Point of Law (21 page)

So she held it in. Not moving a muscle, she lay in the bushes as if she were dead like Cal. Tears ran down her face but she made no move to wipe them away. The voices and searching noises continued for what seemed an eternity. She was deaf to them, too full of terror and grief to let anything else intrude into her senses. After a while the noises stopped.

TWENTY-SEVEN

“D
IDN
’
T YOU SEE
us? We ran out onto the road when you came down the track.” Kim sits on the other side of Sunny now, cushioning her between us.

Sunny shakes her head and a tear splashes against my arm. “I didn’t see anything. It was like I was in a fog. I just knew I had to get out of there. Oh God, when I crawled back and saw Cal, the way they’d stuffed him under a bush . . .” Her voice dissolves in a fresh wave of tears. I wait for them to slow before speaking, picturing my own vision of Cal’s battered flesh.

“Why didn’t you go to the police, Sunny?”

The blonde girl turns her wet face up to me. Thick water is dripping out of her eyes and nostrils. “How could I? Fast is friends with the sheriff—Kim told me so—and I’d help set fire to the lodge.” She pulls away from me and leans harder against Kim, wrapping herself in Kim’s strong, thin arms.

After waiting a while longer, I try another, easier question. “Where’s the cave?”

Sunny’s voice is muffled by Kim’s shoulder. “It’s on that red cliff. Above the meadow.”

I remember my first morning in the valley, climbing on the hot granite with my father. When we hiked back in toward the meadow for lunch, I thought I saw two climbers rappelling down the cliff. I remember wondering why anyone would bother with that crumbly red clay when there was such fine granite down in the canyon. And I remember that night, when Sunny had introduced me to Cal, and I asked him if he was the one I’d seen rappelling. He looked away, refusing to confirm that it had been him. I took it for embarrassment, not secrecy.

Kim strokes her friend’s freshly shorn hair. I assume she’s cut it off either to disguise herself or as some way of attempting to rid herself of the memories. Becoming a new person in a new life. Maybe she doesn’t understand that the old one’s not done with her yet.

Above Sunny’s quivering head Kim and I stare at each other. I’m happy, or at least enormously relieved, despite the horrible story she’s just told us. Once Sunny tells it to the sheriff and district attorney, after I somehow arrange for her to get immunity on the arson charges, they will have no choice but to let Roberto out of jail.

Kim is thinking in the same direction, but she’s looking at it from a different angle. Holding the sobbing girl, she says, “Sunny, we’re going to put those men in jail for the rest of their lives. They’re going to pay for what they did to Cal. And we’re going to save the valley, too. Okay? Cal didn’t die in vain. Remember that. He was a soldier for a rightous cause, just as you are.” She’s still not admitting to her friend that Cal had died serving another cause as well. Vengeance.

Staring at her, I see that Kim’s mouth is grim but her single eye is blazing. I guess what she’s feeling is vindication. Although it had cost Cal his life, her vendetta against Fast is turning out better than she could ever have hoped. Not only will he be ruined financially, but he’ll spend the rest of his life in a cell. Maybe he’ll even get injected. His charmed life is over.

Sunny’s testimony is the kind of evidence that it will be hard for any prosecutor to screw up. Even if she hadn’t seen the men’s faces, she’d heard them call one another by name. There’s no way a jury could believe she would make it up or lie about it. Innocence and sincerity radiate from her. She is utterly without guile.

And the valley will be saved. It will remain public land, open for my father, brother, and me to return and climb there again. The Forest Service won’t exchange land with a killer. It won’t matter that it could take months for David Fast and Alf Burgermeister to be brought to trial. Just the charges against them should be enough for the deal to be put on hold. We can also assure the denial of the swap by telling the government the location of Cal’s cave and the Indian ruins. If it’s everything Sunny has said it is, and if it’s as extensive as Cal claimed, that alone will be cause enough for the Forest Service to reject Fast’s development scheme.

“First, we’ve got to make it back,” I tell them both. “In the morning Fast and his buddy will be out here again, looking for us all.”

Sunny’s body jumps in Kim’s arms with a small spasm of fear.

