The Edge of Justice (29 page)

Brad starts to turn toward him with the gun and I step forward. Before I get more than a step, though, he somehow sees my movement and whirls back to me. I can't imagine what Roberto's wraithlike appearance is doing to Brad's mind, scrambled with crank.

“Who the fuck are you!” Brad shouts. “Come closer and I'll shoot the cop!”

Roberto doesn't even slow. He comes along the narrow ledge behind Brad with a predatory grace. Talking while he moves, his voice is hypnotic in the night, even to me. “You think Heller's a badass, you little punk? You don't know what bad is. I beat men to death with my hands, not little girls. I've ripped a full-grown man's throat open with just a piece of glass and my fingers. I tore away his face with my teeth. I've leaned farther out over the edge than anything you can imagine. I've jumped off it a hundred times and always floated back. I can eat you and your pal Heller whole, kid. Bones, skin, muscle, and blood. I can chew you up and spit you out.”

Brad's hand is shaking violently as he grips the pistol and struggles to keep it pointed at me.

Still talking softly, Roberto comes up right behind him but doesn't touch him. My brother keeps talking with his lips almost against the back of Brad's throat, his voice now a whisper that the wind whips away before I can decipher the words. Brad's rattling so hard he is in danger of coming apart. Behind him I see my brother lift his powerful arm like a matador's short sword, then drive it into the side of Brad's neck as if he were plunging it home. Brad is slammed into the wall. My brother almost gently catches him before he bounces right off into the night. He sets him on the ledge. The gun in Brad's hand slides over the side and clatters down the slab.

“Jesus, bro,” I say.

Roberto shrugs as if to lift the menace from his shoulders. But it doesn't work. Violence surrounds him like a dark cloak. “No worries, Ant. It's just yard talk, you know? Something you got to learn in the can to survive.”

I move toward them carefully and put my fingers to Brad's throat, where he is slumped on the ground. I feel a fast pulse. “I hope you didn't break his neck. How long have you been up here?”

“Ever since I split out of Canon City. I remembered you saying that you were doing some climbing up here at the 'Voo and figured it'd be a good place to hang until the heat's off and I can get down to Argentina. I hoped to spot you up here and blow your mind,” he says, chuckling. “You know, write you a letter and say I saw you or something. Instead I've just been watching these freaks dope up and talk about killing you.”

“I need a rope to get him off of the ledge. Did you see one by the cave?”

“Be right back, Ant.”

Spiderlike, he effortlessly ascends the wall, moving up the short vertical sections between the ledges with a sure- and soft-footed elegance that awes me. His hands and feet seem to barely touch the rock as he glides up, somehow finding holds in the darkness. He disappears up into the night without a sound.

While he is gone I pull my folded tie from my pocket and cinch it tight around Brad's slack wrists. By the time I'm done Roberto is already returning, floating down the wall with the same elegance. In the moonlight I can see a bright rope coiled and draped over his head and one shoulder. He helps me loop it over a thick, scrubby pine that juts out of a crack over our heads. I tie one end around Brad's waist, then set up a body belay with the other part of the rope that hangs from the tree. Unceremoniously, Roberto kicks Brad off the ledge and I start lowering his limp and jackknifed body to the ground. His feet and head strike first and I hear him moan.

While I wrap the rope around my own body to rappel to the ground, Roberto down-climbs the scooped-out slab I nearly died on. He reaches the ground before I do.

I manage to find my shoes and socks after feeling around in the dirt. I find the heavy pistol Brad dropped too. For a few moments I balance it in my hand, feeling Roberto's hard blue eyes on me. Finally I make a decision. “Want it?” I ask, holding it out to him. “You earned it.”

He laughs and says, “You've stepped off the edge,
'mano
. Offering an escaped murderer a gun!” Then he
tsk
s his tongue against the roof of his mouth the way our mother used to do. “No thanks. I won't be needing it. Sometime tomorrow I'm catching a ride to the airport and a flight south. I'm going to do some climbing, take a stab at the clean life.”

He throws Brad over his shoulder as lightly as if he were a coat. As we walk through the dark trees I'm fascinated, as always, by the way Roberto moves through the forest. Normally I feel at home in the backcountry, but I'm a clumsy foreigner compared to my brother. Even with a man's weight on his back he moves effortlessly. Roberto has always been at home in his body and with the environment around him. Utterly unself-conscious, he is a part of the earth rather than just a tourist. He moves with such grace that one wouldn't be surprised to see him walk through walls and rocks. Despite his insatiable appetites and urges, his cells are somehow more directly related to the dirt, the wind, and the trees. Once again, I feel a childhood envy. When we reach the truck I open the back door and Roberto dumps his load inside. I find my handcuffs under the seat and lock the unconscious young man's hands together, taking back my tie.

