Mission

Peter Robertson

Description

When a drowned man is pulled from flooded Boulder Creek, an amateur sleuth’s sense of unease kicks in again with a vengeance.

In Mission, Peter Robertson’s sequel to his debut novel, the precarious world of a Colorado mountain town’s homeless population becomes a focus for a semi-retired businessman and a victim pool for a driven killer.

A decade and a half after finding death and deceit in Northern Michigan in the previous Permafrost, Tom has divorced and relocated to Boulder, Colorado, and has given up the reins of his lucrative business interests to his long-suffering employee Nye Prior for a life of craft beer and bicycling. He isn’t necessarily any richer or happier, but he’s certainly older and fitter.

On an early morning ride, Tom sees a young man pulled from flooded Boulder Creek. The death isn’t so very unusual. In fact another man who was homeless drowned in the creek the month previous. The Boulder cops have certainly seen it before. But Tom hasn’t, and the instincts that drove Tom far north of Chicago in the previous book kick in with a vengeance, and he’s soon riding the creek paths with a whole new purpose: to find the killer before the next deadly spring flood arrives.

Fifteen years have softened the yuppie heart of Tom. He’s lost most of his prized possessions and opted for a simpler life. He’s also looking for love, and he finds a librarian who likes to bike, and, more importantly, isn’t averse to helping out with the sleuthing chores. In addition, Tom befriends Reggie Hawkins, a Boulder cop with a secret life. Tom is determined to find a killer. Nye is determined to brew the perfect stout, and fans of Permafrost will once again discover a potent brew of rich characterization and tense plot in this second in a projected trilogy of Tom novels.

Informations

• Publié par: Gibson House Press
• Date de parution: 13 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780985515850
• Langue: English

Extrait

MISSION
A MYSTERY
Peter Robertson





ALSO BY PETER ROBERTSON
Permafrost
Colorblind


GIBSON HOUSE PRESS
Flossmoor, Illinois 60422
GibsonHousePress.com
© 2013 Peter Robertson
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9855158-5-0 (ePub)
Cover design: Christian Fuenfhausen


DEDICATION
for my family


One
In the morning, on the occasion of my forty-eighth birthday, I rode my bicycle, received a text from my best friend, drank a free cup of coffee, and helped pull a dead body from a flooded creek.
All this took place before the traditional activities of the day: the ingestion of too much alcohol, the somber rather than sober pondering of one’s mortality and the inevitable hard reckoning, and the dismal count of the ever-dwindling days still allotted.
Of course, I still had more time left than the unfortunate gentleman floating dead and blue and still in the icy waters of Boulder Creek on a warm morning in March.
* * *
“Get his leg loose, Kaitlyn.” The Boulder cop standing on the bank was a tall white man with cropped fair hair in his late twenties. The EMT was a curly-haired white girl with large eyes in her early twenties. She was standing waist deep and shivering in four feet of cold tranquil water.
The body was partially floating on the surface of the runoff pool only a few yards from the overpass at Frontage. The pool stood where a section of the creek path split into two, one smaller branch curling around to join the sidewalk on Frontage, the other heading east to Sixty-Third. The police car and the EMT vehicle were both on the overpass, half on the path, half in the traffic, both with their roof lights flashing.
A second older cop, with swept-back brown hair and his left arm in a bright blue sling, was observing the other EMT, a short, portly gentleman in a dark green down vest, as he pulled open a stretcher from the back of the EMT vehicle. Both these men were talking on their cell phones as one languidly worked and the other languidly watched. They were in no apparent hurry.
Frontage backs up against Twenty-Eighth-Route 36, which moves most of Boulder’s perpetually heavy traffic between Denver and Denver International Airport to the south and Estes Park some thirty miles to the north.
I watched silently as the young EMT pulled the dead man’s leg free from between two large rocks. The body drifted to the bank and the cop began to drag it ashore. It wasn’t an easy task for one person. He turned to me. I set my bike down on the grass, and we struggled together for a while. Eventually we wrestled the inflexible body up onto the grass.
I knelt down beside him and placed my hand on his shoulder.
His head seemed misshapen; all broken and bruised and pale and bloodless. He was a young man of no more than twenty-five. One sleeve of his hooded sweatshirt was empty. He had one arm. No, that wasn’t right. It was wedged deep inside his sweatshirt, which was either black or a very dark blue. A shoe was lost. A sock was missing. There was a green sneaker on the other foot. It was a green Puma sneaker and there was no sock inside it. He wasn’t wearing socks. One trouser leg rode up high above the left ankle and there was a tattoo, a single word, a name, Amy , black in ornate swirling script, black against the paper-white skin.
He had known someone named Amy.
All this I observed in a process of silent cataloging, as my hand still lingered on his lifeless skin.
He was tragically boyish, impossibly thin, a post-death color of pale blue fading to white. He had cropped dark hair and a mouth empty and slack and wide open. There was no belt and his jeans were loose in a way that I knew wasn’t some sort of dated statement of homeboy street style. He was just rail-thin in his sad hand-me-down clothes.
Two college boys had jumped from their mountain bikes and were watching us now. Kaitlyn the EMT had gotten out of the water. She was shaking as she pulled a brown wool blanket from the back of the truck and wrapped herself tightly in it. The cop with the sling and the other EMT were still talking on their cell phones. Then the older EMT abruptly hung up and begun pulling more equipment from the back of the truck. I saw the twin paddles of defibrillators, stock props on television crime shows in which everyone stands back as the grim-faced doctor waits for the correct voltage, then presses down firmly, kick-starting the heart, staring at the flat line until it jumps and the attending nurse swoons.
The still-shaking Kaitlyn and the other EMT now began to wheel their cart full of well-intentioned science down the path toward the patient body.
The cop with the sling joined us. He was probably around fifty, close to my age, tall and thin with his hair much longer than I imagined was typical cop style. With the stretcher in place, the younger cop and the older EMT gently lifted the body up. The loose trousers slid down to mid thigh. There was no underwear. The young cop looked at me and smirked. I stared back at him without smiling.
The older cop walked quickly over to the stretcher and, using his good arm, yanked the dead man’s trousers up to his waist. As he did this I saw him glance at the tattoo for a second, and I imagined him mentally filing the image and the single word away. He looked hard at the younger cop and all traces of the previous smirk quickly withered.
“It was good of you to help.” The cop with the sling spoke to me quietly.
“It was nothing,” I said.
He shook his head before he replied. “It was something.”
There was silence. Then I spoke again.
“What happens now?”
“They make sure he’s really dead.”
“Why?”
“It’s what they do.”
“It’s a waste of time.”
He didn’t argue. “It’s still what they do.”
As he said this I noticed about a dozen brightly colored braided bracelets wrapped around his wrist inside the blue sling.
The two mountain bike boys slouched over to stand in place beside us.
We all stood in a line. There would now surely come the inevitable shared moment wrapped in somber quiet. I assumed that, like me, the other witnesses would silently ponder the myriad mysteries of life and death. Why would they not, at a moment of unique perspective like this? Then one of the two cyclists chose to speak, and the wordless eloquence of the moment was indelibly transformed.
“Dude. Did you see the size of his dick?”
I did. And they did. We all did.



