about. This and my resignation from the cops, but more so this. Was he trying to provoke me into a fight to forget what had happened? Or was he just being stupid? My blood was boiling, and after all, this was all his fault. I bit my tongue and walked over to the midget.

Maybe, technically, he wasn’t a midget. If he’d been a woman, you would have said she was petite. He stood about five feet tall, with a beard, leather jacket, jeans, Denver Nuggets cap. Forties, I would have guessed.

“Couldn’t bum a smoke, could I?” I said.

“Certainly,” he said and handed over a pack of Marlboro Lights. I took one and lit mine from his.

“I don’t normally smoke, but it’s freezing,” I explained.

“Yeah, we’re nine thousand feet up, it makes a difference,” he said.

“Train’s late,” I said, drawing in the tobacco gratefully.

“Yeah, the California Zephyr’s late. The California Zephyr’s always late. It goes at forty miles an hour and stops anytime the engineer wants to let people off.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. Did you know that in Greek zephyr means ‘fast wind’? Amtrak employs a satirist to name its trains.”

I grinned.

“You’re pretty funny,” I said.

“David Redhorse,” he said, and offered me his hand.

I shook it. The name sounded odd and familiar. Though probably Redhorse out here was like Lawson back home. Millions of the buggers.

“Alex, uh, Wilson, Alexander Wilson,” I said. “Did you get stuck too? I noticed you getting on at Denver and then getting off the train a little behind us at Fraser.”

“No, no, I have relatives up here, I was just visiting them. I get to ride the train free,” he said. “What were you doing in Fraser?”

“Uh, nothing, just traveling, we’re tourists.”

“I thought I detected an accent. Australian?” he asked.

“Yeah, yeah, we’re Australian,” I said, and then, realizing that John might blow the gaff and make the man suspicious, called him over.

“John, come over, David here was asking where we were from and I was saying we’re just a couple of bums from Australia, traveling around the world.”

“Yeah, we’re from Sydney, Sydney, Australia, going to Chicago now,” John said, giving me a look. The North Belfast accent was so unlike the well-known accent from the south of Ireland that you could conceivably confuse it with Australian.

“Chicago, how come you came out here?” Redhorse asked.

I looked at him. There was something about him. Something not quite right. Where had I heard that name before?

“We got on the wrong train at Denver,” I said, “we were heading to Chicago but we got on the wrong train. West instead of east. Going to Chicago, then New York and then Europe.”

“Wrong train, huh? Not surprised, they don’t tell you anything at Denver. Lucky you noticed you were going west. The life, though. I’d love to travel the world, but I’m afraid to fly, always have been, you’ll never get me on a plane,” Redhorse said.

“Statistically, it’s the safest way to travel, safer than the train, much safer than a car,” John said.

“Well, that’s not the way I see it. If you have a car crash or a train crash it’s not necessarily fatal, but in almost every plane crash everybody dies,” Redhorse said.

John said something back, but I was having trouble concentrating. The ketch wanted to find a home. Redhorse was making me nervous. He said something to John. They both looked at me.

“Alex, David was asking what sports we play in Australia,” John said, giving me a nudge.

“Oh, lots of sports, Australian Rules football, cricket, rugby, that sort of thing, you don’t play them in America,” I said.

“You’ll never guess what my favorite sport is,” Redhorse said with a big grin.

John shrugged.

“Go on, guess,” Redhorse said, nodding.

“I don’t know, baseball?” I suggested.

“No. Think about it, what would be the most unlikely sport I could play?” he said, barely able to contain a chuckle.

“I really don’t know, football, I mean, soccer,” I said.

“No, basketball,” he said impatiently, and then cracked up laughing.

Neither John nor I got the joke.

“Don’t you see?” he said, choking with giggles.

“Not really,” John said.

“You have to be six foot plus. Seven foot plus. Jeez. I thought basketball was big in Australia, that’s what I heard, I heard it was getting big over there,” Redhorse said.

“Oh, oh, yeah, it is, sure we watch it, don’t we, Alex?” John said.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, regretting this whole Australian thing now.

“What’s your favorite NBA team?” Redhorse asked without suspicion.

“Um, favorite team, well, um, oh yeah, I like the, uh, Harlem Globetrotters, they’re pretty good, they always seem to win,” John said, and I nodded in agreement.

Redhorse looked at us strangely for a second and decided to change the subject.

“So are you boys students?”

“Yes, we’re on our gap year, we’re traveling the world before going back to university,” I said.

“Yeah, like I say, love to do that, but you can’t go by boat, it’s too expensive. Besides, I don’t like to be away from the reservation for too long, my family lives there, I am the only one that lives in Denver.”

