Free The Zen Man by Colleen Collins Page A

thirties, he’d have been very comfortable. “Why’d you have a sleeping bag with you?”
    “Thought I’d be heading up to go ‘boarding for the weekend, but felt too zonked, so thought I’d lie there for a bit, listen to some tunes and stare at the stars.”
    “How long did you lie there, listening to tunes?”
    “Long time, man. Probably an entire Sound Tribe show.”
    I waited for more, but those glassy eyes just stared back at me.
    “What time did you get out of the pit?”
    “Maybe nine, ten. Not sure, exactly.”
    Laura leaned forward. “
Four
…hours…you…lay…there?”
    “Yeah. When I woke up, there was all kinds of commotion going on down by the first hot spring pool. Cops and lights and people. I saw those people with Coroner written on their jackets lifting that woman out of the water.” He squeezed shut his eyes and shuddered. “Freaked me out, man. She was so…”
    “Don’t think about it. What happened next?”
    He reopened his eyes. “I crawled out of the pit, walked the back way around the lodge to my ride in the lot.”
    “Down the ravine on the north side?”
    “Yeah.”
    I thought about his story for a few moments. Sounded bizarre as hell, but this was Garrett, the stoned snowboarding gonzo, I was talking to. On several occasions I’d seen boards in the back of his van, no doubt to take off whenever the shredding urge hit. Explained his keeping things like sleeping bags and other gear in his van, too.
    “Why didn’t you talk to the sheriffs that night, Garrett? Makes you look guilty to have sneaked the back way to the parking lot and driven off.”
    “I didn’t sneak, man!”
    “You said you crawled. Sounds like sneaking.”
    He looked crestfallen for a moment, fidgeted with his bead bracelet. “I was stoned. Didn’t want to get into trouble.”
    I started putting the real picture together. “Stoned on what?”
    “Killer indica.” He shifted a little. “And maybe a little acid.”
    I kept my voice low, reassuring. “Garrett when you leave a scene like that, and you don’t tell anyone, you aren’t a dude anymore. You’re more like a suspect for murder.”
    “You’re shitting me.” He made a choking sound. “Man, I had nothing to do with whatever happened to that lady.” He shook his head so hard, dreadlocks were flying. Suddenly he stopped, gave me such a chilling stare, I wondered if he had had everything to do with “that lady.”
    “There’s something else,” he murmured.
    “What?”
    “I…found something.” He tugged an object out of a back pocket of his cargo shorts, held it up.
    “Somebody’s cell,” Laura murmured.
    “No, well, sorta,” Garrett said, turning it over for inspection. “It’s a BlackBerry.”
    I stood up. “Put it down!”
    Garrett’s eyes widened as he set it down on the butcher block table.
    “And don’t touch it again.” I puffed out a breath, staring at the BlackBerry. “Where’d you find it? And where has it been since you found it?”
    “Near the Cottonwood pool. In my pocket.”
    The hot spring pool near the Cottonwood tree, which we’d called the Cottonwood pool from day one. It was about twenty feet from the pool in which Wicked had been murdered.
    “Who else has seen it or touched it?”
    Garrett shook his head. “Only me. I mean, I just found it, so I brought it here, figured it was time to confess I was outside that night.”
    His hands were visibly trembling. Hell, mine were, too.
    “You gonna turn me in?” he asked.
    “It’s not about turning you in, it’s about you coming forward to the sheriff, explaining where you were that night, and why you haven’t come forward before now.” I looked at the BlackBerry. “And what you found.”
    “Man, I’m gonna be so busted.”
    I realized I was scrawling little concentric circles with my pen on my pad, knots of visible black fear. I set aside the pen, stared at Garrett. “Look, I’m going to call my lawyer, explain everything you just said, and my