“Let’s go back now,” Kim says.

“No, let’s wait a few hours. For all we know, they’re waiting at the marina. They’ll be less likely to be looking for us in the middle of the night.” They’ll probably be sleeping in shifts if they’re there at all. The one that’s awake will be watching the docks and hopefully not my truck. We can beach the boat somewhere else and I can go for the vehicle. Had Fast or Burgermeister paid any attention to it the time I’d seen them in the meadow? I guess we’ll find out.

Those two men have earned my respect as well as my strong desire to see them both dead. It takes a special kind of monster to beat another human to death. A bullet from a distance is one thing—the contusions I’d seen on Cal’s body are something else entirely. Somehow much more personal. And Fast is just as much a monster as the one who’d swung the club. He’d brought the monstrous act about.

Kim says something about me needing sleep. Only now do I recall that I hadn’t slept at all the night before, and only a few hours the night before that. I shrug in weary agreement. She and Sunny spread blankets on the wide cushioned space by the front of the cabin. It’s relatively warm inside from the three of our bodies and the dissipating heat of the propane stove. I try in vain to coax Oso into the cabin before setting the alarm on my watch for two-thirty
A
.
M
.

Sleeping with two beautiful women at the same time is supposed to be every man’s fantasy. But I’m more than a little uncomfortable. From everything Kim and Sunny have said, it sounds like their relationship is over. The way Sunny has clung to Kim all evening, though, makes me wonder. I don’t feel any jealousy—just resignation to the fact that Kim isn’t likely to choose me over this innocent blonde nymph. I sure as hell wouldn’t. Some of the happiness I’d felt at finding Sunny and the irrefutable evidence she will give to exonerate my brother is diminished. But the relief is still there.

I step over Oso and out onto the deck. I want to give them a few minutes alone together. In the night air I stare up at the black walls surrounding us before I kneel on the swim step to splash cold water on my face. Although there isn’t any moon, the stars in the narrow strip of sky are bright enough to cast faint shadows. I sit for a while on the deck and rub the beast’s hips.

That Kim cares for Sunny is obvious. After all, she’d come all this way with me to find her. She didn’t cry with relief when we succeeded just because Sunny will help her get her revenge on David Fast. I also think of my father and the plain fact that he’s not here. He’d given his career priority over a son in jail on bullshit charges. I remember again all those lectures on family loyalty that I’d endured as a child. How we should be willing to sacrifice ourselves for one another. How it was like his cherished Pararescue motto—“So that others may live.” And where is he now?

Back in the cabin, both Sunny and Kim are wrapped burrito-like in individual blankets. They lie with their sides touching. Sunny’s face is half-hidden behind the wool but I can see that her tear-swollen eyes are shut. She looks asleep. Kim’s single eye, however, is bright and wide.

“You okay, Anton?” she asks. Her voice is unusually soft.

I just nod. There’s a third blanket that I wrap around my shoulders. I find the switch for the electric lights and turn them off. Oso yawns in the darkness outside. His head still hangs above the steps of the small cabin door. Feeling as tired as I can ever remember, I slump down on one of the bench seats near Kim’s head.

Kim’s eye remains open. It’s a tiny spark of reflected starlight, glinting up at me. I wonder what she’s thinking. Is there some new message I’m supposed to be receiving by telepathy? I don’t have to wonder for long. It turns out she’s reading my thoughts.

“You’ve learned a lot about me today,” she whispers. “Not all of it good. Are we still friends?”

“I’m definitely your friend, Kim,” I answer, wishing it were more.

She stretches a hand out of the blanket and finds one of mine. The glint disappears as she closes her eye. The hand doesn’t draw back.

TWENTY-EIGHT

I
WAKE TO
the smallest sound. It takes me a minute to realize where I am and what I’m doing. My neck aches because of the way it’s propped forward by the cabin wall. It feels like I’ve been sitting in an airplane seat for far too long. Kim’s hand is still in mine, warm and charged with the tingle of electricity that I have felt every time I’ve touched her. I glance at the iridescent wands on my watch and see that it’s one-thirty in the morning. Then the small sound comes again, louder now—I realize it’s the ID tags on Oso’s collar. They clatter lightly when he jerks his head.

