Black Water

by T. Jefferson Parker

  "I'm ready, Arch. I'll be here. You look terrific."

  Archie had used the hotel iron and board to press his uniform, getting the seams crisp and the difficult pleats of his shirt pockets flat before reattaching his badge and nameplate. Concerned about weight, he stripped his duty belt down to the essentials: holster, handgun and plastic wrist restraints; no extra clips of ammunition, no flashlight or radio, no spray and no stick. He'd polished his boots with a miniature shoeshine kit from a drugstore. Shaved his face, of course, and affixed a fresh bandage over his wound, which, in the stress of Sonny and the giant, began emitting a steady flow of pink fluid. Since the giant, it had been getting worse.

  "I called Rayborn, Gwen."

  She didn't answer right away. "Why?"

  "I want to see something."

  "Her?"

  "Not her, Gwen. Me. I want to see something about me."

  "Be careful."

  "I think I got into a fight because of her. I can't quite remember."

  He felt the warm trickle down his neck and knew the bandage pad was full again. He fished a fresh square out of his shirt pocket and peeled away the old one, which he flicked sideways off the cliff. It spun out and caught the updraft, then downward out of sight.

  "Better," he said.

  He gathered up the wings and lay them across his lap. He could feel the sun on the back of his uniform and the sharp breeze drying his sweat. Below him, the colors of the county had changed: now the foliage was red and the houses were a pale turquoise that reminded him of a Baja village he'd visited with Gwen once, years ago, driving the old pickup truck slowly over the pitted asphalt and looking for a lobster restaurant to eat in.

  Archie sighed and looked out at the sky in which he would soon be reconnected to his wife. In the awful confusion after his shooting he had clung to two hopes: that he would see Gwen soon, and that he would kill the men brutalized her. To him these seemed to be reasonable and just desires. True, he'd spared Sonny, because it had been the right thing to do. Sonny had driven, not shot. Sonny would never drive again, though, how unsatisfying it all had been. Archie remembered saying to the giant this is for Gwen, though it caused none of the exhilaration he was expecting. All he really felt as he did these things he'd done his job fairly well, taking a rational satisfaction in details: apprehending Mr. Charles without struggle; jumping the giant's gate in the early-morning darkness and landing without a sound; performance of the noise suppression device. This crude silencer, which he had painstakingly created from two PVC pipes of differing diameters, steel wool and duct tape—all fixed to the barrel of his forty-five with a powerful epoxy cement billed as Squeeze-a-Bolt--- had turned out almost comically large. But it had worked well. After five shots, only a small part of the end had melted. So that Sonny and the Giant were accounted for. But his liberation from numbness had failed.

  And now, with half of his desires fulfilled, Archie felt pinioned and exhausted and alone and he missed his wife even more terribly than before. He thought about his faraway life because he could still feel the moments, though just barely: walking Julia to school with that lump in his heart, and the Little League years when he first understood that he had a gift for the game, and high school ball when he set all the county records; then Gwen and college ball and later the months she put him through the academy and the skinny first years when he worked the jail at odd hours and she built her schedule around his and they lived only to love each other. Then later the friends on the department and the regular shifts and the feeling that he was getting good at his job; even the dizzying spiral into wealth, all the worry and scrounging of money to invest, not knowing if it was going to pay off or no house and the new cars and he and Gwen still in love and it seemed like life couldn't get better. These were true memories, not the neutered snapshots that the Russians had left him with. But the emotions accompanying even these were harder and harder to recall. He remembered now, slowly and with a grim resolve, how it felt the first time he saw Gwen Kuerner in the multiplex out in Riverside.

  Suddenly the tears were rushing out of him as a great spasm of loss cracked through him like a whip. It felt like his soul was caving in upon itself. He could hear his scream, feeble in the wind, but inside him it was deafening as the roar he'd heard standing by the tracks near Willits, when he was a boy with Kevin and they'd seen how close they could get to the train as it howled clattering past, inhaling their thin boys' bodies toward the fatal rails.

