Fast doesn’t reply.
Everything is crystal clear in the night. Horrifyingly clear. We hadn’t gone anywhere by crawling through the mountain. It had all been for nothing. All that darkness and terror. Above and behind us is the steep field of broken red stone that has shed off the cliff’s face over thousands of years. I know that if I turned and looked, I could probably spot the ledge that holds the secret entrance to Cal’s ruin just a hundred feet up. We’re in a grove of widely spaced pines just yards from the meadow.
Fast and Burgermeister have a new friend with them. I guess that the others with the rifles have been sent away—Burgermeister is smart enough to limit the number of witnesses. Even in the dark the new man is vaguely familiar. He is short and stocky with a bristling haircut. I don’t place him immediately because of the dark and the fact that he’s not in uniform.
His name only comes to me when Roberto asks from where he’s kneeling to my right, “Doing a little moonlighting, Blow Job?” It’s Deputy B. J. Timms, the sheriff’s half-pint sidekick.
He responds to my brother’s question by raising an oversized automatic and pointing it between Roberto’s eyes. I know he’s about to shoot but then Burgermeister intervenes.
“He’s mine,” the big man says. He’s standing behind my brother with the wicked silver gleam of a Buck knife in one hand. Without another word, he raises it high, then slams it down, butt-first, on the top of Roberto’s head. In the sickening crunch, I can hear both the tear of skin and the impact of steel on bone. My mad, unstoppable brother collapses forward into the grass.
Timms’s pistol wavers, then swings to the side until its thick barrel is pointed at me. It stays on my head while the deputy walks around to stand behind me. In a way I prefer him there—in my state of heightened awareness I don’t want to see the muzzle flash before the bullet rips through my skull.
David Fast stands with his back to the meadow, facing Kim and me over Sunny’s prostrate form. He’s resting the barrel of his rifle in the girl’s exposed ear. She shivers violently at his feet, pinned to the grass by the gun, and makes no sound. I think I know what she’s feeling—she’s suffered enough and just wants it over with. Escape and capture, escape and capture, escape and capture. She’s probably praying for a bullet right now. I’m feeling a little of the same thing.
Burgermeister stands beside Fast. He grins at us with his big white teeth glowing in the dark. “Y’all sure make a lot of noise for people being hunted. You couldn’t have made it any easier for us to find you, screaming and hammering away down in there. What did you expect, carrying on like that?”
None of us answer. I fight an urge to close my eyes.
“Just look what crawled out from under a rock,” he laughs. “That cave must really be something for you to get all the way down here. I guess that’s Dave’s and my cave now. We decided not blow it up after all. Once the papers are all signed, it might make us a couple of extra bucks.”
I’m on my knees facing them. Timms is right behind me with the muzzle of his pistol pressed against the back of my neck. I can smell his fetid breath blowing into my hair. My hands are on top of my head, inches from the gun, but it’s jammed so hard into my neck that I know the deputy’s finger must be tight on the trigger. I can’t risk even a flinch.
Kim is to my left, kneeling too with her hands on her head, with one sharp elbow against the inside of one of mine. Roberto is to my right. He’s facedown in the dirt and grass. Burgermeister steps over and kneels on his back. I can hear my brother struggling to breathe from under the big man’s weight. I can’t tell if he’s conscious. The giant has the blade of the knife against the skin to one side of Roberto’s neck. From the forced breathing, I know my brother is alive. For the moment.
“It’s kind of funny,” Burgermeister continues. “You all coming out of the ground like that. Funny ’cause you’re going right back in, if you know what I mean. But I don’t think you’ll be coming back out this time.”
I speak to Fast instead of his partner and my voice sounds surprisingly strong, full of an assuredness I certainly don’t feel. “People know where we are. They’re going to come looking for us.” I’m thinking of my father and his last thrilling words to me. I’m coming. I remember telling him we were headed for the red cliff. At least he’ll know where to dig.
Fast says nothing. He just stares down at Sunny, so Burgermeister replies for him. “They aren’t going to look too hard, I bet. Not for a couple of squirrelly ecoterrorists and an escaped convict.”
