The Edge of Justice

by Clinton McKinzie

  As we talk her hands are on the table, one holding the pen as she scribbles the occasional note, the other securing the pad. Her quick fingers look strong for such a slender woman, the nails unvarnished. “I bet some of the same things made you want to be a reporter,” I tell her. “Maybe you should try climbing.”

  When she laughs she slowly shakes her head and her hair drifts back and forth across her cheeks.

  After our coffee and snacks are delivered, she begins questioning me about that night eighteen months ago, and I feel the bitterness I'd forgotten over the last few minutes rising up again. She does it in a sympathetic tone, with a pretense of total understanding. We both know I'm being played, but I let it happen. I tell her everything that happened, from my confidential informant's sobs to the final gunplay itself. She murmurs, “You must have been terrified” and “How awful” at all the appropriate times.

  When I have told her all I can about that night, she asks, “Will you get in trouble for talking with me?”

  I shrug. “Maybe. But I guess I don't care all that much. McGee might be mad, but then again, he seems to like you.” I can still imagine him, though, roaring, “You what!” when I tell him I've given a complete interview. Then he'll chastise me, about how what I say to anyone can be used against me when I testify. I know it's good advice; these are the things my lawyer should tell me but is too inexperienced and afraid of me to say.

  “I had the Post e-mail me all the clippings. I read that there was some talk of charging you.”

  “Yeah, a few people in the AG's Office wanted to prosecute me criminally. Still do. A lot of politician types and community activists too. For murder or at least manslaughter. It would be good politics—get the minority vote, you know? If it'd happened in any other state, any state with a larger minority population, they'd have hung me out to dry from the start. Ross McGee saved my ass by refusing to do it. He even threatened to resign if the office pursued it. And thank God my mom's Hispanic.”

  “So tell me about the civil suit. How did that come about?”

  I tell her that I doubt it was the idea of the Torreses or the other families. They knew those three would die either from a bullet or in prison. Sure, they want revenge, especially the surviving sons and the other gang members whom I'd betrayed. But they want a more primal vengeance than just dollars. They want me six feet under and they want it to take a while. She already knows about the attack from the little brother yesterday. I tell her the suit came about as most of them do—a shark of an attorney, Mo Cash, saw an opportunity and went to the parents with it. His take will be forty percent of whatever is recovered.

  Initially I hadn't cared about the money, as they were seeking it only from the office, believing a lowly state employee like me couldn't have much. I was more worried that a civil verdict against me would result in the murder charges being filed. And about the damage it would do to my professional reputation. Of course, after all the media attention there wasn't a whole lot left of it to degrade. And then Cash and his associates discovered the trust fund my grandfather had left me, and now I could lose it all. Everything, really. My job, my inheritance, and my freedom.

  “In the clippings I read, it seems there's one columnist in particular who has it out for you—Don Bradshaw of the Cheyenne Observer. He's the one who called you all those names.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “rogue cop, QuickDraw, and all that. I really hate that guy. You know I once arrested his son for selling ecstasy to schoolkids? He went out and hired Mo Cash to try and get him off. And Cash got him a good deal too, a deferred judgment, thanks to all his connections and despite my screaming and moaning. Keep that in mind when you read Bradshaw's stuff. Tell me if you see him around—I'd like to say hello.” The asshole had even printed in one column that my brother was in prison for manslaughter, and that my father, as a Special Forces soldier, undoubtedly had taken lives himself. He'd called us a family of killers. But I suspect politeness overcomes Rebecca's journalistic, predatory instincts for a good quote and she doesn't mention my brother.

  I tell her about the summary judgment hearing next week and my unrealistic hope that the whole thing will be thrown out then. My lawyer isn't promoting that hope. For a motion for summary judgment to be granted, dismissing the case, there must be no material facts in dispute. And the question of self-defense versus murder is a large one.

  After a few more minutes it seems like the interview is over. She snaps the cap back on her pen and puts away her legal pad. I'm disappointed but try not to show it. I realize how much I've been enjoying her company. Although I've been through a number of women over the past eighteen months, I can't recall a single conversation. I'd used their flesh, not their minds. So I decide to give Rebecca Hersh a gift.

