I’m self-conscious about being half-naked in her presence. My thin cotton boxers cling transparently to my thighs. Self-consciousness is an emotion I’m not used to feeling. I sit down next to her after handing over the cooler. She hands me back a bottle of apple juice, a banana, and two slices of bread—all that’s left of my portion. For herself she takes out a thin plastic bag full of thick pita bread and a plastic container of garlic hummus. Seeing me eyeing her food with desire, or at least she supposes it’s the food I’m desiring, she smiles and offers to share.
“Tell me some more about yourself,” I say, determined to take advantage of her light mood. And while I chew I need something to focus on other than her slender, well-muscled shoulder, the delicate ribs of her back, and the small weight of her breasts beneath the thin top. All I really know about her is that she was once terribly degraded, that she loves Wild Fire Valley, and that she hates David Fast. “Where were you born? Raised? And all that.”
Her story starts out slow, but gathers details as she becomes more involved in the telling. “I grew up in L.A.,” she says, frowning. “The Valley, not the beach. I escaped from there as soon as I could, which meant boarding school in France. After that I went to Yale for a year but I couldn’t stand all those uptight Ivy Leaguers, pretending to be so concerned and involved and smart about everything but only really caring about getting trashed at parties for four years before they could go work at Daddy’s firm. So I blew out of there, too, and spent a year on a sort of commune in Oregon. Yes, Anton, a real commune, the kind we had about the time you were born—”
I interrupt to protest that she’s at most ten years older than me, so she must have been about twelve at the time, but she ignores me.
“Then I went to Berkeley to get a degree in environmental science. I loved that place—the coast, the groves, the hills. But it was just too populated; there wasn’t any space where you could really lose yourself. And anyways, the people there were kind of like the people at Yale; they acted concerned and dedicated to saving the world but they were more concerned about image than sacrifice.”
While she talks I edge my sandy foot away from me until my calf rests over her toes, barely touching. She doesn’t withdraw her foot, nor does she comment on the contact.
“I went to law school at Utah, where I got joint masters in law and environmental science,” she continues, not referring to the awful thing that happened there. “Then I moved to Tomichi and did whatever kind of legal work I could find—land stuff, representing domestic violence victims, even some divorces. And then that asshole David Fast worked up his scam. . . .” She’s frowning, but then forces a smile and looks over her shoulder at me. She lifts her toes beneath my calf but doesn’t remove them. “Sorry. You already know about that.”
I’m about to ask why she’d chosen Tomichi as her home. But before I can get the words out she says, “Let’s hear your story, Agent Burns.”
So I tell her. “I was raised all over the place. A typical military brat. The first time I ever lived in the U.S. for more than a few months at a time was when I started college at Boulder. I felt almost like a foreigner in my own country.” My father and mother had met when he was briefly stationed in Argentina, fresh from the trials of Vietnam. Mom was still basking in the glory of having competed in the 1972 Olympics as a distance runner; although she didn’t medal, she was a bit of a hometown hero. But she’d been happy to follow him to different bases all over the world. Her own country, and that of my grandfather, was just beginning to deteriorate into what would be known as the Dirty War.
“How did you end up a cop in a place like Wyoming?”
I shrug. “I spent my college summers guiding and climbing in the Tetons when I wasn’t working in Alaska. I fell in love with the place. But I didn’t want to be a guide anymore—I didn’t want to spend my life dragging rich businessmen and their families up the Grand. The AG’s Office has a nice vacation schedule. And being a cop, a state agent investigating drug crimes, seemed like the natural thing to do, since I’d been watching what the stuff did to my brother. Plus, it’s exciting. I feel like a little kid, getting to carry a gun and badge and all that. Like cops and robbers.”
After a few minutes of inhaling the scent of the sun on her skin, I take advantage of her momentary openness and ask, “How did you and Sunny hook up?”
Kim sighs. She looks at the boat and the canyon wall beyond as she relates the story of their brief love affair. Sunny had been a volunteer at the battered women’s shelter where Kim sometimes worked. On her very first day there, Sunny stayed late to talk with Kim. For such a seemingly vivacious girl, she didn’t seem to have a lot of friends. Kim learned that she had a darker side, that she’d been abused by a series of boyfriends—she thought Sunny probably looked to her as a source of strength. And Kim was attracted to her youth and wounded beauty. Sunny took the first step in turning their friendship physical, and Kim went along at first out of fear of the hurt she’d cause if she rejected the girl as much as out of her own attraction.
