The Edge of Justice

by Clinton McKinzie

  By the time he pulls over a small roof and disappears from sight, I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever be able to have children of my own. My harness's crotch loop feels as if it's attempting to sterilize me with a cutting pressure. With great relief I hear his deep voice call out, “Off belay!” There are two sharp tugs on the rope.

  “Nice work, Colonel,” I shout up into the sky. “You've still got it!”

  I feel another two tugs on the rope, signaling that he's anchored and it's my turn to be belayed. I disassemble the anchor, wipe my sweaty hands on my shorts, dip them in the pouch of chalk that hangs just below my butt, and ease onto the hot rock.

  After pulling over the short, difficult roof, I find my father comfortably belaying me from a wide ledge. He sits with his back propped by the sandstone wall and his legs spread before him. He's removed his shoes; his bare feet and ankles protrude off the edge and into space. His eyes are half-closed against the sunlight. I step to the anchor he's built out of two hexes stuffed deep in a constricting crack and clip a bight of rope to the carabiners connecting them. I shake the anchor a little and try to make another joke.

  “Jesus, Dad, whatever happened to not trusting just two pieces? Remember the way you used to yell at 'Berto and me for that?”

  His eyes remain half-closed but I can sense a sudden heat in them. Even his bald, sun-freckled scalp turns a little pink at the mention of my brother's name. For a moment I want to stuff a stinking climbing slipper in my mouth, thinking I've spoken the name too soon. But then I remind myself that Roberto is the reason we're here. The primary reason, anyway. This trip is supposed to be an intervention with Roberto, my drug-addicted brother, as well as a holiday in which our father can relive his glory days and say goodbye to a remote piece of Colorado that's soon slated to become a part of a massive ski resort. Roberto will arrive this afternoon or maybe the next day, and it's time for Dad and me to get some things out in the open.

  So I slump down next to my father. I offer him the bottle of warm water that I've carried dangling from my harness. He speaks first, and I suppose he's trying to head me off from the direction he must know I'm traveling.

  He asks without looking at me, “So, how are you liking this cop stuff?”

  His tone sounds vaguely condescending, as it does every time I see him and he asks this same question. He has to know the response this will provoke from me.

  And I can't resist falling into the trap. “I'm not really a cop, Dad. I'm an agent,” I explain as I always do. I try to keep the annoyance and defensiveness out of my voice. “I don't wear a uniform, I don't write speeding tickets, and I don't eat donuts. I investigate drug crimes—mostly meth—and that's it. Anyway, I like it. I run my own ops and I make my own hours.”

  This last part is something I add in a juvenile attempt to make my father appreciate my job. His dead-ending career is as an Air Force officer in command of an elite Special Forces unit known as the Pararescue Corps, or PJs. Being harnessed to a rigid chain of command, he never runs his own ops or makes his own hours. And he seldom takes a leave that isn't interrupted. We've had this discussion a hundred times.

  With a self-deprecating smile, I add, “And I get to take vacations like this whenever I manage to get myself suspended.”

  That almost makes Dad chuckle. I can see the lines around his mouth deepen for just an instant. I've been suspended twice in my three years as a special narcotics agent for Wyoming's Division of Criminal Investigations, a part of the state Attorney General's Office. The first time had been the result of an officer-involved shooting. Any time a law enforcement officer is forced by circumstances to pull a trigger, especially if he or she manages to put a bullet in someone, there is a mandatory period of suspension during which the shooting is investigated by the office's version of Internal Affairs and ruled either justifiable or not. These bureaucratic inquiries take a long, long time. During the investigation the officer is supposed to seek counseling in order to alleviate the guilt and grief of having shot some scumbag who'd been trying to kill him. I hadn't felt the need for any counseling, but then I didn't kill anyone. I just winged the bastard. And the only thing I felt even a little guilty about was my lousy aim and the terrific amount of climbing I'd gotten in during the prolonged period of suspension-with-pay.

  My current suspension is for three months without pay. It's part of a negotiated plea agreement to avoid having criminal charges pressed against me for assaulting a fellow peace officer. The charges would have embarrassed both my office and the local sheriff's department the so-called “victim” was a member of. I've accepted three months without pay, an official reprimand, and been forced to make a half-assed apology. Kind of like with the prior suspension, the only guilt I feel is for not having hit the deputy harder.

