The Edge of Justice (20 page)

When I finally stand and look at her, Rebecca looks away. Something about my expression makes her do that. I try to swallow the fury. I open my mouth in an attempt to say something comforting, then shut it, my jaw clenched. My eyes stare through her and beyond her, back the way we came. She won't look at my face. She keeps her eyes on the bloody snow and walks around me to Oso's body. She kneels where I had knelt and rubs his still-steaming fur.

“Let's go.” I pull her to her feet more roughly than I had intended.

“Where?”

“I'm taking you out of here. Come on.”

“Shouldn't we bury him?”

I close my eyes for another long moment. “No, there's no time. They'll have found our tracks or tent by now.” And this is the right way for him. His skin, muscle, blood, and bones would be absorbed into the stony ground and the mouths of animals, renourishing the Earth. His soul is gone, flashing somewhere through the snow and trees as he chases squirrels there. Oso is gone. I lead off again into the storm.

The wind rises until it begins to howl. There is nothing to see but the blinding white of the snowstorm and the images of revenge that play inside my mind. I can feel the crunch of Heller's nose as I smash my fist into his face. I'll cut out his heart. I'll piss in the hole. I stalk quickly over the rocks and deepening snow, dark fantasies reeling in my brain, slowing my pace only when I hear Rebecca fall and gasp again. She walks hunched over behind me, her face drawn behind the sunglasses I insist she wear to keep out the pelting flakes.

“The storm is good,” I tell her after hours of stumbling over the talus, once the coals in my heart have been cooled a little by the blizzard. “It probably saved our lives. It's keeping us hidden.” I don't tell her that her presence has saved Heller's and Brad's lives, at least for the time being.

“How much farther?”

“Not far now to the trail.”

I have said that several times. Over a period of hours.

We work our way off the talus and into a forest of squat, wind-torn pines that I remember from the hike in when it was sunny and pleasant, another world. Now their lonely and forlorn shapes seem like demons arising out of the snow. At one point, when I look back at Rebecca, I notice the ice of tears frozen to her face. She is chilled to the bone, utterly exhausted, and I expect her shins and knees are as bruised as her palms from frequent falls. Crossing the scree, she had continually fallen through the whiteness between the rocks.

“We're on the trail,” I tell her a little later.

Every little while I stop and hand her the bottle of water from my pack. I have mixed it with the last of the heavy wine. I make her drink but don't take any for myself. There isn't enough. Our hike through the storm goes on, into thicker and thicker pines. I can see that her reserves are almost gone. She follows blindly.

Finally I stop for good. I reach into the pack and take out my keys. Rebecca reaches out a mittened hand as if expecting me to hand her the water bottle once again. She doesn't realize she has long since drained it.

“Hey,” I say as gently as I can amid the spinning flakes. “We're here. We're at the car. You made it.”

Rebecca looks at me without intelligence behind her dark lenses. The snow has burned her pale skin red and it is stretched tight over her nose and cheekbones.

I brush at the mound of white in front of me, searching for the handle and lock. She climbs in without a word when I open the door for her and hunches over in the seat, crying and holding her knees. I am overwhelmed with weariness too, but safe from the storm, the anger heats up until it is once again a dancing fire. The steering wheel is cold against my forehead when I rest it there. For just a moment I close my snow-stung eyes.

With the snow glittering in the headlights, I fight to keep the truck in the heavy powder between the parallel lines of pines. I inch our way down the unmarked road and drive past the turnoff that will take us back to Buffalo. I drive on to the Hunter Corrals trailhead, where Cecelia said she had told them to go instead of the shorter trail Rebecca and I had taken. There is one car there, buried under more than two feet of fresh snow. I pull up close to it, my headlights revealing the pristine and untracked accumulation around it. In my lap is Cecelia's pistol.

The car is a new-looking, souped-up van. The same van I saw at Heller's house. I slip the pistol back in my pocket and get out of the truck while opening a heavy folding knife. I shuffle around the van in the snow, driving the knife into all four tires. Then with the butt end of the knife, where the worn metal extends past the heel of my closed fist, I slam it down on the windshield. The windshield dissolves in a spider's web of cracked glass.