Roberto flashes a grin at me in the darkness and holds out his own hands, palms upturned and wrists close together.

“Sorry. I only have one set of cuffs,” I tell him.

I put my arms around him to say goodbye and feel the thick slabs of prison muscle on his back. A vision of Ross McGee enters my mind for some reason and I recite his mantra to my brother: “Do the right thing, bro—don't fuck around.” But the words sound corny from my mouth.

Roberto pushes his hands through my hair playfully, amused, and disappears into the blowing trees as if he had never been there at all.

I need somewhere to stash Bradley Karge, and the Albany County jail is definitely out of the question. As is DCI's holding facility in Cheyenne. I have him handcuffed and gagged with a wool sock and some duct tape I found among Oso's shedded hair under the seat. We sit quietly in the Land Cruiser while I think. Brad's waking up; he attempts to cough as strands from my dead dog's thick hair scratch his throat. I half hope he will choke on them. That would be justice of a sort.

Finally I put the truck in gear and begin bouncing over the dirt roads. I head north, winding among the granite towers that are hidden by the night. After twenty minutes we hit the Happy Jack Road that meanders through the mountains separating Laramie and Cheyenne. Every now and then I stop to study a map from the glove box, check to make sure I can reach Laramie County and Sheriff McKittrick without straying back over the Albany County line. I don't want to drive through that jurisdiction with this particular passenger.

THIRTY

N
OT KNOWING WHERE
else to go, I return to the Holiday Inn from Laramie County. Sheriff McKittrick had been happy enough to hold on to Brad, and he still had Cindy Topper in protective custody. He told me that she was at home with his wife. “Sweet girl,” he said. “She's scared shitless that the same guys are going to come for her.” With good reason, I agreed, but wasn't so sure about the sweet part.

I think he was delighted that I was doing all his work for him in catching the murderers of Sierra Calloway, even letting him have the credit of holding Brad in his Cheyenne jail rather than the cells nearby at DCI. And I think he was surprised I brought Brad in alive. “Your reputation's slipping, Agent QuickDraw Burns,” he said. “Maybe you ain't a killer.” He promised to keep the news of the arrest quiet until the next morning. I asked him to do that more out of fear that my suspended authority would be disclosed than to keep the media at bay.

I call Kristi's home. Her voice is anxious when she answers the phone. “Anton, what's going on? Ross is in the hospital, and everyone's saying you've been suspended, that they're talking of filing those charges again.”

“I need some serious help, Kristi. And I can't explain all the reasons why right now. Just that they're trying to screw with me so I can't do anything to postpone the Knapps' sentencing tomorrow morning. The Knapps didn't do it, by the way. They didn't kill that girl. A guy named Billy Heller did with some help from the Karges.”

“Those guys you had me pull the records on?”

“Right. They set the Knapp brothers up, and the sheriff and County Attorney went along with it. And they've killed or had a role in the killing of three other people that I know of since then, trying to shut them up. They're about to do a fourth. What I need is help, a BOLO out on a tan Jeep Wrangler registered in Wyoming to Bradley Karge. There's a good chance it's at a climbing area somewhere within a hundred miles or so of Laramie. Either in eastern Wyoming or maybe northern Colorado.”

There is a long pause on the other end of the phone. Finally Kristi says, “Anton, I don't know if I can do that, with you being suspended and all. I'd lose my job. I'm sorry, buddy.”

After another long moment I ask, “How do you know I'm suspended?”

“Everybody knows it. Everybody's been talking about it.”

“But do you know
officially
?”

“You mean, like, have they sent out an e-mail or a memo or something. No, nothing like that.”

“Then I'm telling you what you've heard is just rumor, okay? I'm not suspended. You can tell anyone who asks that I told you that. I still have my badge.” Since DCI has someone at a communications desk twenty-four hours a day to assist the agents in the field, I ask who is working the desk tonight.

“A guy named Ted,” she says, her voice getting excited once again, “and he's got a serious crush on me. He's been trying to get in my pants for months.”

“Get him to put out the BOLO. No one will even know about it till morning, and then you guys can just say I lied to you about my status. Okay? Will you do it?”

“Okay, buddy, you got it. But you owe me. I can already think of a few ways I'll make you pay. . . .”

A little while later the phone rings.

“We got a confirmation,” a man's voice over the phone says. Ted. “Tan Jeep Wrangler, Wyoming plate number 7–528. At Longs Peak trailhead. That's outside Estes, Colorado, Agent. It's a national park. The ranger on duty said the Jeep's been there all day.”

“Did he check the climber's log?” I ask. When the voice at DCI headquarters doesn't immediately respond, I quickly explain, “There's a sign-in book at the trailhead where climbers write their name and intended route.”

