Trial by Ice and Fire

by Clinton McKinzie

  “Wokowski!” I shout into the night behind me. “Come up here.”

  I don't turn around but I can already hear him walking on the carpet of pine needles.

  “I thought you said you just wanted to talk,” Myron says to the wall.

  “We've talked. Now you're under arrest.”

  “You sure you've got enough?” Wokowski says from behind me.

  Reluctantly holstering my gun in the plastic clip on my belt, I run my hands around Myron's waistband and over his sides. Where the legs of his dirty jeans meet his boots, I point at the mud and look up over my shoulder at Wokowski. He's standing just behind me with his gun in his hand. I'm relieved to see that it's pointed down at his feet.

  He furrows his brow then nods in comprehension. But he doesn't look so sure. I pull Armalli's thin wrists behind him one at a time and cuff them together.

  “Let's take a look in there,” I tell Wokowski.

  “You c-c-can't,” Armalli stammers. He's shaking now. “You gotta have a warrant.”

  “This is government land, Myron. We can look wherever we want.” I check to see that the cuffs are ratcheted as tight as they'll go and jerk him around to face me. Instead of the bullet I'd like to give him, I shoot him through the head with the best glare I've got. But he won't meet it. He just stares at the ground.

  Wokowski looks as though he thinks I'm being hard on this madman barely out of his teens. But Wokowski hadn't been buried ten feet deep under all that snow. And he doesn't know what I'd been thinking of doing.

  “You remember me, don't you, Myron?” the sergeant says to him in a gentle voice. “We've got to take you to the police station for a little while. But I'll take care of you like I always do. Don't worry.”

  “Watch him,” I say to Wokowski. Then I step down into the hovel.

  In the harsh, hissing light of the propane lantern the red paint hurts my eyes. The first thing I see is a rifle propped just inside the door. It's a long-barreled 30.30 with a scope mounted on top. I sniff the muzzle and smell oil and old powder. There's no way to tell if it's been fired recently, this morning or a week ago. But I pick it up anyway and work the bolt. A single bullet pops out.

  I scan the rest of the tiny interior. The entire place is not much bigger than a king-size bed. The floor has been dug down almost three feet into the sandy and thickly rooted earth. It's covered with planks and other debris. There's an old army cot alongside the far wall, which is made of the ridge's stone. A square-shaped rock holds a backpacking stove—the same kind of WhisperLite I have in my gear room. To one side is a shelf with a variety of canned food stacked on it.

  What's even more arresting than the paint and the rifle are the pictures thumbtacked to the walls. All are of Cali. Most of them have been roughly cut out of magazines and show her from childhood to her teens. But some are also yellowed photographs taken from a distance. They show a contemporary Cali. Coming out of the courthouse, coming out of the front door of her house in town, and several that show her outside an enormous log mansion that must be her mother's. In several she's lying in the sun wearing only a small bikini. Some of the photographs and old magazine clippings have been defaced in an obscene way. CALI CALI CALI is scrawled in black paint. All caps, just like in the letters.

  I climb back out into the night. Wokowski is still talking gently to Myron but he looks at me. I wave my hand for him to take a look. He sticks his head in, the glow of the red paint making his face turn red. As he stands there looking without moving, his face grows redder still. He steps away from the doorway and slams shut the rickety door.

  In the darkness Myron looks at the cop then drops his eyes. Then he looks at me.

  “You've got quite a thing for Cali Morrow, don't you?” I ask him.

  Something happens behind his eyes when I say her name. There is a sudden pop of energy like a flashbulb going off. It's there and then it's gone in an instant. But for that split second my hand jerks a little toward my gun and my heart pumps faster.

  “I would never hurt her,” he whispers, looking down again quickly.

  “Sure. Just beat her up twice and avalanche me.”

  Myron remains motionless with his head hanging on his scrawny neck.

  “C'mon, Myron,” Wokowski says in a harder voice. “You're going to jail. You're either going to stay there for a while or you're going to the state hospital at Evanston.”

