When the Killing's Done (44 page)

Half an hour later, the rain still coming down and the churning dark water in the ravine rising by the minute, he begins to have second thoughts. He’s feeling the strain in the long muscles of his thighs, the sleeves of his sweatshirt are mud to the elbow because there’s no way to do this without using your hands, and his ankles throb from the effort of maintaining balance on a forty-five-degree slope. And he’s in shape. Which is more than he can say for Toni Walsh or the two pear-shaped girls or even Josh. They’re all strung out behind him in single file, fifty feet above the waterline, grasping at whatever fixed object they can—whether it has thorns or not—to keep themselves upright, and nobody’s saying anything. Cammy’s right behind him, pushing him even, followed by the two girls, then Toni Walsh (gray-faced, wet to the bone, looking like one of the risen dead), and Josh bringing up the rear so he can keep an eye on her. They must have gone half a mile—they’re almost to the first of the waterfalls, where at least they’ll be able to get out of the mud—and they haven’t seen any sign of pigs, hunters, foxes, ravens or anything else. They might as well be on the backside of the moon. Except it doesn’t rain on the moon. And there’s no mud.

The surprise has been Toni Walsh. He’s been expecting her to give out ever since they began to work their way down the first hill, but every time he glances back, there she is, head down, plodding along. Still, he’s thinking, how much more of this can she take? They need to get up out of the canyon—and soon. Or find a place where she can lie up while he and Josh or Cammy scout ahead, looking for anything that’ll make it worth her while to go on. He’s scanning the terrain where the canyon begins to narrow three or four hundred yards ahead of them—rock and more rock, everything trenched and gouged and spilling with water—when he spots an overhang projecting from the side of the hill like an outsized awning. Encouraged—
Finally
, he’s thinking—he swings round on Cammy and points emphatically before calling out to the others. “Up there,” he shouts, watching their eyes lift from the vacancy of their faces. “We’ll take a break.”

The cover isn’t much—a ledge maybe nine or ten feet across squeezed under a dripping lid of rock open on three sides to the weather—but at least it keeps the rain off. It’s a bit of a squeeze, everybody wedged in shoulder to shoulder, boot to boot, and the first thing they do, to a man and woman, is dig into their packs for food. There isn’t much to say beyond “Scoot over just a little, could you?” or “Did you want the peanut butter or the cream cheese and sprouts?” and for a long moment there’s no sound but the hiss of the rain, the crinkle of cellophane and the soft snap of mastication. Then Josh produces a bota bag (vinyl and plastic, no sheep’s stomach on
his
conscience) and asks if anybody wants a hit.

“What’s in it?” Toni Walsh looks up with interest. She’s crouched in a pink heap amidst a tangle of legs and muddy boots, her face fish-belly white, her hair like the stuff they line packing crates with, and she’s making no concession to present company, working her way through what looks to be a deli sandwich thick with prosciutto and cheese. “Brandy, I hope?”

“Red wine. A nice sturdy zin. It’s good, go ahead.”

And then they’re opening wide, one by one, for a taste of it. By the time Suzanne passes out the homemade oatmeal cookies, everyone seems to be feeling marginally better. When the wine comes round he takes a hit too—why not? He can use the boost.

“So what do you think?” Cammy says, turning to him. “Realistically, I mean? Do we have a chance of getting up there and back before dark?” She’s slumped against the overhang in a sprawl of limbs, looking about twelve years old. “Because I know you didn’t count on this,” she adds quickly. “These conditions, I mean.”

He shrugs to show it’s no big deal and passes the bota bag to Kelly, who’s practically sitting in his lap. If there was any adventure in her face, it’s long gone, but she lifts the bag dutifully, tips back her head and squeezes a thread of wine into her mouth. She smells of sweat and the orange she’s been peeling and her hair frizzes out under the bill of her cap. Absently, he watches her lick the stain from her lips, a dumpy girl, graceless, dull, in desperate need of a makeover if she ever hopes to attract a man and have a life for herself or any life at all beyond a nunnery, before turning back to Cammy. “Yeah, I was thinking maybe I’d go on ahead with maybe two other people while the rest of you make your way back—Toni, I’ll take your camera if you want. Maybe I’ll get lucky.” They’re all watching him but he can’t tell from their expressions whether they’re relieved or not. “But Cammy’s right—we just picked a bad day, that’s all, and there’s no way we’re going to be able to do all that much. Or not the kind of scope we’d planned on anyway.”