  “In the spirit of cleansing my soul here,” I tell her, “I'll give you what might be a scoop on the Knapp brothers if you promise not to print or speak a word of it until McGee clears it.”

  She promises, “Absolutely off the record,” and holds up three fingers in a Girl Scout's salute.

  So I tell her about the methamphetamine connection, the bottle, and the ligature abrasions on Kate Danning. Her eyes light up like she has a fever.

  Through the café's big windows I see it's thoroughly dark outside. The caffeine causes a rumble in my stomach and I ask her if she will have dinner with me. She comes back to earth with a startled look at her watch. She tells me no, she's late for a preplanned dinner with friends. For a moment, unjustifiably, I picture her telling them about how she had coffee with a murderer, one who even had the moxie to ask her for a date. But then I try to persuade myself that I see some reluctance in her eyes as she pulls on her leather coat. Before she leaves she asks if she can have a rain check.

  It's Friday night. I have nowhere to go, nothing to do. For a moment I consider calling Kristi in Cheyenne, seeing what she's up to and if she would like to drive over. But I push that urge away. I like her too much.

  On the way back to the motel I buy a bottle of tequila and another of lime juice from one of Wyoming's drive-thru liquor stores, then a large cheese and pepperoni from Grand Avenue Pizza. I fill a water bottle with the hotel's ice and mix in the Herradura and juice. Oso gets the pizza crusts but I don't share the rough margarita. I feel like I need the release of the liquor tonight before I drive down to see my brother tomorrow. I need to deaden my anxiety, and I know from too much experience over the last eighteen months that a tequila hangover will do that for me—put a hazy buffer between reality and me. A cowboy movie is playing on the TV but I ignore it while making notes on my laptop computer of the day's findings.

  I'm well into my second quart-size bottle and the pizza is half gone when there's a hammering on the door. My face is numb from the tequila, and I have to glance down to make sure I'm still dressed. Looking through the peephole at first I can't see anyone. But then at the bottom of the wide-angled circle there is Lynn, her dirty blonde hair across her face in the evening wind. She looks angry.

  When I pull the door open she shoves me hard in the chest with both hands. I hope Rebecca Hersh or her friends aren't around to see this.

  “You're a fucking cop!” she says, coming in after me. “A goddamn narc!”

  With a lucky snatch through the tequila haze, I grab her wrists as she raises them to push me again, and twist her onto the bed. She fights it, bringing up a sharp knee that's viciously aimed at my crotch. I turn one hip to the side just in time.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute, hang on, let me explain.” I try to calm her. Her breath is hot on my face. She squirms her small, strong limbs beneath me in an effort to get free.

  Finally she stops struggling and I feel safe enough to get up and sit in the chair. I know the “But you never asked” explanation doesn't stand a chance. So I tell her the truth—that I climbed with her because I wanted to, not as part of any investigation. And I prove it with the evidence that I hadn't pressed her to talk about Kate. And until this afternoon, I go on, I didn't even k
now she'd been up there that night. There was no mention of her presence in the police reports. There's still anger in her eyes but she seems to accept what I say. “Look, I don't care if you smoke a little pot, just don't do it around me. As long as you aren't selling it, I don't care. You're an adult. I'm not going to arrest you.”

  Suddenly she laughs. “You're drunk,” she says. “You reek of tequila.”

  I laugh too, realizing I've had a stupid, drunken grin on my face even while we wrestled. “Make you one?”

  “Do it, man.”

  I take a spare quart water bottle and fill it with ice, then half tequila and half lime juice. As I make it she turns off my western movie and turns on and up what must be MTV. The wail of John Popper's harmonica fills the room. “So what the fuck's going on?” she asks.

  “First, I need to know what you were doing up there that night,” I answer, trying to concentrate on the questions I should be asking her.

  She scrunches her face either because of my question or the sip she's taken of the drink. “We go up there to party, man. All the time when it's warm. Anyway, Cindy and Sierra and me split early that night. It was just the guys and Kate who stayed.”

