Badwater (3 page)

four

I
think I’ve treated you before,” the paramedic said as she handed me a rough wool blanket.

I wrapped it around my torso. The nausea and adrenaline were beginning to wear off. I finally realized how cold I was, how hard I was shivering, even with the afternoon sun so hot in my hair. I had to keep my jaw clenched to stop my teeth from chattering. My bare feet were starting to ache on the beach’s smooth stones.

“Let me get your temperature.”

She tried to stick something in my ear. I pulled away. “I’m all right.”

“C’mon. You could be hypothermic.”

I opened the blanket to show her the goose bumps on my chest. “If I was, I wouldn’t be shivering like this. Okay?”

She frowned, but her eyes were smiling. “I
have
treated you before. Or tried to. Last year, at that mine where those people died. You were bleeding from a scalp wound. You wouldn’t let me help you then, either.”

“I think you’re confused,” I said, shaking my head.

But I knew she wasn’t. And I’d liked her then, just as I liked her now. Big hair, makeup, strong-looking body and all. She was probably only a few years younger than me, in her mid to late twenties, but not my type. I always seemed to go for thin, natural women, and I always liked them best when their hair was wild and their features unadorned. But, even so, I really liked the humor and compassion in this woman’s eyes. Someone who did a job like hers and still had all that light had to be something special. Of course, I might not like her so much if I hadn’t won my two battles with her, now and that other time.

I wondered why death, or near death, always made me horny. It was only minutes earlier that I’d been helping to lift a stretcher bearing the boy’s unmoving form up to the top of the giant boulder. Now the ambulance’s siren squawked twice. The driver leaned out the window and yelled, “Jo!”

“Gotta go,” she said. “I’ll get you next time!”

She had to scramble up the slope to the top of the rock, not far from where the modified van with its flashing lights waited impatiently for her. It was in the middle of the highway, blocking it. Other vehicles were backed up on both sides of the highway.

The ambulance took off with a wail as she dove in. The tall trooper was trying to deal with all the people who were getting out of their vehicles and wanting to know what was going on. The beefier trooper had finally managed to herd the two other boys into the back of a patrol car, where they were still screeching like cats. I watched until I saw another police car, this one a county cruiser, pull up.

The punk rocker in the orange life jacket was sitting on the stones. The girl from the raft, which had finally beached, was crouched over him, her arms wrapping him protectively from behind. He looked pretty out of it. He was just staring at a random place on the ground a few feet in front of him. The girl was crying with her face pressed into the side of his neck.

I gingerly picked my way across the rocks to them and squatted down so that I could get my bare feet on the corners of the blanket. The guy seemed to have a hard time focusing on me.

“You okay?” I asked.

He nodded, but didn’t look as if he was entirely sure.

“You did a good job with the CPR,” I told him, meaning it. He hadn’t panicked or forgotten how to perform. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

“I, uh, took a class.”

“Must have had a good teacher. Where was that?”

“New York. Back in high school.”

He was taking his time answering my questions. It was like talking to someone who just couldn’t keep their thoughts together, not like someone who was being deliberately evasive, I decided.

“The kid, uh, did they say if he’s going to be all right?” he asked after another long pause.

“No way to know yet. The cold water sometimes can help. His age, too. Children have something called a mammalian diving reflex, same as seals. It lowers their heart rate and shunts blood to the brain. For some reason adults lose the ability. Anyway, because of it, kids stand a better chance of surviving a prolonged submersion.”

They both looked at me like I was speaking Greek.

So I just said, “What’s your name?”

He licked his lips, probably tasting the same wet river breath that I was. Feeling the touch of those cold lips.

“Jonah. Jonah Strasburg.”

“Mine’s Antonio Burns. Call me Anton.”

I stuck out my hand and, after a moment, he shook it limply. The tattoos on his arm seemed to be Chinese symbols. I thought I recognized one that my ex-fiancée, Rebecca, had on a framed scroll. It was supposed to mean
harmony.

“Where are you from, Jonah?”

“New York. The city. We’re, uh, out here on vacation. This is my girlfriend, Mattie Freda.”

