The Edge of Justice

by Clinton McKinzie

  Despite her comfortable position, Rebecca looks worried. She comments on the fact that I am taking only a camera and my climbing slippers in a small hip pack.

  “How are you going to get up to that rope without any ropes yourself?”

  “Very carefully.”

  “What about the rockfall?”

  I grimace and catch myself again touching my scarred cheek. “With any luck, that won't start till later, when the sun heats up the face.” Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my helmet.

  “This doesn't sound like a good idea, Anton. Why not come back with some other climbers?”

  I don't reply other than to shrug. No time, with the sentencing in just two days. There is something wrong with that discarded rope high above and I need to know what it is. “Are you going to be okay here, all alone?”

  “I think so. Are there any bears around here?”

  “Only Oso. There shouldn't be any up this high. Not much to eat but marmots and the rare pretty journalist. But if it makes you feel any better, there's a gun in my pack.”

  It's her turn to grimace. “No thank you. Just be careful, please.”

  I smile at her again and start picking my way over the field of talus toward the wall. When I turn back to look at her, she has put down her book and is watching me intently. Every time I turn around her eyes are following my progress, her stare interrupted only to glance up at the rope that is hanging from the ledge several hundred feet up the face.

  My progress up the wall is initially easy. It begins by simply scrambling up the slope of loose scree to where the more solid granite starts. From there I follow rising ledges back and forth, occasionally finding a dead end and having to seek out a new path. I can't see the dangling rope above, but I had roughly fixed its position in my mind, using the tent in the talus behind me as a guide.

  One narrow, crumbling ledge leads me higher than the others. It isn't wide enough to walk on—it is scarcely wider than my feet. Instead I find myself moving sideways, searching for handholds in the rock. Half of the better holds come free in my hands. I toss them off the growing cliff beneath me to hear them crash onto the talus seconds later, far below. The ledge ends near a rotten chimney.

  Studying its walls, I can make out faint marks of fresh chalk on obvious holds. I'm on the right track. I find a spot on the ledge that is wide enough for sitting and change into my sticky rubber slippers while taking care not to drop my boots into the void below. Once the shoes are tightly laced, I start bridging my way up the chimney.

  My bruises burn when I move. I suppress a groan when I brace my back against one wall and push my legs against its opposite. The moves are relatively easy, but one place makes me sweat from more than just pain. A large boulder completely blocks the chimney like a marble in someone's throat. I am forced to lean out backward over the enormous space below and behind, shoving my fingers into the cool creases where the stone has wedged itself against the chimney's walls. I'm suspended like this by my fingertips, leaning out, searching for better holds, when the boulder shifts slightly. The air leaves my lungs in a single whoosh. I frantically claw my way on top of the rock, suddenly endowed with greater strength and perception as the familiar adrenaline floods my system. Just a little ways above, I can see the rope swaying as a gentle breeze begins to rise.

  Sitting on the chockstone, letting my pulse and lungs slow in their work, I see the glint of the sun on the binoculars Rebecca holds. By the way the light flashes, it looks like she is shaking her head. Far beyond her Oso's large black form is in stalking mode on a small ridge above the talus valley, undoubtedly in pursuit of a fat marmot.

  The chimney leads only thirty feet higher before it opens out on a broad ledge. The platform is littered with shattered stones. Three enormous ravens there give me dirty looks. They are standing on a red parka worn by a very dead young man. Chris Braddock, I presume. My hope for discovering what happened to Kate Danning that night in Vedauwoo.

  He is lying on his back, arched across a boulder, his inverted face pointed at me. If he had been wearing sunglasses when he fell, they are missing. Along with his eyes. I find the glasses a few feet away where they have been carelessly discarded either by the fall or the birds. The ravens lift off the body at my approach. I stop ten feet from the corpse and stare at it, trying not to look at the face, but those empty sockets tug at my vision like a magnetic force. I can't help but think about how they have been emptied by the hard, pointed beaks. His mouth is open in horror at what the birds have done to him. But the horror is inexpressible, as the soft tongue is gone too.

