Denver Strike Page 9

  He longed for a chance to take the offensive against Nek and his henchmen. The more he saw of the Silver King and his operation, the more he was struck by the putrescent spirit that marked it. Everything Nek and his men touched seemed dirtier for it, sickened by it.

  Hawker thought about Melissa Nek for a moment with a fondness that startled him. An odd woman, no doubt. But then, she had lived an odd life.

  At an early age, she had somehow fallen under Nek’s power. He had forced her to marry him, and then he had abused her physically. The things he made Melissa do had so disgusted her that she refused to even talk about them.

  Many women would have been forever dwarfed by such maltreatment, forever sickened and bitter toward men.

  But Melissa’s good instincts had somehow survived. Something deep inside her had insisted that she try to live, try to experiment with life.

  Hawker had been her first experiment. And it had been a success. Now she was out to help him, do a favor in return.

  The vigilante just hoped she wasn’t caught. Bill Nek wasn’t the type to show much mercy, and the loss of Melissa would be a hell of a loss.

  He hoped she took care.

  One thing her call did was change his plans for the entire morning. He had planned to meet Tom Dulles and head up into the mountains to look for Robert Carthay. Carthay was taking a hell of a chance looking for Nek’s hitmen on his own, and he had to be stopped.

  But now Dulles would have to try to find and stop the old man on his own.

  Hawker called the Denver cop and told him that he wouldn’t be able to make it. Dulles wasn’t convinced he was making a wise choice.

  “Hell, Hawk, that woman’s crazy! She’s the one who stuck a gun to our heads and kidnapped us. When you think about it, it’s damned embarrassing to have been handled like that by a woman—”

  “I agree that she’s no ordinary woman,” the vigilante put in. “But I think she really may have something for us.”

  “Leading you into a trap is more like it.”

  “If that’s so, she could have nailed me last night. She had plenty of opportunity to slip away and get in touch with her husband.”

  “That’s another thing that bothers me,” Dulles objected. “I’ve lived in Colorado all my life, and I’ve known about Bill Nek most of that time. You know, a man that rich gets all sorts of stories told about him. But I hardly ever heard anything about his wife. I mean, nothing. After she drove off with you yesterday, it started to bother me. I mean, these ugly old rich dudes like to buy themselves beautiful rich socialites. Then they like to show them off at parties and charity balls, stuff like that. Nek is as rich and ugly as a man can get, so he should have a beautiful socialite wife, right?”

  “She is beautiful,” Hawker put in.

  “Yeah, but she never gets out. Hell, I didn’t even remember hearing about the wedding. So last night, while I was fuming around wondering if you were dead or alive, I went down to the Denver Post offices. A friend of mine works in the library there. The ‘library’ is now what newspapers used to call the morgue—”

  “Only a lot more computers,” Hawker added.

  “Right. So I looked up Nek. And you know what?”

  “They hardly had a damned thing on him.”

  “Right,” said Dulles. “All these years he’s lived in Denver, and all they had was a few anonymous milquetoast stories on Nek as a silver pioneer, as a minor contributor to some local civic projects. Stuff like that. He’s made the Fortune 500 list every year, but the local reporters can’t even get him to make a comment about it. He’s such a recluse that people hardly even notice that he is a recluse.”

  “Was there anything about Melissa?”

  “One tiny little story,” Dulles said. “It was in the Sunday feature section. The story was all of two inches long. It was just a blurb that said that Nek, known as the Silver King, had been married to an eighteen-year-old girl named Melissa Agno.”

  “Agno? What the hell kind of name is that?”

  “Story didn’t say. You could tell the reporter had taken the information straight from county records. Tried to flesh it out with some background on Nek, but there wasn’t a thing on the woman. Hell, it didn’t even appear in the paper until about a month after their wedding.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Just over five years ago. Since then, there hasn’t been one mention of Mrs. William Nek in The Denver Post.”

  “Was Nek ever married before?”

  “According to the story—and I wouldn’t put much faith in that—it was the first marriage for both of them. But there was a rumor around that Nek had a live-in maid for a lot of years.”

