Trial by Ice and Fire

by Clinton McKinzie

  “I asked you a question, Sergeant. Where were you when it happened?”

  He stares at me for a long time through his bloodshot eyes. I can feel him willing me into the ring that's in one corner of the basement, where yellow tape reading “Police Line—Do Not Cross” is strung between four posts around a moldy gray mat. There's little doubt his superior size and strength would prevail there, but I want it as bad as he does. I'm willing to take the chance, willing to cheap-shot him with a sharp elbow or knee to even the odds a little. It's only the need to know that keeps me from walking over and ducking under the tape.

  Wokowski rips the gloves off his hands and throws them down at my feet. He takes several deep breaths.

  “Patrolling in the valley, okay? I heard the alarm call go out on the radio. I drove there as fast as I could. I got there ten minutes after the city guys. I'm the one who took her to St. John's. So either you believe me or you can get your skinny Mexican ass in the ring.”

  No one's this good an actor. Not even a professional like Alana Reese and especially not Danny Gorgon. Wokowski would have to be either completely innocent or totally insane to be able to pull off the look of righteous fury on his face.

  “Then who was it?”

  “I don't know,” he says, punctuating the last word with a pivot and a bare-handed blast at the bag. When he spins back to me I notice that his knuckles are starting to bleed.

  “I'm going to find him. Then I'm going to take him apart.”

  Wokowski nods. “You do that. I'll be right behind you.”

  We stand looking at each other for a minute longer. The fury seems to slowly drain out of him. His lips start quivering, almost like the big man might be about to cry. I turn away from him and walk over to a vacant bench press. I sit on it and rub my aching temples with the heels of my hands. I can tell by the smell of Wokowski's sweat that he follows me.

  When I open my eyes and look up, he's standing over me.

  “I know what everyone's saying, Burns. And they're full of shit. If they weren't, I'd be the first one coming after you. You know that. So listen: There was nothing you could do. We both thought she was safe, with Myron locked up.”

  What he says causes an even stronger reaction in me. Especially since it's coming from the man who'd been my enemy twenty-four hours ago. Sympathy and pity are hard enough to take from a friend. From him, it's almost too much to bear.

  My cell phone starts playing that stupid song as I walk out of the Sheriff's Office. Rebecca, I think, feeling a tiny bit of hope and a lot of dread—What will I say? What can I do?

  But the text on the flashing screen tells me that the caller is the Assistant Attorney General himself. A well-dressed, weasel-faced man, he's McGee's boss, the office's number two man, its designated executioner, and also, not surprisingly, a guy who happens to be a complete prick. Six months ago he'd stood motionless over McGee when Ross collapsed on a courthouse floor. A heart attack. I remember the slight smile I'd seen on the Assistant AG's face. An expectant smirk.

  The song plays three times before the phone is once again quiet. Getting in the Pig and starting the engine and air conditioner, I wait for the single beep alerting me that I have a message before punching any buttons.

  I have screwed up a very simple case, weasel-face tells me in an attempt at a reprimanding tone that does little to disguise his delight. I have embarrassed the office yet again. A suspension is being contemplated. An internal investigation into my conduct—or lack of it—as well as that of Mr. McGee, is being commenced immediately. I am to have no further contact with Cali Morrow, Alana Reese, or Myron Armalli. And, as if the message isn't enough, I'm ordered to call him back for a person-to-person ass-reaming posthaste.

  I don't call him back. I don't even call Rebecca.

  Instead I eat a big plate of spaghetti at the cabin to try and fill the void in me. When that doesn't work, I pick up the book I've been reading and flop down on the porch with it. Maybe the story and the printed words themselves will clog my brain to the exclusion of all else. Keep the dogs at bay for a while.

  Smoke Jump's ending is tragic, but right now it feels unreal. I can't get a grip on the depth of it, or feel much of the impact the author obviously intends. The dogs barking and yipping in my head are a constant interruption; they're impossible to ignore. But I try.