“Hang on, I've got the ranger on the other line.”

There is a click and music begins to play over the phone. I listen in annoyance to an instrumental version of Creedence Clearwater Revival's “Bad Moon Rising.” The song seems a little too appropriate. I look out the window and see the turquoise water of the swimming pool. In the luminescence of the underwater lights I can see that the wind is whipping up small wavelets. If the pool were just a little larger, there'd be whitecaps. I turn out the lights in my room and look out past the curtains again, up at the sky. The stars and planets are clear, but there is an ominous, hazy ring like a halo around the moon. A sure indicator that a serious storm is brewing. I flip the inside lights back on and curse to myself.

With the phone gripped between my ear and shoulder, I lift the lids off the crates of climbing gear that are still pushed against one wall. I kick off my pants and begin to tug on a pair of fleece tights.

The music clicks off and the voice returns.

“The ranger checked. There's a William Heller and Lynn White with ‘King of Swords' written after it. Do you know what that means? The ranger said it was the name of a climb.”

I curse again, out loud this time. King of Swords is a legend. Not only is it known as one of the hardest alpine routes in North America, it's also one of the longest and at the highest altitude. Thousands of years ago a glacier cut away half the 14,255-foot mountain now called Longs Peak. The grinding tear resulted in a vertical to overhanging 2,000-foot face of granite that rises to the highest point on the mountain. The face is called the Diamond because of its vague resemblance to a square turned on one corner. And King of Swords, I recall from photos I have seen, leads straight up the middle. I had shaken my head at the audacity and grade of the route.

“Yeah, I know what it means. I've heard of it.” For a moment I wonder why Heller would've signed the guidebook, but then realize he'd signed it so if there were questions about Lynn's death he could just call it an accident. I shake the camping gear out of my pack and begin shoving climbing gear into it. A rope. A helmet. A pair of ice tools. Crampons. A small rack of cams, nuts, and a harness. “Listen, get the ranger to call out the park's search-and-rescue team. Get them to the trailhead. Get them there now, tonight.”

“Why search-and-rescue? Is someone hurt?”

“Not yet, if we're lucky. But someone's going to get hurt.”

The big Land Cruiser rocks on its axles as I take the canyon turns far too fast. Racing up Big Thompson Canyon toward Estes, I keep my hazard lights on and my finger poised on the switch that controls the high beams. Again and again I come up on motor homes creeping up the inclines at far below the speed limit. I angrily flip the beams on and off, honking the horn. I grind my teeth when the campers reluctantly pull over, their drivers displaying annoyance, moving out of the way as slowly as possible. I have to struggle to keep my free hand from beating the steering wheel in frustration.

I curse anew when I roar past a local police car concealed beyond a bend with its lights out. My headlights catch a surprised patrolman in mid-sip from a paper coffee cup, and then I'm past. A few moments later I see the inevitable revolving red and blue lights in my rearview mirror but I keep my foot on the accelerator.

With one hand I lift the cell phone off the console and punch in the numbers to the twenty-four-hour desk at DCI. Unexpectedly the call goes through, the digital connection somehow being made over the canyon walls.

The same voice answers brusquely, “DCI.”

“Ted, this is Agent Burns. I'm in Colorado now. Larimer County, I think. Call the Sheriff's Office here, tell them to get the patrolman off my ass in Big Thompson Canyon. I'm in my personal car, a red Land Cruiser, Wyoming plates.” I pause, trying to remember what the numbers are, but can't. “Tell them it's an emergency. I'm meeting Colorado law enforcement and a park search-and-rescue team on Highway 7 at the Longs Peak trailhead.”

“Gotcha, Burns. Do you want to hold?”

I hit the end button and toss the phone onto the passenger seat.

The patrol car pulls within feet of the Land Cruiser's rear bumper. The flashing lights seem to be all around me, reflecting off the canyon walls. Then a spot beam comes on, lighting up the interior of my truck with a ten-thousand-watt beam. It's a blinding ray. Furiously, I swipe at my rearview mirror to turn it away from the beam. Instead I knock it off its windshield mount. I can hear over the rumble of my burdened eight cylinders a voice shouting into the night through a loudspeaker. Not slowing, I fish in my fleece jacket's pocket and come up with my badge wallet. I hold it open up where the mirror had been and see it illuminated by the beam. It blazes gold. Switching it to the other hand, I roll down the window and hold it out there too, into the wind.

The spotlight abruptly goes out. Relieved, I can see the police car backing off a little. Then it swings wide out into the left-hand lane and leaps forward like a startled deer. Within seconds it roars past me, engine pitched high, and abruptly cuts back into my lane. “Shit,” I almost shout, anticipating that the patrol car will hit its brakes to stop me. But instead the car keeps on accelerating with its red and blue lights flashing. I feel a rush of gratitude as the patrol car sets out to clear a path for me.