  Instead of continuing our usual subtle but tense banter in which my father will attempt to degrade my career choice and voice his preference for something more “professional,” I'm surprised when he tries a new tack, mentioning Roberto for the first time himself.

  “Do your bosses know about your brother, Agent Burns?”

  “They know I've got one, but they don't know about any of the trouble. It probably wouldn't do my career much good if they found out.”

  This is something my father knows about firsthand. Just a few years ago he'd been on the verge of becoming one of the youngest generals in the Air Force. Then the crimes of his eldest son had come to the attention of the military. Dad ended up being denied further advancement. You don't become a general, the ultimate leader of men, when you've sired a felon. Fortunately for me, though, the Wyoming AG's Office doesn't concern itself much with background checks on family members prior to promotion. I make a mental note to mention this additional benefit the next time we argue on the career subject, but don't want to bring it up now that we're finally talking about Roberto.

  “Do you know what he's using these days?”

  “Not for sure. He's banging—injecting—I know that much.”

  My father nods. Even in magazine photographs, the tracks of scabby pinpricks on my brother's arms are hard to miss.

  “So that leads me to guess it's either crank or heroin,” I say. After a moment I add quietly, “There's not much out there that's worse, Dad. At least we don't have to worry anymore about him turning to harder drugs.”

  My father doesn't say anything for a while. He just takes a few short pulls from my water bottle and stares up the canyon.

  The ledge is narrow where I'm slumped next to him. My feet and calves dangle over more than two hundred feet of space. I lean over and look down for the large black shape of my dog. Oso lies under the shade of a green-leafed cottonwood, staring straight up at us with his red tongue parting sharp, white teeth. The dog is the cause of my current suspension—the deputy I supposedly assaulted had been trying to spear him with a shovel. I wave my hand at him and see the ears twitch forward.

  Taking back the water bottle from my father, I notice that one of his thick fists still holds the rope locked tight through his belay device.

  “By the way, Dad, I tied in. I'm off belay.”

  He nods. “Waiting for you to say it, son. Belay off,” Finally he releases his grip. I'm annoyed and embarrassed. I've violated one of his cardinal rules by failing to announce my status, but at least he's too preoccupied to comment further.

  “Do you have a strategy for dealing with your brother when or if he shows up?” he asks.

  I take a deep breath. This is something I've been thinking about for weeks, ever since my suspension and the news about the pending development of Wild Fire Valley as a part of a Forest Service land swap. I'd convinced my father to fly in from the Pentagon to meet Roberto and me for a last climb here together—and an attempt to save my brother's life. Despite a lot of mental effort, I'm still uncertain what our plan should be. A hard-core user like Roberto needs confinement and careful medication, something he's not likely to submit to voluntarily. One thing I know for sure is that my father's u
nconcealed animosity, born out of the impending termination of his career, won't help things. Nor will my own distaste for the hard drugs I've devoted my professional life to combating. Persuading Roberto to swerve away from the path of self-destruction he's speeding down won't be easy, and there's no place in any strategy for anger and recrimination.

  Climbing has always been the Burns family's first drug of choice. La llamada del salvaje, as my mother describes it. The call of the wild. According to her it's a sort of genetic flaw on my father's side that has descended to Roberto and me. It's a hunger we learned to feed by getting lethal amounts of air beneath our heels. The fear you feel free-climbing, hundreds or thousands of feet off the deck, and with just a skinny rope as backup, is like an illicit substance—once ingested it makes the sweet stuff called noradrenaline just ooze out from the adrenal glands. It blows through all the panic that comes from deadly heights, replacing it with a tingly sensation. Ecstasy. Exaltation. Rapture. The negative side effect is that it's a little harder to replicate that feeling after each session. You have to push it a little further. Dad and I have learned to control our addiction—we've learned that there's pleasure in just crawling up into the heights without needing to lay it all on the line for that hormonal surge. Roberto hasn't.

  He reached for something even stronger. Starting in his early twenties he turned to pharmaceuticals to pump up the volume. He began with pot, mushrooms, and acid, then moved on to methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin. He was chasing the dragon, looking for a better and louder amp. On the frequent climbing trips we used to take together in my college days, he would sometimes offer me some. I'd never been interested. Even then, before having really seen the damage those drugs could do, I preferred a natural high, although I had occasionally smoked marijuana with him in my teenage years (something I still consider no more dangerous than beer). Roberto once told me he'd discovered that cocaine mixed with heroin—a speedball—could push him beyond climbing's natural rush. It could take him places far further than the thrill of fighting ordinary gravity.