  A fire had blown up in Lander, and by some unseasonable trick of the wind it began heading east toward Jackson Hole. Patrick Morrow, who had resigned from his smoke-jumping team upon impregnating and then marrying Alana Reese, had decided to finish out the summer anyway. For the fun of it. For friendship. He and his best friend, Bill, and five other men were deployed in the vicinity of Elation Peak. The freakish easterly winds increased and the fire threatened to overrun the friends. They elected to make for the summit of Elation Peak, where they hoped to find fuel-less ground—no trees grew on its tabletop apex—on which to escape the blaze. Laughlin led, rock climbing up the butte's back cliff. He made it to the top but Patrick didn't. Cali's father fell into the flames, where he burned to death.

  I remember, but the author doesn't mention, Laughlin's habit of dangerously underrating climbs. Maybe it wasn't intentional—maybe he just didn't know how good he was.

  I put the book away with the others in the cabin and return to the porch to call for the wolf.

  Mungo has taken up her usual position across the lane behind a screen of pine branches. Watching me, thinking I can't see her. She's pulled her lips up, exposing the tips of her big canines. I sit down on the steps to let her play it out. I'm surprised when after only a few minutes of this game she comes out and slinks back toward me, out from the trees. She approaches slowly with her head held very low and that same shy grin on her face. Not looking at me, but watching all the same. She comes right up onto the steps and stands by the cabin's door behind me. I suppose she's anxious to get in out of the heat.

  Not turning around, I say, “You can wait just a minute, wolf.”

  Then she does the strangest thing, something she's never done before. I feel a soft weight on my shoulder. She is resting her head—the prickly, whiskered underside of her jaw—on me. It's such a dog thing to do, so devoted and touching, as if she's trying to soak up a part of my pain, that my throat constricts. Loyalty. That's what it is.

  Intending to just close my eyes for a few minutes, I sleep on the couch for two hours. Heavy, thick, all-engulfing sleep. After I get up and eat some more—just to have something inside me—I sit again on the cabin's narrow porch. The afternoon sun, I hope, might somehow rouse me from what still feels like a bad dream. One of those dreams where you're furious, frightened, and totally incapable of any decisive action, but where it all, at the same time, feels suffocatingly calm.

  I'm pregnant, Anton, I hear Rebecca saying. I'm pregnant. Then, I wish you weren't the father. I divide it up in my head, trying to make it into two separate pieces that maybe I can manage to chew up and swallow.

  I'm pregnant. Does she intend to keep it or get an abortion? One option will make me a father, an immature, too-unprepared father; the other is . . . unthinkable to me now. Even though I'd never believed those long, uncomfortable Sunday mornings in the estancia's tiny iglesia would have any effect but the inverse of what was intended. Roberto's preaching was much more persuasive, and he believed in one thing only: Freedom. But this, goddamn it, is mine. And Rebecca's.

  What about the other thing, the part about wishing I weren't the father? Because she doesn't love me, or because she doesn't think I'm suitable or ready? Or maybe, just maybe, because she doesn't feel ready, and the fact that it's mine makes what would otherwise be an easy decision to abort that much harder. And if that's true, then I can still hope. I cup this tiny spark in my hands and blow on it, willing it into a flame.

  I find the phone book the landlady had left for me in a kitchen drawer and look up the number for the Spring Creek Ranch. Dialing is harder than anything I've done in a long time. Harder than walking down the hos
pital hallway to face Cali and my professional failure. I have no idea what I'm going to say. Or what I'm going to do. Just say what you feel, I tell myself, even though I know I lack the language to make it coherent. Say it anyway.

  The desk clerk tells me that the Hershes are out. Driving up past the Tetons to Yellowstone for the day, I'm told in a friendly, vacuous manner, as if I were just calling to chat. They're expected back for dinner at eight. Do I want to leave a message? She'll scribble something down and slip it under their door.

  Hanging up the phone, I resist the urge to smash it on the porch railing. To throw it across the road and into the trees. Instead I take those deep belly breaths, vow to keep the spark alight, and reverently pack it away into a compartment in my head. The place where I keep my most treasured things. It'll keep there for a few hours.

