Trial by Ice and Fire

by Clinton McKinzie

  “I know about the kid,” I say. “That's why you roughed him up in the first place, wasn't it?”

  He nods and goes back to staring out the windshield. His voice is heavy and sad. “It wasn't that way for you?”

  I also look out at the coming night.

  “I don't know. I think I pretty much knew it was a setup, but I went in anyway. I don't know what I was thinking.”

  From outside the pulse of the crickets is starting to make itself heard even over the engine's idle. A ragged, discordant rhythm, not yet mature this early in the year. The first stars are becoming apparent, with the Big Dipper ladling at the horizon. It's a long while before Wokowski speaks again.

  “Are you sleeping with Cali?” He's still looking through the windshield, pointedly not looking at me.

  “No.”

  His expression is doubtful when he turns to me. “She's been going out with you, staying at your place . . .”

  “I'm supposed to be protecting her.”

  “So, you guys are friends or what?”

  “Yeah. We're friends.”

  We sit quietly for a while longer. I wonder where this is leading now. This big man is full of surprises, too.

  “I want to show you something,” he finally says.

  He reaches up and turns on the overhead light, illuminating the truck's interior. Then he unbuttons his shirt's chest pocket and pulls out a ring. He pinches it carefully between his thick index finger and thumb. The gold band is not much wider than a piece of wire, and the tiny stone embedded in it glitters when he moves it.

  “I was going to ask her a month ago, but then everything went to hell. I'm still going to ask her. Sometime. If I can ever get her to hear me out.”

  “That's a nice ring, man.” A lot of the animosity I've felt for him over the last few days is beginning to bleed away. The pressure that had felt so close to blowing out the Pig's windows is deflated like a slashed tire.

  He rolls the ring in the light for a moment, making it sparkle. “Think I've got a chance?” His tone is flat and casual, sort of self-mocking, but underneath it I can hear what sounds like genuine anxiety.

  I can't get a grasp on what's happening here—I begin to feel a little paranoid. Could he be playing me for a sucker? Was the sheriff covering for him when she'd said she saw him this morning? No, it can't be true. She might try to protect one of her officers, but she wouldn't cover for him in the attempted murder of a state agent. That's too vast a conspiracy to have any credence. And stalking is a solo game. But still, I can't help but wonder. I play along anyway.

  “I don't know. Maybe. If you can make her understand what happened with the old guy.”

  “That's what I was trying to do, when you and me had that standoff outside the courthouse. I was bringing her the tapes of Toby—that's the boy—and the accident. You know, the tape of the accident scene and then some video of him talking to me in his chair.”

  So that's what was in the gym bag. If he's telling the truth.

  The engine kicks up to a higher idle, as if to suggest movement and a way of getting me out of this bizarre situation.

  “Okay,” Wokowski says, nodding slightly. He tucks the ring back in his shirt pocket and buttons it up. “Okay. Let's go say hi to Myron.”

  I take my foot off the brake and the Pig starts rolling forward.

  “Do you know him?” I ask.

  “Oh yeah. I've locked him up a couple of times. Drugged and disorderly, mostly. You know, standing around yelling, holding up traffic, that sort of thing. I never filed any charges on him. Never bothered. I'd kick him loose once he got back to normal again.”

  It's dark enough that I should be using the headlights but I don't turn them on. I don't really need them anyway—everything seems unnaturally bright and intense, the way it always does after strong emotions have shot through you. The adrenaline provides light enough.

  “If you guys know he's out here, how come you haven't picked him up on the hunting violations?”

  “A guy's got to eat. And he's got no money, so it's either poaching or a soup kitchen. Jackson doesn't have many soup kitchens. If I were him, I'd be poaching, too.”

  This is yet another side to this new Charles Wokowski, and it's disconcerting, the way he's blowing away all my preconceptions. The man who deeply regrets his mistakes, and who remains true to his love, is also the man who takes care of his own. Surreal. That's how it seems to me. But I don't allow myself to worry about it. I let it go for now.

