There was a sigh on the other end of the line. After a moment he said, “Arizona, I take it.”
“Yeah, I’m in Page, where Sunny Hansen’s family still lives. And I’m not the only one here. David Fast and his hired muscle are around, too, asking about Sunny.”
He didn’t respond. I could picture him rubbing the stubble on his chin between his thumb and forefinger.
“His secretary lied to you when she told you that your friend and benefactor was on his property up in White River.”
Still no response.
“According to Sunny’s father, Fast is flashing a Tomichi County badge and asking around for her.”
Finally the sheriff spoke just one word. “Shit.”
I was feeling paranoid—wondering how Fast had found out so quickly that Sunny’s family was in Page. Had the sheriff told him? Was I wrong to trust Munik? After all, I knew that not only was Fast his biggest campaign contributor, but I also remembered Kim telling me that the sheriff had been a longtime friend of Fast’s family. It was possible, though, even likely, that Fast had been the one who had kicked in Sunny’s door, and that in her apartment somewhere he had found out that she was from Page.
“How about dropping those charges against my brother, Sheriff? We now know who really did it.”
The sheriff laughed, but there wasn’t a lot of confidence in it. “I don’t know any such thing, son. We’re still waiting on the blood test from the stuff we scraped off his hands. Anyways, maybe Dave’s trying to do me a favor and find the prime witness to a murder case. Maybe he’s just trying to find out more about that mythical cave you told me about.”
“He doesn’t need to impersonate a peace officer to do that.” Why was the sheriff trying to bullshit me about this?
“Look, son, just about every businessman in this town has a badge. My campaign manager gives ’em out like popcorn at election time. Sheriff’s Volunteer Reserve, they’re called.”
After another few moments of silence, he asked, “You found that girl yet?”
“Not yet. But I’ve got a good lead.”
“You find her, you bring her to me. I’ll listen to what she has to say. I suspect you aren’t going to like it, though. She’s going to say it was your brother. In the meantime, stay the hell away from David Fast. One thing I can promise you, son, is that when I see him I’m going to rip him a new asshole for interfering like this without my permission.”
“I’m kind of hoping him you’ll arrest him for murder, Sheriff,” I said, letting the sarcasm come out strong in my voice.
“You bring me some evidence and I might just do that.”
Before Kim came out of the grocery store, I’d taken my .40 caliber H&K out of the glove box and slipped it into a hip pack.
The man at the rental dock is reluctant to let a dog on board one of his boats. Kim again comes up with the solution—a one-hundred-dollar nonrefundable deposit, in other words a bribe, to get him to look the other way. Oso is even more reluctant about the boat than the man had been. He plants all four paws solidly on the dock and struggles against me when I lean on his collar with all my weight. Kim finally bribes him, too. With the slices of turkey I had asked her to pick up for my lunch. Now I’ll be forced to share the cheese and bread Kim has gotten for herself.
The boat is small and almost square. It is entirely open-decked but for where a blue canopy covers the windscreen and steering wheel. An oil-stained engine is mounted at the rear, its propeller tilted out of the water.
The rental attendant is curious about why we don’t want to rent and take along a water ski or a towed surfboard. “Don’t you even got swimsuits?” he asks. Before Kim or I can answer, he thinks he figures it out for himself. He winks at me and says, “Oh yeah, good sightseeing in them canyons. Skinny-dipping too.”
Kim blushes, then glares at me with her good eye when she sees me wink back at the man.
I look around at the other people waiting to rent a boat or a Jet Ski. They are obviously tourists, with their swimsuits, plastic bags of beer, and suntan lotion. “You have any other people renting today who don’t look like the rest of this crowd?”
“Yep, two uptight guys in cowboy boots. Said they were going fishing, but they didn’t have no poles, no gear. Only a duffel bag with what looked like a rifle inside. Going target shooting, I guess. Friends of yours?”
“Sort of. Was one of them a big ugly guy with a shaved head and sideburns? The other neat, going gray?”
“Yessir. That was them all right. Acted like they were in a big hurry to get out on the water.” He chuckles and shakes his head. “Gonna catch themselves a lot of fish with that gun.”
