by Betty Webb
I ignored it. “You can’t write in your condition.”
When she smiled, it was with the rictus of death. “I can once the Fentanyl wears off, which will be soon. Put your gun away, Lena. Neither of us is going to shoot the other.”
She was right, so I holstered my handgun and sat beside her, dangling my feet over the ledge. I would have comforted her with a hug, but there’s a limit to my risk-taking. The drop was more than twelve hundred feet straight down, except for the narrow ledge a few yards to our right where Donohue’s body had prematurely come to rest.
“Gorgeous view,” I said, apropos of nothing.
“If you’re into rock and river. Myself, I prefer Snow Canyon. The terrain is gentler.”
“The place where John Wayne filmed The Conqueror.”
A wry smile. “Girlfriend’s been doing her research. Did you also find out that during Wayne’s last days he refused all pain medication? He wanted to be awake when Death came for him.”
I shook my head.
“Most people don’t know. He could do anything, that man, but John Wayne as a Mongol? Wasn’t happening. I’ve seen all his movies, the Westerns, even the war films where he played the big hero. But he wasn’t a war hero. That old man sitting in jail back in Walapai Flats, he’s the real deal, a hero several times over. You know what he did?”
“He saved Leilani from drowning,” I said.
“Before that. When he was serving in Korea, a sniper shot a man in his unit. Everyone else in the platoon took cover, but Gabe crawled over to him while the sniper was still firing. He dragged the man to cover, stopped the bleeding, and took care of him until the medics arrived. In the process, he got shot up pretty bad himself. They gave him a fist full of medals, but when his wife died the way she did, he threw them out. He felt betrayed by the very government he almost gave his life for. Now he’s a hero all over again, taking the blame for a crime I committed just so Ted Olmstead would get released from jail.” Another rictus smile. “He had no way of knowing that by Monday I’d have confessed anyway, so his heroism wasn’t needed.”
“You’re not going to leave Gabe to rot in jail, are you?”
“Give me some credit, girlfriend. We talked about it and came up with a plan.”
At my look of surprise, she laughed. It sounded genuine, if slightly druggy. “Oh, yes, when I found out Gabe had ‘confessed,’ I arranged that interview with him and offered to turn myself in immediately. He’s not young and fit like Ted, might not bounce back, so I was afraid of what jail might do to him. But he insisted I wait until I finished my story on the Downwinders. He even volunteered to take the blame for everything, to go to prison for me, but I couldn’t allow that. So we compromised. He’d stay in jail for a while longer, I’d make a videotape confessing to killing Donohue, Tosches, and Stark, then send it to Sheriff Alcott as soon as I filed my last story. But like I was saying about John Wayne. Turns out he was a hero, only a different kind. Hanging around without pain meds so he could look Death in the eye and tell him what a sonuvabitch he was. It takes true grit to endure that kind of torment, grit I don’t have.”
“Don’t sell yourself short.” Gesturing toward her gun, I asked, “Why don’t you give that to me?”
“It’s the only thing I have left of my fiancé. He gave it to me for protection after I’d been raped.”
“It was a throw-down, right? A weapon he picked up at a crime scene and kept in case he needed it later. That’s why it was matched to a bullet dug out of a four-year-old girl wounded during a Detroit home invasion. Thugs travel, and their guns with them.”
“You’re thorough, Lena, I’ll give you that.”
“So’s Sheriff Alcott.”
“Yeah, but he’s held back by the kind of legalistic red tape you ignore, so he’s not as fast, is he? He had a false confession and a mountain of evidence to sift through—cops need that stuff—but you focused on motive.” That awful smile again. “Anyway, Gabe’s and my plan was to leave a message on your voice mail telling you where I hid the videotape, but since you’re here in the flesh, I might as well tell you now. It’s at my timeshare, in my nightstand drawer, wrapped in a hand-written, signed confession.”
“Give me the gun, Olivia,” I repeated. “Since you’re not going to use it.”
She picked up the .38 and cradled it in her lap. “I’m not going to use it now, certainly not on you, but being a free-thinking woman I reserve the right to…Well, you know.”
