Point of Law

by Clinton McKinzie

  The smooth slab above us rises another two hundred or so feet. It’s steep enough to require the use of both hands and feet, which we smear against the weather-polished granite, while feeling for any edge or wrinkle. I consider taking the time to put a rope around Kim and belay her to the top, but decide it would take too much time.

  “Keep your butt high in the air,” I advise her instead. “It seems counterintuitive, but your feet will have more friction against the stone that way.”

  Just as she’d done on the cable across the river, Kim nods at me in a way that says, “Okay, I’m scared, but I trust you,” and starts up. That look makes me feel guilty—I’m putting speed ahead of her safety. But often in the mountains speed is safety. Especially when considering Sunny’s safety, and how every minute she remains in Fast’s control puts her in greater danger.

  I try to stay just behind Kim, thinking that if she slips maybe I can arrest the fall. In truth, if she slips she’ll just kill us both. She doesn’t, though, and ten minutes later we’re on a good ledge at the base of a cliff.

  Roberto has already scouted ahead. He says he’s found an ascending ledge that he thinks goes all the way up to the ridgeline to one side of the summit. Unfortunately, it’s too dark now to know for sure. We drink off another half-quart of water each then follow him up.

  Roberto’s ledge is frightening. It would be scary even in the daylight. Between two and four feet wide, it rises steeply and at the same time slopes down toward the cliff. If any one of us falls, we’ll bounce off the wide spot far below where we’d rested, then grate down the two hundred feet of slab. It would be a very bad way to die. To make matters worse, the ledge is covered with small, round stones that feel as if they could easily roll under our feet like ball bearings.

  Up ahead and above, I can see stars to the west through a keyhole-like slot in the ridge. When Kim and I are just fifty feet from it, we meet Roberto, who is scrambling back down.

  “Doesn’t go,” he tells us. “There’s some big fucking cliff on the other side and I can’t tell if the rope will reach.”

  What he means is that he can’t be sure a rappel on my doubled ropes will reach solid ground on the valley side of the mountain. Long ago and many times, Dad had lectured us about how one of the most foolish things you can do is to rappel at night when you’re unsure if the ropes are long enough to reach a ledge. If you make an error, you’ll be stuck swinging at the knots on the rope’s ends. There’s no way we can check the distance with our flashlights because lights high up on the peak could easily be seen from down in Wild Fire Valley. And other than my small Beretta, surprise is our only weapon.

  Roberto moves off our ledge to the left, gripping unseen holds on the cliff face with his hands and the toes of his boots. Within seconds he’s slipped into the darkness. I try not to think of the void beneath him. I’m worried, although I know this is nothing compared to some of the things he’s soloed. Still, all it takes is one loose handhold . . .

  While we wait for him to find a better route, I once again take out my cell phone and punch a button to activate the night-light. There’s finally a connection, but just barely. The signal reads one-by-four. I realize it must be ten o’clock on the East Coast and suspect my father will be at his desk unless he’s already left for Bosnia or Egypt. When I direct-dial his office, the connection is maintained despite the hissing and scratching sounds coming over the receiver.

  “Air Force. Colonel Burns,” his perpetually calm voice answers.

  “Dad. It’s me.”

  “Anton, are you okay?”

  “No problems so far, but I may get cut off because my signal’s not too good.”

  “—barely hear you. Where are you, Ant?”

  “High on Wild Fire Peak, headed for that red cliff above the meadow. Roberto’s with me. And Kim Walsh. We’re going after the girl. I just wanted you to know.”

  There’s a few seconds of silence on the other end. I start to wonder if I’ve lost the signal when the colonel says very clearly, “Back off, Anton. Now. That’s an order. You get the hell out of there and let the locals or the Feds handle this!” His voice is still calm, but his words are so short and clipped that after a lifetime of knowing him, I recognize that inside he’s shouting.

  “I can’t do that, Dad. The local sheriff might be in on it, and the Feds don’t believe us. In any event, the valley’s been sealed off now. They closed the road. So we’re going in through the back door. It’s now or never. They’re going to kill the girl, Dad, once she gives them what they want. Remember her? That pretty blonde in the meadow we met our first day there?” I want the image of the vibrant young girl in the skimpy top and too-short shorts to be in his head.