But she knew it wouldn’t last. Sunny was looking for a strong mother-figure more than a lover. And Kim could see that the girl was hopelessly straight. Just a few days before my father and I had arrived in the meadow, Sunny hooked up with Cal during the Tribe’s weeklong vigil there. From the moment they’d met earlier in the summer at a Tribe meeting, Kim knew Sunny would end up leaving her for Cal. And she even encouraged it, knowing that as impulsive as Cal was, as weird as he was about the Indian cave he’d discovered, he’d never dream of abusing her.
We feed the remnants of our lunch to Oso and pack the debris back in the cooler. Swimming back out to the boat, I feel her palm touch the small of my back as I boost the cooler into the boat. I thrill at the touch.
Getting Oso into the boat proves to be a large problem. Weighted by his heavy wet coat, he’s unable to pull himself onto the slippery ski step at the stern. It takes several tries to perfect a technique that works. Kim stands dripping wet in her improvised bikini, laughing and tugging on Oso’s leather collar, while I furiously tread water and boost from behind. As a thank-you the beast showers Kim with a full-body shake.
Just when I crawl into the boat, we hear the rumble of another motor coming down the canyon branch. Kim modestly pulls on her T-shirt.
The boat is a rented ski craft very much like ours. Two hard-faced men in sunglasses stand behind the windscreen. They motor by us slowly, not waving or even smiling. But their eyes are fixed on us. Burgermeister’s scalp is turning pink in the sun. Next to him David Fast handles the boat’s controls.
“Anton!” Kim hisses. I don’t respond.
Just as they pass us, Fast’s hand drops down on the throttle. The boat idles forward a few feet farther then churns backward in reverse. The sunlight is suddenly brighter; the sounds magnified. I can feel every beat of my heart and every pulse of blood through my veins. I pick up my hip pack, unzip it, and slip my hand in to touch the hard plastic grip of the H&K while not taking my eyes off the men in the boat.
At least they haven’t found Sunny yet. I wonder how they know to look in the same places we’re looking.
Fast stares back at me as Burgermeister bends down so that his hands are out of view. Then he stands upright again, swinging a long-barreled shotgun up in his hands, its twin muzzles pointing for now at the sky.
“Anton!” Kim hisses again.
Some animal sense has alerted Oso to the threat. He stands on our bow with his legs spread wide and his eyes narrowed to golden slits. His lips are pulled high above his teeth; the fangs look like a steel trap about to be sprung. The wet black hair is raised around his chest and shoulders but is plastered tight to his belly, making him look like some monster out of a medieval painting.
“Get ready to hit the deck,” I say to Kim over the drone of Fast’s engine and the increasing roar coming from my dog’s throat. Out of the corner of my eye I can see her frozen beside me. I remember the way she’d seemed to fall apart before when in Fast’s presence and pray she doesn’t now.
Fast steers the boat so that it backs up beside us, just forty or fifty feet away. An easy and deadly distance with a shotgun; not so good for a pistol. Not good at all. I see both men’s sunglasses move slightly as they scan our boat and then the small beach, probably looking for the blonde mop of Sunny’s dreadlocks. Fast’s lips part as he says something to Burgermeister. The big man says something back and smiles wickedly at us—the shotgun starts to swing down in our direction.
To my eyes the arc of the double barrels descends toward us in slow motion. My hand feels as quick as lightning as I bring the sleek automatic up from my side. Just like in the meadow, a part of me can’t believe that these men would want to kill us.
Over a piece of land
. Yet the set of Burgermeister’s face is convincing.
Seeing my gun, Fast turns to his partner in alarm. He seems to notice the shotgun for the first time. He puts up an arm to push the barrels away, but Burgermeister shoves him back with a meaty arm.
This is going to happen.
I can almost picture the pellets blowing at me from down those long iron rods. They’ll come in an expanding pattern, at this distance maybe the size of a truck’s tire. I can almost hear them tearing through the air, followed by a blast of sound I’ll never hear.
But it’s a rebel yell that echoes off the canyon walls. It hasn’t come from either of them, nor from us. Nosing into the slot canyon is an enormous houseboat. A naked young man, as beefy as a professional wrestler, has catapulted himself off the boat’s second story while screaming. He hits the water with the agonizing smack of a belly flop. A pounding rhythm of reggae music builds in volume. The boat’s top and lower decks are filled with college students, a beer can in every hand.