I did, and I didn’t like it. For a moment, I was tempted to make a grab for the gun, but I decided that would be foolish. During the struggle, Olivia and I might both fall into the canyon. So I held back and changed the subject, mainly to keep her talking. Not that it was necessary, because I’d already figured out the truth.
Suddenly one of the red-tailed hawks dove down, vanishing below the rim of the canyon. Soon it rose again, a rabbit clutched in its talons. I turned my eyes away. The rabbit wasn’t dead yet.
“Why did you kill Ike Donohue, Olivia?”
Drugged though she was, an expression of pain crossed her face. “If I’d known how much Nancy loved him, maybe I wouldn’t have. To cause another woman that much anguish, it’s…it’s inexcusable. If I wind up in Hell, it’ll be for hurting her, not for killing Ike.”
Having suffered through the loss of her own love in such a horrible way, Olivia understood that kind of anguish all too well. But in her addled state, she was incapable of understanding the evil inherent in taking any human life. On second thought, killing in self-defense wasn’t evil; killing to save someone else wasn’t, either. But in Donohue’s case…“I know you feel remorse, Olivia, but why did you do it in the first place? He had nothing to do with the nuclear testing.”
Despite her drugs, despite her pain, the hardness returned to her face. “Like his mentor Gerald Heber, Donohue lied for a living, spending decades convincing people it was safe to smoke when he knew damned well it wasn’t. And when he retired, did he stop? No, he turned around and lied about the Black Basin Mine, swearing to everyone it would be safe, all the time knowing that Tosches would run it the same way he’d run the Moccasin Peak Mine. Bringing in Cole Laveen was cosmetic, nothing more. When I found out that Tosches was trying to buy Laveen out, I knew the whole thing was ready to start all over again. All Donohue cared about was getting his blood money. Just like he did when he worked for Cook & Creighton Tobacco. In the end, he helped kill as many people as that government toady Gerald Heber. Maybe more.”
Pointing out the obvious, I said, “Donohue developed lung cancer, so he was paying for his sins.”
“Hoist on his own petard, as they say.”
There’d been no surprise on her face. “You knew, didn’t you, Olivia?”
She looked up at the sky. Nothing up there now but blue. In a voice so soft that I could hardly hear her over the rushing wind, she said, “Donohue and I had a nice little chat before I shot him. Poor foolish Nancy blurted out at one of the Book Bitches meetings that her husband didn’t always come home at night, so one evening I followed him, just to see where he was going. I caught up to him when he parked up here. Despite Nancy’s suspicions that he was seeing another woman, he was doing what we dying people tend to do, spending some quiet time looking up at the stars, thinking about how beautiful they are, cursing God, wondering why he had to be taken away from all that beauty so soon. Or maybe he was just getting his nerve up. Not everyone can die the John Wayne way, with true grit.”
Her voice became knife sharp. “When he saw my gun he knew he was going to die sooner than he thought.”
“He must have been terrified.”
Both hawks suddenly emerged from the rim of the canyon and soared past us, a mere thirty feet away. The rabbit the larger hawk held in its talons had stopped struggling.
“Believe it or not, Donohue wasn’t at all frightened,” Olivia said. “He told me he welcomed death, told me about his diagnosis and what lay in wait for him. Know what he did then? He actually h
eld out his arms so I’d have an unobstructed heart shot.” Her face was impassive as she watched the hawks disappear into the canyon again. “Killing him was no more than assisted suicide.”
“Just call you Jack Kevorkian, right?”
She tried to laugh, but her breath began to spasm, and she coughed so hard that I worried she might tumble off the ledge. Without thinking, I grabbed her and pulled her away.
Once she regained her breath, she checked to see if she still had her gun. She didn’t. She gave me a look that was a mixture of annoyance and relief. “That was sneaky.”
I shrugged.
Her face contorted in pain, but she gamely struggled against it. “Looks like the Fentanyl’s wearing off,” she said, her voice trembling. “You’re going to let me get back to my Downwinders article, aren’t you? Or are you going to drag me over to the jail?”
