Badwater

by Clinton McKinzie

  “How was the water?”

  “High and fast. I was a little worried. Wasn’t sure we’d make it without someone taking a swim. Mattie was having a blast, totally stoked, but that dude Jonah seemed freaked by the rapids. Kept saying he’d never done anything like this before. She kind of teased him about it, but I don’t think he was real happy.”

  “What happened when you got to the sink?”

  “Well, we’d just come out of Rinse Cycle, the biggest waves on the river. Full of head drops and standing waves. It’s a really tricky stretch, especially when the water’s this fast. Mattie was screaming her head off. Jonah was just hanging on, I think. Hell, I was, too.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Well, when we came out of the rapids, Mattie was whooping and talking a mile a minute. Jonah was real quiet. I just let us drift in that slow water, letting the waves drain from the boat. Then there was a plunking sound and I got splashed. Thought it was a trout at first. Then I looked around and saw those three kids up on the cliff. I waved at them, maybe smiled or called out something, then I saw one of the little bastards throw a rock. I yelled at them to knock it off, but they just kept throwing. The closer we got to the cliff, right underneath them, the closer they were getting with the rocks. They were practically just dropping them on us. Big rocks, too, like Frisbees. I picked up the oars and began to row downstream. To get out of the way. Then one of the rocks hit the gunwale right next to Mattie. That’s when the guy, Jonah, hopped out of the boat.”

  “The boys claim they weren’t throwing rocks at you.”

  “Then they’re lying, dude. I can’t swear they were trying to brain us or anything, but they were definitely winging them in our direction.”

  “So what happened when Jonah got out?”

  “I told him to get his ass back in the boat. Mattie did, too. And he tried, but it looked like he slipped on the bottom. We were moving by then, picking up speed a little, and then he lost his grip on the gunwale and fell down. I started backing about then, but we were already twenty or thirty feet away and losing ground. Another rock splashed down right next to him. The kids were laughing and yelling stuff. Jonah turned and began to slosh for the beach.”

  “Would you have done that? Gone for the beach?”

  It was speculation, and wouldn’t be admissible in court, but I was curious.

  Pete barely paused to think about it. “Sure. Dude couldn’t just stand there and wait for me. Heck, I didn’t even know if I’d be able to get the boat back to him. And I surely would have kicked those kids’ little butts for what they were doing.”

  “But you wouldn’t have pushed them off the edge?”

  He looked shocked.

  “Hell no.”

  “Because you knew about that sink.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What if it was just deep water under there?”

  He rubbed the blond stubble on his chin and thought about it.

  “I might have been tempted, but I didn’t know if those kids could swim or not. They weren’t wearing vests, you know. And I’ve got a license to protect. But they deserved a dunking.”

  What would I have done? I wondered. What if it had been Rebecca or Moriah they’d almost hit with a rock? I was pretty sure the little bastards would have more to worry about than just getting wet.

  “Okay, so what happened after Jonah got to the beach?”

  “I couldn’t hear much of anything, because we’d gotten down to where the river was rumbling again, and I couldn’t see because my back was turned so I could haul on the paddles. I just kind of looked over my shoulder every now and then. I saw Jonah on the beach, and saw the kids above him, maybe shouting down at him. Next time I looked Jonah was just standing there looking sad, like a drowned rat. When I looked a minute later he was starting to climb the cliff. Real slow, like he didn’t want to be doing it.”

  “Were the kids still throwing rocks at him?”

  “Not that I could see. But they could have been. Anyway, I expected them to run. They were just kids, right? That dude Jonah’s not that big, but he looks kind of tough with all those tattoos and studs. But the kids didn’t run. Jonah got to the top and it looked like he was talking to them. When I looked again, one of them—the one that ended up in the river—had a stick and was swinging it at Jonah.”

  “Could you see if he hit him?”

  “Looked like he nailed him, dude. I saw Jonah reach up and grab the side of his head.”

  “How big was the stick?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t really see it all that well. But like this, maybe?” He spread his arms all the way, then bent his elbows a little, shortening the span. “That’s the way it looked, anyway.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Next time I looked, there was a tug-of-war going on. Then the kid went off the edge.” After a somber pause, he went on: “The other two, they sort of rushed Jonah. I could hear them then. Screaming and all that. Couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could tell they were pissed. Jonah ran—no, he slid or fell—back down to the beach and went into the water. Like he was trying to find the kid. But the little dude was just gone.”

  “Did he come up for air, or call for help, or anything like that?”

  Pete shook his head.

  “The girlfriend, she started screaming. Then she got out her cell phone and called 911. Said a kid was in the river and hadn’t come up, and that they needed help. Had me stop rowing to tell them where we were. It was just a couple of minutes later when the cop cars showed up on top of the hill, then a minute later you came out of the trees.” He gave me a grin. “Just jumped right in. Like it was a swimming pool. That was something else, dude.”

  “I didn’t know there was a sink.”

  I wasn’t happy. Pete had confirmed everything Jonah had told me. He’d verified that my hunch was correct that the Mann boys were lying about the rock-throwing and stick-swinging, which would make the case messy if it ever went to trial. Worse, he’d convinced me that Jonah didn’t deserve what was happening to him. And I, the good cop, was the one doing it to him.

