Astride a Pink Horse Read Online Free PDF Page A

Cozy, to the governor. When Freddy nudgedCozy and whispered, “You’ve got to be kidding,” Cozy, who was busy watching Major Cameron’s attempt to keep from rolling her eyes, ignored him. Shrugging, Freddy slipped a small spiral-bound notebook out of the inside pocket of his sport coat and began jotting notes.
    Cozy was startled. He couldn’t remember his techno-savvy best friend taking handwritten notes about anything since college, aside from the occasional summation of his stock market trades for the week or the quarterly earnings for the Silver Streak Oil Corporation, which his father owned.
    Surprised that Freddy seemed to be taking the briefing so seriously, Cozy shrugged and turned his attention back to Colonel DeWitt, who was busy recounting the supportive phone call he’d received earlier that day from Wyoming’s governor. Only when the colonel mentioned that the air force’s investigation into the Tango-11 break-in would be in the capable hands of Major Bernadette Cameron did Cozy’s ears perk up.
    “Major Cameron, also from Warren OSI, is well schooled in handling situations such as this,” DeWitt announced. The words had barely left his mouth when the two ponytailed men standing next to Cozy rushed the podium, yelling, “No more nukes! No more nukes!” Their two women companions immediately dropped to the floor, took handcuffs from their purses, and handcuffed themselves to one of the claw-footed legs of the nearest bench just as the teenagers in the front row began shouting, “Racist dogs!” in sync with “No more nukes!”
    Freddy Dames dropped to one knee, slipped a handheld tape recorder out of his sport coat pocket, and shoved it into thefaces of the two female protesters, who continued to scream, “No more nukes!”
    Cozy moved out of the way of Deputy Sykes’s delayed bull rush to the podium. Surprised by Freddy’s uncanny readiness, Cozy looked toward the front of the room to see Major Cameron drop one portly, lunging male protester like a rock with a knee to the groin. The sheriff had the second man down on the floor, with both arms behind his back and handcuffed, before most people in the courtroom had a chance to do much more than ooh or aah in amazement.
    With digital cameras clicking everywhere and television cameras rolling, Cozy watched the ponytailed, redheaded man whom the major had taken out roll around on the floor, groaning in agony, as chants of “No more nukes!” and “Racist dogs!” continued to echo through the courtroom. Staring around at what seemed to him to have been a very well-orchestrated eruption, Cozy caught Freddy smiling, tape recorder in hand, asking questions of spectators while his photographer friend from Denver snapped photo after photo. Noting the photographer’s steadiness in the midst of the chaos, he realized suddenly that Freddy was in fact directing the photographer’s every move. Much of what he was witnessing could only have been planned in advance. Cozy lowered his head, shook it in disbelief, and mumbled, “No, Freddy; you didn’t.”

An hour after Sheriff Bosack’s tumultuous press conference, Cozy and Freddy Dames sat eating burgers and fries at the Wheatland Inn just off I-25. A passing late-evening thunderstorm laced with golf-ball-sized hail had put on a twenty-minute light show before slowly moving off to the east, leaving behind drizzle, minor flooding, and a few distant claps of thunder.
    As Freddy toyed with his burger, Cozy shook his head disgustedly, upset that Freddy had admitted to using the sheriff’s press conference to manufacture news.
    “You didn’t tweak anything, Freddy,” Cozy chastised. “You turned that press conference into the lead story on the nightly news. Damn it, you’re regressing, slipping back to your old ways. Stealing bases against the sign, trying to make something happen on the field when you shouldn’t, swinging for the fences when it’s three and oh and you’ve been told to take a