  I can't tell if she's lying. My receptors are definitely impaired. “Did you leave with Cindy and Sierra?”

  “No way. I don't hang out with those two whores much. I had my own ride, my truck.” She also tells me that she didn't run around with Kate all that much either. She more or less keeps to herself.

  I try to question her more about what was going on that night, but all she'll tell me is that it was a usual party for them—smoking dope and drinking. I ask who was tweaking on meth but she says not her, that she didn't know anyone up there was, at least not that night. Despite my impairment, I'm pretty sure she's lying about that. I ask why Brad didn't tell the police about her being up there and all she can tell me is that maybe he forgot, or maybe Billy told him not to, to keep her out of it.

  Lynn finishes the quart I gave her and I make two more. My eyes keep catching on her thin lips, her sharp teeth, and her pointed tongue when she licks her lips. Then my eyes drop to the open buttons at the top of her shirt. It takes a staggering amount of effort to lift them back to her face. We're talking about other things now, and I realize I've become somewhat desperate for her company. Any company. My emotions have been bouncing like a yo-yo for the last two days.

  Coffee with Rebecca had boosted my libido, as had the renewal of my climbing career. The tequila just fueled the fire and added to eighteen months of depression and loneliness. Things are getting dangerously out of control. I know it but can't stop it.

  While we talk she gets her embroidered cloth bag from where she'd dropped it by the door in the midst of pushing me.

  “Before I got pissed at you, I found this and wanted to show it to you.” Then she laughs and adds, “Shit, before I got pissed I even shaved my legs!”

  She hands me an old, well-thumbed issue of Rock and Ice magazine. It's the issue that featured me and the climb I did with my friends in Alaska's Ruth Gorge. Lynn takes it back and opens it to the full-page picture of me hanging from the colossal, three-thousand-foot wall, as high as three Empire State Buildings stacked one on top of the other.

  Pointing at it, she's swaying slightly on her feet. I can't tell if she is dancing to the music from the TV or just feeling the effects of the drink. “Now that's feeding the Rat,” she says.

  “Feeding the what?” I haven't heard the term in years and my tequila-fogged brain has a hard time recalling what it means.

  “The Rat, man. You know, it's something climbers got in their bellies. It claws around in there, begging for and feeding on the stupid shit we do. Like getting a fix. It's something Billy's always talking about.”

  I hold the magazine open and look at the picture with her. The friend who took it was above me, looking down. He took it just a few minutes after the dinner-plate-size flake of rock had come whistling out of the sky. I'd looked up at the sound, thinking maybe I could dodge to the side, but wasn't quick enough. The picture shows me hanging suspended from a rope, gazing up at the camera. Beneath me is simply a universe of space and then a jumbled glacier far below it. I'm grinning at the camera but the smile isn't genuine. A smear of bright red blood is running from my left eye, across my mouth, down my neck, and splashes across my yellow jacket. The cheekbone from which the blood has erupted is already swelling grotesquely. My helmet too is streaked with four smeared lines of red from where I'd felt it for holes with my fingertips. Even more than the blood, the most arresting part of the photograph is my eyes. They are round with terror despite the grin. The Rat was feasting.

  I remember the bite of the antiseptic that Hal had splashed on my face before pinching the skin back together with Krazy Glue from the repair kit. I'd been taking hard pulls on a plastic flask of Yukon Jack at the time, the taste and the pain bringing tears to my eyes that stung when they mixed with the flayed skin of my cheek.

  “That's how you got that, right?” she asks as she stands close and traces the scar on my cheek with her fingers.

  I nod, unable to take my eyes off the photo.

  Tequila-scented and still swaying, she moves behind me and puts her arms around my chest, pressing herself against my back. Her hands move over my muscles, then trace the ridges of my ribs and stomach. For a moment I think, irrationally and drunkenly, that it's Rebecca behind me. I almost say her name. I feel her face between my shoulder blades as she blows hotly through my shirt and wet on my skin. Rising up on her toes, she touches my neck with her lips. I drop the magazine on the bed and reach behind me, holding her to me. Then I turn to her.