  "We shouldn't have messed with the snake stuff," he sobbed.

  "It was a terrible mistake, Arch. But I was trying to make things go our way. Really go our way."

  The tears kept pouring down his face and he stared through them at the sky and wondered why his life had come down to empty air.

  "It's okay, Archie," she whispered. "Come on, now. Come get me."

  He turned and saw Rayborn climbing up the crest of the peak toward him. Zamorra was behind her ten yards, carrying a shotgun.

  Merci slipped on the loose rocks, steadied herself by grabbing the branch of a low manzanita. She was breathing hard with the elevation and the heat and the uncertainty of what Deputy Wildcraft was doing up here.

  She could see him out at the edge, looking back at her. Two large blue curves dangled where his arms should have been, like wings. She recognized the shape instantly: the swordlike piece of tarp from the hotel trash can was a model version of what Archie now wore at his sides. The cemented joints she had found were prototypes of what must be holding those things together.

  And she thought: Oh shit, he thinks they're wings.

  Experience failed her but she knew it was important to get him talking.

  "Archie! Arch! Thanks for calling."

  She stumbled again, grabbed another branch, then pulled herself to a stop on a small level spot fifty feet away. She heard Zamorra twenty steps behind her and she calculated that he was within effective shotgun range. That she would take the time to figure this irked her but she couldn't help herself: it was in her training and in her spirit.

  He looked down at her, wings tucked, wobbling in the capricious mountain breeze.

  "Thanks for coming," he said.

  "What exactly are you up to?"

  "Going to get Gwen."

  "She's up here?"

  "Yes."

  "You make those yourself?"

  "I got the idea in the hospital."

  She glanced back at Zamorra, who stood spread-legged, uphill and the other braced down, holding the shotgun across his chest like a bird hunter. He'd moved to her left to get a clean line at Wildcraft.

  She turned back to the deputy. "Hey, Arch, we know that the Russians did it. You did what you had to do. You put out Sonny's eyes and shot up Vorapin, didn't you?"

  "Yes. Sonny told me everything. It's on a tape recorder in my bathroom. But I'd remembered the giant's face by then—the was behind the light that night. When I saw him, I knew he was the one."

  "Archie, there's a whole department waiting for you to get healed up and back on duty."

  "I can't. You know that."

  "Then take the disability. You can get yourself a little airplane, get rid of those funky wings."

  "I like them."

  "They won't take you far."

  Wildcraft looked out over the cliff then, and Merci saw the sway his body.

  "I don't have that far to go," he said.

  "I'll tell you one thing—if Gwen was alive she'd kick your butt for even thinking about this."

  "Not true. We've talked it over."

  "And what does she say you'll get out of it?"

  "Just that she's up there."

  "Up where?"

  He looked out again. "There."

  "What about your mom and dad, Arch? And the Kuerners. And Priscilla. And Damon Reese and Brad Eccles. Those people love you. You can't just jump off the end of the world when they're counting on you."

  Wildcraft seemed to consider this. He looked into the abyss, then back at her. "I love t
hem and they're going to have to understand."

  "Understand what?"

  "That I can't just let them fade away. Gwen. Everybody."

  "Of course you can't. But it's going to take time. You're going to heal, Archie. You're going to feel like you used to, someday. Gwen would want that. You say you talk to her? Then ask her if she wants you to jump, or not. Ask her what you should do."

  Merci had the horrible inkling that she'd just said the absolute wrong thing, that Wildcraft would ask Gwen what to do and his imagination, or his memory of her, or the bullet inside him or whatever it was that was guiding him would say, yes, Arch, jump.

  Her heart sank when Archie looked up over his shoulder, away from her, and said something to the air. He nodded. He nodded again.

  "Archie! Damnit, you've got a bullet in your brain and you're not thinking straight. Gwen's dead, Arch. She isn't coming back and she isn't in the sky and she doesn't want you to jump off and die. Trust me on this, Archie. I'm telling you the truth."