  Now what? Where the hell is Roberto? Shouldn't he have shown up by now? I wish he were here.

  I need to move. I have to do something. You've got to get up some momentum, I hear my brother telling me. Go fast. Go fast all the time. You slow down, and then all the shit you shouldn't have done will catch up to you. It was the way he lived, the way he climbed. And look where it got him.

  Inside the cabin, I take out the piece of lethal metal and plastic that is my .40 H&K. I eject the law-enforcement cartridge, which holds fifteen fat hollow-point rounds, then rack the slide to eject the lone remaining bullet. I fieldstrip the gun on an old T-shirt spread out on the dining-room table. Oil the parts. Wipe it clean. Reassemble. Then I load it again, even putting the sixteenth round back in the chamber. I slip an extra clip in my pocket. My mind is perfectly quiet while I do all this, and for some reason it feels very good.

  THIRTY

  IT'S THREE HOURS LATER when I park the truck in front of my dark cabin again and rest my forehead on the steering wheel. Sidestepping explicit orders, I'd spent the afternoon and evening hanging out in a far corner of the hospital parking lot. Charles Wokowski and Bill Laughlin had been the only visitors to come and go.

  Wook had visited twice, wearing a grim expression on both occasions and once bearing flowers. His cop's eyes had picked out my truck in the lot. He'd glanced over at me without slowing his pace and given me a short, quick nod. Laughlin had come once, late in the afternoon. He moved slowly, carefully, as if he were, like me, nursing a brutal hangover. I had to resist the urge to get out of the Pig and offer him some more expressions of my respect for him. Smoke Jump had me picturing him standing above a cliff at night as three-hundred-foot flames roared around him and licked his partner right off the wall. The only thing that kept me from getting out of the car was the awful embarrassment that once again I'd utterly failed to protect his adopted niece.

  I'd left then to drive by a flower shop to buy the biggest spray of bright red tulips they had. Then I'd attached a note. Think of three words when you fall asleep tonight—Anton Loves You. We'll talk tomorrow. At a secondhand store I found a pair of tiny baby sneakers for a dollar. I'd driven my gifts to the Spring Creek Ranch atop Gros Ventre Butte and laid them at the door of the condo where Rebecca and her father were staying. The act eased the blackness that was threatening to swallow me. I could at least hope for hope. I drove back to town and resumed my vigil outside the hospital.

  At eight o'clock a black Suburban with tinted windows pulled up and Cali had been hustled into it along with Alana, Angela, and two of her mother's oversized bodyguards. I'd followed them at a distance back up the valley to the ranch. I'd watched unseen, parked on the shoulder of the highway, as the front gate was padlocked behind them.

  How much longer can I wait, can I hang on? The cell phone chimes its mocking song. I thumb it off without looking at the screen. Three times it had rung while I was driving up the valley and once Rebecca's name and number had appeared on the flashing screen. The other two calls were from the Assistant Attorney General. Two messages had been left. I hadn't listened to either of them. I could guess what the weasel-faced suit would have to say, and I'm not sure I want to know yet what Rebecca is thinking. I'm not ready. Fall asleep tonight thinking of me.

  I throw myself back in the seat and stare out at the night. Then my right hand unconsciously jerks toward the passenger's seat. My fingers close around the plastic grip of my gun.

  Something is on the porch.

  It's a black shape, far darker than the bleached pine boards that make up the steps. It's huddled on them—a void of light. After a moment it takes form and I realize it's a man sitting there in the darkness with his elbows on his knees. There's a tiny orange glow to one side. A burning ember—the hot end of a pale, stiff joint—moves slowly to about where the head should be and then sucks bright enough to illuminate a face.

  His features are half hidden by long black hair. But even in the faint orange light I recognize the high cheekbones and the lean features.

  “Thought you'd fallen asleep, che,” Roberto calls to me in his soft voice, exhaling sweet smoke that drifts into the truck. “What's going on? You drunk?”

  I open the door and get out. “Just generally screwed up. Where have you been, 'Berto? I haven't seen you around in two days. I thought maybe you'd left for Salt Lake without saying good-bye.”