  “You know him a lot better than me,” I say. “I've only seen his picture and read about the charge Cali prosecuted him for. How do you think we should do this?”

  “We'll talk to him. He'll come easy. He always does. He'll remember me. I always treated him right.”

  We finally come to the weedy double-track that branches off from the main Forest Service road. There is nothing to mark it other than a warm and fuzzy welcome sign that reads: “No Trespassing. Trespassers Will Be Shot on Sight.” The lettering is faint with rust and there are numerous bullet holes adding emphasis to the boldly printed words. Even though the double-track goes for a couple of hundred yards before it reaches the clearing with the ruined house, I kill the engine here.

  “Shit,” Wokowski says as he squints to read the sign in the dark. “Maybe we should've suited up. Worn vests. Myron can get a little squirrelly sometimes.”

  He takes off his seat belt and unsnaps the cover of the old-fashioned leather holster he wears belted around the waist of his jeans. I get my gun out from the storage box between the seats and slip it into the nylon holster in the small of my back.

  “There's a small clearing a couple of hundred yards up the road. That's where the house used to be. I checked it out yesterday. He's got to have a tent or a shack nearby. We'll stay in the trees at the edge, sneak up on him. Okay?”

  Wokowski nods. “Sure.”

  We get out of the truck and bump the doors shut with our hips.

  Outside in the night the season's first mosquitoes are already buzzing in the air, zeroing in on the warmth of our breath. The stars overhead are dazzling. Miles from any town, there are no ground lights at all to dilute their brilliance. There must be millions visible up there. They're bright enough that Wokowski and I cast faint shadows when we start to walk even though there is no moon.

  About a quarter mile up the track we come to where it opens up into the clearing. The ruined house, with its chimney and four stone corners the only things left standing upright amid the rubble, looks like some pagan place of worship. Like a funeral pyre waiting to be lit. The stars twinkling beyond it dance and flare like an omen of the sparks to come.

  The menace of this place is as strong as it had been yesterday afternoon. Stronger even. But the anger that had been born beneath a mountain of snow pushes it off. And even though the day's heat still lingers in the air, the darkness is a comfortable cloak. At night the odds are well in our favor. The rifle isn't much of an advantage when there's a lot less to see.

  I stay to one edge of the meadow with Wokowski walking a little ways behind me. The grass whispers beneath our boots. I come to the place where yesterday I'd seen the little path leading into the trees. Standing still for a minute, then turning and studying the thick, dark forest, I think I see a faint light through the trees beneath the hillside's steep, timber-choked slope. It looks like one of the tiny stars has descended to Earth.

  I point it out to Wokowski and he nods. “Lantern,” he says.

  “Keep following me, but hang back a little more,” I tell him.

  With every step I wonder if I'm tripping an alarm. A little fishing line is all it would take, strung through the trees to a rock in a tin can. Meth labs I've hunted out in the past have had far more sophisticated and effective countersurveillance. But is Armalli that smart? That secretive? There's simply no way to know if he's expecting us.

  The path winds through the trees up toward the ridge for several hundred feet. Although dead wood and rottin
g trunks lie across it, we're able to see well enough in the starlight to not make much noise. Ahead I can see the yellow light again, bigger now.

  Near the ridge top, the forest opens up into a small clearing of pine needles and dirt. The light is coming from cracks around a boarded-over window of a ramshackle hut. It's a sort of lean-to that's been built against the ridge crest, where the upturned edge of a granite plate has punched out of the earth at a sharp angle to form a fifteen-foot overhang.

  Over the night noise of crickets and other insects I can hear the distinctive hiss of a Coleman lantern. Then, after a moment of listening, I distinguish the buzz of many flies. The additional sound comes from where a large shape is hanging from a stout branch. Too big to be a person. An elk, probably, poached from the preserve.

