Badwater

by Clinton McKinzie

  First I had to flush out the lactic acid with a long run on an old elk trail that meandered among the cottonwoods lining the creek at the bottom of the canyon. This also served to strip away any extra remaining ounces of fat that would weigh me down when I made my next attempt at levitating into the sky. Then there were backpack-weighted dips to do between two boulders in order to counterbalance the punishment I’d given the muscles in my back, shoulders, and biceps. And there were pots I hadn’t scraped real well in a couple of days, tiny holes in my tent from campfire embers that needed patching, cam triggers that needed oiling, and a gun that needed cleaning.

  I finished off the chores with a jump into my bath—a clear pond formed by a beaver dam. I gritted my teeth against the cold and hyperventilated for more than a minute until my body was willing to work in the water. While I shampooed with a blob of biodegradable soap, Mungo swam circles around me, huffing water and paddling madly with her oversize paws. She nosed every inch of the beaver dam but wasn’t willing to dive to explore. I could almost hear the beaver laughing at this predator so out of her element.

  At sunset we drove back into town for dinner. I wanted to eat in a restaurant—I was sick of my white-gas cooking and I felt a rare need to be around people, particularly people who didn’t know me. Later, I planned to use the office key I’d gotten from Luke to run criminal histories on all our witnesses.

  The restaurant I chose was a Mexican place called Cesar’s. It looked run-down from the outside, but its parking lot was nearly full. It seemed like an indication of good food until I walked inside and found all the people at the dim bar, not around the tables. Apparently it was a local watering hole where the people drank but knew better than to eat. I was hungry, though, so I stayed.

  After five minutes a chubby waitress with big hair finally escorted me to a booth in the back. The table was sticky with crumbs, the menu was slick with grease, and the tall margarita she brought me was nothing but syrup. By the time I actually ordered, I wasn’t looking forward to getting my food anymore. Which was fine, because it took a long, long time for it to come.

  There was entertainment, though.

  The bar at the front of the restaurant was getting frantic with the Saturday-night crowd. Most of the customers appeared to be itinerant male roughnecks out to celebrate the opening of more public lands to drilling. They were all white, twenty to forty, and drinking hard to wash away the sweat, grease, and dust of a shift on the rigs. There were a few little groups of local women eyeing and being eyed by the men, a few older locals watching the fun, and above them all, glassy-eyed and superior, were the smoke-stained heads of deer, elk, and pronghorns.

  The bar, and the crowd, brought on a strange sense of déjà vu. I didn’t know where it came from until a crack of pool balls brought a cold sweat to my skin. It was exactly like the bar in Durango, Colorado, where my brother had killed a man. I’d visited the place one autumn night soon after he was charged, trying to ascertain just what he’d done and whether he was being treated fairly by the local prosecutor. To my dismay, it turned out he was.

  Soon after being released from federal prison (for chain-sawing five miles of telephone poles in a drug-induced rage after the phone company had been late in installing his phone line), Roberto had hit the road on his motorcycle for a climbing trip fueled by speedballs, an injected combination of heroin and cocaine. In Durango he’d been sitting out a thunderstorm at the bar one night with a girl he met there. She was his type—a fragile recovering junkie and former runaway trying like hell to pull her life together. My brother worshiped such women, and they liked to try to mother him. While they were talking, a roughneck lurched out of a booth full of drunken friends and approached. “Take off, spic,” he’d told my brother as he shouldered between them. Laughing and clowning for his buddies back at the table, he reached up between where the girl’s legs were spread on the stool and roughly groped her.

  Roberto had laughed, too. Laughed so hard, in fact, that he managed to smash off the rim of his beer mug on the bar’s edge. When the roughneck turned back to him, Roberto had screwed what remained of the mug into the man’s face. Then he’d taken him to the dirty floor and beaten him to death.

  I began to get that queasy feeling again, started to breathe a little too fast, and I drank more of the margarita even though it only made the symptoms worse. After a few minutes I began to get ahold of myself. I forced deeper breaths and managed to push away the image of my brother now, no longer a semipsychotic defender of animals and women, but a cripple with a dented head and a scarred throat.

