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Chapter Fifteen: Tubes

When I woke up a couple of huge coon cats were watching me warily from the bedroom door. I turned my head and one of them scampered off, but the other made a wrowrly noise and sauntered toward me, tail held high. He jumped onto the foot of the bed, hunkered down with that fat tail wrapped around his feet, and watched my toes stir under the blanket.

My own stomach was wrowrling away. Other than one cookie and some soup, my stomach had held nothing down for about twenty hours. I climbed carefully out of the bed. The cat hopped down and retreated to the door. Maggy had swept away my clothes, leaving a pair of Ralph's green scrub pants and a thick terry robe hanging on the door. A note lay on the dresser, anchored by my watch. "3:00 am. Gone to market, back soon, love M." The watch said 3:00. Maybe the sound of the front door had awakened me.

I rummaged in the refrigerator, the cats prowling about my bare feet. Milk and cheese and a couple of carrots went down quickly. I was also going to need shoes. Munching a celery stalk, I spelunked into the front hall closet. Ralph's Sorels looked far too big, but that was better than far too small.

Maggy had leaned the Heads against the closet shelf, and as I pulled out the boots I noticed that a section of sidewall was missing from one of the skis. It had probably come off when I levered the ski under the leaf spring. I carried the skis into the brightly lighted kitchen and looked at the empty slot where the orange plastic had peeled off.

The slot led to a set of broad hollow tubes. And the inner surface of each tube was lightly coated with a white dust.

Head XR1 and Durafiber skis had four long hollow channels inside. The skis were made by wrapping resin-impregnated fiberglass around four sealed vinyl tubes, which were then laid side-by-side in a mold. When the mold was heated, two things happened: the air in the tubes expanded, pressing the fiberglass out against the sides of the mold, and the resin cured hard. The result was a very strong but very light ski, with a core composed largely of air.

If you wanted to fill the hollow tubes with something -- a liquid or powder -- it would be easy to cut some kind of little access door in the sidewall.

I laid the skis on the kitchen table and scraped out some of the powdery residue with a paring knife.

Cocaine, of course.

I wiped off the table top and the knife blade with a sponge, and set the skis back in the closet. Then the cats and I sat in the dark living room until Maggy returned with her bag of wee-hours groceries.

"Hi."

"Christ, you scared me. What are you doing, sitting in the dark?"

"Figuring this out."

"Well?"

"You have breakfast there? Horowitz must eat all his meals at the hospital. The medicine cabinet is stocked better than the freezer."

"I got eggs, muffins, juice . . ."

We began to fix a meal. I fried eggs. "If you were selling cocaine around town, how would you carry it?"

"In a little bottle, of course."

"Why?"

"So I could hide it. So I could transfer it easily."

"What if you were transporting a lot of cocaine, like a kilo or more."

"I don't know. In something hollow. In a teddy bear."

"If you were smuggling it into the country from South America, how would you carry it?"

"A teddy bear would look suspicious, right?"

"You're not five years old. How about in hollow skis?"

"Wait. Are you telling me that skis are hollow?"

"Not all skis. Just a few skis."

"And Marco's skis are hollow."

"So are Dick Bester's skis."

I told Maggy what I had found, and about what had happened on the mountain. "Yesterday Hildy told me I had things backwards," I said. "What she meant was that Marco wasn't selling cocaine. He was stealing it. Bester smuggled the stuff from Colombia in a few pairs of old hollow skis. Marco figured this out and got a similar ski. He somehow swapped his empty skis for a pair of Bester's loaded skis. I don't know how -- maybe he just swapped skis in the race room. Then he emptied the skis out. Maybe Hildy carried some back to Crested Butte and sold it there. Maybe Marco did this once, or maybe he stole a load every so often.

"It must have driven Bester crazy to lose a ski-load of pure cocaine. When he saw me on Marco's Heads he figured out what was going on. Marco, of course, never skied on the hollow skis. He had his Spaldings. The Heads were hidden in his locker until I busted my Stratos."

"How much cocaine can you put in a ski?"

"I've been trying to figure that out. Figure a tube is six feet long and an average three-quarter inch square. Seventy-two times what, about half a square inch? That's 36 cubic inches. Eight tubes in a pair of skis is almost 300 cubic inches."

I looked in the cupboard. "Here's a 40-ounce box of corn flour. It's what, about eight by two inches, that's sixteen, times six inches wide. Say 96 cubic inches. So a pair of skis holds about 120 ounces, which is seven and a half pounds. And he probably traveled to Portillo with half a dozen pairs of skis. That would be 45 pounds of coke. Maggy, that's twenty kilos. We're talking millions. Millions!"

"This is unbelievable. Bester killed Marco because Marco was stealing coke. And Tug Moran was in on it. Can you prove any of this?"

"Rusty told me about Bester's collection of skis. Lots of people can put Bester and the skis together in Chile, and the airlines might have records of the skis coming back here with a stop in Colombia. I think. And I have the skis."

"Which might only be evidence against Marco."

"Right. Anyway, I'd have to get the skis out to the DA's office in Glenwood."

"Why Glenwood?"

"It's in Garfield County. Outside Tug's jurisdiction."

Glenwood Springs was forty-five minutes down valley on dry sunlit roads. At four in the morning, in the midst of a Rocky Mountain blizzard, it would take a couple of hours. And there was only one road out of town.

Maggy was thinking the same thing. "If they're watching us, they'll see my car or yours someplace along the road. How do you feel about a high speed chase on Route 82? How about calling for help?"

"And what would happen? After a few days, someone from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation would call Tug to find out what was going on. By then you and I would both be in deepfreeze someplace out near Ashcroft."

"Okay, we can't get out in my car or yours. Can we get another car? Or can we get out to Leadville or Eagle?"

"The roads are closed, of course. If I were in better shape, and I left now, I could ski over Independence Pass or Pearl Pass and be in Leadville or Crested Butte by sunset."

"Borrow a snowmobile."

"Huh?"

"We'll hike up Ajax, grab a Ski Corp. snowmobile, and ride it anywhere you want to go."

"I don't know how to handle one of those things in deep snow."

"I do. You can sleep in the back seat. Get dressed. We'll be out by noon."