  There is some primal fear that arises when you are alone with a murdered corpse, and I admit that it grips me there on the ledge. Going near, I half expect his arms to clutch at me, sightlessly and wordlessly begging for help. I find myself muttering at this corpse.

  “My name's Anton,” I tell it. “I'm the one who's going to get the guys who did this to you.”

  I gently pat the hip and chest pockets of the parka but feel no wallet. I don't expect to find one anyway—nobody climbs with his wallet. Most climbers I know prefer to climb without any ID whatsoever. It just seems like you will live a little longer if it takes more time to identify your corpse and notify your family and friends. When their tears begin, that's when you're dead.

  The lead rope is still knotted to the harness on his limp body. From there it leads off the side of the ledge. I examine the knot and find that it is strangely loose in my fingers. If there had been any sort of a climbing fall where placed protection or the rope itself had failed, it should have been jerked tight by the attempt at belaying. I pull up the trail of loose line and see what I expect at the other end, fifty feet out. It isn't frayed from rubbing over a lip of rock and it isn't frazzled from a tension break. It's cut clean. The kind of cut only made by a knife. He was murdered and his missing tongue is nature's clue as to why—to keep from talking.

  I loosen the harness buckle and carefully slide the harness off Chris's body, leaving the rope tied to it. Coiling the rope and attached harness, I sling them over my head and one shoulder. I take several photos of the body from different angles and then a few close-ups of the face. These I take without looking through the viewfinder—I just point and shoot, like the commercial says.

  I don't notice any change in the weather until I'm done. The first wet sting of a snowflake brings it to my attention. The storm is moving in faster than I had expected. I look out and am barely able to spot the bright yellow walls of the tent through the swirling air, but can't see Rebecca. I hope she is warm inside. Oso too is nowhere to be seen.

  I shimmy down to the chockstone and begin rigging an improvised rappel with the dead man's rope to get down and around the loose boulder. Halfway through the process, I hear a sharp crack. For a fraction of a second I almost instinctively shout, “Rock!” But there was no whistle preceding the retort and there is no one to warn anyway. Strangely, I find myself hoping it was a falling rock. Then a second crack dashes my hope.

  The shots echo off the wall, making it impossible to determine where they come from. They sound more like a bigger caliber than the borrowed .32 I had left in my pack.

  I stand with my feet frozen on the precariously balanced chockstone. Twin worms of fear twist in my stomach. For a moment my organs feel loose and weak. The muscles in my thighs and back go soft too. Rebecca, I think. Oso. The fear rears up in my mind like a great wave. A cool, damp sweat pours out of my skin and soaks my fleece underclothes.

  After rappelling off the boulder in what is really a barely controlled fall, the rest of my scramble down the wall goes by in a reckless blur. I tug my boots back on, indifferent to the danger of the tiny ledge, my fingers clumsy with the laces. There are no other sounds but that of the rocks kicked loose by my feet. I restrain myself from calling out their names. The snowflakes continue to fall, fatter and wetter. I am running and sliding once I hit the scree.

  The tent is open and empty amidst the full force of the snowstorm. I cro
uch in the fresh snow, staring inside as the flakes blow in and wet the gear there. My breath is coming in short, harsh pants. I can't seem to catch it. After a long minute I finally move, open the top of my pack, and see that Cece's pistol is gone. Then I hear her quietly call to me.

  “Anton?”

  Spinning around, I see her emerge from a shelter of boulders with her damp sleeping bag pulled over her shoulders. The gun is shaking in her hand. Her eyes are wide and her lips are trembling with cold and fright.

  “Rebecca. Are you all right?” I ask, stepping quickly toward her and putting my arms around her back.

  “I'm okay. What's happening? Who's shooting?”

  “I don't know. Where's Oso?”

  “About the time you reached the wall, he started to growl and ran off.”

  “Fuck. Fuck. Which way did he go?”

  She points in the direction of the ridge where I had seen him stalking from up high on the wall, but the storm impedes any vision more than one hundred feet away. I curse again.