  A distraction helped; into the bar came the paramedic from the river. She definitely stood out in low-riding jeans and a buckskin halter top. Attending to her were three men who, judging by their short hair and mustaches, had to be either fellow paramedics, firemen, or cops. I watched her joke and shove at them and, laughing, get shoved back. They appeared to be celebrating something of their own tonight.

  I ate a tasteless enchilada and watched. Sitting in the dim back end of the restaurant, it was disassociating, like watching TV. The show was about people I had nothing in common with, laughing at jokes that I probably wouldn’t find very funny. Instead of feeling superior, it made me depressed. And homesick for the only real home I’d ever known, my grandfather’s estancia on the Argentine pampas. On a Saturday night there, we’d be outside by the fire pit with all the vaqueros’ families, eating parrillada from a freshly killed steer and drinking wine made from grapes grown just a hundred yards away. Laughing. Playing games. Maybe singing. My brother and I would be planning another trip into the Torres del Paine, or maybe just back from one. And here I was now, seven thousand miles away and all alone.

  What the hell was I doing here? It was hard to remember.

  So I was kind of happy to be distracted further from these thoughts when the paramedic noticed me as she came out of the bathroom. Jerking her body in exaggerated surprise, she grinned and veered toward my table.

  “You’re still alive! Man, that’s a shame. Twice now you’ve made it look like I don’t know my job.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” I told her.

  “Well, maybe you can try to make it up to me. You here alone?”

  I nodded and she slid into the booth. She scooted so close that her hip bumped mine. She smelled of some kind of vanilla perfume.

  She looked at me very intently, then said, “Well, Special Agent Antonio Burns, are you as big a pain in the ass when you’re off duty as you are when you’re on?”

  Her breath was ripe with the fruity smell of hard alcohol.

  “How do you know my name?”

  She laughed.

  “Everybody knows your name, man. All I had to do was ask some cops I hang around with. Half of them think you’re some kind of hero, and the other half think you’re Dirty Harry. One guy told me that they even talk about you at the academy in Rock Springs, a sort of teaching tool on what not to do in an undercover operation.”

  “That’s nice to know.”

  “So which is it, Antonio? You a hero, or a bastard?”

  “The only thing I do know is that you’re obviously as big a pain in the ass off duty as on,” I told her.

  Her laughter made her blond curls shake. Her eyes, which were wet and bloodshot, stayed on me. Around them her skin was dark and sparkly with some kind of eye shadow.

  Then she pretended to pout. “It’s my birthday. I can be a pain in the ass if I want to. What I know about you is that you’re interesting. Maybe dangerous, too. And I’m drunk enough to be interested in a little danger.”

  It had been a long time since I’d been approached so directly. And it took away some of the sting from the morning’s interview with Brandy Walsh. I looked away and drained the oversize glass of yellow syrup that the waitress had claimed was a margarita. I belatedly realized that maybe there was some tequila in it after all, because I was beginning to feel off balance. The chubby waitress brought me another—it was two-for-ones all ni
ght, she said—as well as two screwdrivers for my new friend.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Danger Girl. But I was born Jo. Jo Richards.”

  “Who are those guys you’re with?”

  She said they were friends, fellow paramedics. They were keeping a close eye on us, squinting our way in the restaurant’s gloom. But none of them looked particularly pissed, so I assumed there wasn’t a boyfriend among them.

  “Why don’t we go have a drink with them? Then maybe we can take off and go somewhere.”

  I shook my head.

  “I can’t. I have to work tonight.”

  “No, you don’t. The only thing you have to work at tonight is making up for the fact that you’ve twice hurt my feelings by refusing to let me treat you.” Jo leaned closer, until her lips almost touched my ear, and poked a finger into my ribs. “Tonight you’re going to let me treat you, Antonio Burns. It’s my birthday, damn it.”