“They’re going to look for me,” I tell him. “I’m a cop.”
“We know all about you, Special Agent Antonio Burns. We know you’re suspended. For the second time, too. Tsk-tsk, boy. They’re probably gonna figure you thought you were going to get seriously busted this time. Especially after having helped your brother jump bail, which is what they’ll believe when he doesn’t turn up. Nah, they aren’t going to look too hard for you.”
He’s wrong. My immediate boss and my colleagues know the suspension is bullshit. But he wouldn’t believe me if I told him that. I again try talking to Fast’s quiet form. He still has the rifle barrel touching Sunny’s head where it lies in the grass.
“It isn’t going to work,” I tell him, trying not to plead. “It isn’t going to work in the end. You can’t murder the four of us—five, including Cal—without paying a price. And it’s not worth the cost of the land.”
I’ve sensed a reluctance in him all along. A bit of remorse for what he’d done to Kim all those years ago. And a distaste for his partner’s violent tactics. I feel a tiny glint of hope. I try to will his gun from where it points directly into Sunny’s ear. I will him to lift it up until it’s pointed at Burgermeister.
Fast looks back at me for a long moment. I think all of us, even Burgermeister, who is armed only with a knife now, hold our breaths.
“This should never have happened,” Fast says slowly. “All this, because of a stupid prank and an accident twelve years ago. Jesus, Kim, I can’t imagine what’s going on in your head.” His hands twitch on the rifle. Then he snuffs out my hope. “There’s no going back now. I’d lose everything. I’m sorry, truly sorry, but you brought this on yourself, Kim.”
“It’s time for the four of you to say good night,” Burgermeister rasps, laughing.
“Not yet, Alf,” Timms says behind me, his nasty breath still blowing on me and the pistol’s muzzle still screwed into the back of my neck. “You promised that I could have a little fun first.”
“That’s true,” Burgermeister explains to Kim and me, as if making an apology of his own. “I did promise him that. And he’s earned it. After all, that was his cousin you knocked off the cliff up there. And he’s had his eye on you for a while, Ms. Walsh. I’ll bet Dave can tell us that the honey is sweet. And I’ve been thinking I ought to have some fun with you, too. I’d like to see what I missed by not going to college.”
“Fuck you,” Kim spits. But at Fast, not Burgermeister.
Fast shakes his head mournfully. “Blame yourself, Kim. You’ve fucked yourself.”
“Man, I sure do like my women feisty,” Burgermeister says with another laugh. He gestures at Sunny’s prostrate form. “Not like that one. She’s like dead meat.”
Beside me Kim makes a hissing noise with a sharp intake of breath.
“Hear that, bitch? I’m owed. I’m getting my piece, too.” Timms has pulled the gun from my neck and reached around in front of Kim with both his gloved hands. His free hand grabs at one of her breasts while with the other he shoves the pistol down the front of her baggy pants. “Your one eye’s gonna meet mine.”
They’re making a terrible mistake but they don’t know it. Their threats strike a match in my chest. Before they’d said that about violating Kim once again, I’d almost been ready to let him put a bullet in my head without a fight. I was just too weary. But no one’s going to touch Kim. Not that way. The match flares with a brilliant white heat, so fierce it’s nearly an
explosion. That will not happen. Not without him paying whatever maximum price I’m able to charge.
I look out past Fast at the night sky and try to exhale, to blow the searing flames from my throat. The fire goes out in an instant. It’s like it had never even been there. Instead what I feel is a great emptiness, cool and calm and easy, filled with the night, the sky, the trees and mountains. I’m a part of it all. Something in my brain breaks loose with an enormous yawn that sucks the whole world in. I’m going to make a final struggle. It’s better to die fighting than to surrender, to let the woman I maybe love be violated for a second time in her life. The cells of my body are going to begin their reentry into the elements that made me. And it’s okay.
I have no strategy. And the way I’m feeling, that’s okay, too. I’m beyond fear and pain and worry and guilt. I’m soaring into another place entirely.