Before the students notice us, Burgermeister bends and tucks the gun back down somewhere out of sight. Fast shoves the throttle forward while turning the wheel. Their ski boat lurches forward in a tight U-turn. Burgermeister never stops staring at us. Still grinning, and shaking his head at our luck.
“Fuck you!” Kim shouts at them.
I’m relieved she hasn’t gone comatose on me again, but I’m not necessarily pleased that she wants to antagonize these men who’d been about to murder us. And who just a day and a half earlier had been brutal enough to beat a young man to death.
Fast turns his head at the words. He yells something back. It takes me a minute to register what he’s said over all the noise now flooding the small canyon. Beside me Kim makes a noise of either terror or fury—it’s hard to tell because the side of her face toward me is the one mostly covered by her eye patch and tangled black hair.
He’d shouted, “It’s been twelve years, girl! For God’s sake, let it go!”
TWENTY-FIVE
W
HEN
K
IM FINALLY
looks my way, her single eye sears right through me. She’s silent, but pain and fury comes out of her like a gale-force wind. It almost rocks me back on my heels. I feel as if I’m seeing her unmasked for the first time. Another layer peeled away. Meanwhile, the houseboat continues into the canyon, blasting its reggae beat.
It has no effect on me that Kim has lied. That she probably doesn’t give a shit about the valley and Wild Fire Peak. That her vendetta is about far more than preserving the environment. What it’s really about is visiting devastation on the man who’d humiliated her twelve years ago. Ripping from him the things he holds most dear. Kim wants to take his money, his professional reputation, his livelihood. She wants to leave him naked and humiliated, just as he’d done to her. That’s what the war over the valley is really about. And Kim’s using the law as her weapon of vengeance.
As a sworn law enforcement officer, I know all too well the sad truth that the law seldom results in justice. And at this moment, my blood heaving in my veins from the anticipated impact of pellets, I don’t give a fuck about the law.
They were going to kill us. Just like Cal.
I grab the anchor’s yellow nylon cord and rip the can of cement up out of the water so hard and so fast that it cracks against the hull, undoubtedly leaving a deep ding in the bottom of the fiberglass. When I spin to storm back behind the wheel, ready to slam the throttle forward and chase down the smug bastards with my gun in my hand, my bare shoulder crashes against Kim’s wet shirt with an audible smack. She staggers and nearly falls out of the boat. It’s only then I that perceive she’s been shouting my name.
“Goddamn it, Anton!” she yells when I clutch her upper arm to keep her from falling overboard. “Cut it out!” Rebalanced, she snatches her arm from my grasp. “This is about me, not you! It’s mine! Don’t try to take it from me!”
I stare at her, bewildered by the anger that’s directed at
me
. Her normally tan cheekbones are flushed scarlet; her single coffee-colored eye burns. She glares up at me from just inches away. Raising a hand with her fingers balled into a fist, she shakes it beneath my jaw as if she might hit me. “Don’t take it away from me!”
I look away. The houseboat party has frozen just a hundred feet from us and the beach. Although the music still pumps, the kids on the decks are staring at us with open mouths. There are no more cheerful whoops or leaps from the upper decks, no more bursts of laughter. All conversations have ceased. I pick up my T-shirt and drop it over the pistol, which lies in plain view on a padded cushion. I don’t think they’ve seen it, just as I don’t think they saw Burgermeister leveling the shotgun in our direction. All they see is a maimed couple arguing and some great black gargoyle perched on the bow.
What am I doing wrong?
I ask myself. I only want to kill the men who would have killed us if the houseboat hadn’t chugged into the canyon. If I don’t kill them first, then they’ll eventually try again. It’s a simple matter of self-preservation, even if they are armed with a shotgun and I only have a small pistol. But even as I put these thoughts together in my head, I realize that they’re not entirely honest. What chance do I have against them and their long gun? The truth is that I’m gorged with the longing for blood and vengeance—I want to kill David Fast for what he did to her a dozen years ago, for causing Kim a lifetime of pain. I want to kill Burgermeister for almost killing her just now—and me. Somewhere in my mind I can see Roberto’s face grinning at me—God, how he’d love to see me acting just like him, dealing out justice with my own hands.