“You’re an Indian?” John asked.

“Yes.”

“Cool,” John said.

“From what I read, the Native Americans around Denver got treated pretty rough,” I said.

“I suppose you read about the Sand Creek Massacre,” Redhorse muttered, and threw away his cigarette, immediately lighting another.

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s good that people know that history, but it’s the wrong focus, there were many little massacres and killings that never got recorded, they stole all this land from us, Denver is stolen land, these mountains are stolen land, not that we claimed to own them, we were the guardians of it, the white man claims to own it,” Redhorse explained quickly and deliberately like he’d said this all before many times.

“Is that what you do for a living, then? You’re a lawyer, an advocacy person?” I asked him.

“No, no, I’m a cop,” Redhorse said with a little grin.

John looked at me, froze. I shook my head slightly. We weren’t going to react, we weren’t going to run for it, we weren’t going to do anything stupid at all.

“You’re a policeman?” John asked hesitantly.

“Yes.”

“What type, like traffic or drugs or—”

“I’m a homicide detective,” he said flatly.

“You’re a homicide detective?” I found myself asking.

“Yes, I know what you’re thinking, I’m too short to impress people, I can’t intimidate witnesses, that sort of thing?” Redhorse said, again, like he’d done this speech many times before too.

“No, I wasn’t thinking that.”

“No? Well, a lot of people do think that, they think I’m too short and they think because I’m an Indian and my parents live on a reservation that I get drunk all the time. Well, they don’t and I don’t and I’ve got one of the highest clearance rates in the department.”

“I’m sure you have, I wasn’t thinking any of those things, I’m sure you’re a great detective,” I said.

“I am,” he agreed.

“W-what are you working on at the moment?” I asked.

John had turned white, lapsed into silence; he was sucking desperately on his cigarette and generally drawing attention to himself.

“Where’s that train?” he was mumbling quietly.

“Oh, well, I’m running the RH department. Not leading any particular case,” he said.

“Ok,” I said. “What’s RH?”

“Robbery Homicide,” he said flatly.

“No interesting cases you can talk about?”

“Well, my big headache is a felonious assault that’s become a murder now the victim’s died. The lawyers are saying that the suspect didn’t have his Miranda rights read to him in Chinese within twenty-four hours of his arrest. Both victim and suspect were Chinese. A lot of eyewitnesses, but we might have to let him go. That sort of thing is out of our hands, though. DA’s problem, not ours. Still, if he gets off, it’s in our files. It makes me crazy.”

He shook his head, clenched his fists, obviously upsetting him a bit to think about this, to think about guilty men getting away with a terrible crime. I smiled nervously.

“Where is that bloody train?” John said again.

I smoked and told myself to relax. The cop seemed ok. Like most cops, he’d want to complain about his work. The best thing to do was ease him by keeping him talking until the train came. Still, my mind wasn’t thinking as clearly as it could and we had obviously fucked up somehow by mentioning the Harlem Globetrotters. Any question would do.

“So this Miranda, whatever happened to him? You always hear about the Miranda rights on TV. NYPD Blue, Law and Order, all that, but you never hear about Miranda. He must have got off because they didn’t read him his rights? Is that right?” I said.

“Yeah, it is, Ernesto Miranda got away with kidnap, torture, and rape on a retarded girl. Shit, man. But the story has a happy ending,” Redhorse said with grim satisfaction, his eyes lighting up, so that even in the moonlight I could tell they were a deep brown.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, a few years later he got stabbed to death in a bar. Nice play, I’d do the same if it was my kid, wait a few years, kill the bastard.”

“Yeah,” I said.

And it was only then I remembered my phone call to the police department. That was only this morning? Detective Redhorse. Jesus. And he was a good ’un. I could see he was a digger. He was one of those who would keep after you. And was he here just by chance? No. Bad cops believe in coincidence. At Denver he got on the train with us. He got off with us at Fraser and was now going back to Denver with us. I looked at him. Not coincidence. This was the type who played a hunch. Hear about two guys running from a murder scene. Go to the train station, follow a couple of guys, see what happens.

“What happened to your shoulder?” he asked sharply.

“What?”

“You’re bleeding.”

I looked at my shoulder and, sure enough, blood was soaking through the paper towels and onto my jacket. Just a spatter or two. I decided to play it casual.

“You know anything about first aid?” I asked.

“A little.”

“Yeah, we were climbing up some rocks in Boulder yesterday,” I began, but Redhorse interrupted.

“You don’t need to finish, you didn’t have the proper equipment, you fell, am I right?” Redhorse asked, shaking his head.

“Uh, yeah,” I said, trying to sound embarrassed.