TWENTY-TWO

O
N THE DRIVE
back to Laramie, I force aside the grief and rage that is popping and crackling like a forest fire in my mind, replacing it with something more ancient, something colder and harder. Like the granite I'd gripped just hours earlier. The fury is stuffed in some dark hole in my brain as if it is an overlarge sleeping bag in a too-small stuff sack. The seams creak, threatening to burst, but I keep shoving. I will cry for my dog only when he is avenged.

As the Land Cruiser eats up the dark pavement, I use my cell phone to call the Johnson County Sheriff's Office. When I get the supervising sergeant on the phone, I tell him about the body he will find low on Cloud Peak's east face when the storm ends and he can get in there with a search-and-rescue team. I give him descriptions of Heller, Brad Karge, and their van, but I don't mention how I vandalized it.

“Christ,” the sergeant says when I'm done, “we haven't had a murder in this county in ten years. Not since ‘Fingers' Muletta was on the loose.” I had heard about that case. A drifter who was camping in the Big Horns took too much LSD, then killed and partially ate a hitchhiking college student. When he was caught he still had the student's fingers in his pockets. “Snacks,” he told the deputy who arrested him. After being found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, Fingers spent about six months in an institution before being released. Supposedly he still lives in a cabin just outside of Sheridan.

“You DCI guys want to handle it?” the sergeant asks.

“I'm after those two for another murder in Albany County. And this has become a little personal, Sergeant. I'd like to run it myself.”

“Lemme check with my boss before I make any promises, but yeah, that sounds good.”

I also check my messages at the office up in Cody. There are only two. One is from McGee, who sounds typically surly, demanding to know why the hell have I taken Rebecca with me into the mountains. Not very subtly, he suggests that it's for some immoral purpose. He also reports that he is going back to Cheyenne for the night—his wife, “the old battle-ax,” is ill. The second message is from a Captain Tobias of Colorado's Bureau of Investigation. I know from past multistate, joint-jurisdictional cases that CBI is Colorado's version of Wyoming's DCI. It is their statewide law enforcement agency. The captain sounds irate and says it's urgent that he speak with me. He doesn't say about what. It could be any number of cases, but something pokes at my mind in a warning. I think of Roberto.

It is eleven at night when I drive slowly through Laramie's dark streets back to our hotel. Rebecca has not spoken the entire ride, perhaps sensing my need for silence. Although somewhere around Wheatland she tilted back in the Land Cruiser's passenger seat, I don't think she has slept at all. I know from experience that the exertion, exhaustion, and dehydration can elevate your heart rate and blood pressure, making sleep desperately needed but impossible.

The sky in Laramie is clear and cold. Thousands of bright stars illuminate the night even though there is no moon. I am so tired that I fail to notice the patrol car sitting with its lights out at the far end of the lot, protected from the starlight by the shadows of a large elm.

I pull into a vacant spot near the building and turn off the engine. Rebecca doesn't move, but I can see that her eyes are open. Unable to risk the emotional burden of any conversation, I quickly walk around the car and open the door for her. When she gets out she steps right into my arms. Her tears begin anew.

“I'm so sorry, Anton. Sorry about Oso. Sorry about everything.”

I stroke her dirty hair the way I had stroked Oso's pelt. There is nothing for me to say. I hold her tightly in the dark lot until my emotional dam threatens to crumble. Then I gently push her toward her room on the opposite end of the building from mine.

“Get some sleep, Rebecca. Drink some water and go to bed.”

She looks back at me. “Do you want me to stay with you?”

“No. But thanks.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

I watch her limp past the security lights and into the dimly lit hallway. More than anything, I wanted to tell her yes. But I'm feeling too weak, too brittle, and too cold. To have said yes would be to use her as a crutch. And I have a lot to do before the hearing in Cheyenne just fifteen hours away.

After she is gone I open the truck's back gate and drag out my pack. When I turn around, swinging the pack onto an aching shoulder, a beam of light from a powerful torch hits my face like a punch.

I squint and raise a hand to ward off the light, at the same time letting the pack drop off my shoulder and onto the pavement. I step back and quickly to the side, away from the tall figure holding the light. The police car I hadn't seen before now skids toward me from its hiding place with its roof-mounted gumballs ignited, the sirens off.