But he’d also understand what Kim is saying. She wants to destroy this man on her own, not have me do it for her. And she wants to do it her way. It’s a personal war between the two of them. A sort of blood feud. I’m nothing to Fast and Burgermeister, just some cop far out of his jurisdiction who happens to be the brother of a man wrongly charged for a murder they committed. And a man who is helping their enemy because I’m infatuated with her hot intensity.
I close my eyes and try to swallow the anger.
When I open them, she’s still watching me from just inches away. The deep flush across her cheeks is already dissipating.
“
I’m
going to ruin him, Anton, you chauvinistic pig. And I’m going to do it the right way.” When she sees the skepticism in my eyes, she adds with her lips turning up just the tiniest bit at the corners, “I’m going to bring all his bad deeds back to bite him in the ass. And even better than I’d dreamed, once we find Sunny. He’s going to be more than ruined. He’s going to prison on a fucking
murder charge
.”
She turns to the spectators on the houseboat and waves cheerfully.
The shadows have grown long in this small side canyon. We wait within sight of the houseboat for almost two hours, needing the protection of witnesses in case Fast and Burgermeister come back for us. The party on board has tentatively resumed. While we drift a little ways away, the big boat noses up on the sand where we had shared our lunch. The kids run on the beach, chasing one another and throwing sand and beer, but they manage at the same time to keep a wary, almost sober, eye on us.
Kim and I, in turn, watch the main part of the bay. Fast and his enforcer had turned north to either continue searching for Sunny or to wait for us to come out into an isolated ambush. Now, as the shadows are lengthening across the water and the sun is just a bright light somewhere beyond the cliffs to the west, we see their white boat cruise slowly past us in the outer bay. Sunny is not on the boat. Kim and I both breathe a sigh of relief—they haven’t found her. Through our sunglasses, Burgermeister and I give each other the stink eye from a distance of several hundred yards. I can tell from the grudging way they are heading south, back toward the main channel, that they’re calling it a day. Almost out of view, I see their boat’s stern drop suddenly with acceleration. Foam churns into the air at a height of several feet. In a minute they disappear around the peninsula.
“So what’s the plan?” I say, turning to Kim. She’s standing in our boat’s bow with one hand resting on Oso’s head. She’s like a fierce pirate, in her eye patch and with the beast at her side. A not-so-subtle change has taken place in our relationship and in our mission. She’s completely in charge now.
“We keep looking. She’s got to be out here somewhere.”
I point at where Fast’s wake is rolling lazily toward us. “They had the right idea, you know. It’s going to be cold out here tonight and we don’t have any gear.” Already the air is noticeably cooler. I know from all the camping I’ve done in a similar climate, on my grandfather’s ranch on the high pampas of Argentina, just how cold the desert can get at night.
“We’ll deal,” she replies.
“Aye aye,
Capitán
.”
We leave our friends on the houseboat, who had unwittingly saved our lives, and motor back into the bay. I try to fix their position in my mind so I can find them again in the dark—if it gets too cold we can come back and beg some blankets and food. I swing the wheel to the north. We begin to cruise the next canyon and its sub-canyons, with Kim occasionally calling Sunny’s name in an almost singsong voice.
By eight o’clock the sky is turning from the last, deepest shades of blue to what will soon be undeniably black. The first stars are already making an appearance. I’m thinking that we had better find a place to camp, but I don’t want to be the first to say it. The boat’s hull has already scraped submerged rock twice because I can no longer distinguish the green and brown of shallow water from the safety of the blue. It’s also getting seriously cold. In the shade of the canyon walls our cotton clothes had never completely dried. They’re still damp from when we used them to towel off after our lunchtime swim hours ago. Goose bumps cover my skin.
Kim’s calls out suddenly, “Hold it!”
We’re in a narrow ravine, the water just thirty feet wide between two hundred-foot walls. The cliffs are so vertical that they appear to lean over us from each side. Only a narrow strip of navy sky seems to hold them apart.
“Back up,” she orders.
I nudge the throttle down and the boat churns over its own wake with a small bump. Kim is pointing at a black shadow on the left cliff wall. Peering at it, I can see that the black shape is more than just a water-blackened concavity on the north-facing wall. It’s really a cavelike opening. Although its upper edge is curved down, the opening is about the size of a single-car garage door, ten feet wide and just seven or eight feet off the water.
“It’s probably just a hollow in the rock, but let’s check it out.” Kim says.
I nose the boat toward it, telling Kim to get my headlamp out of the hip pack. She digs her hands into the pocket at the small of my back. I can feel her fingers fumbling there.