“It’s always the same, you don’t know how many kids get injured every year. Some die, you know. You kids, you just can’t go off into the mountains unprepared. Wow, it’s always the same. So dry around here too, because of the drought, tree limb, root can just snap on you. Better let me take a look at it,” Redhorse said with a sigh.

It would be suspicious to refuse, so I rolled down my T-shirt and bent down so he could take a look. John staring at me aghast. I shot him a glance to bloody play it cool.

“Ok, ok, let me see. Yeah, it’s just a scrape. Keep it clean, get a big Band-Aid on it, don’t pick it when it scabs over. And don’t go climbing without proper safety gear,” Redhorse said.

“The train,” John yelled, “it’s the train.”

I looked down the line.

A tiny light in the distance. John frantic:

“Look, what’s that light? Do you see that light? That’s not a truck. I tell you, it’s the train, it has to be, it’s the train, believe me. Alex, have you got our tickets? Look, it’s getting bigger. It’s the bloody train. It’s coming. Maybe it’s a house light. No, it’s it.”

The sound of an air horn, the massive engine, the bell on the crossing. It pulled in aggressively, slowed and stopped. We piled into the carriage, bumping people with our luggage and belongings, looking for seats, but it was slim pickings. The dirty train sweating with exhausted people who had just come through the desert and over the Rockies in thirty hours of Amtrak’s version of hell. Eventually, the steward found three seats together in the nonsmoking section.

Redhorse sat next to a hairy man who asked him if Jesus was his personal savior. He didn’t reply, lit himself a cigarette, took out The Grapes of Wrath, and began reading furiously.

“Have you accepted Jesus into your life?” the man asked me.

“I have,” I said solemnly, the only sensible answer on these occasions.

“That’s great, and what about you?” the man asked John.

“Well, no, not really,” John said.

I groaned.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to tell you a little bit about our Lord Jesus Christ,” the man said.

“I don’t mind at all,” John said.

Having killed someone a few hours earlier, John was obviously vulnerable at this point. I stood up and found my soap bag.

“John, I’m away to the bathroom, ok?” I said, and closed my lips very tight, which I hoped communicated my desire that he should keep his bloody mouth shut, even if the Messiah himself showed up and asked him to confess. A peeler on one side, a bloody missionary on the other. Fantastic. I was sure at the next stop a man with a lie detector would get on.

The bathroom was remarkably clean, considering the length of the journey and the busyness of the train. I found my heroin, boiled it, got a clean needle, exposed a vein, tied it off, and sank away from all this madness. The rattling train, the long tracks, the mountain air. I nodded off, slept a little, woke up as the train went over a set of points.

Back to my seat. Redhorse had gone.

“Where’s the cop?” I asked John.

“They moved him to the smoking section,” John said.

“And Jesus said unto the nonbelievers, ye must be born again, it’s not enough to just keep the commandments,” the missionary said.

I sat down. The ketch had calmed me. Didn’t matter now, let them convert John, arrest me, didn’t bloody matter.

Three in the morning when we got into Denver. David Redhorse came back and wished us a pleasant trip. I said good luck in catching killers. Without further ado, he said goodbye. So his appearance here had been coincidence after all. He hadn’t been watching the train for a couple of runaways or, if he had, he figured we didn’t seem the murdering type. And for a peeler he wasn’t a bad sort. I just hoped he wouldn’t put two and two together. Most cops can be pretty stupid, but Redhorse clearly wasn’t. I was relieved to see him go and bloody shocked when he got back on twenty minutes later.

Oh, shit, he has put it together, he’s come to arrest us, I thought, and grabbed John’s shoulder and tried to pull him up. We could run down the train, exit the next car, get back out into Denver. Probably Redhorse wouldn’t have had time to seal off the station.

“John, we have to get up,” I said.

I pulled him to his feet, but it was too late. David Redhorse walked over to us.

I took a deep breath and got ready for fight or flight. Take this wee shite easy.

“Guys, I just thought I’d come back and tell you, because I know you don’t have a sleeper, the train is going to be stuck here all night, there’s a big derailment up ahead on the line. Track’s blocked. Nobody hurt, but if I know Amtrak, no one’s going to tell you anything about it until the morning and the train isn’t going to get going till tomorrow afternoon, if then.”

“Shit,” I said.

“You boys need the name of a hotel?” Redhorse asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“The Holburn on Sherman, always got rooms, even this time of night,” he said.

“Thanks, we’ll check it out,” I said.

“Ok, well, nice meeting you,” he said.

I shook his hand and he headed off back down the track. Now I really believed that he had decided we were harmless.

“What are we going to do, Alex?” John asked.

“We’re getting off this train, that’s for damn sure,” I whispered.

