“What’s your business, buddy? Are you a cop? You don’t look like no cop.” The bartender looked around the room.
“I’m just a friend of Carol’s.”
“You don’t look like no friend of Carol’s neither. Well, anyway, I don’t know her.”
“What about the other one. She goes by Petra.”
The bartender shook his head.
“And this one?” Ogden showed him the picture of the woman from the cabin.
“Nope, nope, and nope. You’re just shit out of luck.”
Ogden was taken by his failure to react to the photo of the dead woman. He looked at the picture himself. “Can you tell that the woman in this picture is dead?” he asked.
“What?”
“Does she look dead to you?”
“Maybe.”
“But you don’t care.”
“I don’t know her. I don’t know our friend Destiny either.”
“She’s dead, too,” Ogden said.
“It don’t pay to know you, does it?”
“Have you ever seen a guy around here with one hand?”
Ogden watched the man closely. He swallowed, he rearranged his shoulders and his chest ever so slightly, he glanced right. “No,” the man lied.
“So, you don’t give a shit about two dead women,” Ogden said. He set down his beer and looked over at the pool table.
“No, not really,” the man said.
Ogden turned back to look at his eyes. He was telling the truth this time, but he wasn’t that comfortable admitting it.
“People die,” he said.
“The woman Destiny was involved in some kind of drug deal with this One Hand.”
“You should write this all down.”
“You think so?”
“Oh yeah.”
“This guy with one hand put one in the back of Carol Barelli’s head. And you don’t care about that.”
The man bit the inside of his cheek.
“What about this woman?” He showed the bartender the picture of Carla Reynolds.
“Never saw her.”
“Thanks for the beer.”
Ogden was striking out. He’d only learned what he already knew. To make matters worse, the longer he drove around Denver asking his stupid questions, the less he knew what he was doing. And he’d only been there a day; how much could he not know in a week? Did he really expect to solve the murder of the woman in the cabin? That was the only one in his jurisdiction. Or was it some ego thing or, worse, some macho thing driving him? He’d been strung along by the now-dead Carol Barelli and he was determined to find some answers. Perhaps, just perhaps, in the process he would accidentally manage to find Carla Reynolds before she turned up dead.
Ogden’s cell phone rang as he sat down behind the wheel of his pickup. He looked at the phone. That it was ringing at all was disorienting. He reluctantly answered.
“This is Detective Barry.”
“Detective.”
“Can you meet me over at St. Joseph’s Hospital?”
“You bet. What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here. Come to the emergency room.” She told him the address and hung up.
At the hospital, Ogden parked and walked into the emergency room as instructed. He recognized that it was a relatively slow night for the staff, but it seemed plenty busy to Ogden. He saw a uniformed cop by the door to the treatment area.
“Excuse me, I’m supposed to meet a Detective Barry here,” Ogden said.
“She’s back there.” The policeman stepped aside to let Ogden in. “You’ll see her.”
Ogden walked down the aisle between the rows of curtained examination stations, some occupied, some not, and just like the cop had said he saw Barry.
“Detective.”
“Deputy Walker.”
“What’s going on?” Ogden asked.
Barry pulled back the curtain and Ogden saw a badly beaten woman. It was the woman he’d talked to earlier that day, the one who had sent him to the Plank to look for Hicks.
“How is she?”
“She’s not going to die.”
“Who did it?”
“Don’t know. She managed to say that some cowboy came to see her.”
Ogden stepped into the examination room and looked over the shoulder of the attending nurse. The right side of her face was raw, bleeding, a mess. Her right eye was swollen shut and her left remained closed while he was watching.
“Is she conscious?” he asked the nurse.
“Barely.”
He walked back to Barry. “Whoever beat her only used his left hand,” Ogden said.
“Or only had a left hand.”
“She told me his name is Hicks. I have to think this is my fault.”
“You don’t have to think that,” Barry said. “You might choose to think it, but you don’t have to. It might even be your fault, but you don’t have to think it.”
Ogden nodded. “I suppose none of the neighbors saw anything.”
Barry didn’t even bother responding to that comment. “A neighbor did call it in. Good thing she did. She would have died.”
“Jesus.”
“So, tell me, you have any luck tracking down this guy?”
“None. Of course it’s only been a day. Give me a few hundred more and I’m sure I’ll just bump into him on the street.”
“What time did you talk to her?” Barry asked.
“A little after ten thirty.”
“Maybe you should lay off,” she said.
Ogden listened to her words, her tone. “Do you really think that?” he asked.
“I’m required to say it. Doesn’t mean I think it.”
Ogden nodded. He glanced back in at the woman on the table. “I don’t even know her name.”
“Ivy Stiles.”
“What would you do, Detective?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s a woman out there someplace who is dead or maybe she’s going to be dead. Her name is Carla Reynolds. Carol Barelli tricked me into looking for her and now you might say I’m hooked.”
Barry didn’t say anything.
“I don’t think I can let this go. I’m no detective, but I don’t think I can let it go.”
“Don’t get hurt,” she said.
“That’s my plan, anyway.” Ogden took a breath. “I can tell you what Ivy in there told me. She told me that Carol was involved in a scam. She told me that the one-handed man is named Hicks. She told me that he goes to a place called the Plank. I went there and learned that there is a place called the Plank and that’s about it.”
In the hospital parking lot, Ogden called Bucky Paz and told him everything he knew and didn’t know.
“You can come on home whenever you want,” Paz said. It was both a suggestion that Ogden return and permission to stay.
“Ask Warren to find out anything he can about the cabin, the people who own it, the doctor and his wife.”
“On it.”
“Thanks.”
Ogden closed the phone. Then things went black.
~ ~ ~
Ogden came to with his head against what he knew immediately was the ridged metal bed of a pickup truck or back of a van. The vehicle was moving. He tried to sit up, but his hands were bound behind his back and his ankles were duct-taped together. The back of his head pounded. He lay still and tried to assess his situation. He could smell the rubber of the spare tire, grease, gun oil, and cigarette smoke. He could hear the clicking of a stone that had gotten lodged in a tire’s tread. The engine was misfiring in one or two cylinders. They were in town, stopping at lights. The driver was slow on the clutch and so the ride was jerky. Finally he heard someone speak.
“I don’t know what the fuck we’ve got him for. What’s he know?” a man said.
“Maybe he found out something,” a second man said.
Ogden struggled to sit up and did. He looked forward at the two men, one driving, the other sitting in the passenger seat. There was no one else. There were no windows in the back of the van. He could see the bright glow of street lamps and fast-food restaurant signs through the glass up front, the arches of a McDonald’s, a Midas Muffler shop.