  The shack becomes clearer the longer we stand in the protective embrace of the night and the forest. It has been hammered together out of rusty sheets of corrugated iron, rotting boards, and what looks like the hood of a car. The structure is tiny—it can't be more than five feet high, eight feet across, and six feet deep. I guess that it's been partially dug out and into the ridge because of the low roof. An old Ford pickup hulks to one side of the hut. God only knows how he gets it in and out of here.

  There is no good way to approach such a place. I want to surprise him, but knocking on the door made of split boards seems like a good way to take a bullet right through it. Waiting for him to come out—maybe until morning and thereby missing my dinner with Rebecca—is out of the question. I remember the feeling I'd had yesterday of being scoped, feeling crosshairs tattooing the small of my back.

  “You want me to yell?” Wokowski asks from behind me.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  He calls in a loud voice, so loud it causes me to jump, “Hey, Myron. It's Charlie Wokowski. Teton County Sheriff's. You home, man?”

  Immediately the light goes out in the cracks around the covered window. Then there is the distinct sound of a rifle's bolt sliding a shell into the chamber. Chick-chick.

  “Shit,” Wokowski says quietly as he slips off the trail with his gun in his hand. He stands, crouching slightly, behind some thick pine trunks. I do the same on the opposite side. None of the trees here are broad enough to provide total cover. But in the darkness it's safe enough.

  “What do you want?” a voice shouts from the hut. It's a high voice, almost cracking. Like an awkward teenager.

  “You remember me, don't you, Myron? I've had to lock you up a few times in town but I always fed you and let you go. Remember?”

  I note that Wokowski is smart—he doesn't look out from behind his tree and he doesn't speak toward the hut, where the sound of his voice would be easy to trace to the source. Instead he throws his voice by yelling in another direction. I just wish that it weren't my direction.

  “What do you want?” the high voice demands again.

  “We just want to talk to you.”

  “Who else is out there?”

  Before Wokowski can do his ventriloquist's trick again, I call out, “I'm Special Agent Antonio Burns of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation. We just want to talk to you. Put your weapon outside the door right now.”

  There's a long pause. Then the voice from the hut says, “I don't know you. Didn't you see the ‘No Trespassing' sign? No one's supposed to be out here. This is my land.”

  At least he doesn't ask if we have a warrant. “This is government land, Myron,” I yell back. “Either you come out right this minute or we're going to fill your shack with holes and drag your corpse out.” Wokowski looks at me sharply, and I guess that my bluff sounds convincing. My tone comes with the weight and pressure of a hundred thousand pounds of snow.

  When he doesn't respond, Wokowski whispers from across the trail, “What do you want to do?”

  I'm thinking about how this has to be the guy who took a stun gun with him when he tried to go through Cali's window. Who attacked her a second time in the dark of a barroom bathroom and made a fool of me. Who buried me in that avalanche. What I'd like to do is find a shovel and dig a pit here in the dirt, put him in it, fill it up, and never come back. I'd like to walk away hearing him scream from under the ground the way I'd been screaming beneath the snow.

  I'm still savoring this thought—it's far better than pondering the frustration of our apparent standoff—when Myron calls, “What do you want to talk to me about?”

  “Either put your weapon outside and turn your lantern back on or I'm going to start shooting,” I yell back.

  I sense Wokowski looking in my direction. Wondering if I'm really serious and maybe having a moment's doubt about the denial I'd made earlier in the truck.

  Some scurrying noises come from inside the hut. A match scratches and a minute later there's the hiss and the leaking yellow light of a propane lantern coming from the cracks in the plank walls. Finally a door stutters open on the earth before it. More light spills out, becoming a flood.

  “Throw out the rifle, too.”

  A man's silhouette appears in the small doorway—just a head and torso, as if he doesn't have any legs. It looks remarkably like the targets we use on the range. He's leaning forward a little, peering out into the night.

  “I don't have a gun,” he says in the same high voice but softer now.

  “Yeah, sure he don't,” Wokowski whispers to me.

  I'm not going to stand in the trees all night arguing with the psycho in the hut. I make a decision. “Just cover me,” I whisper back.