Two
A torrent of early spring rain had fallen sometime in the middle of the night, and in the morning the lingering snowfall from a previous day had all been washed away. When the storms had moved away, the abandoned air had been crisp and pure and impossibly clear.
In the Colorado springtime, the snow on the Flatirons overlooking Boulder can melt rapidly, adding an abundance of crystalline water to the natural reservoirs located high in the hills. On rare and dangerous occasions, the melting snow and the heavy warm spring rains arrive at the same time, filling the mountain canyons in a matter of minutes, before rushing downhill in a surge that originates high and west of the city.
Boulder Creek is something between a stream and a river and a series of drainage ditches and culverts that run, trickle, dry up, and very occasionally flood their way right through the center of Boulder. It runs under the main streets, past the parks, past the well-used tennis courts, alongside the elegant condos and the more humble student residences, and under a series of low flat bridges carrying bikes, pedestrians and cars over the ever-changing waters.
People walk and run and bike Boulder Creek Path year-round. There’s a child-friendly fishing area where foot-long trout are available for catch and release, and parks filled with metallic, angular sculptures and solemn wood carvings for Frisbees, leather-skinned housewives hard at their yoga and dogs with bandanas to avoid.
In the summer the young meet along the creek and bullshit and tube in the water that warms up a fraction in the hotter months, while the city’s homeless sleep uneasily en masse along the creek banks and under the overpass bridges on the generally temperate summer nights.
As it heads east, the creek breaks down into a series of manmade branches, not much more than concrete strips of drainage aqueduct that terminate suddenly, deliberately, dissipating into a wide flood plain that the environmentally attuned city considers a green enough methodology to subvert the likelihood of a flood.
As is my habit, I had woken at close to seven thirty that morning, brushed my teeth, washed my face, and put on my baggy swim shorts, my old grey Merrell water shoes, and a Belvedere Brewing T-shirt (the words Oh, Belvedere! were in large print under a picture of a bulldog improbably holding a full and frothy pint glass in his big paw). When I had walked onto the large yellow wood porch on the front of my small yellow wood house on Twenty-Second, the temperature was in the low fifties and the ground was soft and muddy and still very wet.
My bike is a five-year-old Gary Fisher hybrid with disc brakes and thin Kevlar tires, and it was chained somewhat optimistically to the leg of a loose patio chair. I had gone back into the house and found my grey Giro helmet, a bike bottle chilling in the fridge, and a sweatshirt that I quickly put on before walking back out to stand and gaze for a moment up at the new rust glow on the closest peaks of the Flatirons, and then further back into the range, where the snows still lingered stubbornly on the highest of the mountain peaks.
Half a block away on Pearl, a truck full of shuddering