Vietnam-sentry madness—and we were vaguely concerned that he might get wiggy and blow Bastian’s head off if they happened to cross paths in the darkness.
But they weren’t moving around much despite the bitter cold. From the spots they’d selected they were both perfectly positioned to deal not only with the threat from the rear or either side of the house, but also to catch anyone approaching from the front in a deadly cross fire of 00-buckshot . . . thus tripling the terror for any poor bastard coming up from the road and straight into the muzzle of Teddy Yewer’s 30-30.
Teddy, a wild young biker with hair hanging down to his waist, had driven out from Madison to have some fun with the Freak Power sheriff’s campaign . . . and he’d arrived just in time to get himself drafted into the totally humorless role of 24-hour bodyguard. Now, with the original concept of the campaign long gone and forgotten in this frenzy of violence, he found himself doing dead-serious guard duty behind a big window in the darkened living room, perched in the Catbird seat with a rifle in his hands and a fine commanding view of anything that could possibly happen within one hundred yards of the front porch. He couldn’t see Solheim or Bastian, but he knew they were out there, and he knew that all three of them would have to start shooting if the things we’d been warned about suddenly began happening.
The word had come that afternoon from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and the word was extremely grim. Tonight—sometime between dusk on Wednesday and dawn on Thursday—Mr. Thompson, the Freak Power candidate for sheriff, was going to be killed. This intelligence had come from what the CBI investigator described as “an extremely reliable informant,” a person they had every good reason to believe because he (or maybe she; we weren’t told) had “always been right in the past.” The informant had not been able to learn the identity of the assassins, the CBI man told us. Nor had he/she been able to learn what means or methods they planned to use on this job. Shooting was of course the most logical thing to expect, he said. Maybe an ambush at some lonely spot on the road between Aspen and Woody Creek. And if that failed . . . well, it was widely known that the candidate lived in a dangerously isolated house far out in the boondocks. So perhaps they would strike out there, by fire . . . or dynamite.
Indeed. Dynamite. RDX-type, 90 percent nitroglycerine. Two hundred and ten sticks of it had been stolen just a few days earlier from an Aspen Ski Corp. cache on Ajax Mountain—according to a report from the Ski Corp.—and the thieves left a note saying, “This [stolen dynamite] will only be used if Hunter Thompson is elected sheriff of Aspen.” The note was signed “SDS.”
Right. Some ignorant dingbat actually signed the note “SDS.” The CBI man hadn’t smiled when we laughed at the tale: He quickly unfolded another sheet of notes and told us that his “reliable informant” had also told him that half the town was about to be destroyed by dynamite—the County Courthouse (meaning the Sheriff’s Office), City Hall (the Police Station), the Hotel Jerome (our campaign headquarters), and the Wheeler Opera House (where Joe Edwards and Dwight Shellman, our attorneys, had their offices).
Only a cop’s brain could have churned up that mix of silly bullshit . . . and although we never doubted that, we also understood that the same warped mentality might also be capable of running that kind of twisted act all the way out to its brutally illogical extreme. It made perfect sense, we felt, to assume that anybody stupid enough to spread these crudely conceived rumors was also stupid enough to try to justify them by actually dynamiting something.
At that point in the campaign it was still a three-way race between me, the incumbent (Democratic) sheriff, and the veteran undersheriff who’d resigned just in time to win the GOP
But they weren’t moving around much despite the bitter cold. From the spots they’d selected they were both perfectly positioned to deal not only with the threat from the rear or either side of the house, but also to catch anyone approaching from the front in a deadly cross fire of 00-buckshot . . . thus tripling the terror for any poor bastard coming up from the road and straight into the muzzle of Teddy Yewer’s 30-30.
Teddy, a wild young biker with hair hanging down to his waist, had driven out from Madison to have some fun with the Freak Power sheriff’s campaign . . . and he’d arrived just in time to get himself drafted into the totally humorless role of 24-hour bodyguard. Now, with the original concept of the campaign long gone and forgotten in this frenzy of violence, he found himself doing dead-serious guard duty behind a big window in the darkened living room, perched in the Catbird seat with a rifle in his hands and a fine commanding view of anything that could possibly happen within one hundred yards of the front porch. He couldn’t see Solheim or Bastian, but he knew they were out there, and he knew that all three of them would have to start shooting if the things we’d been warned about suddenly began happening.
The word had come that afternoon from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and the word was extremely grim. Tonight—sometime between dusk on Wednesday and dawn on Thursday—Mr. Thompson, the Freak Power candidate for sheriff, was going to be killed. This intelligence had come from what the CBI investigator described as “an extremely reliable informant,” a person they had every good reason to believe because he (or maybe she; we weren’t told) had “always been right in the past.” The informant had not been able to learn the identity of the assassins, the CBI man told us. Nor had he/she been able to learn what means or methods they planned to use on this job. Shooting was of course the most logical thing to expect, he said. Maybe an ambush at some lonely spot on the road between Aspen and Woody Creek. And if that failed . . . well, it was widely known that the candidate lived in a dangerously isolated house far out in the boondocks. So perhaps they would strike out there, by fire . . . or dynamite.
Indeed. Dynamite. RDX-type, 90 percent nitroglycerine. Two hundred and ten sticks of it had been stolen just a few days earlier from an Aspen Ski Corp. cache on Ajax Mountain—according to a report from the Ski Corp.—and the thieves left a note saying, “This [stolen dynamite] will only be used if Hunter Thompson is elected sheriff of Aspen.” The note was signed “SDS.”
Right. Some ignorant dingbat actually signed the note “SDS.” The CBI man hadn’t smiled when we laughed at the tale: He quickly unfolded another sheet of notes and told us that his “reliable informant” had also told him that half the town was about to be destroyed by dynamite—the County Courthouse (meaning the Sheriff’s Office), City Hall (the Police Station), the Hotel Jerome (our campaign headquarters), and the Wheeler Opera House (where Joe Edwards and Dwight Shellman, our attorneys, had their offices).
Only a cop’s brain could have churned up that mix of silly bullshit . . . and although we never doubted that, we also understood that the same warped mentality might also be capable of running that kind of twisted act all the way out to its brutally illogical extreme. It made perfect sense, we felt, to assume that anybody stupid enough to spread these crudely conceived rumors was also stupid enough to try to justify them by actually dynamiting something.
At that point in the campaign it was still a three-way race between me, the incumbent (Democratic) sheriff, and the veteran undersheriff who’d resigned just in time to win the GOP
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