“It sucks,” Josh says, his voice gone hollow. He’s looking at nothing, cradling his knees to his chest, the depleted bota bag dangling limply from the fingers of one hand. His boots are mud to the laces. He’s shivering. They’re all shivering. Below them, louder now, loud as static, there’s the steady mocking roar of the water crashing through the canyon. No one else seems to have anything to say. They want to go back, want to give up, all of them—he can see it in their faces.

It’s a debilitating moment, hopeless, depressing. But there’s no way he’s giving up—he’s going to climb up out of this canyon and snap off one shameful inflammatory picture after another so the
Press Citizen
can run them on the front page and everybody can see for themselves what the killers are up to, and then he’s going to cut wire if it takes him all night, if he has to swim back to the boat, if he . . .

And then the wind shifts and everything changes.

“Does anybody smell anything?” It’s Kelly, stirring herself. She sits up, arches her back, narrows her eyes. She sniffs audibly, deliberately, making a face. “It’s like”—and here it is, they can all smell it now, rank, musty and corporeally sweet all at once—“something
died
.”

In the next moment they’re back out in the rain, everybody, even Toni Walsh, working their way higher, to the next ledge, the one above the overhang. There’s a turning there, a scoop of rock carved out of the high wall of the canyon—sage, coyote brush, coreopsis, and something else, a dark shape wedged like a doormat between two over-spilling rocks in a pale slurry of mud. The footing’s bad, horrendous. The odor intensifies, deepens till it’s an assault. “Is that—?” somebody says.

They are looking at the remains—the carcasses—of two pigs, one an adult the size of a big overfed dog, the other a juvenile. The eyes of both are gone, reddened pits gouged out of their faces, their jaws gaping, intestines exposed and shading from blue to gray. The hide is a black bristle animated by the maggots feeding there in a frenzy of moving parts.

“Gross,” Kelly says.

Josh lets out a curse. “Jesus,” he snarls, “what did they ever do to deserve
this
?”

Shivering, hunched, the big pink pocketbook like a withered limb and her face intent on the viewfinder, Toni Walsh moves in to hover over the scene, freezing one frame after another. She doesn’t say anything, not a word, because she’s at work now, doing her job, recording the scene, making history. The others look awed. Or scared. This is the configuration of death, the thing they’ve been fighting—the very thing—and here it is, right in their faces, stinking at their feet.

He’s trying to sort out his own feelings—horror, pity, sorrow, anger—but there’s something else too, a rush of excitement, of happiness even. “Good,” he’s saying, “excellent—this is just what we want,” and he has a stick in his hand now, poking at the carcass of the larger animal, looking for the entry wound, for the bullet, for evidence no one can controvert because these pigs didn’t just lose their balance and topple over the rim of the canyon to wash up here. No, they were murdered,
exterminated
—that’s the word. “Here, Toni—here, I think this is where they shot him, see? Can you get a close-up on this?”

It’s a small space they’re inhabiting, no bigger than a hot tub, the stone slick, the creek boiling below, rain in their faces and drooling from the bills of their hats, everyone crowding in for a look and he and Toni at the center of it, ratified, vindicated, the
sons of bitches
, and when Kelly takes a step back to give them space—a single step—he has trouble registering what’s unfolding before him. She doesn’t cry out. Doesn’t clutch at his shoulder or the withered excuse of the pale insubstantial shadow of a bush beside her. She just murmurs
Oh, shit
, as if she’s engaged in a private conversation on a subject no one could begin to guess at, and then she’s gone.

She goes down headfirst, on her back, both arms spread wide and her hands snatching at nothing, and half the hillside goes with her in a rattling concussion of rock and dirt, a chute opening up before her all the way down to the water a hundred feet below. There’s a thunderous splash, her khaki slicker flapping and billowing in the current even as the dark pinpoint of her bare head, the hat gone and her hair spreading like drift, bobs once, twice, three times before she’s sucked down the channel and out of sight.

There’s no time to absorb the shock of it, no time for curses, exclamations or the strangled shriek that climbs up out of Suzanne’s throat to ring impotently through the canyon, because he’s already in motion, launching himself back down the rock face, darting beneath the overhang and dropping into the mudfield below, his eyes straining at the place where she went down, expecting at any moment—or no, demanding—to see her there clinging to a rock or log. He can hear the others calling out and fumbling behind him and he can only pray that another one of them doesn’t lose their grip and go down with her. There are no handholds. He’s made of mud. He can taste something foul in the back of his mouth.

