Point of Law (9 page)

I expect Fast to run him over. Or at least for him and Burgermeister to get out and give chase. But they don’t. They don’t even get out to tell the sheriff what Cal has just done.

Fast only starts moving again when there’s a light honk from the sheriff’s SUV behind him.

ELEVEN

L
ATE THAT MORNING
and later into the afternoon I climb with my father and brother down in the canyon. There’s no talk about drugs or family disputes or any of our futures. Our conversations, when we have them, are only and carefully about climbing. Dad and I are full of bluff cheer. If Roberto is aware of the undercurrents and the occasional looks passing between us, he’s sharp enough to appear oblivious.

We tell each other stories when we pause to rest. I have Roberto laughing, and even my father grinning, when I tell them about a time I’d taken Oso ice climbing last spring.

A friend and I snowshoed with Oso five miles into the Winds through more than two feet of fresh snow. It was hard going from the very start. Oso, who always insisted on leading the way on summer trails, was frustrated by the way his thick legs sank all the way into the powder. For a while he tried to swim shoulder-deep in the snow ahead of us. Then he figured out that if he followed in our tracks—walked where we had broken and compacted the snow—it would be a lot easier.

Only he was annoyed and impatient at not being in the lead. He walked behind me with his snout nearly up my ass. It seemed like every few steps he would place one of his fat paws on the heel of a snowshoe and send me sprawling face-first into the deep powder. Because of the heavy pack filled with ropes, screws, crampons, food, and other gear, I’d crash so deep into the soft stuff that it would take me long minutes of cursing and writhing to get back on my feet.

We kicked steps up a long couloir toward the base of our intended route. Where the real climbing would begin, when the angle turned steep and the snow changed to gray, rock-hard ice, I stomped a platform in the snow for Oso. I even put down an insulated pad for the ungrateful beast so he could wait for us in comfort. The sight of the three hundred and fifty feet of virgin ice above put me in a forgiving mood. Then we started climbing.

An hour later Randy and I were three hundred feet up the frozen waterfall, less than a pitch from the top, when we began to be pelted from above by spindrift, gravel, and plates of ice. I looked down for Oso, hoping he wasn’t being bombarded, too. But he was gone. I looked up and was terrified to see the black end of his snout protruding over the top of the climb. He’d somehow managed to scramble up the steep talus to one side and now stood above us, triumphant at being first again, as we labored below on the frozen ribbon of ice.

I swore and shouted for him to stay away from the edge. The sound of my voice only excited him more. The beast sent a new barrage of ice and rock to assault us as he danced happily above. Randy took the lead, whacking his axes and kicking his crampons with amazing speed, trying to get to the top before the beast slid over the edge. He was just pulling over it when I heard a shout. I looked up to see a great black mass cartwheeling down the ice, out of the sky, right toward me.

Oso hit me square in the chest. The force of the blow was amazing. It blew the breath right out of my lungs. It ripped my hands from my ice tools and slammed the leashes against my wrists. For a few moments of agony I thought it had dislocated my shoulders. What was even more amazing was that the anchor I was suspended from—two ice screws drilled deep into the frozen water—didn’t blow. Fighting to draw a breath, I managed to hold the massive dog in my lap. He twisted his head up to growl at me.

Randy yelled down that I was on belay and that he’d gotten a solid anchor around a tree. Now I had to figure out how to get out of this mess. Trying to ascend with more than a hundred and fifty pounds of squirming, snarling, snow-soaked dog flesh would be impossible, even after I rigged him a questionable harness out of a couple of slings. In the end Randy had to make a risky and unprotected down-climb to us so that he could lower us back to the platform three hundred feet below.

By the time we reached it, my calves, arms, and stomach muscles were screaming from holding the beast pinned between the ice and my hips. And my voice was hoarse from cursing.

As I tell the story the memory causes me to look down at where Oso now lounges in the shade by the river and swear anew at him. At least he’d finally learned to wait below.

Roberto tells stories of his own. But I seldom laugh at them and my father doesn’t smile. His stories are just too wild, too scary, for those who know and love him. But the afternoon is still peaceful. A father and sons climbing together. Maybe for the last time. Definitely here for the last time, in this place that’s about to be filled with cliff-side condominiums.