  I step out from behind my screen of spruce trunks and walk toward the legless figure. I have my H&K tight in my hand. The short barrel is pointed at the doorway, my index finger caressing the trigger guard. It would be a simple thing for the shadowy figure to reach to either side and grab the hidden and far more accurate rifle. But I know I can at least get off a couple of shots before he'll be able to bring the longer weapon around. And, while my aim's always sucked at a distance, I'm confident I can at least dive for the shrubbery and wriggle into the darkness out of a rifle's sight.

  It feels funny, having Wokowski behind me, pointing his pistol in the general direction of my back, and Armalli, a certified psychopath who's already almost succeeded in killing me once, in front of me with a rifle probably within reach. It gets my blood pumping. I step carefully. It would be a bad time to trip.

  And an unsettling thought overtakes me. I wonder if Wokowski could have been screwing with me in the truck, acting like everything was cool. Putting on a show to get me in a position just like this. I hadn't thought so at the time, but now, with his gun pointed in the general bearing of my back and a psycho in front of me, I'm not so sure.

  The shadow in the doorway comes into focus as I crunch closer on the litter of small stones and pine needles. He's still standing in the doorway but within the hut, no longer leaning forward. Myron Armalli is wearing a too-small sweater that's tight on his torso. His face looks a satanic red from the way the propane lantern's light behind him is reflecting off the interior walls on either side of him; the interior walls have been painted a vivid crimson. Like blood. You'd have to be crazy to paint walls that color. You'd definitely be crazier after spending a night between them.

  Aside from the red glow, his face is thinner than in the picture but normal-looking. The only other difference is that bags of skin hang from beneath his dark eyes. Young, little more than a kid.

  “You know who I am?” I ask.

  He looks at me in the starlight then looks down at my gun. With almost wonder in his voice he says, “You're the man in the mirror.”

  I hear a strange-sounding chuckle come out of my own throat. And I feel myself shiver. “I don't know what you're talking about,” I say. “Now where's the rifle, Myron? I heard you pull the bolt.” Make a move, I'm thinking. Make a move. The sound of the avalanche is in my head.

  His face remains expressionless. I'm only ten feet away now with my pistol unsighted but plainly pointed at his chest. I stop. The feeling of being tra
pped beneath the snow swims up again as I look at him. My finger is not over the guard the way it should be—it's on the trigger. God, he looks young.

  “I, uh, don't have a rifle. I don't know what you're talking about.”

  I'm tempted to question him, to bring up that I'd clearly heard a rifle and that he'd definitely used a gun that morning to bring down the avalanche on me. For evidentiary purposes, I'd like to have an admission. But the answers would be useless—there's no question that he's in custody here with my gun pointed at him and the admission would be worth nothing in court. Besides, the only court this guy's probably going to see is a competency hearing.

  “Come out of there,” I say instead. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  He reaches forward and grabs the door frame on each side to pull himself out. I notice the big hiking boots he wears. They're covered in dried mud, just as my randonee boots had been when Cali and I had finally managed to make it down to the trailhead.

  Of course the mud could be explained a thousand other ways—he lives in the forest, after all, among streams and small lakes and marshy meadows—but it's all the confirmation I need.

  Myron pulls himself all the way out to stand in front of me. At full height on level ground, he's not much taller than I am. He would be a lot taller if he stood at full height instead of cringing slightly. Like Mungo. He's thin to the point of emaciation. It's a wonder he'd been able to keep up with Cali and me on the trail.

  “Turn around and put your hands on the wall.”

  I hesitate before stepping forward to pat him down. I remember something I'd once seen at the state prison when I was there to bust the guards for selling contraband. A bunch of convicts in the exercise yard were taking turns bracing themselves against a wall. One inmate, playing the role of cop, would come up from behind another to check for weapons. The one bracing the wall would reach between his own legs in a lightning-fast move and grab the “cop's” ankle then pull up hard. The “cop” would go down on his back between the prisoner's legs. The prisoner would pretend to stomp him. The sight of this practice session had given me nightmares. And now I think about how madness can make you very strong and very quick.