Badwater

by Clinton McKinzie

I remember thinking that the car couldn’t possibly be Smit’s—no red-blooded Wyoming male would own such a car, particularly not a tattooed and bearded giant whose principal interest in life seemed to be intimidating others. Maybe it was his girlfriend’s, or maybe it had been borrowed or stolen. The fact that they were coming at me in such an incongruous car was as alarming as the speed at which they were moving. They must be planning something bad. They must mean me real harm.

  I didn’t have time to think about how stupid I was for having allowed them to follow me unnoticed. There was only a millisecond in which to react. The Pig was parked lengthwise between stout pines and the road, and it would take too long to get around it. Or even to make a dive over the hood. All I could do was press into the Pig’s side and duck as the two-by-four came swinging at my head.

  I almost didn’t duck low enough. I felt the wind in my hair as the piece of wood passed over my head. My shoulder actually bumped the door of the throbbing Chevette as it tore by. There was a cowboy whoop, then a sound like a batter hitting a home run. As I turned to look after the little car and felt its wind and exhaust, I saw my side mirror sailing up into the blue sky. It was a damned good thing I’d already rolled up the windows, otherwise Mungo’s head would have been in the line of fire.

  I was too startled and too mad to do the sensible thing and get in the Pig and go after them. Or, even more sensibly, just call it in to the sheriff and have the trio picked up. Instead I started running after the Chevette as it bounced down the rutted road. For some reason, just as I started to run, I threw open the Pig’s door, too, letting Mungo out.

  She might have thought it was a race, or more likely, due to the rumbling coming from her throat that was audible even over the sound of the high-revved engine, she was even more pissed at the Mann brothers than I was. Within a few paces she was outdistancing me.

  Through the rising cloud of dust, I saw the Chevette brake just before a turn in the road and start sliding sideways. I finally should have had reason to begin to doubt my choice of actions. They were executing a bootlegger’s turn, preparing to come back at us. But I kept running toward them. My blood was up. I’d had enough. And I was only barely aware that my gun was in my hand.

  Where was Antonio Burns, the good cop? In action, when you’re relying on nothing but gut instincts, is when you reveal yourself. I could have easily slipped into the woods and called for the sheriff. Instead, I wanted a confrontation. I needed one.

  The Chevette was facing us now, still sliding, but twin plumes of dirt were rising off the back tires as it tried to get forward traction.

  “Mungo!” I shouted as I slowed, and the gun in my hand came up. She was still loping down the center of the road, intent on taking on the car directly. From her point of view, it probably wasn’t much bigger than a yearling buffalo, a creature her ancestors had been tackling for millennia.

  Someone in the car gave another cowboy hoot.

  As I tried to take aim on the windshield over the back of my low-flying wolf-dog, something far bigger than the Chevette appeared from around the corner just behind it. The new object was lime green and moving fast—fast enough to actually plow right into the back of the Chevette with a metal-crumpling, window-shattering crash.

  The forest-service pickup never even slowed before hitting the Chevette. The corner it was coming around was blind and the driver was going too fast. The Chevette, which had still been trying to gain purchase on the dirt with its skinny tires in order to come after me again, was shoved into the trunks of stout lodgepole pines, where it collapsed like an accordion. Even if it was still drivable, the forest-service truck held it pinned.

  “Mungo!” I yelled again.

  This time she veered away, spooked by the truck’s sudden appearance and the resulting crash.

  “Load up!” I shouted.

  She reluctantly turned and passed me on the way back to the Pig.

  I approached cautiously. The forest-service worker was getting out of the truck, rubbing his shoulder. Nobody was getting out of the Chevette. It seemed so small and crushed that I wondered if the men inside were dead. But I thought I could see some movement.

  “Don’t shoot,” the ranger called, thinking, I supposed, that I was stalking toward him.

  “I’m a cop. The guys in the car just tried to run me over. Use your radio and call the sheriff in Badwater.”

  The ranger jumped back in his cab.