  I finally lie still, spent and exhilarated and wary. I've never known a girl to be so strong and wild. My wariness comes from that roughness, the way she shouted those words in my ear and impaled her body upon me with such force. “Fuck me!” she'd demanded, again and again. “Harder!” Although I am by no means inexperienced, this was a whole other world. Past girls had proved agile and limber but nothing like this. This was something else altogether.

  Lynn's face is buried against my chest. Her breath is still blowing as hot and fast as mine. Again without intending to, I imagine that her blonde hair, where it sweeps across the muscles of my stomach, is darker and richer, like Rebecca's. Turning my head, I can see Oso's yellow eyes watching from his prone position in the corner. His ears are forward; his amber eyes concerned. I feel that he's trying to send me a message that he himself doesn't quite understand or know how to express. A hint of danger. A warning.

  “Holy shit,” she says, rearing up over me with her voice a purr and her eyes glassy, “that was good. Give me a minute, man—then let's do that again.”

  FOURTEEN

  I'M UP EARLY the next morning despite a headache and a slightly sick feeling down low in my gut. The sight of the bed torn apart and the empty tequila bottle on the dresser turns a worm within me. Outside, as I hurry through my morning training, Oso watches balefully from where he's preemptively tied to a tree as another soccer game is taking place.

  Back at the hotel I shower, shave, and take two bagels and a paper cup of tea from the hotel's coffee shop. The mountain-born wind hasn't warmed yet so I pull on my wool coat and call for Oso to “load up” into the truck. Once on Interstate 80, we head east past Vedauwoo, where the granite is orange in the morning light. In Cheyenne I stop by the unoccupied lab at DCI's headquarters to drop off the bottle I'd recovered from the cave. I had already called the chief tech and conveyed the need for urgency along with McGee's endorsement. I was told to expect results the next day, Sunday. Then Oso and I turn south on I-25 and cross the state border into Colorado and the flatland of the eastern plains.

  Five hours later the sun is high and the road has turned hot. I pass the signs for Canon City and follow directions to the Colorado Bureau of Prisons. It's a sprawling series of concrete buildings ringed with chain-link fencing, concertina wire, and warning signs. Parking at the far end of
the asphalt lot under the shade of some dusty elms, I let Oso out to water the trees before locking him back in the truck with the windows partway down. Distracted, I forget to tell him the usual, “Stay, Oso, I'll be back,” and the dog gives his impolite master a hurt look as I stride away toward the building.

  He looks harder than ever, I think, staring at a face that is very much like my own through the bulletproof glass. We have the same slightly hooked nose, full lips, and dark hair that come from our mother's Indio ancestors. We have the same heavy brows and protruding jaws from the Celts whose blood runs in our father's veins. But my features lack both the cruelty and beauty of my brother's. His cheekbones are higher, his eye sockets more slanted, and the eyes themselves convey a mercilessness that mine do not. They are a pale, cold, and startling shade of blue. His skin used to be tan like mine from too much sun, but confinement has turned it a faint shade of olive, almost translucent. And the man behind the glass wears his hair long and unkempt. He could be a movie star playing swashbuckling leading men if he weren't an adrenaline junkie whose fix comes from the dangers of both heights and chemicals. And if he weren't a convicted killer.

  At a bar in Durango one night three years ago, when thunder roared across the sky and Roberto had stabbed a syringe into his arm like a bolt of lightning, mainlining meth, a cowboy was scoping the girl my brother was with. The cowboy left his friends, who were chuckling and elbowing each other in a cracked leather booth, and approached Roberto's girl. The cowboy came between them like a driven wedge. “Take off, spic,” he said as he shouldered Roberto out of the way. Then he reached a hand up beneath the girl's skirt and grabbed at her crotch. Almost casually, my brother smashed his mug of beer against the bar's brass rail so that he was palming the mug's base, the broken upper half like an open mouth with teeth of jagged glass. When the cowboy turned at the sound, Roberto slammed it into the cowboy's face while the man's friends looked on. Then he took him to the floor and beat him to death before a bar full of witnesses. They said my brother was laughing.