The Edge of Justice

by Clinton McKinzie

  “Easy, cowboy. I get first shot at them. Officially. Your cute little reporter friend already's talking 'bout filing a complaint with the office. Maybe the state'll send another one of you agents down to investigate that! Anyway, Bender and Knight are saying they heard a commotion, saw you go down, then saved your ass. Bender is boasting that it's the second time in a week. And he says the reporter's full of shit.”

  “Where is she? She was in the hallway when I was jumped. Then I thought I saw her here earlier with a bruised face.”

  “She's around, but I kicked her out when we came in to take the pictures. Caught an elbow during the ruckus is all. She's acting like she's your personal watchdog now. Says she knows you through Ross McGee. She your girlfriend or something?”

  “I wish. Speaking of watchdogs, where's Oso?”

  Jones laughs. “We've been trying to take your Land Cruiser to the impound lot for safekeeping. Got the keys out of your pocket. But that damned monster wouldn't let anyone near it, even when we tried to give him a Big Mac through the window. Finally that reporter girl gave it a try, and damn if he didn't let her in. I thought she was dead meat when she opened that door. I thought there'd be blood on the roof for sure. But she just started it right up and followed a marked car to the lot, even let the dog out for a piss. He wouldn't leave the truck though, hopped right back in, so we locked him in there with the cheeseburger.”

  “What about the Surenos who pounded on me?”

  “Those boys and girls are filling all our cells, partying and laughing about giving it to you. If the public defender doesn't get some of them bonded out soon, they'll take over the place. Bender and Knight, with the help of some of those security guys, arrested the whole lot of them.”

  Jones calls Kevin the photographer back in to finish taking pictures. After a few of my face, they have me roll onto my front to get photographs of the bruising to my back and legs. Jones jerks loose the tie on the back of the hospital smock and whistles through his teeth when he sees the exposed skin that's turning black and blue. “You look like a piñata after the party's over,” he comments. “Cute ass, though.”

  “Fuck you, Jones.”

  As Kevin is finishing up with the pictures, the door bangs open and McGee shuffles in. He is out of breath as usual. His face is set in stone and his blue eyes blaze. But he looks better than he had the day before, as if anger has burned up some of the sickness. “Goddamn it, Anton . . . can't you keep out of trouble?” he bellows. “You look like a bull's been tap dancing on your hide.” Then he whacks Jones's ankle with his cane and huffs, “And you, what kind of town do you have here . . . letting those kids take advantage of one of my limp-wristed agents?”

  Rebecca eases into the room behind McGee without making a sound. I quickly roll back over and pull the sheets up to my chest as she looks at me and smiles. McGee continues to rave. There is a swollen purple bruise on her forehead and her cheeks are red and flushed. Seeing her earlier hadn't been a dream. In my head I can hear her shouting for help when everyone else had turned their backs. I give her a small nod, smiling back, unable to communicate the gratitude I feel toward her with words, but hoping my eyes pass along the message.

  After McGee finishes deriding the Sheriff's Office, his own agents' ineffectiveness in a fight, the citizens of southeast Wyoming, and the human population in general, Jones excuses himself from the room and takes Kevin with him. McGee and Rebecca pull both of the room's two chairs close to the bed, where McGee hesitates before lowering his bulk. Instead of sitting, McGee examines a sore spot on my cheek that has swollen up under my eye. “Looks like Nikes,” he remarks. “We'll hold all their shoes as evidence . . . just to screw with 'em. Reminds me of a case a few years back. Four bangers opened a can of whoop-ass . . . on one of their friends. Someone nearly finished him off . . . with a kick to the head. . . . We couldn't figure out who did the coup de grace . . . until we matched up the tread patterns on their boots . . . to the marks on the vic's face. It turned out they beat him . . . because he'd played a little prank on one of the others . . . who'd passed out drunk the night before. You see, the vic had smeared the banger's privates . . . with peanut butter, then called for his dog . . . to clean it up while he took pictures.”

  “Thanks for the story, Ross. Is there a point?”

