Trial by Ice and Fire (23 page)

TWENTY-EIGHT

T
HE WALK FROM MY CABIN
to my truck is long, but the walk down the hallway toward Cali's room is far longer. And that is partly due to the fact that I can see Angela Hernandez standing in the hallway, watching me come toward her. In one hand she holds a large bottle of Evian water. I start to take my sunglasses off but then decide to keep them on for a while.

Angela does not smile when I get close. “I guess you heard what happened,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“I thought you had the guy. Hooked and booked, you said.”

I don't say anything. She looks almost as bad as I feel, with dark rings under her eyes and her normally russet skin the color of ash. Putting the bottle under one arm, she takes a bottle of aspirin from a pocket, opens it, and shakes four pills out. She swallows two of them then chases the pills with thirsty gulps of water. I appreciate that she shares the pills and bottle with me, but I don't appreciate what she says next.

“I thought you were supposed to be some kind of superstar, Antonio Burns.”

“I'm not.”

After a moment she decides to take pity on me. “Cali's okay. Her face was cut up a little and she's got some bruises. She wasn't raped, if you hadn't heard. She and the doctor agree about that. At least not physically. It appears like this time he didn't try to kidnap her. He just wanted to rough her up a little. Scare the hell out of her.”

I let out a sigh. But my guilt and pain are undiminished. I reach for the doorknob but the FBI agent touches my arm.

“You don't want to go in there, Burns. Ms. Reese's with her daughter.”

“
Ms.?
Not Alana?”

“She seems to feel I should have been doing something other than drinking with you last night. Gorgon told her about us leaving together—I think he followed us out and saw us talking in your car, the asshole. But I guess he forgot to report that you wouldn't even kiss me. So she's probably not going to be buying my screenplay anytime soon, and I'm being replaced by another agent tomorrow.” She finally smiles a little as she says this last part, as if we are fellow casualties.

We're not, though. Not even close. She may go back to anonymously chasing bank robbers at the L.A. field office but I'm probably going to be fired. Disgraced. And McGee is going to get the same kick in the ass.

I push my sunglasses up on my head and look at the door. No, I definitely don't want to go in there. But like all the hard things in life, it's best to jump right in without hesitation. I turn the knob and push the door open.

The room is blindingly bright. Brighter still is the glare Alana Reese gives me. “Here comes Wyoming's finest. Our so very
special
agent, Antonio Burns.”

Each word bites at my flesh.

The movie star is standing just inside the door so I have to almost brush by her to come into the room. I can feel the animosity coming off her like radiation.

Cali is sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, dressed in her pajama pants and a T-shirt. Some bruises are evident on her arms. Pink turning to blue. Her pretty face is half covered in white tape but the hurt in her eyes is what pains me the most.

“Mom,” she says, “give him a break. He did what he could. He thought I was safe. Everyone thought I was safe, me included.”

Alana whirls to her daughter. “He was supposed to be protecting you, Cali. It wasn't
your
job to tell him when his work was done.” She turns back to me, smiling grimly. “I'm afraid even your governor agrees with me. I spoke to him an hour ago, Agent Burns. They're going to be meeting with your supervisor tomorrow morning. I'd pack my bags if I were you. Hang up that badge you're so proud of.”

I stare back with a pretense of confidence. “There was no indication that anyone else was after Cali. I know without a doubt that Myron Armalli was following her around, writing her letters, and that he is obsessed with her. When I arrested him I believed—wrongly—that she was out of danger. I can't tell you how terrible I feel about it.”

“So
you
decide to stop protecting her? The moment when she needed it most?”

There's no point in arguing. Just as there will be no point when McGee and I are called before the suits.

“Can I talk to your daughter for a minute, Ms. Reese? Alone?”

“No, you may not. I'm afraid that once again, just like at the party that you disrupted the other night, I must ask you to leave. You have proven yourself quite incompetent at your job and I can think of no reason for you to remain—”

Cali interrupts her. “Go, Mom. Give us a minute.”

