Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

then he related how, when Rattlesnake had driven that woman home to Dutch Flat, her boyfriend had kidnapped the gold dealer and forced him to lead his bunch of vigilantes back down to where Ricky was sleeping. Rattlesnake Jim had been held at gunpoint and forced to watch while Ricky was beaten within an inch of his life.

By the time the last pieces fell into place the following day I had a queasy feeling every time I looked at the manila folder on my desk with the witness and victim statements and photographs accumulating inside it. After a few years as a ranger, you can tell when it's going to rain from the smell of the air and which way the wind's blowing, and that morning I must have felt the wind blowing in a certain sick direction, because purely on a whim I picked up the phone and called the Colfax Police Department. When the chief answered, I asked him if he knew a miner by the name of Ricky Marks.

"Well, funny you should mention Ricky, because he's sitting right here. He's a real mess, and believe it or not, he's come to seek police protection."

I asked the chief to hold him there until I arrived.

The police station was a nondescript old two-story stucco building on the main street of Colfax, a rough little town nestled in a valley in the pine and red-dirt hills along Interstate 80. Across the street from the station were the rusty tracks of the switching yards, a padlocked Southern Pacific Railroad passenger station, an abandoned freight station, and a four-story wooden hotel with all of its windows broken out. These had been the town's vitality before the lumber mills, mines, fruit-packing outfits, and railroad had consolidated their operations elsewhere. A few doors down from the Colfax police was the Station House Saloon, where the waves of men laid off by these companies had mumbled over their beer and fought with each other for decades, and where Ricky Marks had received the first of his beatings that summer.*

When I came in, he was seated on a gray metal chair with his back against the pale wall next to one of the policemen's desks. He was a wiry man of thirty-six in jeans and a T-shirt. His hands were callused and his nails broken and blackened, and he had the ropy arms of someone who moved stones in the river for a living. His face, beyond the regions covered by his thick red beard and hair, was a mess of purple and greenish yellow bruises, black sutures, and crusty dried blood. His eyes were swollen nearly shut.

I introduced myself. He told me he knew who I was. I said I guessed I was becoming famous. He said he was sorry about the shack, but he knew he couldn't stay there anyway because his life was in danger. He and Jerry planned to go up there and disassemble the dredge before winter. I told him to remember to stop by our office and pick up his gun and machete.

I sat down with my notepad, and he told me a story that was pretty much the same as those I had heard from Mary Murphy and the other witnesses, differing in only a few key details, such as the consensual nature of the central act. According to Marks, after the run to the liquor store they'd all gone skinny-dipping in the river, and the woman hadn't objected to kissing and having her breasts fondled, not only by him but by his partner, Jerry, and by Kenny, another miner who had happened along and helped them drink the rest of the wine. Later, when he had driven up the road with her, he said, she had agreed enthusiastically, if drunkenly, to his suggestion of oral sex. They had gotten out of the car and started making out and ripping their clothes off, but they were both so drunk they fell down and finished the act with her lying naked in the gravel. Thinking back on it now, he didn't blame her for yelling like that when Rattlesnake Jim appeared around the turn—the gold buyer knew everybody in this country, and considering how crazy her boyfriend turned out to be, he could see how she might have been worried about the news getting back to him. Maybe they had all had a little too much to drink, but it sure was fun until it turned bad. And then it was bad, real bad.

"What kind of rifles did her boyfriend and the other men who beat you have?" I asked him.

"Like paratrooper rifles—the army kind. Full auto," the miner answered.

"What does he do for a living? Can you show me the road where he lives?" I inquired.

"Do I look that stupid? What do you think he does for a living? Something with drugs, that's for sure," he replied.

When we finished talking, I left the police station and drove back into the canyon to Yankee Jims to look for Rattlesnake Jim. This time I got lucky; his white van was parked by the bridge. I found him down at the river haggling over a small vial of nuggets with the miner who had told me about his kidnapping. Rattlesnake Jim looked nervous when he saw me.

The gold buyer's story pretty much lined up with everyone else's. He really didn't know whether Mary Murphy had been raped or had gotten scared her boyfriend would find out about Ricky Marks. But there was no question her fear of her boyfriend was justified, he said. That boyfriend was one crazy son of a bitch, or at least whatever he and his buddies were doing down at that old mine, they didn't want anyone to know about it. When Rattlesnake had driven the woman home—and it was way the hell down this dirt road where the old-timers had hydraulic-mined the land into tortured hoodoos and the trees were all twisted—the boyfriend had emerged on the