His ebony coat is streaked with silver in the starlight. He’s sprawled on the rear deck outside the open cabin doorway with his paws hanging over the first step. Except for twisting his head to the boat’s rear, the beast hasn’t moved since I’d fallen asleep. Now he’s staring off into the darkness beyond the rented ski boat tied behind us. His ears are all the way forward. A gentle huffing sound comes from his nostrils and I watch him tilt and raise his head to better test the air. A rumble begins faintly in his chest, then steadily becomes louder.

Letting go of Kim’s hand, I use the table to pull myself to my feet. The boat rocks a little from my movement. To my left, Sunny and Kim are motionless and breathing deeply. Even though I suspect the beast is growling at some leaping fish or bathing bird, I touch the hip pack on my belly to make sure my gun is there.

It’s not. I rub my face, annoyed at myself, remembering that I had taken it off and left it under the steering wheel on the floor of the ski boat. As upset and scared as Sunny had been when we’d found her, I’d thought it was a good idea to leave the gun out of her sight and reach. That was an early rule I’d learned at the police academy and a good one:
Keep your weapon away from emotionally disturbed people.
But now the night seems more menacing than it had earlier, when Kim and I were so pleased with our good fortune in finding Sunny.

Growling louder, Oso lumbers to his feet. As he moves the boat rolls again, but this time with more force than could be caused simply by his weight. And it continues to roll back and forth even after the big dog has stopped moving. I hear another rumbling sound that, like his growl, is also growing louder. The sound seems to pulsate off the narrow canyon walls.

“Anton?” It’s Kim’s voice, slurred by sleep. “Is it time to go?”

“Hang on.”

I step around the table to the cabin’s half-sized doorway. Behind me there are rustling sounds as Kim or Sunny squirms beneath the blankets on the vinyl mattress in the forward area. Pulling myself through the small doorway and out into the night, the first thing I see is Oso standing by the stern. His growl has increased to a low roar. His black lips are raised and his clenched white teeth are the size of small daggers. His legs are slightly crouched. He stares at something in the night beyond the smaller ski boat.

I’m just unfolding to full height on the Sea Ray’s deck when I see the ski boat suddenly shove toward us on its short tether. I have just enough time to brace a hand on the cabin roof before the two boats come together with a soft, jarring crunch.

Sunny screams from inside the cabin. I strain with my eyes to see what had caused the smaller boat to bang into us. And what I see makes my heart drop down to my gut.

In the dim starlight, I make out several things in a split second. First, that a third boat has entered the tiny cove. Second, that it’s a small white ski boat just like the one Kim and I had rented. Third, that there are the figures of two men on board. Fourth, that one of them is extraordinarily big and bald and that he has the long shape of a shotgun cradled in his arms. He’s staggering from the deliberate collision.

My brain begins racing at full speed, every flashing thought telling me just how incredibly stupid I’ve been. I never thought that Fast and Burgermeister would be tenacious enough to look for us in the dark. And I never thought that they would be lucky enough to actually find us. But then it must have been a simple thing for them to circle back after rounding the promontory and fooling us into thinking they were heading back for the marina. It would have been so easy for them to hide under the shadows of some outcropping below a cliff and watch to see which canyons we explored. And from which we failed to return.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid
. I deserved to die for my stupidity. But not Sunny and Kim.

With a quick scrabble of claws on fiberglass decking, Oso releases from his crouch like a missile from a silo. He shoots out into the darkness, a thundering black blur arcing in the night. He comes down running on the bow of the ski boat tied behind us. He moves though the open hull in a single lunge and is once again arcing through the air toward the two men in the third boat. Then the night is split open by a blinding flash of light and a sound that blows all the air from the narrow cove. Oso skids off the deck of the third boat—I see him cartwheel sideways and crash into the black water.