  “Oh? Do you know anything about her?”

  “Not a thing. I guess live-in maids aren’t all that uncommon,” said Dulles.

  “But when a sixty-nine-year-old multimillionaire marries an eighteen-year-old girl, you’d think it would get more notice from the press.”

  “Hell”—Dulles laughed—“that kind of story went out in this state with stories about interracial marriages and sex-change operations.”

  “You’ve got some real weird folks living here in Colorado,” Hawker said dryly.

  “Yeah, and most of them are from someplace else. If you want to see the real weirdos, go to Aspen and hang around the Hotel Jerome for a while. They ought to put a tent over that place and charge admission. Real Coloradoans won’t go anywhere near it.”

  “Well, let’s hope Nek’s wife really does have some information we can use,” said Hawker.

  “If she does know the location of the place where they’re keeping Jimmy Estes and Chuck Phillips, what are you going to do?” Dulles asked.

  “I like you, Tom,” said the vigilante, smiling, “so I’m going to do you a favor. I’m not going to tell you what I’m going to do.”

  twelve

  The waiter was a typical French waiter. He was surly and inefficient. The food was typically French food. It was complicated, the portions were small, and it was ridiculously overpriced. The atmosphere of the restaurant was typically French. It was small, dirty, and badly ventilated.

  Hawker and Melissa Nek sat at a dark corner table studying a U.S. Geological Survey map. The woman wore a chic, slinky gray dress and a hat that looked to be out of a 1940s movie. The clothes made her look older—they gave her a Rita Hayworth sultriness.

  “Are you sure he’s not going to miss this?” Hawker asked her for the fourth time.

  “I told you that I’m not sure about anything,” the woman replied. “He told me he was going to be away from the house for a few days. He was still really mad about you and the policeman making him look like a fool. He had a real dangerous look in his eye when he left this morning.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about,” said Hawker. “I don’t want him to take it out on you.”

  “He already had his chance this morning. When I came back with the new car, he acted like he couldn’t care less. He’s very preoccupied about something.”

  “Yeah,” said Hawker. “He’s afraid his old partners are going to make a success out of the Chicquita Silver Mine. He’s afraid they’ll prove that they’re as good as he is. That’s why he wants the mine so badly. He has a screw loose.”

  “Don’t tell me!” The woman snorted. “I live with him.”

  The vigilante thought for a moment, then spoke. “Melissa, I know you don’t like to talk about it, but I really would like to know the history of you and Nek. I don’t know anything about how you came to marry him, and maybe I can help—”

  The blonde touched her index finger to his lips, silencing him. “You’ve already helped, James,” she said softly. “You’ve helped more than you can ever know.” Beneath the table, she nudged her toe up under Hawker’s slacks and massaged his calf as she added, “It hurts me to talk about it. I know that’s hard for you to understand. But when I’m with you, all the craziness of my life disappears. It almost seems as if it never happened. That
’s why I don’t want to talk about it. When I talk about it, it makes the nice fantasy of you disappear.” She reached across the table and brushed the back of her hand on his cheek. “Let me keep my fantasy, okay? Help me not to spoil it. Don’t ask me anymore, okay?”

  “Okay, Melissa. But if you ever need help, a different kind of help—”

  “Quit, please,” she said, her voice husky. “You make me so damned emotional. Come on, look at the map and tell me what you think.”

  The map was a relief map of the Colorado Rockies. Even on paper the mountains were spectacular. The vigilante noticed several circles penciled in around small mountain towns like Leadville, Redcliff, Silverthorne, Marble, and Ragged Mountain. Beside the circles were scribbled numbers in odd sequence.

  “What do the numbers mean?” Hawker asked.

  The woman shrugged. “I’ve thought a lot about it, and I still don’t know for sure. It probably has something to do with his lease dates and expiration dates. The rest of the numbers probably refer to the various claims he’s filed, maybe, or the dates when he filed.

  “Yeah,” said Hawker. “I can see that now. Most of these claims are really old.”