“Hi, Mattie. So what do you guys do when you’re not vacationing?”

She answered, her voice a little choked by her tears. “I’m in school. At Columbia. He’s a musician.”

That explained Jonah’s spiky hair, the tattoos, and the pierced eyebrow. And she looked like a clubber, too, with her black dye job and pointed bangs. She was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt but didn’t have any tattoos that I could see.

“Rock and roll?” I asked Jonah.

“It’s like that. But faster.”

There was a lot of noise coming from the road. I turned and looked. People were moving around up there, on top of the hill where the highway veered closest to the river. Some of them seemed pretty angry. They were shouting things, both at the cops and down toward us. Locals, not tourists, judging by their manner of dress and the type of vehicles they were climbing out of. But a few tourists, too, in motor homes on their way to Yellowstone and the Tetons. They all wanted to know what was going on and the cops were apparently telling them something.

I wanted to know, too.

“You sure you’re all right, Jonah?” I asked.

He’d been following my gaze up the hill. And now, as he met my eyes again, his pale skin was turning a greenish shade, and his eyes were again losing their focus.

“Hey. You okay?”

Jonah closed his eyes and nodded.

I felt a little lousy, interrogating him like this. But somebody needed to get a voluntary statement out of him, and I figured I could do it better than either of the state troopers. They did traffic violations, accidents, drunk drivers, stuff like that. DCI did mostly drugs, but serious stuff, too. Besides, I’d once been very good at this. Likability had once been my greatest asset as a cop. It enabled suspects to tell me things they wouldn’t even tell their own lawyers, and it got me deep inside everything from outlaw biker gangs to hippie dope rings. It was a skill that came, I supposed, from having grown up as a military brat, a different school on a different base each year, and an urgent need to fit in.

“Can you look at me, Jonah?”

He opened his eyes.

“Tell me what happened.”

Jonah licked his lips.

“We were on the river. Rafting. With a guide we hired.”

“Okay, good.” I gestured out toward the river. “Tell me what happened here.”

Jonah cleared his throat and swallowed another breath. It looked like just breathing was a conscious act for him. This guy was really out of it.

“We came through those rapids. Upstream. You can hear them. They were, uh, really wild, and I guess I was pretty shook-up. First time I’d ever done something like that. Rafting, I mean. We came into this slow section here and those kids were on top of the cliff. We waved at them.”

Mattie’s teary face lifted off his neck. It was an angular face with a hawk’s nose, but probably quite pretty without the blur of mascara beneath red-rimmed eyes.

She whispered, “They started throwing rocks at us.”

Still squatting, I touched a finger to my lips. “Let Jonah tell me.”

“Yeah, they started throwing rocks at us,” he said. “I don’t think they were trying to hit us. Not at first, anyway. They were just splashing us.”

“Did you know them?”

“No. I’d never seen them before.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. We just got into town yesterday.”

“Go on.”

“Well, the guide, Pete, he yelled for them to cut it out. They didn’t. They just laughed. Called us some names. Then, as we were going under the cliff, one rock almost hit Mattie.”

He paused for a long time.

“Okay. What happened next?” I prodded.

“Before I knew what I was doing, I’d gotten out of the raft.”

“We told him to get back in,” Mattie whispered. I supposed she meant her and the guide. He was now talking to one of the troopers up on the hill.

I frowned at her and touched a finger to my lips again. “Go on, Jonah.”

“I thought I could scare them. I tried to get back in. But I slipped, and the raft was moving away. Pete had put down the oars, I guess, now that we were in this slow part. The raft drifted farther away. There was nowhere to go but onto the beach. But the kids up above it were still yelling stuff and throwing rocks.”

“So you went up there?”

“Hey, man, I couldn’t just stand on this beach and be a target.”

He was striving to sound defensive, but it came off hollow. His words started coming faster.

“I scrambled up the slope there. I honestly thought they’d run when they saw me coming. They were just kids.”