Alana looks like she might argue, or break into a rage, but she gauges the tone in Cali's voice. Years of practice in never, ever, making an unglamorous scene take hold. She gives me a few more moments of her icy stare—shooting sharpened icicles into my head—then walks out, slamming the door.

I sit down on the bed next to Cali. She is looking at her hands where they're folded across her lap. She won't meet my eyes.

“I'm sorry, Cali.”

She nods her head a couple of times, still looking down.

“Tell me what happened. I need to know just how bad I fucked up. Hurt me.”

Her lips are swollen on the side of her face but I see them lift just a little in a faint, sad smile.

“I went home after the Granary. I was too tired to do anything else. I fed Lester then changed into some pajamas and got into bed. I don't know when, but sometime late the doorbell rang. I went downstairs.” She glances at me then quickly back down at her hands. In an even quieter voice she says, “For some reason I thought it might be you.”

My heart sinks even deeper into my gut.

With another small, sad grin she continues, “Lester was hissing and spitting in the entry hall, so I thought he must smell Mungo. I checked myself out in the mirror, then opened the door without even thinking. I didn't look out the little window. I didn't even think there was anything to worry— Sorry, I don't need to hurt you that much, do I?”

She inhales and exhales, her fingers quivering.

“I opened the door but was so . . . tired or something . . . that I forgot to turn off the alarm and undo the chain. A man with a brown suit covering all of him and a black hood over his head was outside, pushing against the door. The chain broke. I hit the mirror with my head.”

I can see goose bumps now on her skin. And I can hear the blood pumping in my own ears, like I was there. She's stopped talking.

“Who was he?”

“I couldn't tell. It was like a blackout or something. More like the world just turned inside out. The only details I remember are about me, running, screaming, fighting. He seemed very tall, very big and strong, but maybe that's just because I was so scared.”

“Did he say anything?”

After a moment she shakes her head, the short blonde hair drifting forward to cover her bandaged cheeks, and answers in a voice quiet but pitched high. “I was screaming too loud to hear if he did. I ran for the upstairs bathroom, the only door with a lock on it. But he pulled me down on the stairs. I somehow managed to kick him off me—good thing I've got skier's legs, right?—and made it up there. But the door is pretty flimsy and he could have broken it down if he wanted. Maybe he heard the sirens, but I couldn't hear them. All I know is that the next thing two city cops were coming in.”

We sit in silence for a long, long time. Tears run down her cheeks and drip from her chin. She's still staring down at her hands.

When I finally manage to speak, my voice sounds far off. Deep, as if it were coming from the bottom of a well. “Was it Wook?”

She shakes her head. “No. I don't think so. He showed up after the town guys. He's the one who brought me here.” Then, after another minute, she asks, “What are you going to do with Myron?”

“I'm going to make sure they hold him for some hunting violations and suspicion of harassment, at the very least. Even though he was in jail last night, that doesn't mean he didn't do some of the other stuff. He'll be in for a couple of weeks, I bet, until they can do a competency exam and all that.”

I still have a hard time getting my mind around the fact that I may have arrested the wrong guy, a harmless, screwed-up kid. I have a hard time facing the fact that there actually
is
someone else out there who wants to do her harm. Who wants to at the very least keep scaring the hell out of her, beating her up and psychologically traumatizing her. It's the kind of coincidence that's hard to imagine. In books and movies they always mean something sinister—the detective will boldly state that he doesn't believe in them. But I know that's bullshit. They happen in real life all the time.

“When you get out of here, stay with your mom and Angela. Okay?”

“How about Uncle Bill's? He came by this morning and invited me. I know he has some guns—a rifle and some handguns—so he should be able to protect me, right?”

“How did he look?”

“Not good. Like he had a rough night. Should I stay with him?”

I wonder, with a new sad pang, if the old legend is starting to free-fall. “No. Go to your mom's. Stay with her and her bodyguards. With Angela Hernandez and the other FBI agent who's flying in. It doesn't sound like Bill's well enough to look after you.”

She nods her head. “Okay.”