  “They would have to be,” said Melissa. “They’re in the White River National Forest area. They don’t allow mining claims there anymore. See, that’s half the key to the old bastard’s success. He filed so many claims before there were any regulations that he’s grandfather-claused in on places where no one else is allowed to operate.”

  “These aren’t the only claims he has in the state, though, are they?” Hawker asked.

  “No way. He has hundreds and hundreds. I imagine he has active and abandoned silver mines in almost every county of Colorado.”

  “Then why did you bring just this map?”

  “Because I overheard him talking to the pilot of his Learjet on the phone. He was telling him to make arrangements to fly to Aspen this morning. These are the mines closest to the Aspen airport.”

  The vigilante smiled. “Good work, woman. I may just have to hire you.”

  “Come on,” she blushed. “You always work alone. Your dossier says so.”

  “Not always.” Hawker laughed.

  “Does that mean I can come with you when you leave for Aspen?”

  “How do you know I’m going to rush right up to Aspen?”

  “Because I know you,” said the woman. “And I know how anxious you are to help your friends rid themselves of this whole business. My guess is you’ll leave for Aspen the moment we finish our lunch.”

  Hawker looked at the dollop of strained potatoes on his plate and the coin-size circle of beef hidden behind a dirty sprig of parsley. The French, he thought as he poked at the untouched lunch, are the spoiled brats of Western civilization. Because they are lazy and because they are cowards, they are the eternal prey of would-be dictators. When other nations rush to their rescue, the French unfailingly end up hating their rescuers more than their conquerors. To a gullible world, only the French sense of snobbery keeps them from joining the ranks of the pathetic.

  Hawker touched his tongue to the beef, then returned the beef to his plate. “You are wrong,” he said. “My lunch was finished before the waiter came. I’m going to leave for Aspen now. Can I take this map?”

  The woman smiled. “As long as you promise to bring it back to me.”

  “I promise,” said the vigilante, patting the woman’s hand. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

  The vigilante returned to his hotel and made two quick calls. One was to Jacob Montgomery Hayes in Chicago. The other was to Hayes’s acid-witted butler, Halton Collier Hendricks. Hendricks was in the west of Ireland, taking the “sea cure,” as he put it, for a case of the “American doldrums.”

  Hawker respected these two men more than anyone else in the world, and he had a nice long talk with both of them. Mostly, though, he let them know what he had planned. In the event he wasn’t successful, he didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye to his two old friends.

  That day would come, of course. He lived a life of concentrated violence, of unnatural violence. It was inevitable that his moment of defeat would arrive. Hawker knew that one day he would meet up with someone who feared less than he or who cared about less than he, and he would take the final long step, sent by a bullet or knife blade or bomb or club into the last darkness.

  Until death came knocking, though, he would live his life as fully as possible.

  At the moment, that meant getting ready for the trip to Aspen. It meant packing carefully and effectively, preparing for any emergency. It meant getting ready to travel fast and light and to act surely, ruthlessly, without qualm or regret.

  Hawker went for a short run through the streets of Denver, then did a half-hour of tough calisthenics. Then he set about packing. He packed a leather flight bag with his personal clothing and needs. He could live out of the bag indefinitely, for months if need be.

  Then he opened the two wooden boxes and began to carefully select the weaponry he might need while in the mountains. He spent more than an hour preparing, getting everything just right. As he did, he tried to imagine every eventuality and allow for it. To the vigilante, preparation was one of the most important aspects of any assignment. Furthermore, it was one of the most important aspects of any trip.

  Hawker couldn’t abide traveling with people who packed too much, who carried too much weight, who lived carelessly while on the road.

  In the vigilante’s mind, traveling was a craft. Traveling efficiently was something he took pride in. It increased the enjoyment of all his trips while lessening the hassle. Very, very few people, he had learned, traveled well.

  When he was finished packing, he showered, shaved, then dressed himself in glove-soft woolen slacks, a silky chamois shirt, pure cotton socks, and Vibram-soled boots.

