Cold Quarry Read online

  “All right, mister. Turn around and start walking. And keep your hands in the air.”

  “Why? So you can shoot me in the back the way you did Chester Carew?”

  “I said shut up! I didn’t shoot nobody. But I’m about to shoot you if you don’t get yourself moving.” The accent was thickly Southern. The voice sounded young—I guessed early twenties—and scared. I wondered what of.

  “Okay. Okay.” I started to turn.

  “Wait a minute.”

  What now?

  “Let me see your wallet.”

  “You want to rob me too, is that it?”

  “Let me see your friggin’ wallet,” he demanded.

  I pulled it out and handed it to him.

  He flipped it open and looked at my license. “From Virginia,” he read. “Frank Pavlicek. … Oh, Jesus. You’re a goddamned private investigator.”

  I stared at him and shrugged.

  “Shit,” he said. He repeated it four times. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “If you decide to shoot me, they’ll find you. You’ll leave a lot of traces of your presence.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “You hear?” He swung the barrel of the gun away for an instant; then he brought it back hard against the side of my mouth.

  The blow from the cold steel felt like being struck with a heavy chunk of ice. My tongue tasted blood and my lip seemed to have suddenly caught fire.

  “Now turn around and get moving!”

  “All right.” I nodded vigorously. I guess I’d pushed him about as far as I could. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  Turning, I felt the shotgun drop completely away from my face and heard the thump of my wallet and the jingle of my keys as he flung them off into the woods. It was the brief mistake I’d been waiting for.

  I kept on turning to spin a complete three-sixty, squatting toward the ground as I did and driving forward into his lower body. I must’ve had thirty or forty pounds on the guy and I was lucky; he’d instinctively pointed the gun toward the sky as he’d tossed the keys. He gasped and let out a sound like a bull snorting when I hit him. The Mossberg went sailing from his grasp. It also discharged into the treetops with a thundering boom while we tumbled together in a heap to the muddy ground.

  Keeping ahold of him, however, proved to be like trying to wrestle a wriggling trout. I opted for going after the gun. Maybe that was my mistake. The young man recovered quickly and leapt to his feet. As he did, I noticed he’d torn the shoulder of his fatigues in the fall. A colorful tattoo, a firebird it looked like to me, winked out for a second before he shifted the ripped material back across his upper arm. Then he panicked. Simply gave up on the weapon and ran. He was already about twenty yards down the ridge by the time I was able to grab the gun. His dark boots flying over fallen logs made thumping noises like a deer pounding through the trees.

  I let him go. Plenty of tracks to follow, as long as it didn’t rain later. I’d also seen the mark on his shoulder and I hoped there might be some latent prints on the weapon. I fished a tissue from the now-muddy pocket of my town jacket and pressed it against my lip to stop the bleeding. The front of my cord pants were soaked and spotted with mud as well.

  I reached into my coat pocket the way my attacker had and felt for my cell phone to dial 911—maybe I could get somebody on this idiot’s tail before he got too far. Only one problem. It wasn’t there. Had I left it in the truck? No, I remembered stuffing it into my pocket as I entered the woods. I hadn’t realized it, but the masked man must have taken it along with my keys. Wonderful.

  I looked over the weapon. This was no recreational duck hunter’s gun. A sleek black über-modified model, similar to the military version, it held at least five more three-inch shells in the magazine ready to pump into the chamber.

  I spent the next fifteen minutes rummaging around in the brush before I finally came up with my wallet and my key ring snagged around an exposed rhododendron root. No such luck with the phone, however. Maybe the guy still had it with him. It would most likely end up in a trash can somewhere.

  I followed the masked man’s tracks until they ended at the highway about three-quarters of a mile from where I had parked my truck. So he must’ve had a vehicle too. Or maybe someone had been waiting for him. Either way, he had to have been in one heck of a hurry to get out of there because I found his second mistake lying in plain sight on the shoulder of the road.

