Angle of Attack by Rex Burns Read Free Book Online

to give them the names and addresses of a few more of Covino’s acquaintances who might have seen him Sunday night, and then, still watched by the seated service manager, they swung back toward town among the midmorning traffic on Federal. Here, north of I-70, the four-lane street made long rises and falls across the sandy flats of lower Clear Creek valley. This time Axton drove and Wager stared in silence out the window. It was one of those light-filled spring days whose sun stung hot through the windshield. Only when you saw the roadside dust scud across the highway or felt the shudder of the car did you know how hard the wind was blowing off the iron-colored mountains. Wager watched the snapping pennants and blurred plastic windmills over the truck and camper sales lots, the passing furniture warehouses and cut-rate lumber stores, the plaster horses that touted Western gear; just beyond the cluttered line of sprawling one-story commercial buildings rose a fringe of cottonwood trees not yet ripped from the stream bed to make room for more asphalt. Their sharp lines of branches had grown slightly fuzzy with the pale green of early leaves. Wager gazed at the faint spring greenness and wondered why someone wanted to tear up those trees instead of build around them—wondered what was in some people that made them search for the tallest and cleanest, the noblest, just to disfigure and destroy it.
    Axton broke the silence. “I get the idea we’re going in circles. It all comes back to the same thing: he was a good kid and there was no reason for what happened.” He eased up on the gas, coasting until the distant traffic light changed and the column of waiting cars and trucks began to move; then he smoothly joined the line without wasting motion.
    Axton was like that, Wager mused; he had the kind of forethought Valdez admired in Frank: looking ahead, planning the moves for the greatest economy of effort. Maybe that came from living in a body as big as Axton’s: you learned to look ahead for low doorways or jutting furniture, you stayed at the edge of crowds, you sat with care on strange chairs. “Do you think Valdez was telling the truth?”
    “Don’t you?” Axton’s question meant “What did I miss?”
    “Yeah.” Wager’s fingers rapped the dash. “I guess I do.” He knew he’d held a faint hope that Valdez would lie about something. If the kid had lied, their work would be a hell of a lot easier. But Valdez had not seemed to, and for a cop to have too much imagination was as bad as not having enough. Wager knew that this was one of those dangerous times when his hopes, guesses, and inventions were beginning to be churned by impatience, and he could feel himself pulling against the facts to create a pattern of motive and opportunity. But take it easy— cachaza . “The seed sprouts when it will,” his mother would have said. “Chico, you’ll end up with a fistful of farts,” would be his father’s warning. It all said the same thing: stick to the facts.
    “You know the only link we have between Scorvelli and Covino is your informant’s word. Maybe he was wrong, Gabe.”
    It could be. Information like that came in whispers and nudges and not in legal depositions. Every informant’s words had to be salted a little, and some more than others; though Tony-O was the most reliable Wager had found in ten or so years of sifting information, the wrong word, the wrong interpretation, was always possible. “Right or wrong, it hasn’t taken us anywhere. I think we should know more about the victim before we talk to the rest of the people on that list.”
    Axton eased into the left lane for the turn onto the I-70 freeway and the quickest route to the downtown campus. “Valdez said Covino filled out some work-study forms at the college.”
    Max was thinking Wager’s thoughts again, which is what good partners did. “That’s what I had in mind, too.”
    Wager was lost. The Auraria neighborhood that had been his