  I smiled and sipped my drink. It was tempting. Man, it was tempting. I could imagine what her lush body would look like without the fringed halter and jeans. I could imagine what it would feel like. I looked into her blurry eyes and knew that the ride would be a wild one. And, God, I needed a ride into oblivion.

  Her fingers slid down my side and gripped my thigh.

  “Where should we do the examination?”

  Then she laughed a little nervously, as if, even drunk, she realized just how badly she was behaving.

  “I’m camping out,” I explained. “More than a half hour outside of town.”

  “Well, I’ve been living with my folks since I broke up with my boyfriend. That won’t work. They’re nice, but they’re foursquare fundamentalists. Dad would chase you out with his shotgun and Mom would make their whole church pray for our souls for the next ten years.”

  She stuck out her lower lip for a moment, then looked around and gave me a sly smile.

  “Maybe we should just do the initial assessment in your car.”

  “Only if you don’t mind sharing the backseat with a hundred-and-twenty-pound mutt.”

  Jo pouted again. And I pondered. I couldn’t take her to the county attorney’s office, could I? No. I wasn’t ready to jeopardize my job like that. Plus I was still half in love with Rebecca. And Jo was just too wasted. I was enjoying the explicit flirting, I was flattered and tantalized by it, but I already knew it wasn’t going to happen tonight. In fact, it wasn’t going to happen ever. She just wasn’t my type. But I let her thumb and fingertips massage my thigh just above my knee as I swallowed more syrupy tequila.

  People at the bar looked toward the door, and I heard conversations pause then pick up again. I squinted through the dark and the smoke and saw that the Mann brothers had just walked in. Horseshoe and Hairlip, the twins I’d confronted by my truck and who were rumored to share a meth addiction.

  To Jo I said, “I think we should schedule an appointment, Doctor. Maybe sometime when you’re sober.”

  She laughed again, but this time it sounded fake. Some of the heat that had been building between us was blown away. The gentle pressure of her fingers stopped kneading my thigh.

  “Hey, Antonio, I may be a little trashed, but I know what I’m doing. I’ve had a crush on you for a year now, ever since I tried to wrap your thick head at that old potash mine.”

  “You said you didn’t even know my name until two days ago.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested. Nobody would talk about you at the mine. Or what had happened. All I know is what I read in the papers, about some kind of botched raid on an underground meth lab. Something the Feds said DCI had screwed up, but the word is it was the other way around. Your name was never mentioned. The FBI was running around squelching everybody, including yours truly. What the hell was going on?”

  “I could tell you, Jo, but then I’d have to kill you.”

  She groaned at the joke and continued, “Oh yeah, then you got in that piece-of-shit truck that almost ran over the commander of the state patrol. Thought he was going to go into cardiac arrest, he was so mad. I liked that. That bastard’s a friend of my dad’s. He’s been hitting on me since, like, I turned fourteen.”

  That gave me the opportunity to change the subject. I asked Jo about herself while I watched the men at the bar. The Manns were looking around, smirking at the other customers and staring back aggressively at anyone who met their eyes. They moved their heads and arms in little jerks, drinking from their beer bottles too often. Even from across the dark restaurant it wasn’t hard to guess that they were tweaking.

  Jo was still talking, telling me about growing up in Badwater, about being a junior regional rodeo champ as well as Miss Colter County, about trying to save up enough money by living at home to finish college in Billings, then maybe go on to medical school.

  “I know you’re supposed to talk about yourself when you’re drunk, but I want to talk about you. Who the hell are you, Special Agent Burns? Why’d you risk your sexy little butt jumping in that sink after the Wallis kid?”

  “I didn’t know there was a sink there.”

  The one with the scraggly soul patch—Hairlip—finally locked in on me. He nudged his twin, said something, and pointed. Then they were both glaring my way with mean little smiles on their mouths.

  “Uh-uh. That’s not what I heard. Word is that you dove twice. The first time you maybe didn’t know, the second time you had to.”

  “Do you know those two idiots at the bar?”