The slope was one side of the big boulder, and it topped out onto a flat area. I’d run up that way, helping to carry the stretcher up the steep incline to where they could roll it toward the ambulance on the road. Although the ground was granite, some spindly pine trees grew in clumps out of the crack in the rock. There’d been three bikes in a heap. In my head I could see where the overhanging edge fell away into the river. It was maybe fifteen or twenty feet straight down. Into the deceptively calm waters that concealed the sink.

“But they were still there?”

“Yeah.”

Jonah, talking even faster, told me the basic facts.

five

J
onah crested the slope. The three boys were just standing there. All dressed in jeans and T-shirts, some bicycles lying nearby. One of them was grinning. The grinner was bigger and older-looking, so Jonah spoke to him.

“Hey, you brats. What the hell do you think you’re doing? You could kill someone, throwing shit like that!”

He expected to intimidate them with his tone, his age, and his tattoos. The tattoos were particularly impressive, running down both arms. When they were exposed in the summertime, people on the street would give him nervous sidelong glances even though Jonah was anything but aggressive. They were just for show, part of his image. But the bright orange life vest he was still wearing also made him feel a little ridiculous.

Maybe the kids were able to sense it in him. The niceness, the foreignness, because the fat kid snickered.

In a surprisingly deep voice he asked, “Where you from, man?”

A memory of some obnoxious late-night TV commercial for Tabasco sauce flitted through his mind and stopped him from answering “New York City.”

What was wrong with these kids? They weren’t running. They weren’t cowering. And they certainly weren’t apologizing. Jonah reached into his pocket and took out the Ziploc bag he’d put his pen and notebook in. He kept them with him everywhere for writing down lyrics.

“I want your names,” he demanded. It was all he could think of to say.

This made the fat boy laugh. As soon as he started hooting, the two other boys started to laugh, too. Theirs were sneering laughs, half giggles and half grimaces full of sharp teeth.

“You gonna call our daddies?” the fat boy mocked.

Yeah. That was exactly what he intended to do. Suddenly it didn’t seem like such an impressive threat. While Jonah stood there dumb, considering, the fat boy spoke again.

“Hey, Cody, why don’t you whack this yuppie dipshit with a stick?”

A yuppie? Me?
Jonah thought.

And while Jonah stood there, dumber than ever, one of the kids—the littlest, who couldn’t be more than ten and couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds—picked up a long stick. The little guy snapped off a few of the branches until he held a thin piece of wood that was maybe three feet long. Jonah was almost fascinated. He’d never seen children this outrageously cocky. He sort of admired them—it really was a little bit awesome. He almost couldn’t believe this was happening. He realized he was half smiling, acting amused rather than intimidated.

Then the stick swatted him in the ear.

“Hey!” he’d yelled, jumping backward. The little brat had whacked him! He touched his ear. His fingertips came away with a smear of blood. Looking at the kid, he tried to think of what to say, what to do. The kid was grinning nervously. Fat Boy was hooting louder than ever.

“Hit him again! Whack the tourist piece of shit!”

The kid stepped forward and swung again.

Jonah grabbed the stick. It was so thin and brittle-looking that he tried to twist it, to break it. But it was too green to break. And the brat hung on—Jonah wasn’t able to twist it out of his grasp.

The kid stepped back and tugged. Jonah held on. The little brat tugged harder, leaning back with all of his insignificant weight. The edge was just a couple of feet behind him. Below that was twenty feet of space and then the water. Fat Boy was howling with laughter. Jonah wanted to let go just so he could punch Fat Boy in the face. But he didn’t let go. He couldn’t do that. No, he couldn’t hit a kid, no matter how obnoxious he was.

He remembered the way the cliff overhung all the way down to the still water. He remembered the deep pool beneath the cliff. That’s what these brats needed, he thought with sudden inspiration. A serious soaking. A cold, wet lesson. Beyond the kid, in the river, he could see Mattie and Pete rowing upstream toward the beach.

The kid tugged again, really putting what little weight he had into it. Jonah smiled and let go, even giving it a little push. The brat staggered back two steps and tried to regain his balance. With his arms windmilling, the stick waving frantically in the air, he glanced over his shoulder and the uneasy snarl left his face. Then slowly, very slowly, he began to topple over the edge.