  It was a handheld global positioning receiver, a Magellan Sport Trak Pro, built especially for climbers and hikers. Scuffed with dirt but brand-new from the looks of it. Was the guy worried about getting lost?

  A slick shotgun and now this shiny new piece of hardware in trade for my cell phone—seemed like a better than even exchange as far as I was concerned.

  Something told me this was going to be one heck of a funeral.

  2

  “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we now commend …”

  The pastor talked on, but his words soon faded into the background of a staccato whoosh of wings. Two red-tails and one broad-wing hawk selected for the release leapt from their respective falconer’s gloves. They shot away above the headstones, maybe the oddest and most beautiful version of a twenty-one-gun salute I’d ever seen.

  To his credit, the pastor got the message of the birds’ sudden premature departure and hastily concluded his sermon. Chester Carew may have been one of the most fervent followers of Jesus I had ever known, but he’d never been one for long preaching.

  His final resting place was a tidy affair, an orderly arrangement of a dozen or so tombstones on the heights overlooking the factory bottomland below. In Nitro, the pulse of the Kanawha River was never far away. In St. Albans, Institute, Dunbar, South Charleston, and Kanawha City—most of the industrial towns surrounding the state capital—the river flowed in wide snaking arcs past chemical plants, boat landings, and fine river houses. Here, at the metro area’s farthest reaches, it did much the same; except that not being blessed with a modern chemical facility, the old factory buildings down along the shore were mostly either dead or dying. The main evidence of industrial activity came from the gargantuan trio of steam stacks of the John Amos power plant belching out their smoky product in the distance beyond the rising girders of the I-64 bridge. Much closer in, around the casket, fresh-cut flowers held out their blossoms bravely against the cold.

  “That was really nice,” Marcia D’Angelo whispered in my ear.

  She meant the hawks. For a moment, I’d almost forgotten about her leaning against me with her arm wrapped in mine. Marsh was a class act. She’d met Chester Carew the year before and said she wanted to drive out for the funeral. She was also my former girlfriend. We were ultimately incompatible, she’d decided, which had started me wondering whether any two human beings were ever really compatible. My ex-wife had used the same logic on me for different reasons years before.

  On my other side, my daughter, Nicole, also had an arm looped within mine. My best friend, Jake Toronto, stood several yards in front of us at the edge of the small crowd, a frail old man leaning heavily against his shoulder. All in all, a sad reunion for a sad occasion.

  “You okay?” Marcia asked. She kept her tone low.

  I nodded. “You?”

  “Fine. I hate funerals.”

  Chester’s wife, Betty, and his young son, Jason, moved into position beside the casket. The pastor began speaking to them about something no one else could hear.

  “Are you going to get involved with this … Chester’s shooting, I mean?” Marcia asked.

  “I guess I’m already involved.”

  After returning to my truck, I’d driven down to Dutch Hollow Park to find a pay phone and called the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Department. By the time I’d finished talking to the two deputies who’d shown and turned the shotgun over to them (I decided to hang on to the GPS unit), it was nearly time for the funeral to begin. I’d brushed off my coat as best I could, found a change of pants in my overnight bag,
and rushed to the church. Marcia had shaken her head. “You look awful,” Nicole had said. Jake had waited patiently to hear what happened. After I explained about the man in the woods, they’d helped me get cleaned up further so as to be at least halfway presentable for the service.

  “Do you have to be involved?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  Marcia nodded. I could sense her disapproval but she said nothing. We’d all driven in separately the night before and were staying at a motel at the Cross Lanes exit off the interstate, a Sleep Inn just over the hill from an industry that was thriving: a thousand-slot “racino,” as its promoters liked to call it, complete with a greyhound racing track and video poker. Apparently, suckers spring eternal, even here in the shoulder of the Appalachian Bible belt.

  A particular numbness settled into the pit of my stomach. It was the same as I’d felt at my own father’s funeral a decade before. All the conversations I’d had with Chester over the past three or four years, mostly about falconry, but about other things as well, came flooding back to me.