  There’s a long hiss of static. I hear only a few words of my father’s reply, and understand just two. “I’m coming.”

  The scratching over the receiver fades to nothing but the hair is standing on my arms. Those two words send a thrill through me. He’s coming. He’s far too late of course, but still, he’s coming. All those years of indoctrination about family loyalty at all costs—it had been the truth.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  ROBERTO PULLS HIMSELF back up on our precarious ledge. His teeth are like tiny white cubes in the night. “Found it,” he says. “We’ve got to traverse down and to the left ’bout a hundred feet. No sweat.”

  “Kim’s not a climber, ’Berto.”

  “Guess it’s a good time for her to learn.”

  I dump the rope out of my pack then put together the small selection of gear I’d brought. Roberto wordlessly takes the gear while giving me a long, significant look. Then he takes one end of the rope and disappears once again.

  “There’s no time to do this right,” I tell Kim, helping her back into her harness. “Just try and follow the rope to the left. Use whatever hand- and footholds you can. Roberto’s going to set some pro along the way, so if you fall, you won’t swing too far. But the trick is that you have to unclip the rope from any gear you pass. I’ll be right behind you. Do you understand?”

  She starts to nod, then shakes her head. So I run through it again.

  “What about you?” she asks. “If I’m taking the rope, then what’s going to protect you?”

  “Don’t worry. I can handle it.”

  “Why don’t you tie in to the rope, too?”

  “Because then if I fell, I’d pull you off. And both our weights might be too much for this skinny rope. And it might be too much for the shitty belays Roberto likes to set.”

  “Are you as good a climber as he is?”

  “Actually, I’m better. Trust me one more time.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she too disappears into the darkness over the side of the ledge.

  I pull on my backpack, tightening the chest and shoulder straps but leaving the waist loop undone. I don’t want it to pull my shoulders down. For a moment I listen to Kim panting in the darkness just a few feet away. While the long hike up the mountain’s side had been nothing for her exertion-wise, the fear now is causing her heart to race and her lungs to accelerate as if she were sprinting, even though she’s only moving at a sloth’s pace. The suck of gravity can do that to you. I feel my own pulse speed up a notch as I lower myself over the side after her.

  The holds are good. I find fat flakes for my hands and feet. Below and to the left, I can hear Kim breathing like she’s in a race. She’s silhouetted by the starlight, just ten feet away. “I’m right behind you. You’re doing fine.”

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  “Remember the rope, Kim. If you fall, it will catch you.”

  Gamely she keeps moving down and left, following the rope into the night. I try to stay just ten or so feet behind her. The rocks are getting looser—we’re getting to a rotten part of the wall, and it has me worried. One protruding flake Kim had just used as a handhold comes off in my hand. With a shiver, I put it back instead of dropping it. We keep moving.

  “Anton!” Kim says. “What do I d
o?”

  The part we’re on has turned vertical and I’m afraid to look too hard at the holds she’s gripping. Leaning back to look beyond her, I see that the cliff inverts. A part of the rotten wall has fallen away as if some gigantic ice cream scoop has gouged out a portion of the mountain. And the rope leads on into the night just above the scooped-out part. Fucking Roberto, I think unreasonably.

  There’s a sort of rim that the rope trails laterally across. A kind of huge upthrusting flake that must be solid or it would surely have fallen away with the rest of the face years ago.

  “Okay, Kim, here’s what you do.”

  There’s white all the way around her single eye when I quietly explain that she needs to grip the edge with her hands, then hook her right heel up there, too. With the stronger muscles of her leg she can take some of the weight off her hands. “Just go across hand-over-hand, keeping as much weight as you can on that heel. You’ll be fine.”

  “You’re kidding.” There’s just a trace of delirious humor in her voice.

  “No. Are you having fun yet?”