  A groan came out of the Chevette. Then a curse. I could see inside an open window now, and it wasn’t pretty. The front seat was a tangle of blood, limbs, and glass. Bad guys don’t wear seat belts, so I was expecting it. The limbs were moving, though, and I heard more curses, growing louder. At least someone was still alive. Looking in, I began to sense some order in the mess.

  Smit’s head was in Zach’s lap, twisted and looking up at me. Zach was folded over him, but Smit’s bloody face was exposed. Ned, who had been in the tiny backseat, was sprawled on top of both of them. Smit snarled something unkind, which made me laugh. All things considered, for a moment I suddenly felt pretty good.

  I smiled at them from behind the sights of my automatic.

  “Hey, guys. You having fun yet?”

  It took most of the afternoon to see the twins and Smit carted off to the hospital, write the reports, and finally arrange to have the trio booked into the jail. Amazingly, not one of them was seriously injured. Zach had broken his collarbone, Ned one wrist, and Smit just his nose. There were numerous contusions and lacerations covering all three, of course, but the hospital was willing to discharge all of them after a few hours, so the deputies transported them down to the basement jail. My report accused them of attempted assault on a peace officer and more minor charges such as careless driving. Smit, at least, with his lengthy adult record, would not be getting out of jail again anytime soon.

  Less fun was the brief run-in I had with one of the paramedics who responded to the scene, Jo Richards. She scorched me with evil looks and muttered insults every time I came into her view.

  At one point I worked up the courage to approach her and say, “Hi, Jo. It’s good to see you. I’m sorry I haven’t had time to call yet, but as you can see, things have been pretty busy—”

  I meant it, too. She looked good in her jumpsuit, sober and professional except for the muttering. I’d been without a woman for way too long.

  She interrupted me, saying, “Get away from me, you lying son of a bitch. You’re going to have to do a lot more than just call if you think I’ll ever go out with you.”

  It would turn out that placating her would require more time and energy than I had to offer. My day wasn’t over.

  I was in for another surprise that afternoon when I returned to camp. In a way, it was even less pleasant than being accosted by three steroid junkies in a Chevette.

  Mungo and I bounced up the canyon trail late in the afternoon. I was eager to get up on Moriah, and I suppose she was eager to eat again. But just as we began the final climb up the steep hillside to the camp, I had to hit the brakes.

  There was a vehicle already there.

  A big white van was parked next to my tent. It had Colorado handicapped plates and a bumper sticker reading “Bad Cop—No Donut,” which, of course, had been put there for my benefit.

  “’Berto,” I muttered. “Shit.”

  Clearly pleased with himself for having found me, he was sitting beside a small campfire with his canes laid across his legs. He was clearly stoned, too. I could see it in the width of his grin and the broadness of his wave.

  Mungo was happy to see him. She ran to him and nearly bowled him over in the leaves. Between them, it had been love at first sight. She seemed to view him as the leader of the pack, something that hadn’t changed even after Roberto got hurt. In her eyes he was still the alpha male. It had always made me a little jealous, but Mungo probably sensed that I looked up to my big brother despite all his faults, and he was as much a wild animal as she was. Maybe even more so.
r />   “Eh, eh, chica,” he was saying in his soft voice as she danced around him. “Cool it now.”

  He snagged her by the scruff of her neck and threw her onto her back. It was an impressive feat, done one-armed with a 120-pound resisting wolf-dog, especially from a seated man with little or no leverage coming from his legs. And it was meant to be. Looking up at me, he held her that way, rubbing her chest, while she squirmed and whined with pleasure.

  “A couple of hours ago you were about to take on one thousand pounds of steel. Now you’re acting like a sissy,” I told her. But she didn’t care.

  “You up for a little climbing, che?” Roberto asked.

  I looked at him. Skinny legs, massive arms, dented skull, scarred throat, and fused spine. I felt the sickness coming over me. The glacial-blue eyes were bright, though, even if the pupils were just tiny black pinpricks. I wondered just how stoned he was. But the need—the hunger—in his face was glaring. I couldn’t deny him.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “I think I am.”