  It's done, I tell myself. Cali's safe. The thought that I could be terribly wrong never crosses my mind.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I FEEL WEIGHTLESS as I approach the table. Airless, too, as if I've lost the ability to breathe. My lungs just won't fill.

  The restaurant is called the Granary. It's attached to what is supposed to be the most expensive hotel in the western United States, the Amangani, which sits almost fifteen hundred feet directly above the town atop West Gros Ventre Butte. At $680 a night, I would feel out of place here even under normal circumstances—especially because of the bizarre “prosperous” native decor, something that hadn't become close to authentic until the advent of Indian casinos. With burrs clinging to my painter's jeans and duct tape wrapped around the toe of one shoe, what I feel now is beyond discomfort. It's more in the realm of nail-biting anxiety. But the alien economics of this place and its outlandish furnishings have nothing to do with it.

  The cause of my apprehension is unaware of my approach. She sits with her left shoulder to me, nodding gravely at something her father is saying to her from across the table. The curtains of her auburn hair are pulled back to expose smooth, pale skin and the sharp contours of her face. Tonight Rebecca looks young and vulnerable as well as a little exotic. Almost Asian because of the collarless black tunic she's wearing. It has Tibetan designs scrolled across the shoulders and down the open neck.

  Beyond her is an enormous plate-glass window. A ghostly image of this woman's profile is reflected in it. Through the image I can see a jagged tear of black on the northern horizon where the Teton masses blot out the stars. It looks as if half the night sky has been ripped away.

  “Speak of the devil,” McGee growls, the first to see me coming.

  Rebecca's father turns to look but doesn't smile at me. He simply nods at a fourth chair beside his daughter.

  Rebecca does smile, though. It's a small smile, strangely shy, but it still lights me up from the inside out. Suddenly I can draw a breath again. When I do, it pumps oxygen into my blood, plants my feet firmly on the ground, and brings her into brilliant focus. The rush I feel being on the receiving end of that smile is even better than adrenaline.

  I gradually become aware of the noises and odors of a busy restaurant as well as the table and empty chair before me. The plates have already been cleared and the coffee served. It had taken longer than expected to book Armalli into the jail—the psychopath was sane enough to want to call an attorney—so I'd missed the meal. It's no loss. I couldn't have eaten anyway. Not before I know how things stand.

  Rebecca pushes back her chair and steps toward me. I take her in my arms, my palms running over the bones in her back through her silk shirt as I pull her in. Her small breasts and narrow hips push against me with enough force that I want to groan her name out loud. I happily eat the pain that snarls up from my bruised ribs.

  She allows me to kiss her lips once, lightly, before she slips out of my grasp. “Hi, Ant.”

  “Stop groping my goddaughter, you pervert,” McGee orders. “You're going to make me vomit up . . . what was until now a fine meal.”

  “I'm really glad you invited my boss to join us,” I tell Rebecca, earning me another small smile but not the laugh I'd hoped for.

  It's only when the smile fades as she returns to her chair that I notice something different about her. A darkness beneath her eyes, and a single faint line on each side of her mouth. They're the first physical signs of her thirty years of age that I've ever noticed. Other than for those, she could still pass for under twenty. And for some reason these new features make my h
eart swell to a degree that's near bursting.

  Rebecca's father stands and leans across the table, holding out a hand to me. I feel even more underdressed as I note his expensive-looking brown sport coat and his crisp white shirt, and I'm glad the tablecloth hides my duct-taped shoe from his view. At least I'd remembered to put on the cashmere coat that had graced my truck since Saturday night.

  His face has a surprise in it, too: a coldness that I haven't seen there before. Even though he's never been exactly friendly—in many ways he was the typical overly protective father of an only daughter, one whose choice in lovers was something less than ideal—he'd always at least been gracious. I take the hand and receive a knuckle-grinding grip from this normally mild-mannered law professor.

  “How are you, Mr. Hersh? You've been working out, I think.” When he releases my fingers I shake them out in the air.