That strange, familiar feeling comes over me. The feeling that comes on the rock, when I’m high off the ground and run-out far above any protection. When the rope is no longer a lifeline but just a dead, swinging weight. Time slows. Sensations magnify. The night becomes brighter, more focused. My body feels like a tightly coiled spring. It’s the noradrenaline squeezing from my nerve endings, firing into my blood and brain.

I don’t feel my flesh tear and I realize in another split second that the shotgun blast hadn’t been pointed at me. Its double barrels were aimed at the flying beast. And he’d been hit. Without ducking, without thinking or even flinching backwards, I launch myself over the side into the water just as the shotgun fires again.

The cold shocks me, as if the blast and the sudden radiance and Sunny’s scream hadn’t done that already. But for a moment it blessedly swallows all the noise except for the throb of the engine. And it allows me just an instant to think.
Oso
. He’s somewhere in the water. He’d been shot in the side at close range—he’d cartwheeled off the deck as if he’d been punched by the night.
The fuckers
. My blood seems to rear up from where it had dropped so low with the initial fright.

Underwater, I twist around and kick until I can feel the hard fiberglass of the Sea Ray over my head. I pause there, feeling the convex shape of the hull, and trying to orient myself as my lungs begin to struggle against the need for air.
Get it together, Anton
. Fast’s boat is in front of me. The boat Sunny and I had rented is tied bow-to-stern with the Sea Ray, between it and Fast’s. And Oso had splashed into the water somewhere over to the left. So I start kicking to the left with my eyes open wide against the blackness.

Pausing before surfacing far out from the side of the Sea Ray, I try to will my lungs to relax. I don’t want to come up loud and gasping. I blow out the remaining air while still under water. Then I raise my head slowly, trying to somehow see before my eyes break the surface.

The beam of a powerful flashlight is fixed on the water just a few yards away. Focused on my dog. Oso’s eyes are colored a demonic red in the white light, but they are the only thing intimidating about him as he splashes in a wounded dog-paddle, huffing and coughing and still trying to growl. It hits me like a blow, seeing my great beast rendered hurt and helpless. It also stokes the fire in my chest.

“Don’t worry about the fucking dog, Dave,” a man’s voice says from the darkness behind the flashlight beam. It’s Burgermeister’s voice, deep as a bass drum. I remember him threatening Roberto and me that day in the meadow, after Dad had prevented my brother from braining the big man with his own tire iron. “It can’t get up on the boat. It’ll drown or bleed out in a minute. Shine the light over there. Look for Scarface. I want to make sure he’s dead before we fetch the cunts.”

I try to keep my thoughts from focusing on a single-minded desire to make them pay—I need to concentrate on somehow getting Oso and Sunny and Kim out of harm’s way first.

“I don’t see him,” says the man who started all this twelve years ago, when he’d humiliated Kim, taking her pride and causing her to lose the eye. Fast’s voice sounds dull and tired. From what Sunny had said, I know Fast never expected things would go this far. He didn’t want to be a killer. But I feel no sympathy.

The light swings away to the other side, leaving Oso grunting in the darkness.

“I think I nailed him, right as he went over,” the man called Rent-a-Riot tells his partner.

“I don’t see any body. Or any blood,” Fast responds.

Now the light passes over the back of the Sea Ray. A piece of the cabin’s rear wall is a mess of splintered wood. Right where I’d been standing.

“Forget him. I nailed him. Blew his ass right off the boat.”

“A body should float.”

“Not a dead one. Not in fresh water, anyway. They sink for a few hours until they fill up with gas. Then they come up.”

“How long’s it take one to gas up?”

“Shit, Dave, I don’t know. Don’t worry ’bout it.”

I breaststroke silently through the water. The big dog is surprised when I grab his collar. He twists his head violently to the side with the speed of a rattlesnake’s strike and sinks his teeth into my forearm. The beast is capable of snapping through bone, but he doesn’t. He smells my scent before biting down all the way. I grit my teeth and hiss, “Oso.” The pressure fades until it releases all together. I begin sidestroking, pulling the beast behind me, toward where I hope is the narrow gap at the far end of the cove. I remember Sunny telling us it was by swimming up the gap that she’d been able to climb the cliff.