  If you’ve lived in West Virginia your whole life and have any brains about you, Carew once said, you learn to endure the hillbilly comments and inbreeding jokes about Appalachia with a certain amount of defiance and pride. I’d heard the jokes ever since I’d lived in Virginia. What’s the state flower of West Virginia? A satellite dish. You get the idea. In New York, we used to assume the same sort of superiority over New Jersey or Upstate. I’ve been told they say the same thing in St. Louis about Arkansas. Why do you suppose we do that, Carew had asked, run down somebody else’s home turf in order to elevate our own?

  I stared across the blue tarp surrounding the casket at Betty Carew. Her face was stoic as she listened to the pastor’s words, the wind catching wisps of her white hair and winding them about like tendrils, though her eyes betrayed a hurt the likes of which I could only imagine. She and Chester had been together for what, thirty years? Beside her, the boy shifted his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other as he continued holding on to her hand. He was seven or eight years old and was adopted, but besides that I knew little about him.

  The wind rose again and several of the three or four dozen other mourners in attendance shivered against the damp air. More than half were falconer friends from Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, but the rest were people from Chester and Betty’s church or people he’d known from his work at the chemical plant in Institute. Chester had lived in the Kanawha Valley his entire life. This was home ground for him and he had loved it. At least the local earth had seen fit to return the favor and had not been too frozen to delay the interment.

  When the ceremony ended, the assembled mourners began to file from the cemetery, navigating the narrow walkway along the edge of the bluff back toward their cars. Marcia, Nicole, and I went over to Toronto and the old man at his side.

  “Marcia, Nicky, I don’t think either of you have ever met Jake’s father.”

  Felipe Baldovino—he and Toronto’s mother had never married—listed hard to port into the wind, using his son’s ample arm as support. He was shorter than Toronto and much thinner, except for a bloated belly. Across his wizened face he bore a perpetually surprised expression, the result of thick gray eyebrows curving upward. Today he wore a threadbare black overcoat with a tall gray fedora atop his head that must have been a holdover from the sixties.

  “A pleasure to meet you young ladies,” Felipe said. His voice was firm despite his frailty and the cold.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Marcia said.

  “Me too,” said my daughter.

  “I’m only sorry it had to be on such a sad occasion. Chester was a good man. A very good man. And my son here … well, I suppose you all know how he felt about him.”

  He looked at my mouth. “Frank, what happened to your face?”

  Marcia and Nicole had managed to help me stop the bleeding from the corner of my Up, but when I’d looked in the mirror in the church bathroom, I also saw a nice little bruise blossoming there. I exchanged glances with Toronto. He’d been the one who’d called to tell me about Chester’s death a few days before, but his expression, or lack thereof, gave nothing away.

  “Let’s just say I had a bad encounter with a pine tree,” I said.

  “Did you come all the way down from New York, Mr. Baldovino?” Marcia asked. She was the only one of us, besides Felipe, dressed appropriately for mourning: a long black wool overcoat, black pants and fashionable low-heel black shoes. From me she knew how Felipe had lived in Queens while his son had grown up mostly without a father on the streets of the Bronx and Yonkers. Felipe had worked for years as a longshoreman. He had also, according to Toronto, nearly drank himself to death, chased just about anything in a skirt and, although he’d never physically struck Toronto’s mother, had inflicted unimaginable mental anguish on the woman he refused to make his wife. Seems Felipe, at the time, had had this little problem of a wife and five children over in Queens.

  I was surprised a few years before when Toronto had told me he was going up to New York one weekend to visit his father. But by then his mother had already been dead for more than a decade, the old man wasn’t in the best of health, and maybe Toronto had wanted, if not to forgive him, at least to allow the remaining years of his father’s life to include some form of relationship with his estranged son.