  “Nay, lad, just an observation. So tell me what happened to you. The sheriff told me . . . his men's version, and sweet Rebecca Hersh . . . told me another. Give me the gospel according to QuickDraw Burns.”

  I repeat what I can remember. McGee sits through my short narrative twisting his cane in his hands and remaining largely silent, only occasionally asking a question for clarification. He says nothing when I finish, but the blue eyes are brighter than ever. Rebecca adds how the morning had ended—with police officers and security guards dragging the gang members away as they kicked at the head and back of my prostrate form. One of them even unzipped his pants to urinate on my face, but Rebecca's shouts left him unable to make the necessary water. “That's where I got this,” she says, pointing to her forehead. “When the police came in after all hell broke loose, the one who wouldn't let you in the door hit me with his elbow. I think he did it on purpose.”

  Bender, I think. After a pause I say to McGee, “I want them burned.”

  “Sure, lad. But what would we charge them with? And how would we prove it? It looks like they did . . . save your hide from worse.”

  “Fuck,” I say.

  After a few minutes of glowering at the wall and barely tolerating the pounding ache in my head and the cutting sensation that I feel across my ribs with each breath, I put that question to rest for a while.

  “What were you doing in Cheyenne this morning?” I ask.

  “The AG wanted to see me . . . wants you to back off this Danning thing . . . Karge has been making complaints . . . making threats. I told him to go fuck himself.” I wouldn't have been surprised if McGee did so in exactly those words. No wonder he wasn't popular with the administration.

  “Do you want to hear the latest on Danning?” I pointedly look from McGee, to whom the question is addressed, to Rebecca, wondering if he will ask her to leave the room.

  McGee looks at her too. “Let's have it. And I want her to hear it too. She's earned the right . . . after trying to save your sorry butt. In addition, we may need some help . . . from the media on this. Otherwise everyone's urge . . . will be to bury it. But I want it understood, lass . . . that all this is off the record . . . you cannot write one word about it . . . without my permission. Do I have your word?”

  She gives it, prudently not mentioning that I have told her some of it already, and McGee quickly fills her in on our concern that Kate Danning did not fall off the cliff. He summarizes the evidence for her like the veteran prosecutor he was before his diminishing health and increasing vulgarity made him no longer fit for addressing juries: the unexplained bruise to the rear of her head, the ligature mark on her neck, the bottle with what was probably her blood and hair on it, Brad Karge's fingerprints, the unproductive interview, and the admission that both Brad and Billy had sex with her that night.

  I add what I learned from the hotel maid, Sierra Calloway, that morning. I don't mention my evening with Lynn. I can't bring myself to admit what I did while I was drunk, both because of Rebecca's presence in the room and the ridicule McGee would rightly subject me to for having slept with a potential witness.

  “It sounds as if the weak link . . . is obviously this youth Chris. Have you talked to him?”

  “No. That was number one on my to-do list before I got jumped. And it still is number one. I'll do it as soon as I get out of here.”

  Rebecca hasn't said a word during our summaries. Now she asks, “What I don't understand is why. Why would those climbers push the girl off the cliff?”

  I think about that. “I don't know much yet about Brad Karge, other than that he seems to be doped up most of the time. Heller though, he's a control freak. According to everyone I
talk to, all those kids worship him. And he takes advantage of them, particularly the young girls, and keeps them all well supplied with crank. Maybe Kate Danning had threatened to turn him in. Or maybe he was just having fun. But we know Brad hit her with a bottle because of the fingerprints—we just need the DNA and a witness to confirm it.”

  McGee says, “Which brings us to Kimberly Lee again. We know she was at least an amateur climber . . . may have run around with this Heller cult. According to her boyfriend . . . the NA counselor . . . she was planning on telling the Sheriff's Office . . . where she'd gotten her drugs. Maybe the Danning girl was thinking . . . about doing the same thing. And maybe the Knapps . . . weren't Lee's dealers after all.”

  “Or maybe Heller's just found a new way to feed the Rat,” I say.

  “The what?” Rebecca asks.