The old Neil Young lyric floats through my head as I tense myself for a suicidal lunge to the side. Better to burn out than to fade away. Above me in the night sky is a leathery flutter like a giant bat’s wings. Weird, I think. Since my childhood I’d pictured Death as the Grim Reaper—bony hands and a cloaked face and blazing red eyes reaching up beneath me on an alpine wall to snatch at my ankles. Weird that it’s more like a winged Angel of Death coming out of the sky, like something out of a medieval painting, something that I never imagined before. Weird that after all the time I spent fighting him on the rock, he can just sweep in like this and grab me.
As I start to raise a knee in order to get a foot beneath me, I look up to catch a glimpse of the monster. I want to smile in his face. Give him the finger one last time. But there’s nothing up there but a thousand tiny pinpricks of light and Death’s vast black shape sweeping across them. No one notices me brace my right foot against the solid earth that’s soon to hold my decomposing flesh. They’re all staring at the sky, too. He must be coming for more than just me. That makes me smile.
I spin and lunge to the left, driving with all the power in my good leg. My shoulder smashes into Timms’s ribs down low beneath his arm. I rip him off Kim’s back and take him down hard into the dirt and the grass. My hands grasp at his face and throat, tearing flesh and hair, seeking the soft gelatinous meat of his eyes. He’s screaming with his hands flailing on my wrists. I realize he’s lost the pistol—it most have gotten tangled in Kim’s pants with the initial impact when I knocked him off her.
In my strange, expanded state of mind the others are clear around me despite Deputy Timms’s screams. Kim still kneels in the grass with both her hands down her pants. She’s trying to untangle the gun. I want to tell her to forget it, to run, but the words are buried by all the other noise.
Fast is hollering before us. He’s pulled the hunting rifle’s barrel from Sunny’s ear and is aiming it at Timms and me. But he’s unable to get a clear shot with the off-duty deputy writhing before me. Maybe he’s unwilling to pull the trigger. But it doesn’t matter. The way I’m feeling, it will take more than a few bullets to stop me before I’m done. You’re next.
Fast makes it easy, coming at me now quick across the grass. He’s reversed the gun and is raising the butt to smash at my head. I whip Timms back and forth as my fingers tear at his throat and face. Fast strikes once and the hard wooden stock cracks off the deputy’s forehead when I use it to parry the blow.
To the right, Burgermeister is also caught up in the battle’s frenzy. He’s reaching under my brother’s throat with the long knife. But Roberto has managed to grab his wrist. Even on his face in the dirt, with one hand awkwardly twisted before him, his maniacal strength is slowing the big man’s stroke.
Then the night is split wide open when Fast strikes a second time. In slow motion I watch the rifle butt swinging in a short jab toward my temple. It’s like a flashbulb goes off in my face. Night becomes day. My fingers lose their grip on Timms’s face and throat. I sit back on my ass, unable to lift my arms to ward off a second blow. My arms just won’t work.
But Fast hesitates. Through the brilliant light I see the deputy slumped at his feet. He’s not moving. Fast glances down at him, too, then reverses the rifle a second time so that its muzzle is aimed at my face. The black hole in the barrel looks huge. It pulls at my starred vision, seeming to drag my very being into it.
A new sound overwhelms all the screaming and hollering. It sounds like the earth is opening up beneath us. Dirt and mud and sticks tear through the air, stinging my face. The sound of automatic weapons, I realize with a sudden jolt, and I’m almost disappointed when Fast’s gun wavers off my chest. Around me I see three orange flames coming from three different directions, converging on our deadly little battle, but shooting short into the grass and the small pine trees. Fast still has the gun pointed in my general direction as he looks around wildly.
It takes a few seconds before my eyes clear of the blinding light. Then I’m aware of three shadows, darker than the night, loping toward us. Behind one of them billows an even larger black shape. It takes me a minute to realize it’s a parachute trailing behind the running shadow. And it takes a moment for me to recognize the shadow’s steady lope. That hadn’t been Death fluttering overhead. Just Dad.