There’s only one bad moment in an almost perfect day. It comes at about dusk, when the three of us are hurrying to finish one final climb to the canyon’s rim before night falls. Roberto is leading the last pitch while Dad and I watch from the belay, a large ledge two hundred feet off the deck.

“Are we going to have the talk tonight?” I ask my father.

He shakes his head. “Tomorrow. Let’s enjoy the rest of the day together before things get nasty.”

I’m reminded again that tomorrow will be the last time he’ll ever be able to climb here at the site of his glory days. His playground and my childhood Valhalla will soon be gone.

Waiting sounds like a good plan to me. I’m happy to put off “the talk” as long as possible. Dad and I have worked out a ridiculously hopeful strategy—he’ll offer to pay for Roberto to enroll in an exclusive inpatient rehab center not far from my current assignment in Lander, Wyoming. That way Roberto will be able to get out and climb with me on weekends.

Killing time, I ask my dad if he’s aware of any caves or Indian ruins in the canyon.

“No,” he answers, “but just because I haven’t seen any doesn’t mean they don’t exist.” He’s intrigued by the possibility when I tell him of Cal’s claims about finding an Indian ruin buried beneath rockfall somewhere in the valley region. He says he’s never explored the lower walls farther down in the canyon. If we had more time, I’d like to wander around down there to see if I could find Cal’s site. The idea of an unexplored cave exerts a magnetic force on me, like a black hole.

Far above us, Roberto grunts and curses his way up over a huge roof that juts more than 20 feet from the canyon’s rim. It’s the crux of the route, rated “5.12a” by the guidebook. In other words it’s very, very hard. And it’s just getting dark enough that finding foot- and handholds has to be difficult, especially on the roof’s shadowed underside.

“How’s it going?” I shout up as I feed out a little more line.

“Fucking grim,
che
,” Roberto shouts back. Even though he’s sixty feet above me, I can hear him gasping with exertion and the psychological stress that comes with tying in to the sharp end of the rope. I watch him pause to lick the blood from a split knuckle. His hands have been bleeding freely all day as we’ve climbed, and I wonder if the drugs he takes have caused him to become hemophilic. Looking down at my own bloody hands, I worry for a moment about AIDS. But surely he’s smart enough to use clean needles.

I realize the rope is pulling out into space, away from the wall. It shouldn’t. It should lie close, clipped through the protection Roberto has placed, even as he moves out from it on the underside of the roof. I study the wall above and realize Roberto hasn’t placed any gear. Nothing. He’s soloing again—the only good the rope is doing is that it will allow Dad and me to follow safely when he makes the rim, where he can belay us from above. If he makes the rim.

“He’s not placing pro,” I say quietly to my father, who’s standing on the ledge next to me and staring out over his canyon.

He looks up sharply and sees as I had that the rope is free from the wall. “For God’s sake, Roberto, put something in!” he hollers into a sky that’s turning the color of a new pair of blue jeans.

My stomach tries to crawl up my throat when I see Roberto’s feet kick out from under him, forcing all his weight onto his fingertips. His legs pedal in the air.

“Don’t need it!” he yells down, panting hard. He folds his legs back up like the blade of a jackknife. They seem to find some invisible edges for the sticky rubber shoes to grip on the underside of the roof. With a slowness that’s agonizing to watch from our position, he finally disappears over the roof’s lip.

“Jesus Christ. Does he want to kill himself while we watch?” I say to my father. “What can he be thinking?”

When he doesn’t respond, I turn my head to look at him. Despite the growing dark, I can see that his cheeks are shiny and wet. I quickly look away.

TWELVE

A
FEW HOURS
later I wake to hear a distant scream. Just when I’ve convinced myself that it was only a dream, and as I twist onto my side in the tight confines of my mummy bag to fall back asleep, Oso starts bellowing in my ear. I jerk as if I’ve been jabbed by a cattle prod. “Hey, hey. Easy boy. What is it?” The beast stops roaring at the sound of my voice but continues to growl at some faraway threat. I find the bag’s zipper by my head and sit up.