It's like this guy's trying to scare the hell out of her and hurt her, but not kill her. Not yet. I don't know what he's thinking. It's escalating, but I don't know why he hasn't taken it all the way when he so obviously could have. And he doesn't seem particularly afraid of getting caught. He's playing a game, but this time I don't know the rules. Usually there's something motivating criminals, greed or a thrill or rage. But this guy—I don't know.

The silence in the room is more painful than her mother's words. I stand up then crouch in front of her, trying to get her to meet my eyes.

“I'm going to find who's been doing this, Cali,” I tell her. “I'm going to take care of it. Even though I'm about to be taken off the case. I fucked up, but you didn't. I'm proud of you. You're a total badass, you know, fighting him off three times. He won't get a chance at a fourth. I promise.”

She still doesn't look up at me. Her only response to my attempt at encouragement is to say in a little-girl's voice, “I thought you said I was safe, Anton.” The tears start sliding off her chin again.

TWENTY-NINE

I
FIND
W
OKOWSKI
in the basement gym of the Sheriff's Office. He's gloved up and pounding away on a heavy bag, dressed in a T-shirt and workout shorts that are drenched with sweat. Big beads of it run down from his close-cropped blond hair. The three or four other men lifting rusted weights stop what they're doing the second I walk through the door. Wokowski appears oblivious—his face is clenched like a fist and his eyes are scowling at the leather he's pummeling.

I walk up to within a few feet of him but he still doesn't seem to notice me. The bag receives jarring jabs and huge, hooking body shots. His chin is tucked into his chest and beneath his eyes are the same dark smudges Angela Hernandez had on her face. A day's growth of beard further darkens his countenance. His forearms are glistening with sweat but I can't spot any obvious defensive wounds on them. That doesn't mean that it wasn't him—the heavy coveralls Cali described could easily have shielded his flesh.

But it has to be him. There's no one else. It also doesn't make any sense—why would he attack her when he was on the verge of winning her back? Of having a decent shot at it, anyway. It doesn't make any sense, I tell myself again. I'm totally adrift, without facts or evidence or motive.

There's one fact that I can't get past. I have no other suspects.

Wokowski throws a savage hook that nearly folds the eighty-pound bag in half. Then he whirls to face me as the bag is still shuddering on its chain. His eyes are shot with red and his breath is coming in shallow pants.

“Fuck!” he says loud enough that the obscenity reverberates around the concrete walls.

I'd been sure he'd been so focused on destroying the bag that he hadn't noticed me. But I was wrong.

“I don't like the way you're looking at me, Burns,” he breathes, glaring.

I give it right back. “You shouldn't. Where were you when it happened, Wook?”

The pumped-up muscles beneath his tight T-shirt swell even further. So do the massive corners of his jaw. His eyes narrow into crimson slits. The ceiling, which in this windowless room is not more than eighteen inches above my head, seems to press even lower.

“Fuck you,” he says.

He pops me in the chest with one of the wet gloves. Not hard enough to hurt, but with enough force to cause me to stagger backward a single step. I almost bounce back swinging. Somehow, though, I manage to hold my feet still and keep my arms at my sides. Along with the throb of blood in my veins, I can feel the wide eyes of the weight lifters.

“C'mon. You want to go?” he asks, touching the gloves together.

I don't say anything.

He reaches out to push me again. This time I knock the glove away with a swipe of my palm. The temptation is almost overwhelming. But I haven't boxed in almost twenty years, not since my brother and I saw
Rocky
on a Manila air force base and made our father set up a ring in the hot Philippines sun. And Wokowski probably has inches of reach and more than fifty pounds on me.

“I asked you a question, Sergeant. Where were you when it happened?”

He stares at me for a long time through his bloodshot eyes. I can feel him willing me into the ring that's in one corner of the basement, where yellow tape reading “Police Line—Do Not Cross” is strung between four posts around a moldy gray mat. There's little doubt his superior size and strength would prevail there, but I want it as bad as he does. I'm willing to take the chance, willing to cheap-shot him with a sharp elbow or knee to even the odds a little. It's only the need to know that keeps me from walking over and ducking under the tape.

Wokowski rips the gloves off his hands and throws them down at my feet. He takes several deep breaths.