  That fact made what I had to do next even more unpleasant.

  The motel where Mattie Freda and Jonah Strasburg had been staying was called the Wagon Wheel. It offered the usual amenities—cinder-block construction, vending machines prominently displayed, a parking lot full of minivans, a swimming pool jam-packed with bladderless kids, and exorbitant summertime prices. As much as I tried to dislike the “tourons” and their crowd-loving, littering, give-the-bear-a-Twinkie-and-smile-for-the-camera habits, I had to bless them, too. Their loose dollars were the biggest barrier to the state’s desire for drilling or chopping down everything in sight and implementing its shoot-on-sight policy toward the recently recovered wolf packs.

  No shade in sight, so I locked Mungo in the truck and left the engine running and the air conditioner blasting. I headed for the front desk but diverted when I spotted Mattie by the pool. She was sitting stonily amid splashing, running, screaming children and the mothers who were trying to restrain them.

  With her pale skin and fanglike bangs, she looked even more out of place here than she had on the river. She was dressed entirely in black, sitting rigidly on a deck chair beneath an umbrella. A book was open on her lap, but she wasn’t looking down at it. Instead she was just staring into space like a gargoyle from behind a pair of dark lenses. There seemed to be an invisible barrier around her. Not one of the children crossed its line, nor did any thrown balls or flung water seem to penetrate.

  Seeing all the small, wet bodies made a lump rise in my throat. The dads were probably all off fishing. I swore I would never leave Moriah behind like that. An irritating voice in my head laughed at that. Look at yourself, Ant. What the hell do you think you’re doing?

  “Mattie?”

  She jumped. Her expression hardened even further when she realized who it was who had spoken her name.

  “What do you want?”


  I sat down on the empty chair next to her.

  “I need to get your statement. And I need to apologize for what the county attorney said after the hearing this morning. Sometimes all lawyers think about is winning the case, not the people involved.”

  She stared for a moment, then looked off into the distance again.

  “I need to apologize, too. I got in to see Jonah. After court. I’m sorry for what I said to you. For part of it, anyway. I thought you were the one who beat him up. Now I know you weren’t. He said he heard the guards bitching that you insisted he be put into protective custody.”

  She said it formally, without real sincerity or appreciation for what I had done. I was the enemy. Just because I had done something decent, it didn’t mean my enemy status had changed.

  “Has he talked to a lawyer yet?”

  She laughed, but not very cheerfully.

  “The public defender won’t represent him.”

  “I know. You should probably hire someone good.”

  “Yeah, right. I went through the town’s yellow pages, which is about the size of a take-out menu. Do you realize there’s more than twenty frigging lawyers in this shitty little town and that only two of them were willing to take his case? Both of them said it would require a large retainer. I was quoted a minimum of ten thousand dollars.”

  “Do you have it?”

  She looked my way again through her black lenses.

  “Do I look like I have ten thousand dollars?”

  “What about your car? Maybe you could sell it.”

  She pointed to a 1970s Oldsmobile sedan in the parking lot. It made my Pig look like a shiny Mercedes. The windshield was cracked, the tires bald, the vinyl roof pilled, and the most visible color was gray primer.

  “You think somebody would give me even a hundred bucks for that? Besides, it’s not even ours. We borrowed it from a guy in Jonah’s band.”

  “I thought the band, Purgatory, was supposed to be pretty good.”

  “They do okay, for a band. That means maybe eight or ten shows a month, a couple of thousand bucks split four ways, and after the manager takes his fifteen percent. It’s not enough to even cover my tuition or our rent. Purgatory isn’t ever going to make any serious money unless they sell out. Start doing pop.”

  I asked some more questions and learned that she hadn’t spoken to her parents in years and that they didn’t have any money anyway. Jonah’s parents had both moved to Israel two years ago and he had barely heard from them since then. Mattie was financing her education with partial scholarships and loans. She and Jonah had about five hundred dollars to fund their remaining vacation.

  “Okay,” I told her, trying to sound reassuring. “So you’ll qualify as indigent. The judge will appoint someone. He has to. You won’t have to pay a dime.”

  I knew that sometimes you’re a lot better off with court-appointed counsel. A good public defender—a true believer—can be better than a dream team. The True Believers care about more than just money. It’s a calling for them. A crusade against cops and prosecutors, which, having seen things from my brother’s side of the law, I didn’t really begrudge them. Unless, of course, their swords were hacking at me. Plus the state will pick up the tab for experts and investigators, something a defendant himself has to do if he’s represented by private counsel.

  But it’s hard to convince defendants they’re usually better off with a public defender or appointed counsel. It was even harder in this case.

  “Luke—the prosecutor—told me the judge is going to call around. There’s bound to be someone with the free time and willing to accept the court’s rates.”

  Mattie’s look, even concealed behind sunglasses, told me just how bad that sounded.

  I sighed and decided to get down to business.

  “Are you willing to talk to me about what happened yesterday? About the river trip, and how the kid ended up in the water.”