In the starlight I can make out my father sitting next to me with his bald head cloaked beneath a balaclava. Roberto is groaning on the ground nearby, muttering, “What the fuck?” He had disappeared into the trees, heading toward the canyon, when Dad and I bedded down after dinner. He’d said he was going to howl at the moon for a while. And indeed we later heard a lonely “Awwooo” reverberating off the canyon’s walls. To shoot up or smoke something was the real reason. Oso had already woken us up once when Roberto staggered into the camp a couple of hours later.

“Did you hear that?” I ask them.

My father’s head dips in a quick nod. Like Oso, he stares around the dark meadow intently.

“Yeah. I think that fucker just blew out my eardrums,” Roberto says with his hands rubbing his ears.

“Not that. The scream.”

Dad nods again, still listening. A few flashlights are blinking on and moving in the activists’ camp across the meadow. Their beams swing around the open field and are snuffed by the night just a few hundred feet from their origins. I try to recollect the sound that had awakened me. It seemed like a short cry of pain cut off mid-scream. I wasn’t sure how much of it had been a dream.

“It sounded pretty far away,” Dad says, confirming what I’d thought.

Roberto groans again and flops back down in his bag. “Man, you can’t get no sleep in this place!” In a few minutes he’s snoring. Dad and I sit up a while longer, looking around, watching the flashlights click off one by one. Above us the sky is a deep, deep black. Thousands of stars are freckled across it. I’m reminded of how the ancient Greeks thought the night sky was like a great black cloth, veiling the sun, but full of tiny pinpricks.

“Nothing to do about it now,” Dad says. He lies back down.

I’m about to do the same when Oso starts rumbling again. His head is pointed toward the center of the meadow, and I can make out a slim silhouette moving across the grass toward us. I recognize the smooth, efficient grace. It’s Kim.

“Someone’s coming,” I say to Dad. “I’ll talk to her.” I try to quiet Oso again as I slip out of my bag and into my belay jacket. The figure stops a little ways away from our camp. I step barefoot into cold boots, leaving the laces undone, and shuffle across the grass to her. Oso follows at my side. He’s no longer growling but is loudly snuffing at the air.

“Anton?”

“Yeah, Kim. What’s up?”

“Did you hear it?”

“It sounded like a scream.”

“I’m worried about Cal and Sunny. They’re camping a ways down the canyon, away from everyone. I think it came from that direction.”

I want to ask,
Why talk to me?
But I’m flattered she’s come and don’t want to put her off. Instead I say, “What can I do?”

“Well, you’re a cop, right?”

“Right. In Wyoming, not Colorado.” But she’s made me feel important and sort of useful anyway. “Did it sound like Sunny?”

“I couldn’t tell. Maybe.”

“Do you have any reason to worry about her?”

She shrugs and hugs her arms across her chest as if to ward off the high-altitude chill. “I don’t know. With the fire last night and all . . .”

I wait for her to say more but she doesn’t. I know what she’s thinking, though. Maybe Fast and his boys wanted a little payback. I remember Fast and Burgermeister intercepting Cal before the melee in the meadow. I recall it looking like an angry exchange. Maybe Fast wanted to know about Indian ruins. Or maybe Cal was dumb enough to make some threats. And I remember how he’d stepped out of the trees this morning, as the developers were leaving with the sheriff, as if to say
Got you, dude.

“Okay, let’s go check on them. Let me get a light.”

She follows me back to camp, where I dig a headlamp out of my climbing pack and explain to my father what we’re doing. Feeling the chill on my bare legs, I also pull on a pair of gray fleece pants.

“Want me to come?” he asks.

I look his way in surprise—he’d been very clear earlier that he wanted nothing to do with the activists. He’s worried about me, I realize. I’m too touched to respond right away.

“No, it’s nothing,” Kim answers for me, probably very aware of my father’s disdain for her activities. “I’m just being paranoid, I’m sure.” While she’s distracted, talking to him and looking down into the star-filled V of the valley, I unlock the glove box and slip the reassuring weight of my H&K into a jacket pocket. Just in case.