  “Listen, put on your warmest clothes right now. We're leaving everything else.”

  She does as she is told while I put a bottle of water and a few candy bars into my pack. The cut rope and harness I stuff in the pack as well. I slip the gun into my parka's front pocket, leaving it unzipped.

  “We're going to get out of here. But first I've got to find Oso, and I can't leave you alone. So follow me, move as quietly as you can. Don't say anything. Okay? Not a word.”

  She nods.

  I lead us into the swirling clouds of fat white flakes. They are quickly filling in the spaces between the rocks. Their wetness makes the talus slippery, and Rebecca falls again and again. I point for her to walk in my tracks. Through all her slips and trips she never makes a sound. I look back at her once and see her holding one wrist, the beginning of tears in her eyes.

  A deeply ingrained lesson from my father to always be conscious of my surroundings and my remembered view from the wall brings us toward the small ridge above one side of the valley. Before stepping over each slick rock, I scan ahead and around as best I can, which isn't much. Visibility has dropped to maybe fifty feet and the storm is still closing in. I stop looking back each time I hear the sharp rasp of her nylon jacket on granite, not wanting to see the pain and fear in her eyes. She stays behind me, gamely not making a sound.

  Coming on top of what I guess is the low rise I had seen from the wall, the boulders are more scattered and the ground more level. I spot a series of faint depressions that are being filled by the gathering snow. Maybe twenty minutes old. I scan 360 degrees around us, then kneel by the tracks, assessing their number and direction. I'm not surprised that there are two sets, walking together in a line toward the wall. And toward our tent. What is surprising is that we hadn't met the men who made the tracks on our way up the hill. We are very lucky. I silently lead Rebecca in the direction from which the tracks had come.

  I stop again when I see the large black lump farther along the hillock. I stand still for a long, long time, staring at it, no longer feeling the wet flakes stinging my face. But I hear her gasp when she sees the dark mass and the bright cherry stain polluting the fresh snow around it.

  “Oh God, Anton.” She clutches my arm from behind.

  I pull away from her, stepping forward quickly. Then I'm running toward the bloody shape. I kneel in the red snow and lower my head to press my face into the mane of fur at Oso's neck. The flakes keep falling. They sparkle like diamonds on the black fur. My hands lift my dog's shattered muzzle and I see his lips are locked in a snarl where a bullet hasn't torn them away. I press my forehead to his, love and grief and rage exploding like dynamite in my head.

  When I finally stand and look at her, Rebecca looks away. Something about my expression makes her do that. I try to swallow the fury. I open my mouth in an attempt to say something comforting, then shut it, my jaw clenched. My eyes stare through her and beyond her, back the way we came. She won't look at my face. She keeps her eyes on the bloody snow and walks around me to Oso's body. She kneels where I had knelt and rubs his still-steaming fur.

  “Let's go.” I pull her to her feet more roughly than I had intended.

  “Where?”

  “I'm taking you out of here. Come on.”

  “Shouldn't we bury him?”

  I close my eyes for another long moment. “No, there's no time. They'll have found our tracks or tent by now.” And this is the right way for him. His skin, muscle, blood, and bones would be absorbed into the stony ground and the mouths of animals, renourishing the Earth. His soul is gone, flashing somewhere through the snow and trees as he chases squirrels there. Oso is gone. I lead off again into the storm.

  The wind rises until it begins to howl. There is nothing to see but the blinding white of the snowstorm and the images of revenge that play inside my mind. I can feel the crunch of Heller's nose as I smash my fist into his face. I'll cut out his heart. I'll piss in the hole. I stalk quickly over the rocks and deepening snow, dark fantasies reeling in my brain, slowing my pace only when I hear Rebecca fall and gasp again. She walks hunched over behind me, her face drawn behind the sunglasses I insist she wear to keep out the pelting flakes.

  “The storm is good,” I tell her after hours of stumbling over the talus, once the coals in my heart have been cooled a little by the blizzard. “It probably saved our lives. It's keeping us hidden.” I don't tell her that her presence has saved Heller's and Brad's lives, at least for the time being.