  He looks the opposite of what I feel: totally serene and in control. Like a king surveying his dark domain.

  “Kicking back,” he says, now lifting a squat bottle and putting it to his lips. “Came down off Moran today. The Sickle and Scythe, a route that your buddy Bill Laughlin put up in sixty-eight. God, it was good up there. You should've been with me, bro.”

  “I wish I had been.”

  I sit down next to him on the wooden porch steps. Mungo comes padding up out of the trees. We're both quiet as she trots across the road and climbs up the steps. She sniffs at me for a minute then lies down between us.

  “That's some dog you got. You shouldn't keep her locked up like that.” He grabs the ruff of her neck and shakes it affectionately. “Ain't that right, mariquita?” Mungo doesn't flinch away from his touch.

  “I guess you made yourself at home.”

  He tsks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “You left a window open. That's like an invitation to us criminals, che. You really should be more careful. So, you get your man? The stalker?”

  “Last night I thought I did. This morning it turned out I hadn't.”

  He drops the joint into the dirt and crushes it under a boot heel so that the remaining paper and marijuana disintegrate into the dirt. Reaching to one side of the steps, he lifts what I now recognize as my special bottle of Chinaco Reposado, toasts me, then drains the last few swallows.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I don't know.”

  “What about your girlfriend? That Rebecca chick who thinks I'm such a bad influence?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Shit then, Ant. You don't know much.” He throws the squat, round bottle into the blackness across the road, where it swishes through branches before landing with a thunk. “Somebody'll find that a hundred years from now and think they got a really cool artifact.”

  “Good thing Mungo's already come back.”

  Roberto stands up in one swift motion that seems to contradict the odors of lazy sweat, tequila, and pot emanating from him. “So, you ready to go? I got my gear right here.” He points into the shadows of the porch where there's a large lump shaped like a backpack.

  I laugh for what seems the first time in forever. He has a knack for showing up when I need him. It's good to see him right now. And it's good to be touched by his impulsiveness. He wants to climb, he climbs. He wants to get high, he gets high.

  I shake my head. “I can't, 'Berto. I really wish I could but I can't. I'm too tired and I've got too much work to do.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, I'm serious. Things have been really fucked up lately.”

  “That's what you get for being a cop, trying to make everyone else play by your rules. Now c'mon, che. Get your shit tog
ether. Let's go.” He grabs one of my arms and hauls me to my feet. I don't resist, but I don't exactly leap. Mungo stands up with us. “You need to feed the Rat, bro. A little adrenaline will blow out all the shit that's clogging up your heart.”

  “What about your meeting with the Feds? It's in two days, right? Thursday night? You still going to do that?”

  His face grows serious and he nods. “Yeah, I think so. If it's for real. That guy they want—my old friend Jesus—he's messing with the wrong people, you know? He's doing women and kids and shit. Yeah, I'd like to fuck with him a little. 'Specially if they're willing to give me a clean break. But like I told you, there's one thing I got to do before that, che,” he adds, his smile a Cheshire grin in the darkness, “and that's climb with you.”

  I find myself smiling back, thinking, My brother's like a virus. He infects you.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “The North Face Direct.”

  I laugh again. “Yeah, right. There's no way in hell I have time for that. You, either. It took us three days when we did it with Dad. And we were speedy little guys back then.”

  “We can be up and down the Grand in a day. Twelve hours or less. No ropes, che. We'll solo the motherfucker. It'll be faster.”

  I shake my head without taking my eyes off his. He's still smiling at me, and I can't stop smiling back. “I can't do it, 'Berto. Too dangerous for me. And I haven't been climbing nearly as much as you—I'm in no kind of shape for that. No way.”

  But while I stand there looking at my brother, I remember that maybe I've lost the only woman I have ever loved. I've surely lost my professional reputation and my pride, anyway. I've screwed up the job of protecting a woman who trusted me. Who am I to refuse a trip into the sky with my beautiful, mad brother—even if the trip might not include a return ticket?