THIRTEEN

W
E HIKE IN
the dark on the rugged Forest Service road. Far in the distance I think I can hear an engine gearing down the road toward Durango. The head- and taillights are either turned off or the forest obscures them. If the lights are turned off, it would explain the high-revving engine sound—they’d be downshifting to avoid braking and flashing the taillights. It’s even possible, though, that I’m simply hearing the sound of a truck miles away where the valley road meets the highway. I ask Kim if she hears it, too, but she just shakes her head as she plays her flashlight over the screen of trees to the right. She tells me there’s an old logging track into the woods somewhere around here and that’s where Cal and Sunny are camped. Up high on the valley’s side where the track dead-ends.

The night is otherwise silent but for the gentle sweep of a breeze against the trees’ upper branches and the pulse of crickets. Overhead, the stars cast enough light on the ground to make hazy shadows. Oso sniffs along beside us, no longer growling but looking alert with his ears bunched forward.

We find the old track. It’s barely more than a trail, just a skinny break in the forest to the right of the road. There’s the odor of exhaust fumes in the air. To me it smells like diesel, like many of the trucks Fast and his friends had driven into the meadow for their counter-protest two days ago.

“Kill the light,” I say quietly.

She flips the beam off and stares at me in the dark. I stand still and silent for a few minutes, letting my eyes adjust to the night. Something feels wrong. Dangerous.

From a few hundred yards away and up the valley’s side, where the track seems to lead, I hear the faint jangle of keys. Then a door slam and the whine of a four-cylinder engine revving way too high.

“Let’s get into the trees,” I say quickly. “We don’t know if that’s the screamer or the screamee.”

Kim slips off the road and disappears into the forest. I hurry after her, grabbing Oso’s collar and pulling him along.

Headlights slash through the straight trunks of lodgepole pines as a car comes slamming down the old logging track. The axles bang again and again over deep ruts. Branches screech against the paint. From where we crouch in the trees I take the pistol out of my pocket and point it at the ground between my legs. With the other hand I keep a tight grip on Oso’s collar. After only a few seconds a small white car bounds past us.

Suddenly Kim is leaping out after it. She’s yelling, “Sunny! Sunny!” But the car hits the Forest Service road with a crashing slide and keeps slamming west toward Durango.

“Was she alone?” I ask, running after Kim as the taillights disappear around a corner but the motor’s noise still tears through the night.

“I . . . I think so. I just caught a glimpse of her. She looked like she was crying. And there was something dark on her face. Like blood.”

Kim’s standing in the middle of the Forest Service road now, one hand still half raised toward the sound of the engine. It’s more than a mile back to the meadow, back to our cars, so there’s no point in trying to go after Sunny. I put a hand on Kim’s arm and gently pull it down to her side.

“Come on. Let’s see what she was running from.”

We hike up the old logging road. It runs almost straight up the steep, forested hillside. We walk slowly, not using our flashlights at my insistence and letting our vision get used to the dark again. I don’t have to tell her to avoid making noise. Oso keeps a shoulder against my hip, for once obeying my command to heel.

“I think their camp is somewhere up there,” Kim whispers, and points ahead.

As we’ve climbed, the track has turned into little more than an overgrown trail that’s been almost entirely reclaimed by the wilderness. At various places diseased or lightning-struck trees have fallen across it, rotted to mushy kindling, then crushed under the recent passage of wheels. Heavy bushes press against the sides, fighting for the light the narrow track provides in the daytime. Young aspen saplings rise right in the very center of the road to take advantage of the same light and one day soon block it out. Splintered bark is as white as bone in the night where the undercarriage of a car has bent the saplings until they snapped.

The forest here seems denser than that which surrounds the meadow. The trees are closer together and, weirdly, the underbrush too is thicker. It takes me a moment to realize that the hillside probably faces south, therefore getting a lot of light to justify the heavy growth. The smell of decaying vegetation is also stronger here. It smells a little like the mushroom bin at the health food store.

“Why would she be driving like that? And the screaming earlier . . .” Kim talks quietly, more to herself than me. She sounds worried but not necessarily scared. It seems like the forest is a comfortable place for her. I like that—that she could be out in these cloying woods so late at night, with a stranger, and still not be too frightened. So many people I’ve known find the woods menacing. If it hadn’t been for the scream earlier, and if it hadn’t been for the wild-eyed girl behind the wheel of an out-of-control car, I’d probably be trying to figure out a way to kiss her.