“Ha!” Jonah had yelled in triumph. “Who’s next, you little shitheads?”

“He can’t swim!” the smaller boy yelled.

“What happened next?” I asked.

“I didn’t know . . . I didn’t think . . .”

The tall trooper began to slide down the slope toward us, now that other cops—county guys—had shown up to handle the crowd. I still needed to get his name. The guide’s—Pete’s—last name, too. And those of the other two kids, the cousins. Jonah was staring out over the river, so I made a little motion with my hand for the trooper to hang back. He caught it, but so did Mattie. She turned and looked up at the trooper.

“What did you think would happen when you pushed him with the stick?” I asked.

It was a critical question. Intent was everything here.

“I didn’t really push . . . just a little, when I let go . . . I didn’t think . . .”

Yeah, he didn’t think. It was a stupid thing to do, to push a kid into the river. He didn’t know the depth or any hazards that might be below—like a fucking sink. I could still feel its frigid grasp. My already-shivering body flinched, trying to shake it off, while Jonah searched for words.

“Who are you?” Mattie suddenly demanded.

She wasn’t crying anymore. Her gray irises were bright and sharp.

“My name’s Antonio Burns, like I told you,” I said. “Jonah, tell me—”

“No, who
the fuck
are you?”

“I’m a special agent with Wyoming’s Division of Criminal Investigation.”

I saw her shiver now. Then she said into Jonah’s ear, “Don’t talk to him anymore. Don’t say anything.”

Jonah took a couple of deep breaths, looking like he was thinking, or trying to think.

Then he said, “Look, Officer, or Agent, or whatever you’re called. It was an accident. Jesus Christ. I thought he was just going to get wet, you know? I didn’t know he couldn’t swim.”

I believed him, for the most part. But God, it was a stupid thing to do, especially in hindsight. And Jonah, tats and all, really didn’t seem like such a stupid guy. I had to wonder, what would I have done in that situation? What if some brat had nearly brained Rebecca with a rock? I wanted to ask again what he had expected to happen, and how angry had he been, but the voluntary part of the interrogation was over. If I wanted more, now that he knew he was being interrogated, I’d have to read him his rights. And with the people yelling from up on the hill, it wasn’t the place or time.

“Jonah, I need you to stand up.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. But I need you to stand up,” I repeated.

Jonah tried to push off the ground, but his legs crumpled, like they wouldn’t support him. Mattie stood with him and helped hold him up.

“Now turn around, please.”

“What?”

The first time he’d sounded puzzled. Now he sounded alarmed. He was finally getting it.

“What are you doing?” Mattie demanded. “What do you think you’re doing?”

I glanced up at the tall trooper and gave him a nod. He clattered over the stones toward us.

As gently as I could, I put a hand on the life jacket and pushed Jonah around. I ran my hand down his arm and held the wrist out for the trooper. He ratcheted a handcuff onto it. Mattie grabbed Jonah’s free arm and tried to pull him away from us.

“Step back, Mattie,” I said.

“No!” she yelled. “What are you doing? It was an accident! A goddamn accident!”

“Step back. Accident or not, he’s got to go to the sheriff’s office. If you want to help him, then please don’t interfere.”

I stuck out an arm and put my palm to the upper part of her chest, pushing her away. She leapt back as if I’d tried to grope her. The trooper managed to get Jonah’s other wrist into the handcuff. The young man’s chin fell onto his chest—he wasn’t resisting at all. Mattie backed off but was still yelling.

I said to the trooper, “Take him to the sheriff’s for me. I’ve got to get my stuff on the other side of the river. It’ll take me about an hour to get into town. Don’t talk to him. Don’t let anyone talk to him until I get there.”

He nodded, then said, “Be careful over there. I thought I saw something moving around in the trees where you dumped your stuff. Could be a wolf or a bear.”

I smiled, but I didn’t feel like smiling. I was feeling pretty bad. This sucked. But I was determined to do this by the book. I was going to be a good cop. I could hear my boss saying,
Just do your damn job—nothing more!

“It’s probably my dog.
You
be careful up there. It looks like some of those people are getting pretty riled up. We don’t want a lynching.”