  “Sorry, Antonio,” he says with a quick, tight grin that looks a little bit embarrassed. “It's David. You've been calling me David since the day we met.”

  Before today he had appeared far more approachable. More familiar. It's his somber bearing that tonight had made me use his surname.

  I take the remaining chair beside Rebecca and facing my boss and her father. I wonder again why she'd brought him. She had never before seemed like the type who needed her father's support. In fact, she'd never even seemed all that close to him despite the fact that they live only a half hour apart. But then she'd never before acted so strangely.

  A thought strikes me like a punch to the stomach—could she be afraid of me?

  “Well? You get Armalli?” McGee asks.

  “Hooked and booked. Some good stuff for the evidence room, too,” I say, meaning the defaced photos and the rifle we'd dragged out of Myron's hut. I'm still looking at Rebecca's father, trying to find some hint to explain his presence and demeanor. I know McGee will provide no clues—he's ornery as ever.

  “It's good to see you again, David,” I tell Rebecca's father, cutting off McGee's interrogation. “Thanks for coming up with 'Becca.” And then I turn to Rebecca. “And I can't tell you how good it is to see you.”

  She smiles back but not enough. And she doesn't reply.

  McGee growls, “What about me?”

  “Fuck you, boss,” I say, stretching myself out all the way to try to lighten the mood.

  But it doesn't work. Only McGee chuckles. Rebecca and her father might not have even heard me—they're both looking out at the black void. I've never known her to be this quiet. Especially not when there's so obviously something to say. It's like there are strong currents in the air above the table, swirling around and among us all, but I can't get a fix on them. I can't read them at all. It's a foreign language that I can't even hear, much less understand. All I can do is feel it and worry.

  “How was the drive?” I ask, desperately hoping for even the tiniest bit of illumination.

  The professor gives Rebecca a few beats to answer and then responds in her place. “It was very nice, Antonio. Rebecca gave me a running commentary of your old haunts along the way. Let's see, there was Vedauwoo, the Snowy Range, Split Rock, the Wind River Range, and finally the Tetons. I'm sorry we came over the pass too late to really see the Tetons. I hear you consider them your old stomping grounds. But what you do up there, I have to admit, I don't quite understand. Ross was just telling us about how you spent a good part of this morning lying upside down beneath an avalanche.”

  I shoot McGee a malevolent look and try to decide how to answer. I'm starting to feel defensive, like I'm back up on the witness stand with a slick lawyer pretending to be my pal while he sharpens his knives. But maybe that's not what's going on. Maybe he is really trying to understand.

  “I went up there just to do a little skiing. The guy I arrested tonight caused the avalanche by shooting off a gun. It was, uh, unforeseeable.” It sounds lame to my own ears.

  “But why go up there in the first place? What's this fixation you have with doing dangerous sports in those mountains?”

  An old saying about climbing pops into my head: If you have to ask the question, you won't understand the answer. Instead I say, “My father took my brother and me on our first big climbs here in the Tetons. The place was kind of a playground for us.” In the days before Roberto got out of control and found both the needle and higher peaks, I don't add. And in the days before I killed three men in a blaze of not glory but suspicion and condemnation.

  A waitress comes by filling cups and I request some coffee, too. McGee asks for amaretto in his.

  “But it's really Vedauwoo that's my favorite place,” I babble on, intentionally not answering his question. “It's where we learned to climb when Dad was stationed at Warren. I don't get back there much anymore.” It's too close to Cheyenne and too full of recent bad memories. I quickly add, “It wasn't until we were a little older—in our teens—that he started bringing us up here.”

  “I should hope so. But tell me, Anton—I'm really trying to understand—what draws you up there? Why do you feel the need to climb mountains?”

  McGee says something rude about limited intelligence but I ig-nore him.

  There's no way I can explain it without putting Rebecca's father in a harness. It would be like a believer trying to explain to an atheist why there is a God. I find myself looking to Rebecca to answer for me. One layperson could probably better describe it to another, and Rebecca had at least tasted it even if she hadn't swallowed.