“Maybe she and Cal got high or drunk or something . . . every time I came up here to visit them they were baked out of their minds. I never should have introduced her to Cal. But he wouldn’t hurt her—he’s not that kind.”

Up ahead in the dark I see some yellow fabric. Part of a tent? Laundry? I touch Kim’s arm to make her stop. Then I touch her lips with a finger to keep her quiet. I push Oso’s collar into her hand and whisper for him to sit, to stay.

As I move very slowly, trying to avoid the worst of the twigs and the leaves in the dark, I think of the possibilities. Maybe Sunny and Cal had a fight and she split. That seems most likely. Maybe I’ll just find Cal drunk and pissed. Still, some sixth sense makes me stealthy and causes me to once again take the gun out of my pocket. I don’t want a surprised and stoned ecoterrorist to split my head with an ax.

The yellow is a part of a tent. The nylon rain fly. It looks like someone’s half wadded it and tossed it over a leaning tree. And as I get closer I can see clothing and pots and sleeping bags messily scattered about a small clearing. There’s an unpleasant odor, too. I’m still for a minute, sniffing the air, and thinking that I’m spending too much time around that dog. Then I recognize the faint, coppery smell of blood. It’s laced with the heavier scent of voided bowels. That’s when I see the foot.

I’m almost tempted to ignore it because it seems so out of place in the cool, quiet night. So ugly, bare and extending from under a bush. I stare at it long enough to be sure that it’s what I think it is and to be sure it’s not going anywhere. My eyes make out the whiteness of a calf through the thin broken branches, then a thigh, and another foot to one side. Cal must be really wasted to crash naked under a bush, I think wishfully, already knowing that’s not the case.

I scan around the dark woods three hundred and sixty degrees, listening for any sound other than Oso’s panting thirty or forty feet behind me. Nothing. With my free hand I take the headlamp out of a pocket and hold it in my palm. I take a deep breath. Then I turn the switch.

The body under the bush is chest-down. One leg straight, the other folded. As best as I can tell through the leaves, the hands are wrapped loosely around the bush’s knotty trunk. It’s a skinny young man’s frame, naked and tattooed and streaked with blood. There’s no doubt in my mind it’s Cal when I angle the light to illuminate a patch of short, bleached hair and the light reflects off the metal studs he’d pierced through his ears and face. His head appears swollen and lumpy, like a rotten fruit. It’s turned to the side. His jaw looks as if it’s come unhinged. His lips are pulled back in a surprisingly gentle smile. Even violent death will do that to you, make you look as if you might have enjoyed it. It’s one of the Grim Reaper’s dirtiest tricks. Thankfully, the one eye that’s visible is puffed shut.

As I reach my hand into the bush to touch the carotid artery on his neck, I can’t help but feel an unreasonable fear that the corpse might suddenly turn and bite me. I consider for a moment reaching for the wrist instead. I shake my head, willing away the irrational fear. With two fingers I finally touch the lukewarm skin of his throat and the sticky blood that covers it. As I press just a little for a pulse, Cal’s skin sinks beneath my touch like warm wax. No muscular resistance. And no pulse.

“Did you find anything?” Kim hisses in my direction.

“No. Stay there. Don’t move.”

I switch off the headlamp in my palm and put it back in my pocket. I put away the gun, too. Standing still, now blind in the night, I wonder if I should say a prayer over Cal’s corpse. I hope he believed in more than I do. I hope he was expecting something to follow this instead of just rotting away under a bush. The problem for me is that I don’t have faith in much. People never seem to get what they have coming—good or bad—and there’s an ungodly amount of cruelty and pain in the world. But at times like this it would be nice to believe in something.

“Anton?” Kim says. She sounds far away.

I walk back to where she waits on the narrow track. Oso is straining at his collar and she’s having trouble holding him. The beast is still wild enough to get excited at the smell of death.

Kim’s good eye is wide in the night. I can see the white all the way around her single dark sphere. She senses something, too. I take Oso’s collar with one hand and take her arm with the other. “Come on,” I tell her, pulling her back down the track.

She tries to tear free of my grip. “Let go of me! What is it? What did you find?”

I don’t let go. “A crime scene. Cal’s dead.”