He advises us to stay away from where the water is green or brown, as that’s the indication of shallow water. Dark blue water means deep water. “You rip the bottom out of the boat, you’re going to be in a damn sight of trouble. And you’ll have to pay for the damage, too.”
At my request he points out a Sea Ray so we know what one looks like. The one we see parked nearby is long and low, a good deal bigger than our little ski boat. Two huge motors are bolted to its stern. I don’t doubt that it is very, very fast. According to the attendant, it also has a decent-sized cabin below the front deck. He tells us you can live aboard one of those for days.
After a quick lesson in how to drive the ski boat, we’re under way.
I observe the no-wake restriction around the marina area and ease the boat slowly and carefully out into the lake while Kim studies the map we’d purchased. Once past the limiting signs, it feels good to push the throttle forward, to feel the boat leap up and plane on the lake’s surface, and to leave the heat and the stench of gasoline behind. The roar of the single engine drowns out the shouts and laughter of the other boaters. Oso stands on the foredeck or the bow or whatever it’s called and hunches low when we bounce across small waves. His lips lift from his long white teeth and begin to flap in the wind. I think he might be enjoying it, too.
The surrounding landscape is almost devoid of vegetation. The blue water twists between bordering cliffs of red sandstone. For just a few feet above the water, the cliffs are a chalky white up to what I guess is the high-water mark. It’s as if the lake’s water has leached all the color out of the rock it touches. Far ahead the land’s relief increases dramatically, where the low cliffs rise up in multiple steps until they tower hundreds of feet above the lake’s surface.
Next to me, Kim flattens the map on the dashboard beneath the windscreen. Despite the protective glass, the map flutters violently at the edges. A quick glimpse of the laminated chart’s center between her spread fingers shows we are headed toward an area where the lake reaches out in all directions like a spider’s legs. The multitude of canyons to the left, the area Freddy Kruge had called Last Chance Bay, is about thirty miles east of us.
All around us are sailboats, houseboats, powerboats, Jet Skis, and leaping water-skiers. We’re moving swiftly among them, sending out a two-foot wake. The Jet Skiers and water-skiers chase us, catching air on the V fanning out behind us, while the houseboaters occasionally shake their fists or middle fingers. I can’t wait to be away from them all. For a while a low-slung speedboat runs alongside us, as if we’re in a race. It’s nearly twice our length and its deck is crowded with young women in bikinis. They wave to us until the pilot, apparently the only man on board, shoves the throttle forward and nearly swamps us with an incredible burst of speed. I guess we lose.
“How do you want to do this?” Kim shouts in my ear. The crowd is thinning as we get farther away from the marina.
“Let’s start with the first canyons, the ones to the south, and work our way north.” I’m beginning to get concerned, just now truly aware of the gigantic scope of the lake. Still studying the map at my side, Kim confirms my trepidation.
“It’s going to take forever—each canyon has like a hundred side-canyons within it. Even the side-canyons have side-canyons.”
For more than an hour we bounce our way eastward. The scenery
around us grows more spectacular with each passing mile. The cliffs rise higher, some of them hundreds of feet straight out of the water, and the stone is an even darker red. Almost crimson. There are island buttes, too, standing tall in the center of the channel. Sometimes our passage is only a few hundred yards across and other times it’s miles wide.
When we pass a long, sharp peninsula on our left, I know we’re getting close to the canyon turnoff. Kim points out an island butte a short distance ahead—Gregory Butte. It marks the turnoff for Last Chance Bay. I nudge the steering wheel left and we sweep to the north.
The bay is about a mile wide. It’s hard to visually tell where it ends because of the way it writhes northward, but according to the map the bay forks into two smaller canyons about forty miles up. I curse when I see all the tiny ravines peeling off on each side of the bay. The words are swallowed by the engine’s roar, and they were in Spanish anyway, but Kim understandingly nods beside me. By shouted agreement we start with the small canyons and sub-canyons to the right, saving the ones on the left for the return trip.