  I explain that Heller's getting older without ever having achieved the fame he probably deserved. His climbing skills are diminishing and he's losing his grip on the group of kids who are his supplicants. Maybe this is a new way to control them, while at the same time finding some new avenue of pursuing thrills. I can picture him enjoying the rough sex, corrupting the youths around him and the youth that had betrayed him, while as a side benefit protecting his drug-selling income. He could easily have killed Lee and set the Knapp brothers up for it. It would have been simple, especially with the County Attorney's son as his accomplice. The locals would have eagerly ignored them as suspects.

  “But those climbers couldn't have killed Kimberly Lee,” Rebecca says. “Remember, the Knapps confessed. And what about the evidence found in their pickup? What about the pipe in her house with one of the Knapps' fingerprints on it?”

  I look at McGee. “Anyone could have dropped the glove and skin in the pickup. Who did they confess to? Who found the pipe?”

  McGee says, “Sheriff Willis. Sergeant Bender.”

  I don't say a word and McGee nods at me that I don't need to. We are in agreement that the Sheriff's Office is suspect. The fact that there was a brief gunfight with the police when the Knapps' door was first knocked on at two in the morning could simply be the brothers' standard procedure, considering their pseudo-militaristic leanings and the liquor and drugs they had been consuming.

  “Nathan Karge's campaign manager and his nephew,” Rebecca says to herself, gently touching the bruise on her forehead. “But I can't believe Nathan Karge would go this far to protect his son. My God, the man's going to be the next governor!”

  “The sentencing's on Friday morning,” McGee reminds us. I have to struggle to remember that today is Monday.

  They both leave to get dinner on their way back to the hotel soon after a nurse brings me a tasteless hunk of chicken with green beans and Jell-O. The doctor stops by to check the size of my pupils. He tells me that although I am basically just bruised, I have a concussion and they want to keep me in bed and awake to prevent me from slipping into a coma. I ask him what will be done if I do go into a coma. He shrugs and gives a long explanation that amounts to: not much.

  Despite the doctor's order that I remain overnight for observation, I resolve not to spend another minute there. Both the rubbery meal and the thought of Oso alone and worried in the truck gets me to my feet. I wince when I stand, and want to wince even as I breathe, but am able to slip the hospital gown off my shoulders. At the foot of the bed I find a plastic bag with my clothes neatly folded inside. The shirt smells vaguely of floor polish and shoe leather. I am able to slowly pull on my jeans and T-shirt but leave the sandals unstrapped. It hurts too much when I bend over.

  In the hallway outside there is a uniformed deputy reading the sports section. I'm relieved not to recognize him. He is large-boned but frail—too old for patrol duty. His face looks more like that of a retired farmer than a cop, with close-set, friendly eyes and an upturn to his lips that appears permanent. The fingers that grip the paper are nicotine-stained. An enormous and ancient revolver is strapped to his gun belt.

  “Hey, Agent,” he rasps, “you ain't supposed to be going nowhere.”

  “I'm not under arrest, am I?”

  The cop scratches his head. “Nope. You leaving?”

  “That's my plan.”

  “Mind if I call it in real quick? I'm supposed to keep an eye on you.”

  He says it innocently enough, as if he is there simply to protect me from a further attack by Sureno 13. And that might be all he has been told to do, but I look at him suspiciously, wondering if he too is some distant relation of Sheriff Willis or Nathan Karge. And it doesn't look like he would be much protection; even his gun looks as if it's on its last legs. I let it go. I'm more worried about my dog than whether and why the locals are watching me.

  “Not at all, Deputy. Actually, I could use a ride too. I need to go to the impound lot, where they've got my car. I don't know where I am.”

  NINETEEN

  OSO IS DELIGHTED to see me when I get my truck from the Sheriff's Impound Lot. He makes a strange sound in his throat, like an affectionate growl, and thumps his head into my chest when I open the door. I wince again and rub his flanks, feeling choked up by his obvious concern for me. And McGee's and Rebecca's and Kristi's. For the first time since the shooting in Cheyenne, I realize that people care about me. Oso explores the bruises on my face with his rough tongue. I take him back to the hotel to feed and water him.