“Good-looking piece of ass,” a voice says.

My sight is still devastated from the sudden light, but I recognize the voice. Bender. His comment about Rebecca prods me to the core.

“What do you want, Leroy?”

“For starters, you little half-spic, put your hands in the air. Unless you want to give me an excuse to cap your ass right here.”

My vision is clearing despite the light that is still in my eyes. Bender's other hand holds his gun. It's pointed at my chest. I do as he says, seeing another deputy get out of the car with his hand on his holster. Deputy David Knight's young face looks scared in the revolving red and blue colors.

Bender shouts at Knight, “Cut the lights!”

Knight reaches in and flicks the switch. Bender keeps his torch on me.

He says, “Where's your piece?”

I can smell whiskey and tobacco on his breath. “In evidence. Remember, you booked it in after you let that gangbanger brain me with it.” Sometime on the ride back to Laramie I had tucked Cecelia's .32 under the car seat.

“Right. Whoowee, now that was fun. Too bad it was unloaded. You've got to be a serious pussy to—”

I cut him off. “Leroy, do you have any idea what I'm going to do to you for this? For drawing on me in the middle of the night? Now get that fucking light out of my face before I go blind.”

He laughs. I lower my arms and take a step toward him, ready to knock the flashlight away.

“Don't move! Up against the car,” he shouts, the laughter abruptly cut off the second I moved. When I hesitate he drops the flashlight on the pavement and braces his gun hand with his free one. In the light from the stars and the hotel's low-watt security bulbs, I can see his finger on the trigger. “Move a muscle, QuickDraw, I'm gonna blow you away. Now turn around!”

Again I do as he says, almost choking with the fury that's flooding my head, and raise my hands once again above my shoulders. He shoves me toward the patrol car, where Knight stands as if frozen, not saying a word. Bender shoves me again with a hand on the back of my neck, propelling me roughly onto the car's hood. When my palms hit the warm metal his left hand is still on my neck. In his right he holds the barrel of his pistol pressed into the muscle on one side of my spine.

I allow myself to bounce off the hood. He is not expecting it when I come off and back, spinning. I knock his gun hand wide and see Bender's eyes go even wider with surprise. I drive my right fist straight into his face while his pistol arm is still outstretched. He starts to go down and I leap after him, ready to wrestle the gun away.

“Freeze! Freeze, Burns!” another voice is shouting.

Someone kicks me in the ribs, sending me off Bender and sprawling across the gravel. In my anger I had forgotten about Deputy Knight. He goes on screaming and repeating himself, his small automatic pointed at my head.

“Stay down! Stay the fuck down.”

I watch, one cheek pressed against the ground, as Bender gets to his feet. He rubs his cheek thoughtfully. Then he takes two quick steps toward me and drives his boot between my ribs and my hip. A white light explodes in my head, a thousand times brighter than the beam of his torch. The kicks keep coming, but the white light is a little dimmer with each blow.

From a great distance I hear Knight's voice, pitched high with fright. “Stop it, Sarge! You'll kill him.”

“Don't you tell me what to do, Dave,” Bender snaps, breathing hard. But the force that propels his boots seems to diminish.

When he is finished kicking me, they work together to handcuff my hands behind my back. Even if I wanted to, I'm unable to help. Kneeling on the gravel with their hands lifting at my shoulders, I can't even raise my head. I try to retch but nothing comes up.

They haul me to the patrol car and toss me in the back like a duffel bag. At first the sandpaper texture of the rough, plastic bench seat feels cool on my face. It quickly becomes wet and sticky. I open an eye and see in the light of the car's dome that my own blood is staining it.

When Bender and Knight slam shut the doors it sounds like a faraway echo. The engine starts and my head bounces on the plastic as we pull onto the street. Bender's voice comes from the same great distance.

He speaks to Knight. “Anyone taught you to make popcorn, boy?”

I don't hear Knight reply but I know what is coming. “Popcorn” is what makes a tough kernel of a suspect into a soft, fluffy, and edible meal for a cowboy cop.

“Got your seat belt on?”