  "I'm coming," he said, but Merci couldn't tell if he was talking to her or not. He was still turned, looking up and behind him. "But I need to do one thing first."

  "What?" Merci asked.

  Archie answered, but the wind snapped the words from the air before they could get to her. It looked like he was having a conversation with himself.

  "I'm coming," he said to Gwen. "But I need to do one thing first."

  "What?"

  "Just to see. Just to see what happens if I do it."

  Gwen didn't answer.

  He turned, spread his blue wings and glided down to Merci. ! couldn't believe the damn things actually worked. He landed softly, duty boots sliding to a stop on the sandstone gravel. The wings folded down and back. She saw that his bandage was soaked in pink and pupils were grossly dilated. His head and neck were shiny with sweat, but his uniform was pressed.

  He came toward her. She glanced back at Zamorra, who had gun raised in the relaxed manner of a man who doesn't miss.

  Archie stepped up close, then spread the wings around her. The breeze hissed against the polypropylene and she could smell fear and aftershave. She brought the nine up and out of the leather.

  He held her close now, moving her—she was sure of this—into Zamorra's sightline. Though with Wildcraft so close to her, there a no way that Zamorra could fire. She held the barrel of her automatic against one of his ribs. She heard Zamorra crashing through the brush behind her. Slowly, she raised her left hand above the outstretched wing and turned the palm back toward her partner.

  Archie gulped hard and kissed her lightly on the right cheek. Then the left. Then he brushed his lips against hers, drew a long, deep breath and pulled away.

  "Nothing," he said.

  Her heart was thrumming fast and light as a bird's and she felt awful heaviness in her legs.

  She lowered her hand and put the tip of her forefinger into the of one dimple, set her thumb under the good hard line of his chin, and pulled his mouth against hers. His body went rigid and his weight began to shift away so she wrapped the gun hand around his back, held on tight and kissed him like she'd once kissed Hess, without thought or method or even a nod to consequence. She ended it with her breath was gone.

  "No," he whispered. "I don't feel anything."

  "I feel everything, Archie."

  "Thank you."

  She dropped the gun, tried to get one hand on the shoulder of his uniform and one around his belt but he was too fast and much too strong for a takedown. Wildcraft wrenched himself away and scrambled back up to his perch on the cliff. He looked down at her. Then he turned and spread his wings and hopped into the abyss. He rose in the draft. Hovering, he looked at her again, then gained elevation with two strokes of his powerful arms. He floated out and away and she saw the hopeful concentration on his face as he lifted gracefully in the breeze and drifted out over the great space. Then he fell. By the time she made it to the edge and looked over he was beating hard but falling fast. He hit a rock outcropping a couple of hundred feet down, bounced off it with a terrible sound then careened wing-over-boot another hundred feet, colliding with a huge boulder that spun him the other way into the deep black canyon and out of sight.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  M erci carried a heavy, overfilled silence through the rest of her shift. It felt like her blood had turned to lead, her bones to iron.

  She volunteered to call on George and Natalie Wildcraft Kuerners. It was her first line-of-duty death notification and her training had instructed her to be informative, helpful and soft-spoken.

  She told them unflinchingly what had happened, enduring first questions then their silences. She omitted the part when Archie felt nothing and she felt everything. When they were finished she and Zamorra left without lingering. As a messenger she was killed twice; as a detective formerly suspicious of the deputy's actions she was killed twice again.

  Sheriff Abelera asked her to make "the Wildcraft statement." This in lieu of the noon press conference originally meant to deal the Russians and the probable innocence of Archie.

  She stood there in the courthouse conference room, feeling heavy and thick as an Easter Island statue, telling the lights and the reporters that the best efforts of her partner and herself were not enough to bring Deputy Wildcraft down from the precipice of Santiago Peak. She told them that rescuers had recovered his body about half way down the mountain. She said nothing of wings, only that the deputy had been shattered by the death of his wife. At the word "shattered" she saw in her mind's eye the pinwheeling descent, then Achie's broken body careening into the maw of shadow and stone.