  He was a free spirit. He’d always made his own decisions, even if they were consistently to his detriment. It wasn’t failure or a fall that would finally crush him: it was me telling him what he could and couldn’t do.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  His legs would support only a very little weight, so he had to essentially climb the vertical pitch all the way up to the cave with just his arms. One-armed pull-ups, really, off flared hand jams, over and over again for more than a hundred feet. Even Roberto, with his massive arm strength and his former technical abilities, was barely able to pull it off. But he raised his head to gently chide me every time I tried to lift some of his weight with the rope. Still, he was wringing wet with sweat and blowing hard when he finally pulled himself over the edge and into the cave.

  I didn’t say a word. And I didn’t dare look directly at him.

  My brother settled in next to me, legs swinging in the void, while his breathing slowed. I stared at the cliff across the canyon and the festively colored aspens below.

  Finally he said, “You might’ve picked something a little easier for my first time back, bro. What was that, 5.10?”

  His tone was light, his complaint mocking. A laugh burst out of me.

  “First time? I heard about the Great Stupa. What did it go at?”

  He started laughing, too.

  “Oh, I don’t know—5.7, maybe. With twenty feet of bouldery overhang at the start. But it seems a lot harder when there’s a bunch of monks in saffron robes swinging brooms and trying to knock you off.”

  We talked and laughed for a while. I was so relieved, I couldn’t shut up. I showed him Moriah, which gaped just over our heads, and he whistled in appreciation and even tried to get up in the crack. But with legs that didn’t work very well, even Roberto couldn’t do more than hang in it for a minute. He also gave me a professional confirmation that if it went, it would be the hardest wide crack in the world.

  Still on my talking jag, I told him all about what I was doing up here other than Moriah. I told him all about Jonah, the river, and the prosecutor’s and town’s planned semilegal lynching. Roberto listened intently. He might have been stoned and borderline psychotic, but he certainly wasn’t dumb. When I told him about my sympathy for Jonah and what he’d done, Roberto saw the obvious parallel. He knew I was really talking about his accident and how I blamed myself and my overblown ego for having put him there.

  Later, after the sun went down, we rappelled out of the cave and down to the ground where Mungo waited.

  “You start dinner,” he told me. “I’m going to take a little walk and howl at the moon.”

  I knew what that meant. That he was going to get high. Higher.

  I wanted to tell him not to go, not to ruin it. But who was I, a drug-enforcement agent with my own stash in the back of my truck, to tell him what to do? Before I could even sort it out in my own head, my phone started making its electronic chime. Roberto hobbled away as I picked it up.

  “What the hell are you trying to do?” Luke demanded. “Make sure I lose the election?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The goddamn Mann boys. What were you thinking, hooking them up? Don’t you know that their pa can swing the entire cowboy constituency? And their uncle everyone else?”

  “They tried to kill me, Luke. Took a swing at my head that would have taken it off if I hadn’t ducked.”

  “Shit. That’s no big deal. I’ve wanted to do the same thing myself a couple of times recently.”

  “Fuck you, Luke. It’s assault on a peace officer.”

  “We’ll see about that. I already got the twins bonded out, at least. But Ed Mann was not at all happy. You’ll be pleased to know Smit’s staying inside. There’s no way I can cut him loose, not with his record. But he didn’t seem too upset about it, since Jonah Strasburg’s been transferred back over from Park County.” Sniggering, he added, “I gather Smit was pretty pleased to see him. Now, you be on time for the hearing tomorrow. You’re going to be the star witness, QuickDraw. You’d better do a good job—I hear you’re awfully close to getting kicked out of DCI.”

  When Roberto staggered back from “howling at the moon,” I was waiting for him.

  “Hey, ’Berto. Will you do something for me?”

  “I’d do anything for you, che. You know that.”

  That was true. Just looking at his wrecked body, you could see how true it was.

  I swallowed hard, then asked, “Then how about going to jail for a week or two?”