  She spits out a short laugh. I realize that she’s having an epiphany of sorts, that she’s feeling the bite of the Burns family’s first drug. Noradrenaline. The depth of the void beneath us is incalculable in the night.

  I cling to a couple of lousy holds and watch her make her way across. I have to struggle to keep from shouting out encouragement. And then shouting in fright when her heel slips off the edge.

  For a sickening moment she’s floating in space. Her hands alone battle gravity while her feet kick above the dragging weight of the darkness beneath her. She swings like a child from monkey bars, only there’s no soft playground sand to catch her if she falls—only jagged rock, far below. I try to see if Roberto has managed to put in some protection nearby but all I can see is the thin purple line running on to the left and into the night, hanging free. Obviously he hadn’t found any cracks to plug in gear.

  If she comes off, she’ll drop, picking up speed, until the rope catches on a distant piece of pro. That will jerk her to the left and slam her into the side of the scoop, wherever that is. I tense and pray, waiting for her to swing off into the night, already hearing the sound in my head of her body smashing against stone.

  But once again Kim is game. She gets her right heel hooked back up on the edge with her hands. Her breath is coming now like a bellows. Then she starts moving away from me, until she slowly follows the rope into the blackness.

  Ropeless and unprotected, I make the same moves. And as usual, I can’t help but smile to myself as Death tugs at my free ankle. In my mind I kick him in his bony face.

  Soon I’ve caught up to Kim again, who’s scrambling sideways on thankfully solid rock. After another twenty feet I can see Roberto’s shadow taking in the rope from a starlit notch in the ridge. Kim and I both drop into a small platform in the notch with relief.

  “Nice job,” he tells me quietly as I step past him and study the valley on the other side. I think about how just a few days before, Wild Fire Valley had seemed like the glorious temple of my father’s youth. Now it looks much more ominous, especially now that I know that Cal’s tales of caves and Indian ruins are true. The valley has a dark and hidden life below the earth. It’s a temple full of secrets, one that occasionally demands blood sacrifices to nurture its soil.

  Roberto was right about this being a good passage across the ridge and down. A long field of large talus leads all the way down the west side of the mountain to tree line. We’re looking out over the dark valley from somewhere near the peak’s summit. From two thousand feet below us and a little to the right comes the distant hum of a gasoline-powered generator. I can see lights on in one of two white construction trailers parked near the burnt-out remains of Fast’s mid-mountain lodge. A couple of trucks gleam in the moonlight nearby. One of them looks like Fast’s black Suburban.

  I hear no tortured screams, which I guess is a good thing, but I’d sure like to know if Sunny is alive.

  “You see that?” Kim asks.

  She and Roberto stand on either side of me. Like me, they’re both staring down into the valley. I follow the outline of Kim’s pointing arm to the treeless expanse of the meadow, and close to it, the darker shadow of the crumbly red cliff on the hill. A few flashlights wink among the trees near the hill’s base.

  “I saw Sunny and Cal rappelling down that cliff the first day I got here,” I say. “That’s it. The cave’s somewhere on it.”

  The cliff is invisible in the night, but the flashlights appear to be slowly working their way up the hill from the side.

  “Let’s go,” Roberto says.

  He leads the way down Wild Fire Peak, hopping from one boulder to the next on the long talus field. He seems to float above the ground like a phantom. And Kim follows right behind him. She too is amazingly surefooted now in the night. As I descend after them, my pack’s zippers jingle softly. I wish I’d had the forethought to tape them. While it had taken us hours to climb the peak’s back side, it seems like just minutes until we’re back below tree line.

  We enter the dark pines and the bone-white trunks of aspen groves, skirting well clear of the trailers and the burnt-out lodge. At the point when we’re closest to them, just a hundred or so yards away, I can hear country music playing from inside. And the sounds of rough laughter. I’m tempted to peek in the windows but I don’t think Sunny will be there—she’ll be where the flashlights are ascending the small hill, guiding them to Cal’s Bad Cavern.

  Roberto finds a hiking trail and we jog carefully down it, trying to plant our feet as softly as possible and not trip over exposed roots.