Behind me I hear Burgermeister’s voice booming off the walls. “You girls come on up out of there. Come up with your hands over your heads and you won’t get shot.” The light is still on the back of the Sea Ray.

With my forward hand I touch cool rock. I swim to the side for ten feet until I reach what feels like a corner. The gap. I edge into it, still tugging Oso behind me, not knowing where the gap goes but praying it leads to dry land. In the darkness behind me I can hear Sunny crying and Kim’s scared voice calling, “Anton? Anton!” I have to will myself not to go back. At least not until Oso is safe from drowning.

“I’m afraid he got his head blown clean off,” Burgermeister explains with a hoarse laugh. Then the voices fade out behind me.

At what I guess is about fifty feet into the gap, my knees touch sand. The gap here is no more than five feet wide and the high walls block out all the starlight. Climbing to my feet, I pull Oso toward what feels like a narrow, sandy shelf. Oso tries to walk up on his own but one of his hind legs collapses under him and he staggers in the shallow water. It takes both my hands on the dog’s collar to drag his waterlogged mass up onto the sand. I don’t have time to check his wounds but I do take just a second to whisper, “I’ll be back, Oso. Wait here. Stay. Stay, damn it,” and I rap his muzzle with the palm of my hand.

After stripping off my wet shirt, jeans, and shoes, I soundlessly reenter the cold water. I pray to a god I don’t believe in that for once the contrary beast will listen. I pray for Sunny and Kim to have strength and courage. I pray for a lot of other things, too, like for my gun to be somehow within reach over the side of the ski boat. That’s an unlikely wish, though. I recall that the sides of the ski boat are high and that I placed the gun well out of both sight and reach below the steering column in the center of the boat.

Breaststroking hard, my hands brush both walls most of the way back out of the gap. When I’m close to the cove again, some of the starlight returns. The wider walls ahead allow it to illuminate the three boats there. Fast has nosed his boat up to the Sea Ray’s stern, right next to my rental boat. His isn’t tied to anything, though, and it seems to drift a few feet away from the others as I watch. Somehow they’ve gotten Kim and Sunny aboard it.

The two women are huddled beside each other on the stern bench seat. Sunny has her face buried in her hands. Burgermeister stands near the steering wheel. He has the shotgun in one hand and the flashlight in the other. Its beam is pointed toward the women’s faces. In the refracted light I see Fast standing there, too, with a pistol pointed loosely at the deck.

Closer still, I can hear Kim talking over Sunny’s sobs and the drone of the idling engine. Her voice is low and brittle. “You aren’t going to get away with this, you motherfucker,” she says without much outrage, as if she’s in shock. She’s speaking to Fast alone and ignoring the greater danger. “The Forest Service knows about the cave. The sheriff knows you killed Cal. He knows you’re stalking Sunny here in the lake. He’s going to know what you did to Anton. It’s all over.” For just a moment I’m proud of her as I swim and listen to her valiant bluffing.

But the bluff is going nowhere. “Unfortunately for you, Miss Walsh, you’re full of shit. The sheriff is a friend of mine, and he’s got nothing to tie me to Cal’s death. And all the Forest Service knows is that some whacked-out kid keeps sending them cheap photos of a ruin that could be anywhere. They think it’s something you hippies made up just to keep me from making a living.” Then he says, more softly, “You should’ve let it go, Kim. You should’ve let it go twelve years ago. It was just a stupid prank. No one got hurt, at least no one was supposed to. What happened to you later was an accident. I never even touched you, girl.”

“Just like what you did to Cal was an accident?”

Fast shakes his head but doesn’t reply.

Kim stares at him for a second, trying to keep up the pretense that she’s in control, then I see her bow her head.
Don’t give up, Kim,
I think.
I’m coming.
I stroke closer, ready to duck beneath the surface if the light swings my way. But it doesn’t. Instead it moves down from Kim’s face to play over her shirt. Burgermeister makes it swirl around where her breasts push against the fabric of her damp T-shirt. Then it drops to her crotch and pauses there before disappearing from my view as it slides over her legs.

“He may not have touched you,” Burgermeister says, laughing, “but
I
sure as hell am.”