Later…

It’s four a.m.

A dead time in a dead town. The prostitutes are gone from Colfax Avenue, the patrons home from the LoDo bars. Magpies, crows debate the labyrinth of alleys and deserted cul-de-sacs. The lights are on at Coors Field, but the game is long since done.

Fuck the Holburn. No way am I going there. So instead we go back to our old place, but the bastard there wants us to pay for another week, cash in advance, which is suspicious and makes me think that he thinks we’re in some kind of trouble. I don’t like it, and breezily refuse.

I explain it to John, and reading Lonely Planet he suggests the youth hostel on Seventeenth Street. On the way there, they’re delivering The Denver Post. I pay a quarter, find the story on page three.

A man fell to his death from the fourth floor of the Mountain View apartment complex on Cheesman Park today. Eyewitnesses spoke of a struggle with an assailant. “The building has been burglarized twice in the last month,” said Jean Simmons, a neighbor. Police are looking for two men said to be light-skinned Hispanic males in their twenties or early thirties. A DPD officer is believed to have shot and seriously wounded one of the assailants.

I stop reading, put the paper down. The first thing I have to do is reassure John:

“John, you can relax, a dozen eyewitnesses, three of them cops, and they have us pegged as wetbacks. Jesus Christ. That little crack in Spanish to the dude in the army T-shirt worked.”

He grins at me. “Aye. Typical. You see what you want to see. Bloody racists. Xenophobes. All burglars are fucking Latinos,” he says.

I nod. It doesn’t let us off the hook, but it helps. Maybe that was why Redhorse had changed his mind about us. Of course, I don’t tell John that sometimes the cops are tricky about what information they release. In any case, he looks visibly relieved.

An exhausting walk. The youth hostel. Overhead fans. Insomniac Swedish boys flirting with German girls. Clean, nice, inviting. John collapses into a chair, I go to the desk.

The receptionist, bald guy, sweating in a white wife-beater shirt and thinking he’s part of the Christmas story: “There’s no room at the inn, we’re full.”

“Look, we’re desperate,” I say.

“Plenty of motels out on Colfax near the airport,” he suggests.

“How far?”

“Three, four miles, I don’t know,” he says.

“Isn’t there anywhere closer?” I plead.

The man looks at me for a minute.

“Where you from? What’s that accent?” he says a little unexpectedly.

“We’re from Ireland,” I say, too exhausted to lie anymore.

“I thought so,” he says, “I thought so. Sean Dillon, ex — Denver Fire Department,” he says, sticking out his hand.

I shake it wearily.

“Alex Flaherty,” I say.

“I golfed the ring of Kerry once,” Sean says.

“Is that so?”

“Rained every day. Miserable. Yeah, look, about the room. How picky are you?”

“We want anywhere, we’re desperate.”

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be a hotel, right? Just a room, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me see your passports.”

We take out our passports, show the man, they’re British passports but they’re registered and stamped in Belfast. He doesn’t notice I gave him a fake name, seems satisfied.

“Yeah, look. If Pat lets you, there’s a building, a few blocks east on Colfax. Noisy out there, but Pat’ll let you stay for, I don’t know, ten bucks a night.”

“That’s fine, anything,” I say.

“Finder’s fee, give me twenty bucks, see what I can do,” Sean says.

I give him twenty bucks.

“Ok, it’s late. I’ll call Patrick and see if it’s ok,” he says, picks up the phone, dials a number.

“Sorry, Pat, I knew you’d be up. Yeah, I know, me too, but at least I’m paid for it. Couple of possibles for you. I told them you’d charge ten bucks for that room. Irish kids…. No, from Ireland, for real…. They seem ok, one looks like Big Foot on a bad hair day, the other, I don’t know, Val Kilmer’s skinny brother.”

He puts down the phone.

“Pat says you can come over. You’re very lucky, you can have one of the furnished rooms for a while. It’s on the fifth floor. He’ll meet you in the lobby.”

We walk all the way from the youth hostel to the building. Not just a few blocks. Twenty bloody blocks. The front door is open. We go in. No sign of Pat. The elevator is busted, too, so we hike up to the fifth floor. On one apartment there’s a note and a key taped to the door. It says, “For the two Irish boys, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

A studio apartment. Foldout bed. Tiny bedroom — box room off to one side, kitchenette. Damp on the walls, crumbling ceiling, plastic — fake wood tiles on all the floors. Small bathroom, a great view over Colfax and the mountains to the west.

“It’ll do,” John says.

“I want the bed in the wee room,” I tell him.

John is too exhausted to argue. I slouch into the little room and close the door, John bursts into tears and weeps for I don’t know how long, since within ten minutes I’m out for the bloody count.