  That done, he called Lomela to see if Tom Dulles had arrived at her cabin hideout yet. There was no answer. Where the hell could they be? The vigilante thought about the possibilities as he dialed SkyCab and arranged for a chopper ride over the mountains to Aspen. The woman on the phone seemed offended that he wanted a helicopter. They had several seats available on their private planes that afternoon, and if it was good enough for the likes of John Denver and Jimmy Buffett, then why not—

  Hawker cut her off short and told her that price was no object. He wanted a chopper, and he wanted a pilot who had some time on his hands—preferably a Nam vet who had spent some time in-country.

  The woman said she would try, though she clearly was not pleased to be forced out of her routine and now would actually have to use her brains to satisfy the needs of a customer.

  The vigilante hung up, grumpy with the American working woman, especially the service secretary. He wondered why so many of them were bitchy, lazy, indifferent, self-important, and so generally worthless. Maybe it was because their National Organization of Women meetings kept them up late at night. Maybe it was because they all had embraced the symptoms of pre-menstrual syndrome as the proper behavior for the modern woman. Whatever the reason, they were irritating as hell. Hawker knew that out of all the hundreds of thousands of service secretaries around the country, there were undoubtedly some good ones—probably a dozen, maybe even more.

  Hawker dialed Mountain Car Rental and got a bored but fairly efficient woman. She reserved a four-wheel-drive vehicle for him in Aspen. No, she couldn’t tell him for sure if it would be a Bronco, a Cherokee, or a Blazer. Yes, he could pay cash if he left a sizable deposit. Yes, she would see that the vehicle was left for him at the airport.

  The vigilante tried Lomela’s number once more. No answer. He lifted his two duffels and stopped at the front desk. He paid the deskman cash in advance for two weeks’ room rental. He palmed a hundred-dollar bill and left just the corner showing when he asked the clerk to make sure no one was allowed access to his room while he was away.

  The hundred disappeared into the clerk’s pocket in a blur as the man made grav
e promises about the sacred rights of the hotel’s guests.

  Hawker got a cab to the airport and found his chopper and pilot waiting. The pilot was a twenty-three-year-old roustabout who would have looked more at home on a horse. Once they were off the ground and Denver was fading into a mass of geometries beneath them, Hawker fanned a pair of hundred-dollar bills and told the pilot he wanted a few detours on their way to Aspen.

  The pilot removed his earphones. “You a drug runner?” he yelled over the whirring racket of the helicopter.

  “Nope. A tourist.”

  “Bullshit. If you’re a tourist, I’m Sylvester Stallone. You a cop?”

  “Nope. I just want to do a little sightseeing.”

  “You look like a cop to me.”

  Hawker met the man’s inquisitive look with a chuckle. “What are you, some kind of game-show host? I didn’t hire this chopper to be asked questions. And I didn’t pull these bills out of my pocket to liven up the conversation. Are you going to fly me around so I can do some sightseeing or not?”

  “Don’t get mad, mister. I just don’t want to do anything illegal.”

  “Yeah? Are you sure you’re not just afraid to fly something different than this hobbyhorse course to Aspen? Look, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, buddy. I hear it takes a pretty good chopper pilot to handle treetop stuff in these mountains. If you can’t handle the thin air, just say so. Hell, I’m happy you’ve got the guts to admit it. I don’t want to get splattered all over the side of a mountain.”

  The man’s face flushed slightly. He reached out and took the bills. “Friend,” he said, “if it had controls, I could fly an elephant up an ant’s ass. There’s no place in these hills I’m afraid to fly. Just tell me what you want to see, and I’ll take you there. Like I said, as long as it’s legal.”

  Trying not to smile, Hawker pulled out the map and showed the pilot. The pilot’s name was Jake. Jake said the four abandoned silver mines shown on the chart were way the hell off the beaten track, but he could get to every one of them. No problem.

  It had snowed in the mountains, and they flew over a fairy-tale world of silver trees sprinkled with silver snow, all glittering on a rolling blanket of white. Leadville was a gingerbread village between snowy peaks. Cars on Highway 24 were colorful toys on the twisty-turny mountain road, and the shadow of the helicopter blew past them like a dark cloud.