  The meadow is eerily quiet and vacant. It’s hard for me to believe that just days ago it was swelling with activity. The environmentalists have been forced to end their vigil by the approval of the land exchange. They probably would have left anyway—there’s been too much violence and death around here. And there’s about to be more.

  The flashlights are above us now, moving through the trees toward the hill’s summit. They’re about eight hundred feet up the gently sloping hillside. I call a halt in the trees after we sprint across the meadow.

  “Here’s the plan,” I tell them as we huddle together, all three of us panting lightly from our rapid descent. “The cave is somewhere on the cliff face, but it’s hidden enough that they need Sunny to show it to them. So they’re going to set up a rappel on the top, the way Cal and Sunny did. When they find it, they’ll dynamite it.” Probably with Sunny inside, but I don’t say it because I don’t want Kim thinking about it.

  “So this is what we’re going to do. I’m going to go up the hill alone. With my gun. You two wait about halfway down. The three of us going all the way up together would make too much noise.

  “I’m going to sneak up on them and pull my gun. I’ll shout when I’ve got whoever’s up there covered. Then you’ll come up. Roberto will take any weapons and throw them off the cliff. Kim will go immediately to Sunny. Then we’ll disappear into the woods and hopefully not see those fuckers again outside of a jail or a courtroom.”

  “Give me the gun. Let me be the one to go up,” Roberto says. “You crash through the trees like a fucking rhino, bro.”

  “No, it’s got to be me. You’re on bond, ’Berto. Can’t have a weapon, remember?” Besides, I know that Roberto has even less faith in the legal system than I do. A part of me is afraid he’ll just shoot them all and spare the courts any trouble.

  “Why not capture them? Tie them up or something?” Kim asks.

  “We’d never get them out of here. Remember, the sheriff’s men, Fast’s men, are blocking the only road into the valley. And there’s no way the three of us can get a bunch of prisoners out the way we came in. We’ll have to deal with them later.”

  Kim gives my hand a squeeze before I move off. Her fingers are trembling, but I can’t tell whether it’s with anger or fear.

  THIRTY-SIX

  THE FOREST FLOOR is cove
red with a thin layer of yellow aspen leaves. They crinkle beneath my boots as I make my way up the slope with my flat little Beretta in my hand. Worse, the bright fallen leaves reflect the moon and starlight, illuminating everything in the forest with a ghostly glow. As I creep closer to the top of the hill and ponder the very real possibility that I may be about to get shot—that I might get us all killed—I feel a twinge of regret that I hadn’t given Roberto the gun. There’s no doubt in my mind that he would be willing and able to use it against the men who are holding Sunny. That he’s capable of pressing the .22 to a temple and pulling the trigger, which is the only sure way to end things with such a small gun. He certainly wouldn’t have any of my or Kim’s qualms about keeping them alive so we can bring them to justice.

  Roberto has his own brand of justice. And although right now I’m inclined to agree with him, I’m still too much of a cop to turn my approval into up-close, very personal action.

  Distant voices drift down in the night from the hill’s summit. Men’s voices. I hear Burgermeister issuing orders in his deep bass and Fast responding, but I can’t make out the words. I grip the little gun tighter in my sweaty palm and check for the fifth time to be sure the safety is switched off.

  Sunny’s high voice is clear, cutting through the dense forest. “Please. Don’t do this. Please.”

  The last word is cut off by the sharp slap of a hand striking flesh. “This better be the right place, bitch. I’m not coming up here twice,” Burgermeister says.

  As my pulse starts racing, I struggle to move slowly, quietly. I measure my breaths, inhaling and exhaling with a steady rhythm. I focus on moving like some night creature, like Roberto, a coyote on the hunt, gliding soundlessly through the trees. Stalking.

  The flashlights are visible now through the foliage above and ahead of me. And the voices are louder. I move forward at irregular intervals, hoping that the crunch of leaves under my boots will seem innocuous in the night. I can smell the strong odor of a burning cigar wafting down on the late summer breeze. Just ahead, the forest ends near the hill’s summit, which has been swept almost clean of trees by another season’s harsher winds.