I slide the boat through the twisting canyons with a growing confidence in my handling of the machine. I keep my eyes on the water—trying to stay where it’s deep blue—as well as on the other boats and the cliffs while Kim searches for Sunny’s Sea Ray. The initial canyons are well populated with houseboats and Jet Skis. Drunken college students jump from their decks and some nearby low cliffs, barking at Oso as we zoom past. And Kim earns more than one wolf whistle despite her eye patch after she sheds her shirt. She stands next to me with her feet braced wide and wearing only an orange sports bra over her worn-out jeans. After one particularly drawn-out whistle, I think I hear her make a noise. I turn to glance at her and see she’s smiling.
Taking a chance, for just a moment I take my eyes off the cliffs, water, and boats to give her a longer look. I make my own low whistle. It pays off—she laughs out loud and slugs my arm with her bony knuckles. Progress, I think. Maybe.
After more than an hour of racing through the maze of water-filled canyons, I spot a small, deserted beach. I circle back around to it and answer Kim’s quizzical look with one word: “Lunch.” For a long time my stomach’s been growling and my bare feet ache from where the big motor’s vibrations have been rattling up my legs.
Unsure if it’s safe or acceptable to nose the boat up onto the sand, I let it drift to a stop about ten yards from the shore. Kim drops what we guess is supposed to be the anchor—a nylon rope tied around a bucket filled with concrete—into the water. She ties the free end around a metallic T screwed onto the boat’s deck.
Shimmying out of her jeans, she quickly dives overboard. For a moment I’m actually breathless at the sight of her tan, slim figure curving through the air and entering the water almost without a splash. Almost without a sound.
An instant later the sound of scrabbling claws gets my attention. I turn my head just in time to see Oso launching himself after her. He, however, is far from splashless. The beast hits the water with a loud smack and a high wave. “Cannonball!” I yell as Kim comes up for air just in time to meet Oso’s tsunami.
In seconds I’m following Oso’s example, having hastily stripped off my own clothes down to my boxer shorts, and I cannonball perilously close to Kim’s head. It’s a delight to see her laugh again. For a few minutes she and I paddle around one another in the cool water, occasionally splashing, as Oso circles like some ridiculous, hairy shark. He has a dead-serious expression on his face. His rubbery lips float wide on either side of his mouth as he steadily huffs and snorts at the water. We can’t stop laughing at him. It takes all my will to keep from pulling Kim’s slick body to mine.
For the next few minutes all my worries and frustration are forgotten. For the first time in more than twenty-four hours, the image of my brother slowly combusting in a jail cell is out of my head.
Too soon the frivolity ends. Kim walks up onto the beach with my eyes stuck to her backside. When she turns and sits in the sand, with her legs tight together and pulled up against her chest, I haul myself halfway into the boat and pull out the small Styrofoam ice chest into which she’d packed our lunches. Or what was left of mine, anyway, after Oso’s sliced-turkey bribe.
Oso paddles gravely beside me as I swim to the beach with our lunches held high.
I’m self-conscious about being half-naked in her presence. My thin cotton boxers cling transparently to my thighs. Self-consciousness is an emotion I’m not used to feeling. I sit down next to her after handing over the cooler. She hands me back a bottle of apple juice, a banana, and two slices of bread—all that’s left of my portion. For herself she takes out a thin plastic bag full of thick pita bread and a plastic container of garlic hummus. Seeing me eyeing her food with desire, or at least she supposes it’s the food I’m desiring, she smiles and offers to share.
“Tell me some more about yourself,” I say, determined to take advantage of her light mood. And while I chew I need something to focus on other than her slender, well-muscled shoulder, the delicate ribs of her back, and the small weight of her breasts beneath the thin top. All I really know about her is that she was once terribly degraded, that she loves Wild Fire Valley, and that she hates David Fast. “Where were you born? Raised? And all that.”