I didn’t answer her question, just asked another of my own. “Why didn’t you leave Donohue for the coyotes?”
“That’s what I’d planned to do, but while we were talking, he told me how much he loved to sail, so I thought, why not? I said ‘Bon voyage,’ shot him, and rolled his body over the edge for a final trip. The dead saluting the dead, and all that. I was just too weak to get him out far enough, the poor shit, so he landed on that damned ledge. He…”
An increasing wind from the canyon took away her voice. Mine too. When the wind calmed, I asked, “What about Tosches, Olivia?”
Her eyes narrowed in anger. Or maybe it was pain. I could no longer tell the difference. “After Donohue, killing Roger Tosches was a piece of cake, especially since I was certain he’d paid someone to kill Kimama Olmstead. As soon as I heard about Tosches’ early morning trips to Olmstead’s ranch, I made plans to be at the turnoff next time he turned up. For four days in a row I parked my car behind the mesa and hiked over to the turnoff and hid in the bushes. Don’t look so surprised, Lena. Reporters learn to be patient. Yesterday Tosches finally showed, driving his look-at-me Mercedes.”
“What if there’d been someone around?”
“Like I said, I’m patient. When I saw him make the turn, I stepped into the road. Boy, did he hit the brakes. Not so much as to keep from running me down, but because he was pissed off about the article he knew I was writing about the Black Basin and wanted to give me a piece of his mind. Instead…”
“Instead, you gave him piece of yours. Okay, I understand your reasons for killing Tosches—not that I agree with vigilantism, I don’t. But why shoot Deputy Stark? He never did anything to you.”
Olivia’s eyes were red with pain by now, but not enough that I couldn’t see a gleam of satisfaction. “Consider it a community service.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Snow Canyon, Utah
“Right here on this little hill, that’s where Curly and me watched the Duke make his movie,” Gabe said, raising his voice so it could be heard above the hot wind that screamed along Snow Canyon. “Curly stood over there where that creosote bush is now, I stood right where you’re standing, and the Duke and Miss Hayward and the rest of the actors, they was spread out all along the canyon floor. Nothing’s changed.”
Except for the deaths. And the fact that the former movie location of The Conqueror was no longer radioactive.
As I looked down across the narrow valley that had caused so much misery, I imagined its appearance sixty years ago. Red dirt. Interminable wind. Horses neighing. Animal hide yurts scattered along the canyon. Two hundred and twenty actors and crew, three hundred Paiute extras—all trying their best to make the American Southwest look like Mongolia.
The vivid blue sky vibrated against jaw-dropping cliffs of orange and white-banded sandstone, falls of black lava rock, and acres of green brush that looked surreal against the spectacular red earth. If there really was a Heaven, it looked like this.
“That Opening Day party at the Black Basin was something, wasn’t it?” Gabe said. “All them people. All them flags. Guess it’s gonna make them nuclear power people happy.” There was no irony in his voice.
“Yeah, happy,” I said. Until there was a meltdown.
On the way up to Snow Canyon, we’d stopped to see the festivities. It looked like the entire population of Walapai Flats was in attendance. Red, white, and blue streamers were everywhere, attached to the fence, the earth-moving equipment, the stage, the cotton candy concession, the parked pickup trucks and horse trailers—even the people. There was hardly a person there who hadn’t stuck a streamer or two to a hat or purse, or wrapped it around their torsos like beauty queen banners. Neither of the Laveens wore streamers; they didn’t have to. They and their Jack Russell terrier were dressed entirely in outfits that matched the streamers. When the high school band played “God Bless America,” everyone cried.
Especially Gabe.
As moving as it had been, Gabe and I hadn’t waited until the end of the festivities. A man of his word, he’d promised to show me this beautiful canyon, this holy canyon, this poisoned canyon.
“Is it as beautiful as I said, girl?”
“You didn’t exaggerate, Gabe.”
The wind kicked up again, blowing red dust into our faces until we could hardly breathe, let alone speak, so we stood there without speaking, just listening to the wind scream against those other-worldly cliffs.