  From among the crates of climbing gear in the back of my truck I find an old bottle of prescription pain pills. Codeine and Tylenol. I take three before going to sleep, another three in the middle of the night, and by morning I feel stronger but a little fuzzy. The shower still stings the places where my skin has been abraded.

  Sometime during the night the phone rang. I had ignored it, too sore and emotional and drugged to hold a conversation. Now I listen to the message that was left on the hotel's answering system. It was Lynn, who again sounded stoned. And angry.

  “Fuck you, Anton. Really, fuck you. I know you're there—I drove by and saw your truck in the lot. I just wanted to say thanks a lot for calling me after you balled me the other night.”

  “I didn't have the number until yesterday,” I say aloud to the telephone before erasing the message. I feel guilty and stupid. And not ready to call her back.

  After giving Oso an early-morning walk, I go into the hotel's coffee shop for breakfast. My damaged face causes every head in the nearly full café to turn to me. I pull a Denver Post and the Laramie Boomerang off a counter and find a table for four that is uninhabited although still full of stained coffee mugs and half-eaten meals. Pushing the mess aside, I sit and open the Post.

  “You're the DCI agent, right? The one that was assaulted yesterday at the courthouse?”

  I turn to see a middle-aged man in slacks and a polo shirt instead of the waiter I had hoped for.

  “I am, unfortunately.”

  He introduces himself and says he works for the Rocky Mountain News. Then he moves to sit down across from me, but I raise a hand and say, “Look, I'm not going to talk about it. Let me get some breakfast in peace.”

  The man hesitates. “I'd really like to ask you some questions.”

  “I'm sorry, friend, but I'm not going to answer them. Get the police report—it's all there. You can get it from the Sheriff's Office.” I turn back to the paper.

  “You should read the News, not that rag,” the man says before putting his card on top of my paper and walking off.

  Reporters approach me two more times before I am even able to place my order. Neither one of them is the Cheyenne Observer columnist whose nose I want to punch, which is fine with me because I don't feel strong enough to do the damage I intend. Between interruptions I skim the Post's “Denver and the West” section and see a brief blurb with Rebecca Hersh's byline. “State Agent Attacked in Laramie's Courthouse.” The article is only two paragraphs long, just five quick sentences, but in that short space she summarizes my beating by a group of juveniles and refers to my past history with the Sureno 13 gang
. I don't sound like much of a hero—just a state cop who's being sued by the families of three men he shot and who got his ass kicked by a mob of angry kids. It's accurate, but a little humiliating. It doesn't mention the role of the deputy sheriffs in failing to respond. In the local Laramie paper there is an even briefer article about the incident under the “Lights and Sirens” department.

  Just as the old dishes are carted away and my eggs and toast are delivered, Rebecca herself appears, distantly followed by McGee, who is leaning heavily on his cane. She looks good and fresh; the bruise on her forehead has already faded a little. Her hair is pulled back in a tangled ponytail. There isn't a trace of makeup on her face, but her cheeks are flushed as if she has been running. She wears a long-sleeved T-shirt and her lean legs are encased in Lycra running tights. A memory of Kate Danning's splayed body and tights flashes unbidden in my head.

  “Hi, Anton,” she says, sitting down at my table. “How are you feeling? And what are you doing out of the hospital?”

  “I feel like I've been run over by a train,” I tell her. “I checked out last night.”

  “I hope the doctor approved that,” she says doubtfully.

  I don't reply and she doesn't pursue it. Beyond her McGee is working his way through the reporters, with whom he appears surprisingly popular. They are hanging on his every rasped word, laughing.

  Rebecca looks around the café for the waiter. “Why's everyone giving me the stink-eye?” she asks after tentatively waving to some of her reporter friends and not receiving any response.

  “Because they've been trying to talk to me all through breakfast, and now I'm talking to you.”

  She smiles. “How come you're talking to me?”

  “You weren't polite enough to ask before sitting down.”

  She laughs and McGee finally arrives and also sits down unasked. He clutches three or four newspapers of his own. No wonder the reporters appear to like him; he makes a show of reading all their articles.