  “How much farther?”

  “Not far now to the trail.”

  I have said that several times. Over a period of hours.

  We work our way off the talus and into a forest of squat, wind-torn pines that I remember from the hike in when it was sunny and pleasant, another world. Now their lonely and forlorn shapes seem like demons arising out of the snow. At one point, when I look back at Rebecca, I notice the ice of tears frozen to her face. She is chilled to the bone, utterly exhausted, and I expect her shins and knees are as bruised as her palms from frequent falls. Crossing the scree, she had continually fallen through the whiteness between the rocks.

  “We're on the trail,” I tell her a little later.

  Every little while I stop and hand her the bottle of water from my pack. I have mixed it with the last of the heavy wine. I make her drink but don't take any for myself. There isn't enough. Our hike through the storm goes on, into thicker and thicker pines. I can see that her reserves are almost gone. She follows blindly.

  Finally I stop for good. I reach into the pack and take out my keys. Rebecca reaches out a mittened hand as if expecting me to hand her the water bottle once again. She doesn't realize she has long since drained it.

  “Hey,” I say as gently as I can amid the spinning flakes. “We're here. We're at the car. You made it.”

  Rebecca looks at me without intelligence behind her dark lenses. The snow has burned her pale skin red and it is stretched tight over her nose and cheekbones.

  I brush at the mound of white in front of me, searching for the handle and lock. She climbs in without a word when I open the door for her and hunches over in the seat, crying and holding her knees. I am overwhelmed with weariness too, but safe from the storm, the anger heats up until it is once again a dancing fire. The steering wheel is cold against my forehead when I rest it there. For just a moment I close my snow-stung eyes.

  With the snow glittering in the headlights, I fight to keep the truck in the heavy powder between the parallel lines of pines. I inch our way down the unmarked road and drive past the turnoff that will take us back to Buffalo. I drive on to the Hunter Corrals trailhead, where Cecelia said she had told them to go instead of the shorter trail Rebecca and I had taken. There is one car there, buried under more than two feet of fresh snow. I pull up close to it, my headlights revealing the pristine and untracked accumulation around it. In my lap is Cecelia's pistol.

  The car is a new-looking, souped-up van. The same van I saw at Helle
r's house. I slip the pistol back in my pocket and get out of the truck while opening a heavy folding knife. I shuffle around the van in the snow, driving the knife into all four tires. Then with the butt end of the knife, where the worn metal extends past the heel of my closed fist, I slam it down on the windshield. The windshield dissolves in a spider's web of cracked glass.

  TWENTY-TWO

  ON THE DRIVE back to Laramie, I force aside the grief and rage that is popping and crackling like a forest fire in my mind, replacing it with something more ancient, something colder and harder. Like the granite I'd gripped just hours earlier. The fury is stuffed in some dark hole in my brain as if it is an overlarge sleeping bag in a too-small stuff sack. The seams creak, threatening to burst, but I keep shoving. I will cry for my dog only when he is avenged.

  As the Land Cruiser eats up the dark pavement, I use my cell phone to call the Johnson County Sheriff's Office. When I get the supervising sergeant on the phone, I tell him about the body he will find low on Cloud Peak's east face when the storm ends and he can get in there with a search-and-rescue team. I give him descriptions of Heller, Brad Karge, and their van, but I don't mention how I vandalized it.

  “Christ,” the sergeant says when I'm done, “we haven't had a murder in this county in ten years. Not since ‘Fingers' Muletta was on the loose.” I had heard about that case. A drifter who was camping in the Big Horns took too much LSD, then killed and partially ate a hitchhiking college student. When he was caught he still had the student's fingers in his pockets. “Snacks,” he told the deputy who arrested him. After being found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, Fingers spent about six months in an institution before being released. Supposedly he still lives in a cabin just outside of Sheridan.

  “You DCI guys want to handle it?” the sergeant asks.

  “I'm after those two for another murder in Albany County. And this has become a little personal, Sergeant. I'd like to run it myself.”