“Patrolling in the valley, okay? I heard the alarm call go out on the radio. I drove there as fast as I could. I got there ten minutes after the city guys. I'm the one who took her to St. John's. So either you believe me or you can get your skinny Mexican ass in the ring.”

No one's this good an actor. Not even a professional like Alana Reese and especially not Danny Gorgon. Wokowski would have to be either completely innocent or totally insane to be able to pull off the look of righteous fury on his face.

“Then who was it?”

“I don't know,” he says, punctuating the last word with a pivot and a bare-handed blast at the bag. When he spins back to me I notice that his knuckles are starting to bleed.

“I'm going to find him. Then I'm going to take him apart.”

Wokowski nods. “You do that. I'll be right behind you.”

We stand looking at each other for a minute longer. The fury seems to slowly drain out of him. His lips start quivering, almost like the big man might be about to cry. I turn away from him and walk over to a vacant bench press. I sit on it and rub my aching temples with the heels of my hands. I can tell by the smell of Wokowski's sweat that he follows me.

When I open my eyes and look up, he's standing over me.

“I know what everyone's saying, Burns. And they're full of shit. If they weren't, I'd be the first one coming after you. You know that. So listen:
There was nothing you could do.
We both thought she was safe, with Myron locked up.”

What he says causes an even stronger reaction in me. Especially since it's coming from the man who'd been my enemy twenty-four hours ago. Sympathy and pity are hard enough to take from a friend. From him, it's almost too much to bear.

My cell phone starts playing that stupid song as I walk out of the Sheriff's Office. Rebecca, I think, feeling a tiny bit of hope and a lot of dread—
What will I say? What can I do?

But the text on the flashing screen tells me that the caller is the Assistant Attorney General himself. A well-dressed, weasel-faced man, he's McGee's boss, the office's number two man, its designated executioner, and also, not surprisingly, a guy who happens to be a complete prick. Six months ago he'd stood motionless over McGee when Ross collapsed on a courthouse floor. A heart attack. I remember the slight smile I'd seen on the Assistant AG's face. An expectant smirk.

The song plays three times before the phone is once again quiet. Getting in the Pig and starting the engine and air conditioner, I wait for the single beep alerting me that I have a message before punching any buttons.

I have screwed up a
very
simple case, weasel-face tells me in an attempt at a reprimanding tone that does little to disguise his delight. I have embarrassed the office yet again. A suspension is being contemplated. An internal investigation into my conduct—or lack of it—as well as that of Mr. McGee, is being commenced immediately. I am to have no further contact with Cali Morrow, Alana Reese, or Myron Armalli. And, as if the message isn't enough, I'm ordered to call him back for a person-to-person ass-reaming posthaste.

I don't call him back. I don't even call Rebecca.

Instead I eat a big plate of spaghetti at the cabin to try and fill the void in me. When that doesn't work, I pick up the book I've been reading and flop down on the porch with it. Maybe the story and the printed words themselves will clog my brain to the exclusion of all else. Keep the dogs at bay for a while.

Smoke Jump
's ending is tragic, but right now it feels unreal. I can't get a grip on the depth of it, or feel much of the impact the author obviously intends. The dogs barking and yipping in my head are a constant interruption; they're impossible to ignore. But I try.

A fire had blown up in Lander, and by some unseasonable trick of the wind it began heading east toward Jackson Hole. Patrick Morrow, who had resigned from his smoke-jumping team upon impregnating and then marrying Alana Reese, had decided to finish out the summer anyway. For the fun of it. For friendship. He and his best friend, Bill, and five other men were deployed in the vicinity of Elation Peak. The freakish easterly winds increased and the fire threatened to overrun the friends. They elected to make for the summit of Elation Peak, where they hoped to find fuel-less ground—no trees grew on its tabletop apex—on which to escape the blaze. Laughlin led, rock climbing up the butte's back cliff. He made it to the top but Patrick didn't. Cali's father fell into the flames, where he burned to death.

I remember, but the author doesn't mention, Laughlin's habit of dangerously underrating climbs. Maybe it wasn't intentional—maybe he just didn't know how good he was.