When finally he does get to the water, riding a cascade of rock and mud—and what’s it been, five minutes, ten?—it’s all he can do to keep from being swept away himself. As it is, he plunges in up to his waist before he can catch hold of the embankment with one hand and the crown of a slick streaming willow with the other and still he can feel the current tugging at him as if it’s alive. There are shouts from above. Tumblings of pebbles, sticks, brush. He looks up, outraged, to see that two of them—Cammy and Josh—are working their way down to him. Don’t they understand? Don’t they realize the danger? “Go back!” he roars, never so furious in his life.

It is then, even as he jerks his legs from the water and lurches upright in the clinging unstable mud that keeps giving way underfoot as if he’s on a treadmill, as if he’s running in place in a waking nightmare, that the magnitude of what’s going down begins to hit him. If she’s hurt—Kelly, and all he can think of is the way she went over the side as if she’d been snatched by the collar, helpless, utterly helpless—there’s going to be a lot of explaining to do. To the Coast Guard. The cops. The newspapers and the membership of FPA and everybody out there who’s going to do the hard calculus that measures the fate of the animals against human suffering, human life, and what are they going to do, interview her in her hospital bed? Autograph her cast?

It’s a mess. A fucking disaster. And he’s moving now, humping low along the waterline, clinging to whatever he can catch hold of, frantic to find her, save her, get her out of this and back to the boat, wrap her in blankets, feed her hot soup, anything, brandy, crank the heater, and the one thing he won’t allow, won’t even think of, is the darker apprehension that Kelly, with her eager face and pear shape and the patch she wears on her sleeve—
Animals are not ours to eat, wear or experiment on
—is beyond any help he or anyone else can give her.

The rain has slackened to a drizzle, the light fading from the sky, the harsh clawing rush of the river the only thing he’s ever known—bonecold, aching, sick in his soul—by the time they find her. She glows against the dark tumbled backdrop of torn brush and brutalized trees, pale as a mushroom, because what the water has done, the force of it, is strip the clothes from her so that there’s no trace left of her sweatshirt, her shorts or the khaki rain slicker either. He’s the one fighting the current to reach her while the others form a human chain and pay out the rope somebody found in the bottom of a daypack, and he’s the one to touch her, her cold naked flesh, and see the way the rocks have treated her and how her face rides low in the water while a willow branch, caught in the crevice of her underarm, waves back and forth in an imposture of animation.

She’s been carried all the way down to where they started, where the resuscitated river undercuts the rock on one side and sweeps wide to fling its refuse on the other—if only they’d known they could have gotten to her sooner. But they didn’t know and they had to work their way down-canyon foot by foot, scanning the banks and calling her name till the voices died in their throats. Is there irony in that? He doesn’t know. All he knows is the moment and the moment is as bleak and sorrowful as anything he’s ever had to live through on this earth. When he takes hold of her, thinking of how Cammy kept saying she knew CPR—she’d been in junior lifeguards when she was in high school and trained on dummies, that’s what she kept repeating, her eyes tearing, her breath coming fast—he has to brace himself against the bottom, the heavy freight of the water at his back, pushing him, jerking his legs out from under him, though it can’t be more than five feet deep here, and that’s another irony. He wraps an arm round her shoulder but can’t really get much purchase—she’s stuck fast, tangled in the branches, that’s what it is—and his impulse is to be gentle with her, but gentle does nothing, and so he tugs, actually tugs at her as if this is a game, a contest of wills, as if she’s tugging back. From the bank, Suzanne’s voice, thick with phlegm: “Is she okay?”

He is racked with the cold, hypothermic, losing it, but he will not give up, jerking and twisting at the soft obstinacy of her till all at once she breaks free, a disjointed branch of the willow coming with her in a cortege of gently nodding leaves, but he can’t hold her, her face revolving to fix a censorious stare on him as the current tears her away. There’s a cry from shore, frantic activity, but he’s lost his hold on the rope too and what’s left of the tree gives way under his frantic clutch. He’s adrift. Churning his feet, windmilling his arms, fighting it, but the river has him and the river is going to do what it will. Something clutches at his groin beneath the surface and then there’s a hard fist of wood coming up on him to pound the side of his head and then there’s another and another and now the river has him by the neck and his face is being pushed down in the murk and for one annihilating moment he can’t see, can’t breathe, can’t find his way up.