Bender hits the brakes and I crash into the clear partition. Then he accelerates, throwing me back onto the bench seat. I can hear him laughing. He hits the brakes again. This goes on and on—the screech of the brakes, the smack of my body against the partition, the laughter, and the ricochet back onto the plastic seat. At some point I let myself enter a dream. In it I'm on an icy summit, the sun and the wind on my face, my ice tools hanging limply at my sides. I'm smiling, knowing that my big dog is waiting faithfully for me far below.

I come to my senses when they pull me out of the car and drag me by the arms into the Sheriff's Office through the underground garage. My knees and boots scuff along on the floor. Unlike the time I woke up in the hospital, now I'm fully alert. The rage cuts through all the mist.

They drop me on the floor in an interview room. It is like tens of others I have been in around the state, observing someone else handcuffed and scared. It is not much bigger than a closet and is furnished with a table, a couple of plastic chairs, an intercom box mounted on the wall, and a one-way mirror. The intercom and mirror would lead into a smaller room where a video camera or recording equipment is usually set up. There is an odor of fear and desperation in the room. So many times I have sat, protected and superior with my badge clipped to my shirt pocket, across the table or behind the mirror, watching a suspect sweat. Now I know a little of what they felt.

“I'm a little disappointed, QuickDraw,” Bender says when I try to stagger to my feet despite having my hands cuffed behind my back. “You were supposed to be a tough guy. A cocky little son of a bitch. Now it just looks like you've been rode hard and put up wet.” He pushes me back down onto the dirty carpet and sweeps my legs out of the way of the door.

“Let's go get the sheriff, Dave,” he says to Knight as the door shuts and locks.

Left alone, I turn onto my back, then roll to my feet. The dizziness and pain come on so strong I almost go down again. With one foot I tug a chair out from under the table and barely make it into it. I want to put my head on the table's flat surface but I guess I'm being watched from beyond the mirror. So I sit up straight and stare into the glass.

The metallic sound of voices comes over the intercom after the sound of a door closing. The small-town idiots have left it on two-way transmit. Despite the pain, I almost grin when I realize that.

“Mean-looking fucker, ain't he?” It's Willis's voice.

“He's a pussy,” Bender says.

Willis laughs. “You saying before or after you hooked him? Looks like he gave you a nice shiner.”

There's silence for a moment.

“Look at him, glarin' at that mirror, like he can see us. Maybe he thinks he's still pretty,” Bender says.

“Nathan won't be happy if he files a brutality complaint.”

“Don't worry, Uncle Dan. It would be his word 'gainst Knight's and mine. Knight's a stand-up guy. And no one would believe a word that little spic has to say, 'specially as he's under investigation for aiding his brother's escape. Anyway, he ain't the type to do that. He likes to keep things personal. It'll be between him and me.”

So Roberto has gone and done it. I should be worried, but I am strangely relieved to hear my brother has done what he threatened to do. His soul had been burning itself up while caged in that prison. He's better off with a short, wild run than a long death. And I don't believe he will let himself be caught. Not this time.

“The fucker's still staring at us. I'm gonna wipe that smirk off his face.”

“Easy, boy. I want to talk to him first. Did he say anything 'bout his brother?”

“No, sir. I didn't say anything myself. I thought you'd want to bring that up.”

“Good boy. Do the paperwork—charge him with obstruction and resisting. Assault on an officer too. That ought to get him held till Friday, even without those Colorado guys we got coming up. Nathan says it don't matter what we do with him after the sentencing. He'll be good as elected by then.”

“What about his boss, that old guy with the beard?”

“Nathan says he'll take care of him.”

The door opens and Sheriff Willis follows Bender into the room. A silver rodeo belt buckle holds up his big belly. Instead of riding upright, facing out, the buckle reflects down to the snakeskin boots on his feet.

“I'm a little surprised to see you back in town, Agent.”

“I'm a little surprised you haven't had a heart attack yet, Sheriff,” I tell him, looking at his belly.

The sheriff sighs. “It sounds like you want to do this the hard way, boy.”

“Sheriff, I don't think there's much that's hard about you.”

The sheriff allows a chuckle, then slaps me across the mouth. My senses are too dulled from pain and exhaustion to see it coming. I gather my feet under me and start to stand, but Bender puts his hands on my shoulders and slams me back down in the chair. Again I can taste fresh blood in my mouth.