I'm almost to the town of Estes when my phone chimes the Mexican Hat Dance from the seat beside me.

“Burns,” I say sharply as I swing too fast into another curve.

“This is Captain Tobias of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. What the hell do you think you're doing?”

“Trying to stop a murder. And catch a killer. Guess what, Captain, I need your help.” I need to placate him, to get him to help expedite the search-and-rescue team.

There is a laugh on the other end of the line. It isn't a pleasant laugh. “You bet your ass you do. Remember what I told you about coming into my state? What you're going to do right now is stop whatever it is you're doing. I know where you are, Burns, and you better pull over and stop right now.”

“Captain, there's a man who's killed four people in Wyoming. Now he's about to kill another up on Longs Peak, if he hasn't done it al—”

“Stop right now! And shut your goddamn mouth!” Tobias interrupts. “You don't come down here out of your jurisdiction without official permission—”

The man isn't listening. And he isn't going to listen. I hit the end button and try to focus on the road.

After a few minutes the patrol car that's been escorting me suddenly begins to slow. In the glow of my headlights I can see the patrolman in the car raising both hands into the air in a dramatic shrug or “what-the-hell” gesture. Tobias must have reached him on his radio. I slow with him for a moment, then shove my foot on the gas pedal and spin the wheel to the left as I shoot by the confused patrolman. Past him, I flick my own lights on and off once, knowing the brake lights would flicker on and off too, in the trucker's gesture of “thank you.” The phone next to me keeps playing the Mexican Hat Dance until I find the thumbnail button that shuts it off.

Another patrol car, this one a U.S. Park Services SUV, is lighting up the night at the entrance to the trailhead parking lot. Parked behind it is a Larimer County sheriff's car. I skid past both and don't slow until I reach the small ranger's cabin at the end of the lot. My headlights reveal six or seven men and women standing in the darkness around a camper that has a Search and Rescue insignia on its side. The S & R team is dressed like I am, in Gore-Tex and fleece. They have aluminum mugs of coffee in their hands. Loose leaves blow among them and I notice the pine trees beyond are bending. The storm is picking up.

I get out of the Land Cruiser, pull my climbing pack from the rear, and step through the informally assembled group, nodding at them in a rushed greeting. They are a random assortment of climbers, long-haired and short-, doctors, lawyers, construction workers, and bums. They train many hours a week, several weekends a month, for the unpaid privilege of rescuing one of their own. The positive energy of that radiates from their concerned faces and makes me feel embarrassed when I return to my truck and slip Cecelia's gun into my pocket.

Several of them ask me questions that I barely hear over the wind.

“Two climbers on the Diamond,” I say quickly, moving toward the cabin, “on a route called King of Swords.”

“In this fucking storm? Lunatics!” one says. But he grins like the others. The idea of going on up the highest alpine wall in the continental United States in the middle of a gale appeals to them. They are amped.

I walk quickly to the door of the ranger's cabin, rap it twice with my knuckles, and push it open.

Three men turn to stare at me from inside the small building. Tobias is there, a phone to his ear, his face immediately coloring at the sight of me. Even his ridiculously outdated military haircut seems to bristle. One of the other two is a man I've never met but I've seen before in climbing magazines, honored for the rescues he performs. I remember his position as that of the highest-ranking ranger in one of the country's busiest national parks. The third man is a total stranger.

The one from the magazines is older, probably in his early sixties, and wearing a Park Service uniform below a lean, weatherworn face. His lantern jaw reaches far over the collar of the stiff, green uniform, and the look in his eyes is as strong as the jaw and the starch.

The other man, the stranger, is almost the ranger's opposite. He is small and thick with a chin that recesses instead of jutting. He wears a cheap blue suit, much of its polyester lining hanging below the hem of the jacket. The fat jowls of his sweaty face rise above his version of a uniform. Despite his obvious dishevelment, his small dark eyes are probing, assessing. Cop's eyes. The small man looks from me to Tobias as if awaiting a command. I peg him as Tobias's toady.

I nod at the ranger. Before either of us can speak, Tobias starts in.

“I warned you, Burns. I warned you not to come into my state. Now I'm going to have you up on charges. Reckless driving, eluding a police officer, even accessory to escape, if I can make it stick. You're not going to—”

I ignore him and speak to the ranger, holding out my no-longer-official badge and hoping Tobias hasn't heard of my suspension. “As you've probably heard, my name's Antonio Burns. A man I believe is responsible for several recent murders in Wyoming is on the Diamond with an essential witness. He's going to drop her. He's done it before.”