My father is dressed entirely in black. Even his face has been painted with charcoal or tar. The only things not black are a pair of slender white parentheses on each side of his irises. The two other shadows circle us to the sides with ugly short rifles gleaming in the starlight.
“Put down the weapons! Put down the weapons!” my father is shouting. Even shouting, his voice still has that odd authoritative calm. The sound of it makes my hair stand on end.
I look over at Roberto. Burgermeister has let go of the knife and is rising off my brother’s back with his hands in the air. Roberto’s still pressed facedown in the dirt but his head is turned toward me. He’s looking at me, and I realize he’s grinning. I grin back. Unbelievable. He came through.
With a single motion that’s so quick it’s just a blur, Roberto rolls over onto his back, sits up, and keeps rolling forward. The long knife flashes before him. He thrusts it upward with both hands as he drives ahead. His back blocks my view but the grating sound of steel on bone is unmistakable. The giant screams.
Roberto, soaked with blood, whips the knife out and whirls to his feet as Burgermeister collapses like an enormous lodgepole pine. My brother bends down and spits in his face. “How’s it feel to be violated, puta?”
“’Berto! No!” my father shouts, way too late.
In front of me Fast drops his rifle. I think he drops it more in horror than from my father’s command. Deputy Timms moans on the grass, clutching his head and throat. My fingers had pulled the skin half off his face.
Kim has finally gotten the pistol out from her pants. She takes two steps forward and shoves the barrel into Fast’s open mouth. I hear teeth breaking. “On your knees,” she hisses at him.
My father comes forward. His gun is no longer on Fast but now points at Roberto. And his oldest son is smiling back with his eyes just bright slits in the dark. The blood that covers his face makes him look as dark as Dad.
“Step back, ’Berto. Put down the knife.” His voice is immeasurably sad. It’s as if he knows Roberto has crossed a line, that he’s stepped over the edge now and will never come back.
Roberto does as he’s told. But while my father watches, he licks some blood from his knuckles.
Life finally returns to my limbs. I get to my feet and put my hands on Kim’s shoulders. “It’s over,” I tell her. “You’re finally going to get to see him in court.” She’s shaking as hard as Sunny, who still lies curled and silently sobbing in the grass. I’d been tempted to let her kill him, but something tells me that’s not what she needs. She needs the Law to exact her Justice—it’s what she’s fought for all these years. For her, my brother’s type of justice would make those years seem empty.
I slide my hand down to her wrist and pull the gun out of Fast’s mouth. The asshole looks relieved. And he shou
ld be. My brother would gut him, too, if my father and his men weren’t here. I might have done it myself, with my bare hands, if the blow to my head hadn’t temporarily paralyzed my arms.
“Lie down,” I say softly to Fast after I kick the rifle into the deep grass. He does it, even putting his hands behind his head without me having to tell him to.
“Now who’s fucked?” Kim asks him.
FORTY-THREE
TEN MILES DOWN the bumpy Forest Service road, just a few miles from where it meets the highway, two Sheriff’s Department SUVs block the road. Beyond them I see a third truck with the same colors and insignia parked between some pines to one side. There are three men standing together talking in the clean morning light as we drive the black Suburban down toward them. I recognize Sheriff Munik in his Stetson with the two young deputies. They look up, see Fast’s truck, and wave. Roberto toots the horn as we approach. He’s driving because my right ankle’s so swollen and sore from Burgermeister’s blow that I can barely weight it.
Even though he’d washed his face in the creek, a fresh line of bright red blood runs down my brother’s face from the wound on top of his head.
The sheriff walks toward us when Roberto brakes to a stop. One of the deputies gets in an SUV to move it out of the way. As the darkly tinted driver’s window slides down, Munik is saying, “Boys were here all night and nobody tried . . .”
His voice dies away when he realizes that it’s Roberto, not David Fast, in the driver’s seat. And that I’m beside him.
“Tried what, asshole?” my brother asks.
The sheriff’s smile flexes into a grimace. His right hand slaps the leather holster under his sport coat and comes up with the huge revolver. He points it at my brother’s face.
Point of Law Page 31