  “It's just an ice cream habit,” he'd explained when I'd given him a hard time about the hard drugs. “I got it under control, bro.”

  Right.

  But it isn't just the drugs, although they've become the center of Roberto's life. It's the way he interacts with people, the way he thinks, even the way he climbs. Roberto has become addicted to living on the very edge. If he isn't climbing, he's slamming a needle deep into a vein. If he isn't surrounded by the circle of fast-living friends who worship him as the fastest of them all, then he's brawling with anyone he perceives as having done something unjust. And if he isn't utterly free, then he's caged in a county jail somewhere. Recently there had even been a brief stint in a federal prison. Roberto has happily danced so far out on the edge and for so long that it's a miracle the void hasn't yet sucked him in.

  Do I really believe we can change that? It would require almost a repolarization of my brother's soul. I know, even now, that this is simply a last hurrah before the odds catch up with him. There's no chance in hell he'll ever become an ordinary citizen, responsible with his life and his future, and constrained by the rules that civilization demands.

  So I say to my father, “No strategy, Dad. Just show him that we love him, that if he keeps this up we'll be the ones who suffer.”

  My father shakes his head and uncharacteristically expresses some emotion in his voice while looking at the red and gold stone of the canyon's opposite wall. “Shit, Anton, it'd be hard to suffer much more. It'd be a relief if he were dead.”

  You'd think a son would be shocked to hear his father talk about his brother like that. But I'm not. In my darkest moments I often think the same thing. I'm tired of waiting for the telephone to ring late in the night; waiting for the quiet voice of some Colorado police officer to tell me that my brother's dead.

  There isn't much more to say than that.

  I close my eyes and recall a scene from this morning, just a few hours ago, when my father and I sped on the highway out of the seemingly endless suburbs of Tomichi in the predawn blackness, on our way to the valley. I'd been glancing over at my father's deeply lined face while we talked, noticing how old it looked in the glow of the dashboard's light. His mouth opened suddenly. His eyes narrowed. I snapped my own eyes forward to the road. A big coyote was braced facing us in the middle of the lane. His eyes burned with green fire in the reflected heat of the headlights. The silver-tipped ruff of fur around his neck and shoulders was standing straight up. I swung the wheel hard to the left, onto the wrong side of the road, mashing the brake and throwing my big dog in the backseat across the truck. The coyote never even flinched.

  That coyote was just like Roberto. Totally defiant in the face of law and civilization, even when it's coming at him seventy miles per hour in the form of three thousand pounds of rusty Japanese steel. Utterly audacious, reckless, and not long for this world. But beautiful all the same.

  I realize that my brother's luck must soon run out, that the world won't swerve away much longer. And that Roberto's nuclear-powered élan combined with whatever sort of shit he likes to spike in his veins will vastly magnify the force of the inevitable collision. What I don't yet realize is just how many lives are about to be lost in the crash.

  Opening my eyes to the blue sky, I take up the sling of gear my father has laid between us. Without a word I add the pieces from the anchor I'd pulled below and slip it clanking over my head and one shoulder. Standing, I arch my neck upward and try to plot the course that will take me another rope length into the sky. My skin touches the warm, rough rock as I slide my fingers over the lip of a small contour above my head. The familiar texture of it for the first time in my life fails to give me a small thrill. For a moment I'm caught off balance, experiencing a sense of vertigo and dread I've never experienced before. This is a mistake, I tell myself, as I will the web of well-conditioned muscles in my forearms to grip with my fingers and hold me on the ledge. Something bad is going to happen. A cold sweat seeps out of my skin. I glance at my father and see him looking back curiously. Concerned.

  “Locked and loaded?” I ask, trying to reassure myself with the start of the short litany he'd drilled into Roberto and me as children. We examine the harness buckles and knots at each other's waist.

  “Tight and right,” Dad responds, his voice puzzled.

  “On belay?”

  “Belay on.”

  “Climbing.”

  THE EDGE OF JUSTICE

  A Dell Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Delacorte hardcover edition published June 2002

  Dell mass market edition / April 2003

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2002 by Clinton McKinzie

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001052942

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

  Visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

  Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33412-5

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