  It took Jo a minute to focus that far and pick out which pair of idiots I was talking about—the ones staring hard at us. When she managed, she rolled her wet eyes.

  “The ’roid boys. Wonder who let those freaks in here?”

  Carrying their bottles, the brothers began weaving through the empty tables and coming our way. They walked stiffly, sticking out their puffed-up chests and holding their arms out from their sides. They both wore flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled high so everyone could admire their overbuilt biceps. I pushed the table lightly and discovered it wasn’t bolted to the floor. Then I sat where I was but shifted my weight forward, over my feet.

  “Maybe you should take off,” I said to Jo.

  She laughed, but didn’t move to leave.

  “Hey, Wolfman,” Horseshoe called as they approached. “What the fuck you doing here? You’re in some deep shit, man. Our friend Smit’s gonna be looking for you before long.”

  “He ain’t no Wolfman,” Hairlip said. “He’s a fucking rabbit. That’s why he ran away yesterday before we were done talking to him. Ol’ Smit is going to be sticking a boot up your ass when he gets out. That was a pussy thing to do, shooting him with that stun gun. Had to get six fucking stitches in his tongue.”

  They were definitely tweaking. It was as plain in the cadence of their speech and the way their jaws were clenched as it was in their pinprick pupils. It wasn’t good, either, that they were obviously friends with the giant that I’d Tased in the jail. I wondered if they had encouraged him to further torment Jonah. Not good at all. In just forty-eight hours I’d apparently stirred up what must be the entire criminal underbelly of Badwater, Wyoming.

  Before I could say anything, Horseshoe continued, leaning against the table now, “What the fuck you doing here anyway? You’re supposed to be working, making sure that New York motherfucker gets the chair for what he did to our cousin. Make sure those fucking city lawyers come into town today don’t get him off like O. J.”

  News sure gets around in a small town like Badwater.

  Jo spoke up before I could.

  “You boys use the word fuck one more time and I’m going to slap those grins right off your stupid faces. Then I’m going to stop by the clinic and have a word with your mom.”

  The brothers glowered at her, acknowledging her for the first time.

  Horseshoe said, “What are you doing with this guy, Jo? He’s a goddamned narc.”

  “Then maybe he should be taking a closer look a
t what you two morons have been up to.”

  “That’s bullshit!” Hairlip howled. “We don’t mess around with that shit! Anyone who says so is lying.”

  “Yeah!” his twin said. Then he tried to change the subject back to accusing me by saying, “This jerk told a state trooper to shoot Randy and Trey when they were going after the guy who killed Cody.”

  “Because they were interfering with CPR,” Jo said. She’d really been checking up on me, too, finding out everything she could about what had happened at the river. “And he said it just to scare them off.”

  “It was a shitty thing to do,” Horseshoe said, turning his glower on me. “You don’t threaten our little bros.”

  Jo waved a hand dismissively, saying, “They’re brats, same as the two of you. Always sneaking around the woods in back of my folks’ place, just like you perverts did when you were in junior high. Hoping to see me in my underwear or something. Now get out of here. Go smoke your crank or pump your weights or masturbate into the mirror. Just get out of my face.”

  For some reason they took this from her. I guessed it was some leftover power from high school, where she had surely been older and undoubtedly popular. I tried not to laugh, knowing that adding my ridicule to hers would immediately escalate things.

  “You’re a real pain in the ass, Jo.”

  “Everybody’s saying that tonight,” she said, nudging my leg with hers.

  As they turned to go, Horseshoe suddenly leaned across the table and stuck his finger in my face.

  “You’d better watch yourself, narc. Don’t mess with us. And you take care of that fucking tourist.”

  Jo knocked his hand away.

  “Get over yourself, Ned. You aren’t scaring anybody.”

  I hadn’t said a word, but they were making me nervous. These idiots were too dumb to care who they were messing with. They were more afraid of this girl, and their mother, than that I was a cop with a nasty reputation. This stupidity made them very dangerous. If they were a little smarter, they wouldn’t have bothered me so much.