  “No, no. Didn’t Jake tell you? I own a cabin maybe thirty, forty miles from here,” Felipe said. “A few of us got together and bought it to go hunting way back when I was still working the docks. Now I’m the only one left. We didn’t pay but a couple hundred dollars for it. Just a battered old place … like me, eh?” He chuckled to himself. “ ‘Course that was pretty good dough back then.”

  “You still come down here to hunt?” Marcia asked. She knew he meant deer hunting.

  “Nah.” He waved his hand. “I come down for a few weeks every now and then just to check on the place. That’s how I got to know Chester. Didn’t think I’d ever be attending his funeral though while I was here.”

  No one said anything for a few moments.

  “That was a nice touch with the release,” I said to Jake. “Whose idea was it?”

  “Mine,” he said. “I got Mark Bigelow and Lonnie Richards to set it up. They run that rehab operation and breeding facility down toward Beckley.”

  “I didn’t know Chester all that well, but from what I remember and what Frank has told me, it seems to me it’s exactly what he would have wanted,” Marcia said.

  Toronto nodded. “Still remember the day Chester called and asked me to be his sponsor … like I could teach him anything.”

  His father poked him in the arm. “Hey, I told him you were my son. He said he checked you out with all those other hawk people and they said you was the best.”

  “Hawk people” was how Felipe referred to anyone having anything to do with falconry. He said he couldn’t see why anyone would waste time chasing a bird around the woods when you could a lot more easily just grab a box of shells and a thirty-ought-six and go.

  A wiry man with dark red hair and a goatee came walking over to us. “Hey … Jake, Frank, you guys got a couple of seconds?”

  Toronto and I turned to look at him. Damon Farraday was a plumber from across the river in St. Albans who was a recent apprentice of Chester’s. He’d probably spent more time with the old guy in the past few months than anyone besides the new widow.

  “Geez, Frank, what happened to your mouth?”

  I repeated the pine tree story.

  “That’s too bad. Listen,” he said, “I’d really like to talk with you guys.”

  “Yeah?” Toronto said.

  I was afraid Farraday might want to talk about what would happen to Chester’s remaining two birds, which seemed a bit untimely given the fact that he wasn’t even cold yet in the ground.

  But instead he said, “I suppose you guys have heard I’m the one found Chester the other day.”

  �
��Right. We know.”

  I hadn’t, in fact, but obviously Toronto had known so I said nothing.

  “I’d really like to talk with you guys about it. I mean, you two used to be cops, right? And nothin’ like that’s ever happened to me before.”

  “You must’ve already talked to the police, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but you guys knew Chester, and I want to get your take on it. I got some ideas of my own about who mighta killed him.”

  “Oh, yeah? You think we got time for that, Frank?”

  I guessed my gunman had been about the same age as Farraday; not as tall, however.

  “Plus, Betty wanted me to ask if you two will be stopping by the house before you leave town,” Farraday said. “There’ll be a bunch of folks and food and stuff, but, Frank … she especially says she’d like to talk with you.”

  I glanced back at Marcia and Nicole and at the remnants of mud on my clothes. I also felt the inside of my swollen lip with my tongue. “Be happy to talk with her,” I said.

  Another mourner, a woman, came along in front of us. She was of medium build, wore her wavy blond hair in a short bob, and was dressed from head to toe in the chocolate-brown uniform of a West Virginia conservation agent, a forty-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun holstered to her side. Farraday introduced her. Her name was Gwen Hallston.

  “So you must be the famous Jake Toronto.” She looked Toronto up and down. “Heard a lot about you from Chester.”

  “Mmm. …” Toronto said.

  She said she had had a great deal of respect and admiration for the old falconer.

  “He’ll be missed, that’ for sure,” I said.

  “You going by the house now?” Farraday asked her.

  “No. I’ve got to head down to Cabin Creek for a meeting.”

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “What’s your opinion of how Chester died? You buy into this hunter theory?”

  She shrugged. “We get our share of hunting deaths, that’s true. Except, of course, it’s usually the people carrying the guns.”