  How did you find him?" asked Gary Brice. "I mean, before he jumped."

  "He informed us of his whereabouts."

  "Why wasn't a negotiator brought in, or a rescue team assembled?" asked Michelle Howland.

  "We had no indication of his purpose. There was no time."

  "How long did you talk to him?" asked KTLA.

  "Less than a minute."

  "What, exactly, were his last words?" asked Brice.

  "Thank you."

  "For what? What had you done?"

  "Nothing. I think that, by then, he was ... completely disoriented."

  "Were you close enough to physically restrain him?"

  "My attempt failed."

  "There was contact, then, a scuffle?"

  "Yes."

  "How would you describe his expression when he jumped?"

  "It can't be described."

  "How was he dressed?"

  "In his summer-weight uniform."

  "Was he armed?"

  "His sidearm was holstered."

  Abelera had instructed her to leave the Russians out of all this for now while the lab corroborated Wildcraft's confession with evidence.

  "This press conference is over," she said. "But you can stay and ask all the questions you want."

  She turned off the mike and walked out the back door with Zamorra.

  For a long while she sat in her office cubicle, staring at the phone, her picture of Tim, the calendar. She had a small stack of mail but no heart to open it or even look through it. Zamorra left the homicide pen without a good-bye.

  Around three, a couple of uniformed deputies stopped by to tell her they were sorry about Wildcraft, but wanted to thank her for taking Archie's side. They knew all along he hadn't killed Gwen, but it was good of her to believe in him even when the evidence was against him. She asked them to sit a minute, but they excused themselves with a nervy curtness that she respected.

  By four o'clock she'd received two calls—both from deputies she knew were hostile to her—telling her they were pleasantly surprised/proud to see the way she stuck by her department as far as Wildcraft was concerned, and pleased/honored that she'd accepted the nomination for the Deputy Association. She would have their votes. Merci felt Mike's unsubtle hand in this but the calls helped slow the thick ice she felt closing in around her heart.

  Dobbs cam
e by to ask if there was anything he could do. "You half cracked this case, Deputy," Merci said. "Thank you."

  "Last time I'll turn a crime scene into a parking lot."

  "Dobbs, you're going to be just fine."

  "Thank you, Sergeant. I'm headed here, you know. Homicide. That's my goal. That's what I want."

  "Careful what you wish for."

  "I will be."

  Gilliam called.

  Her father called.

  Ryan Dawes called to tell her she had good instincts about this case and had been right to follow them. He sounded like a movie critic praising a trashy blockbuster, so she hung up on him.

  Al Madden called and said he was sorry about Archie, but gratified that the deputy had been innocent all along. He wondered if his investigation had helped drive Wildcraft to suicide and she didn't think so. Madden apologized for having to get involved and remarked that her fieldwork was, in his opinion, flawless.

  Neighbor William Jones called to find out if the press conference account of Archie's suicide was accurate, if there was anything else she could tell him. She told him that Archie believed he was joining Gwen. Jones said if he was Archie he'd go and join her, too. Merci excused herself and rang off.

  George Wildcraft called to ask about his son. He wanted how he'd looked, what his state of mind had been before he did it.

  She told him what she'd told Jones. She told him she tried her best to take him down, get him off that mountain alive. Her throat went hard and her eyes hurt and she could barely get the words out.

  He thanked her and said he was impressed by her and always believed she had had justice and his son's best interest at heart. He apologized for Natalie "throwing herself around." His voice was soft and Merci figured he was sneaking the call on her.

  "He was a good man, Detective. Such a good man."

  "Yes, I know he was."

  Abelera stopped by and told her to take a few days off. She agreed.

  Zamorra appeared at five-thirty. "I went to the market. I'd like to make dinner for you and Tim and Clark."

  She looked at him, a little surprised. "Great. Tell Kirsten to come."