  “It's like a drug. Cheating death,” she says, speaking her first words since saying my name.

  “It's more than that,” I protest. “It's not dangerous at all if you're careful and you know what you're doing. But there's the illusion of danger even when you're roped and belayed. You still get the chemical rush that fear brings on. And that feels like when you have a close call in your car . . . when you nearly head-on a car going the other way on the highway or something like that. You pull over and you feel so totally focused, so alive.” Stop babbling, Ant.

  “I'm very frightened when that happens,” her father says. “I don't find it exciting at all, and I don't ever want to feel that way again.”

  “Anton's not being entirely honest, Dad. A lot of the time he doesn't wear a rope. Both figuratively and literally.” Rebecca doesn't look at me as she says it. And I can't help but be struck again by how much smarter she is than me, how much more insightful.

  I feel as if I've walked into a trap and I frantically try to think of a way to extricate myself. Then I'm saved, but not in a way that brings any shelter. McGee, Rebecca, and her father are all looking up somewhere above my head.

  “Anton?” a voice asks. It's Cali's.

  My name hangs there in the air over our heads. Alarm bells clang inside my chest.

  I stand up too fast and bump the table with my thighs, causing the coffee to slosh.

  “Cali. What are you doing here?” I'd called her from the Sheriff's Office to tell her that she was safe, that we had Armalli in custody. I'd called Jim, too, to let him know he no longer needed to be looking out for her and could go back to his plane. “This is my girlfriend, Rebecca Hersh. And her father, David. You already know Ross McGee.”

  To Rebecca and her father I add, “Cali is a prosecutor here in Teton County. I've been working with her on the arrest I made tonight.”

  Both Rebecca and her father stand and shake Cali's hand. A look passes between Cali and Rebecca, their eyes connecting for a fraction of a second too long. It isn't anything threatening—it's more like they are asking each other telepathic questions. Questions that are far more dangerous than the ones I've already been wrestling with.

  “I've heard a lot about you,” Cali tells Rebecca. “Anton talks about you quite a bit.”

  To me she says, “Excuse me, but can I talk to you for just a minute?”

  I excuse myself, trying to look at Rebecca as I do with something resembling calm and assuredness, and follow Cali to an alcove near the restaurant's front door.
>
  “Jesus, Cali. You could have called me on my cell.”

  She gives me a small, pitying smile. “Yeah. But I wanted to see her for myself. You know, scope out the competition.”

  I shake my head at her then ask, “What's up?”

  “Nothing. I only wanted to ask you if you're absolutely sure this Armalli's the guy. See, Wook called a little while ago and asked if I'd have lunch with him tomorrow.”

  Wokowski's not wasting any time.

  “He said he wanted to take me on a picnic tomorrow, and something about how he wants to explain to me what's been going on. You know, beating up my defendant and all. By the way, he denies throwing him down the stairs.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, now that you have Armalli in custody, do you think I should go?”

  I think of the thin gold ring with the tiny diamond on it. “That's up to you. But Armalli's definitely the guy. He had pictures of you all over the inside of this hut he lives in. A gun, too. Wokowski's in the clear as far as that goes, and I think he might be in the clear about the beating. Morally, at least. Maybe not legally, but that's his problem. Anyway, yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with you hearing him out.”

  Cali nods distractedly. She's looking past me at Rebecca again. I don't turn around to see if Rebecca is looking back.

  “You okay?” I ask in a softer voice.

  “Yeah. You sure you . . .”

  “What?”

  She looks up at me then away. “Never mind.”

  “I need to go back to the table now. I'm sorry. But this is important.” But while I'm anxious to get back to Rebecca, I'm not eager to have the odd interrogation by her father resume.

  Cali nods again and keeps staring past me. “She's beautiful, Anton. Really beautiful. And nice, too. I don't know that I'd be so polite. So don't be an idiot. Don't let her get away. I don't think you know what you've got there.”