I put the book away with the others in the cabin and return to the porch to call for the wolf.

Mungo has taken up her usual position across the lane behind a screen of pine branches. Watching me, thinking I can't see her. She's pulled her lips up, exposing the tips of her big canines. I sit down on the steps to let her play it out. I'm surprised when after only a few minutes of this game she comes out and slinks back toward me, out from the trees. She approaches slowly with her head held very low and that same shy grin on her face. Not looking at me, but watching all the same. She comes right up onto the steps and stands by the cabin's door behind me. I suppose she's anxious to get in out of the heat.

Not turning around, I say, “You can wait just a minute, wolf.”

Then she does the strangest thing, something she's never done before. I feel a soft weight on my shoulder. She is resting her head—the prickly, whiskered underside of her jaw—on me. It's such a dog thing to do, so devoted and touching, as if she's trying to soak up a part of my pain, that my throat constricts. Loyalty. That's what it is.

Intending to just close my eyes for a few minutes, I sleep on the couch for two hours. Heavy, thick, all-engulfing sleep. After I get up and eat some more—just to have something inside me—I sit again on the cabin's narrow porch. The afternoon sun, I hope, might somehow rouse me from what still feels like a bad dream. One of those dreams where you're furious, frightened, and totally incapable of any decisive action, but where it all, at the same time, feels suffocatingly calm.

I'm pregnant, Anton,
I hear Rebecca saying.
I'm pregnant.
Then,
I wish you weren't the father.
I divide it up in my head, trying to make it into two separate pieces that maybe I can manage to chew up and swallow.

I'm pregnant
. Does she intend to keep it or get an abortion? One option will make me a father, an immature, too-unprepared father; the other is . . . unthinkable to me now. Even though I'd never believed those long, uncomfortable Sunday mornings in the
estancia
's tiny
iglesia
would have any effect but the inverse of what was intended. Roberto's preaching was much more persuasive, and he believed in one thing only: Freedom. But this, goddamn it, is mine. And Rebecca's.

What about the other thing, the part about wishing I weren't the father? Because she doesn't love me, or because she doesn't think I'm suitable or ready? Or maybe, just maybe, because she doesn't feel ready, and the fact that it's mine makes what would otherwise be an easy decision to abort that much harder. And if that's true, then I can still hope. I cup this tiny spark in my hands and blow on it, willing it into a flame.

I find the phone book the landlady had left for me in a kitchen drawer and look up the number for the Spring Creek Ranch. Dialing is harder than anything I've done in a long time. Harder than walking down the hospital hallway to face Cali and my professional failure. I have no idea what I'm going to say. Or what I'm going to do.
Just say what you feel,
I tell myself, even though I know I lack the language to make it coherent.
Say it anyway.

The desk clerk tells me that the Hershes are out. Driving up past the Tetons to Yellowstone for the day, I'm told in a friendly, vacuous manner, as if I were just calling to chat. They're expected back for dinner at eight. Do I want to leave a message? She'll scribble something down and slip it under their door.

Hanging up the phone, I resist the urge to smash it on the porch railing. To throw it across the road and into the trees. Instead I take those deep belly breaths, vow to keep the spark alight, and reverently pack it away into a compartment in my head. The place where I keep my most treasured things. It'll keep there for a few hours.

Now what? Where the hell is Roberto? Shouldn't he have shown up by now?
I wish he were here.

I need to move. I have to do something.
You've got to get up some momentum,
I hear my brother telling me.
Go fast. Go fast all the time. You slow down, and then all the shit you shouldn't have done will catch up to you.
It was the way he lived, the way he climbed. And look where it got him.

Inside the cabin, I take out the piece of lethal metal and plastic that is my .40 H&K. I eject the law-enforcement cartridge, which holds fifteen fat hollow-point rounds, then rack the slide to eject the lone remaining bullet. I fieldstrip the gun on an old T-shirt spread out on the dining-room table. Oil the parts. Wipe it clean. Reassemble. Then I load it again, even putting the sixteenth round back in the chamber. I slip an extra clip in my pocket. My mind is perfectly quiet while I do all this, and for some reason it feels very good.