  “Why should I tell you anything? You’re the guy who put Jonah in jail.”

  I wanted to tell her that I’d had no choice. I’m a cop, and that’s what cops do when it’s apparent a crime may have been committed. Especially when it involves the death of a child.

  But all I said was “Because it might help Jonah if we can learn all the facts.”

  Her version was pretty much the same as the guide’s. And Jonah’s. The kids’, too, although like Pete and Jonah she was emphatic that the kids were throwing rocks at them. Trying to hit them, she believed. And she’d watched Cody Wallis pick up the stick and swing it at Jonah’s head.

  After hearing her out and making my notes, I put my card on the plastic table next to her.

  “Call me if you think of anything else. Or if you hear that someone’s giving Jonah a rough time in the jail.”

  She said nothing, and she didn’t touch the card.

  “Look, Mattie. I’m sorry about all this. I had no choice but to arrest Jonah. If I hadn’t, the state troopers would have. Or the people up on the road would probably have torn him to pieces. My only job now is to collect all the facts and evidence and turn it over to the county attorney. He’s the one who files charges and decides what those charges should be.”

  In other words, the biggest cop-out for a cop: Just doing my job, ma’am.

  She still said nothing. She just watched me squirm, through her dark lenses.

  I sighed, closed my notebook, and stood up. I was halfway to the gate in the iron fence surrounding the pool, weaving among the milling children, when she called out.

  “Hey!”

  I turned around and went back to her.

  “I saw in the paper that the funeral’s going to be on Sunday. Should I go?”

  Now it was my turn to stare blankly at her. All this trouble, all this anger and resentment, and the woman thinks she ought to go to the funeral. Yesterday I’d suspected that Jonah was truly remorseful, that he was probably a good guy. The same was clearly true of her. I wasn’t used to dealing with these kinds of people.

  She looked away from my stare.

  “I’d really like to go,” she said softly.

  I remembered the clenched jaws I’d seen in court that morning among the relatives and spectators. The slaps on the prosecutor’s back and the “Hang him high, Luke. Hang him high.”

  “Don’t,” I told her. “The family’s pretty upset. The whole community, too. It would be better if you didn’t. Your presence there might just make it worse. You should lie low, stay out of sight until this all gets sorted out.”

  God knows it can’t get any worse, I thought. Or can it?

  fifteen

  I was hanging in space at eight o’clock on Saturday morning. It was exactly where I wanted to be.

  Two hundred feet off the deck, the right half of my body wedged in a fat crack splitting the underside of a forty-foot roof, my muscles shaking with an overdose of lactic acid, and my breath coming in ragged gasps, I was happy. It didn’t matter that sharp crystals were grinding into my shoulder and forearm and knees, or that there was a very good chance I was about to drop like a bomb and take the big swing—a swing that would end in an explosion against the rock face below. I’d made it out almost twenty feet from the little cave where the roof began. Halfway. Farther than I’d ever made it before. Now if I could just get some protection into the crack, I’d be safe.

  The rope ran back to the anchor in the cave from where it was tied to the self-belaying device on my harness. Only one piece of pro kept it from drooping all that way: a Number 5 Camalot whose expanded quad cams I’d placed by standing in the cave and reaching out as far as I could. But that was still fifteen feet behind me.

  If—when—I fell, I would drop straight down at first, toward the green blur of aspen leaves that grew up to the side of the cliff. Then, as the rope caught my weight, it would swing me toward the smooth granite face below the cave. I would bash into it, just as I’d already done three times that morning. But this time, since I was farther out than ever before
, I knew the cost of a fall would be magnified by the increased momentum of the swing. I would pay the price for progress with pain.

  But I was determined to pay and pay until I couldn’t lift my arms above my head, until the skin on my shoulders and hands was ripped clean off. Then, stripped bare, I’d load Mungo in the Pig and drive to Denver.

  But I wasn’t feeling the fear, or the pain, or even the anticipation of seeing Rebecca and my baby daughter. All my consciousness was focused on nothing but somehow freeing my left hand, snatching up the cam clipped to my waist, and cramming it into the crack. There was no other thought in my head. Some people call it flow, or being in the zone. What climbers and surfers and skydivers call it is feeding the Rat. The addictive joy of putting yourself in a situation so primitive and physical that your awareness of everything else in life is turned off completely.

  I let go of the crystal I had been pinching with my left thumb and fingers and reached for a cam on my harness. Immediately, I felt myself on the verge of taking a dive. Gravity hung on to my back like a three-hundred-pound gorilla. I was suspended only by where my right elbow, palm, and both knees were jammed up into the flaring crack. Suspended, but barely—a feather could have brushed me out. My hand was shaking so bad I couldn’t get the cam unclipped.

  Then a shrill tone cut through the air.

  And my world suddenly accelerated at warp speed.

  I dropped in a great swoop, the wind roaring in my ears and the colors of sky, stone, and trees all running together. Fall like a cat, I reminded myself as I did the opposite and wrapped my arms around my head and brought my knees up to my chest. Then, just as the momentum reached its peak, I struck the cliff.