  So I made my fourth arrest of the day. I handcuffed my brother and took him to the Colter County Jail.

  twenty-five

  The evidentiary suppression hearing went about like you would expect. The defense filed every bullshit motion imaginable and asserted that every bit of evidence was tainted. There was no reasonable suspicion of a crime for the officers to detain the defendant on. There was no probable cause to arrest him. Any and all incriminating statements I said he’d made were fabrications I made up to implicate him. And, in the alternative, if they weren’t lies, then they were involuntary. They alleged that I’d intimidated and beaten Jonah for the confession he’d told me on the beach, that I’d tortured him later in the interrogation room, and that I’d ordered him further tortured in the jail. They argued, too, that the town was only prosecuting Jonah in order to alleviate its own grief at a local boy’s death in an accident the boy himself had instigated. This resulted in some outraged shouts from the gallery. The judge had to have several people removed.

  They argued all these motions with a straight face, too. And they brought up every rumor and piece of dirt they could about me during cross-examination in order to impeach my credibility. Especially Cheyenne. Sustaining Luke’s repeated objections, the judge wouldn’t let them question me about it at the hearing, but he did allow them to make their argument in open court—in front of the spectators and the media—that I was beyond unreliable, that the state had settled a lawsuit with the families of the gangbangers I’d killed three years ago for an undisclosed sum, the obvious implication being that I was a murderer being protected by the state’s chief law-enforcement agency.

  Not only that, but they wrapped the whole thing in a pretty package, too. Brandy Walsh in her elegant chocolate-brown suit did the honors.

  So I wasn’t in a particularly good mood as I sat in the idling truck just a block from the scene of my annihilation. Bogey was holding forth for his pet press corps—there were a lot more of them now—and posing for pictures on the courthouse steps. His wish for increased media coverage seemed to be coming true. Some townspeople were watching in groups, fanning the flames by occasionally yelling at him and giving outraged interviews. An impromptu protest by angry Badwater residents was forming. Early in the summer, after I’d arrested Jonah, I’d been worried that he might be lynched. I couldn’t care less, though, if the mob decided to go after Bogey or Brandy.

  Adding to my discomfort was th
e fact that I hadn’t heard anything from Roberto. I couldn’t exactly go down to the jail and talk to him, as I’d booked him under a fake name, claiming I’d found him staggering on the highway with a small amount of heroin in his possession. Thanks to Colter County’s antiquated computer system, the fingerprints wouldn’t reveal his true identity for weeks. The part about the heroin was true, though. Now I just had to wait until he either called me or I picked up some gossip from Luke or the deputies about things in the jail. I was seriously regretting my decision to put him in there. Roberto wasn’t a superman. Not anymore. How was a cripple like him supposed to protect Jonah from a monster like Smit?

  It was tempting to pull him out. All I had to do was go down, interview him, then claim he’d agreed to act as an informant. I could have him out in an hour. . . .

  I noticed my personal executioner slipping away from the crowd in front of the courthouse. She was walking quickly, presumably back to her own car, when I let the Pig creak up beside her. Mungo—who seemed to feel my pain—was glaring balefully out the window.

  “Get in.”

  She looked over with surprise, then suspicion.

  “We need to talk,” I told her. “In private.”

  She still just stared at me.

  “Get in, damn it. As much as I might like to, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  She seemed to consider, frowning, then looked up and down the street. She waved to someone, but I think she was faking it. She just wanted me to think someone was watching her in case something happened.

  She climbed in and placed her briefcase demurely on her lap. She didn’t look at me. I pressed the accelerator and began working through the gears.

  “We need to talk about Jonah,” I said.

  No response.

  “The way you guys are making this town look in the media, I sure as hell hope you plan on filing for a change of venue. Otherwise, they’re going to hang your client just because of the way you’re talking about the people here.”

  She finally turned and examined me. Her nose seemed to be faintly wrinkled. It was not a look a man wants to see on the face of a beautiful woman observing him. Mungo protectively placed her huge paws on the armrests and thrust her head and shoulders between the seats. Brandy pressed herself against the door, leaning away as far as possible. Good dog, I thought. I hoped the lawyer’s suit would be covered with gray hair by the time I let her out.