Her story starts out slow, but gathers details as she becomes more involved in the telling. “I grew up in L.A.,” she says, frowning. “The Valley, not the beach. I escaped from there as soon as I could, which meant boarding school in France. After that I went to Yale for a year but I couldn’t stand all those uptight Ivy Leaguers, pretending to be so concerned and involved and smart about everything but only really caring about getting trashed at parties for four years before they could go work at Daddy’s firm. So I blew out of there, too, and spent a year on a sort of commune in Oregon. Yes, Anton, a real commune, the kind we had about the time you were born—”
I interrupt to protest that she’s at most ten years older than me, so she must have been about twelve at the time, but she ignores me.
“Then I went to Berkeley to get a degree in environmental science. I loved that place—the coast, the groves, the hills. But it was just too populated; there wasn’t any space where you could really lose yourself. And anyways, the people there were kind of like the people at Yale; they acted concerned and dedicated to saving the world but they were more concerned about image than sacrifice.”
While she talks I edge my sandy foot away from me until my calf rests over her toes, barely touching. She doesn’t withdraw her foot, nor does she comment on the contact.
“I went to law school at Utah, where I got joint masters in law and environmental science,” she continues, not referring to the awful thing that happened there. “Then I moved to Tomichi and did whatever kind of legal work I could find—land stuff, representing domestic violence victims, even some divorces. And then that asshole David Fast worked up his scam. . . .” She’s frowning, but then forces a smile and looks over her shoulder at me. She lifts her toes beneath my calf but doesn’t remove them. “Sorry. You already know about that.”
I’m about to ask why she’d chosen Tomichi as her home. But before I can get the words out she says, “Let’s hear your story, Agent Burns.”
So I tell her. “I was raised all over the place. A typical military brat. The first time I ever lived in the U.S. for more than a few months at a time was when I started college at Boulder. I felt almost like a foreigner in my own country.” My father and mother had met when he was briefly stationed in Argentina, fresh from the trials of Vietnam. Mom was still basking in the glory of having competed in the 1972 Olympics as a distance runner; although she didn’t medal, she was a bit of a hometown hero. But she’d been happy to follow him to different bases all over the world. Her own country, and that of my grandfather, was just beginning to deteriorate into what would be known as the Dirty War.
“How did you end up a cop in a place like Wyoming?”
I shrug. “I spent my col
lege summers guiding and climbing in the Tetons when I wasn’t working in Alaska. I fell in love with the place. But I didn’t want to be a guide anymore—I didn’t want to spend my life dragging rich businessmen and their families up the Grand. The AG’s Office has a nice vacation schedule. And being a cop, a state agent investigating drug crimes, seemed like the natural thing to do, since I’d been watching what the stuff did to my brother. Plus, it’s exciting. I feel like a little kid, getting to carry a gun and badge and all that. Like cops and robbers.”
After a few minutes of inhaling the scent of the sun on her skin, I take advantage of her momentary openness and ask, “How did you and Sunny hook up?”
Kim sighs. She looks at the boat and the canyon wall beyond as she relates the story of their brief love affair. Sunny had been a volunteer at the battered women’s shelter where Kim sometimes worked. On her very first day there, Sunny stayed late to talk with Kim. For such a seemingly vivacious girl, she didn’t seem to have a lot of friends. Kim learned that she had a darker side, that she’d been abused by a series of boyfriends—she thought Sunny probably looked to her as a source of strength. And Kim was attracted to her youth and wounded beauty. Sunny took the first step in turning their friendship physical, and Kim went along at first out of fear of the hurt she’d cause if she rejected the girl as much as out of her own attraction.
But she knew it wouldn’t last. Sunny was looking for a strong mother-figure more than a lover. And Kim could see that the girl was hopelessly straight. Just a few days before my father and I had arrived in the meadow, Sunny hooked up with Cal during the Tribe’s weeklong vigil there. From the moment they’d met earlier in the summer at a Tribe meeting, Kim knew Sunny would end up leaving her for Cal. And she even encouraged it, knowing that as impulsive as Cal was, as weird as he was about the Indian cave he’d discovered, he’d never dream of abusing her.
We feed the remnants of our lunch to Oso and pack the debris back in the cooler. Swimming back out to the boat, I feel her palm touch the small of my back as I boost the cooler into the boat. I thrill at the touch.
Point of Law Page 19