When the wind took a break, I said, “Olivia never told me Curly was her grandfather,” I said, admiring his straight-backed stance on the crown of the hillock. Now that he was a free man, he looked years younger than his actual eighty-two. Regardless of his age, I was half in love with him.
He turned away from the canyon to face me, his eyes bright and clear. “Oh, Lena, that poor girl was in so much pain there at the end she’d stopped tripping down Memory Lane. She didn’t even tell me he was her granddaddy until I looked into that bony face of hers and saw my old buddy. When I asked her, she admitted it, but said she never got to know him. Her father Hector was Curly’s only kid, born two months before they started filming The Conqueror. That’s why he needed the money so bad. Wrangling don’t pay squat unless you’re wrangling for movie folks.”
“What happened to Hector?” As if I needed to ask.
“Died of thyroid cancer sometime back in the eighties. So’d Olivia’s mother. Girl was raised by her Aunt Delores, and from what I hear, old Delores was crazy-mean. Maybe the radiation got at her, too, only it ate away her brain instead of her glands.”
Olivia’s family history might explain her actions, not that it excused them. But who was I to judge? Before I left her at Sunset Point, she let me know she’d discovered my secrets, too—that when I was nine years old, I’d been raped by a foster father, and that a few weeks later I’d lain in wait with a knife to take my revenge. A revenge that wasn’t yet finished.
“You were just a kid,” she’d said to me, pity in her pain-ravaged eyes. “You couldn’t stab deep enough.”
“It’s the only thing I’m sorry about.”
“Speaking as one vigilante to another, have you decided what you’ll do when he gets released from prison next year?”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. What would I do to the man who’d not only raped me, but was discovered to have raped three other foster children as well? I only knew one thing for sure. When he walked through those prison gates, I’d be waiting for him. Whether I’d be holding a bigger, sharper knife remained an open question.
Gabe’s voice broke into my dark thoughts. “That was a good thing you did, letting the girl go.”
“What’s good about letting a three-time murderer off the hook?”
“Lena, you just granted her a temporary stay of execution.”
That was one way of looking at it. After Olivia promised she wouldn’t murder anyone else, I left her at Sunset Point, uncertain if she could hold out long enough to finish her Downwinders story.
But she did.
As if he could read my mind, Gabe said, “Too bad she didn’t live one more day so’s she coul
d see her story on the front page of the New York Times. She’d have been so proud.”
“Sometimes pride in a job well done isn’t a strong enough reason to stick around. Sometimes you just have to end it.”
Olivia had ended it last night in a swan dive off Sunset Point, plunging twelve hundred feet into the pure water of the Virgin River. By the time a family from Milwaukee found the suicide note spiked onto her car’s aerial, her body was long gone.
Olivia wasn’t the first Downwinder to die, and she wouldn’t be the last. Wherever she wound up, she wouldn’t be alone. Waiting for her were those who had gone before: her doomed family and friends, the long lost people of Walapai County. And the other lost ones, too. The southern Paiute, the Navajo, the Hopi, the Havasupai, the Chemehuevi, the Hualapai, the Tonto, the Apache, and a dozen other tribes whose homes and hunting grounds lay in the path of the radioactive wind. But as Gerald Heber once said, hey, they were only Indians.
“She coulda wrote another story, the one about Stark,” Gabe said, still admiring the once deadly canyon. “What’s that funny name you gave him?”
“Detective Smiley Face. Yes, I imagine she would have enjoyed writing that. But it wasn’t to be, Gabe. We do what we do.”
“Maybe she knows anyway.”
It was nice to imagine Olivia looking down from some lofty paradise, smiling at the detective who found the carbine that killed Kimama Olmstead. Stark had hidden the weapon in his storage shed after warning his cowed wife he’d beat her within an inch of her life if she ever went in there. He forgot to warn his daughter. When Sheriff Alcott arrived at Connie Stark’s front door to inform her she was a widow, the little girl volunteered the information about the “secret toy” Daddy kept out back. Sheriff Alcott immediately obtained a search warrant for the house and surrounding property. After retrieving the carbine, Alcott and a deputy drove it straight to the crime lab. Three hours later it was matched to the bullet that killed Kimama.