“It’s the thing that’s not shaped like a gun,” I tell her, trying to be helpful.
Finding it, she flashes her small white teeth at me in the dark before twisting the plastic cover and blinding me. Then she holds the beam of light out to illuminate the black shape beside us as she steps back up onto the bow of the boat. I think I see another, more distant flash of white through the blackness but I can’t be sure. I’m still seeing dancing ghosts from having had the beam aimed directly into my eyes.
I maneuver the boat closer to the cave. Kim has to duck when the bow slips a few feet under its roof.
“This thing’s not a cave but an arch,” Kim says excitedly, one hand reaching up to touch the rock above her head.
“Watch the sides—push us off if we get close,” I instruct her as I turn into the hole. We inch twenty feet farther and around a slight bend before the roof slides away.
It’s a tiny lagoon set among sheer walls. Amazing—I wish we were here in the daytime and that I had a camera. In the last of the fading light, I can see the walls are a deep copper while the water is the color of coal. The cove briefly widens to the width of an Olympic swimming pool before the walls close into a tapered slot too tight for a boat. It’s shaped like a bullet, with the cave or arch as its flat rear and the slot ahead as its point. That gap is the only other possible exit, if it is an exit, and you would have to swim it.
The starlit sky is just a ribbon above our heads, impossibly distant in the gloom. Floating in the center of the widest part of the lagoon is a long, low-slung boat that looks exactly like the Sea Ray that had been pointed out to us at the marina. There are no lights aboard and there are no sounds.
I cut the engine with a turn of the key and we drift slowly toward the bigger boat. Oso stands braced on the bow like a fearsome Viking masthead.
No one appears when Kim shouts out “Hello.” The hatch that leads into the small cabin is open and there’s a towel spread on the rear decking next to a can of diet Coke. Tangled clumps of blonde hair float in the water just feet from the side. A pair of scissors lies on a cushion.
The two boats come together with a gentle bump. With our nylon anchor’s line in one hand, Kim stretches a leg across onto the Sea Ray’s stern. She straddles the two boats while fastening the line around a cleat on each boat.
“Sunny?” she asks quietly, stepping all the way onto the bigger boat. I rotate my hip pack around my waist so that my gun is within easy reach.
There’s no answer.
Kim’s expression matches the worried feeling in the pit of my stomach. I follow Kim onto the rear deck of the Sea Ray, intending to save Kim from the sight of any residual evil that might be on the boat. Maybe Fast and Burgermeister had found her first—maybe they’d tortured the location of the cave out of her before killing her. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t been aboard their boat when we had seen them heading back toward Page.
The silence is eerie, particularly with the evidence on deck that someone had been there so recently. I step in front of Kim before she can enter the cabin, and jump down the two steep steps. From behind me, she shines the headlamp over my shoulder. In its weak glow the cabin appears empty.
Climbing back up onto the deck, we both scan the black water around the boat. I can’t see anything—there’s only the gentle slap of our wake on vertical rock. The water looks ominous, though. Deep enough to conceal a body in its dark embrace.
“Sunny!” Kim shouts this time. The word bounces off the walls.
“Kim?” a voice calls out tentatively from somewhere above us. All three of us, Oso included, stare at the night sky. “Kim!” the voice calls again, more certain and desperate now.
Finally I make out the silhouette of a head and waving arms high up on a cliff. I point it out to Kim, who calls back, “Sunny! Sunny! Are you all right?” She shines the light up in that direction, but at that distance the beam is swallowed by the night.
“I’m fine. Hang on.” The silhouette disappears. A few moments later there comes the sound of pebbles plunking down into the water.
Sunny appears at the lowest part of the walls that surround the cove, thirty or more feet above the lake. She’s faintly spotlit now by the headlamp Kim aims and she’s waving at us once again. The light plays over her pale skin. The natty dreadlocks have been cut away—her blonde hair is now short and sleek. I guess she’s hoping to disguise herself. She’s wearing nothing but a pair of river sandals, which she kicks off into the water. Then she jumps in, feetfirst and holding her breasts, far less composed and graceful than Kim’s earlier dive by the beach. The responding wavelets of water spread and rebound off the walls of the tiny cove.
After collecting her floating sandals, she pulls herself halfway up on the swim step of the Sea Ray and then hooks a heel on the platform. I look away at Kim as Sunny comes out of the water. I can feel more than see the enormous relief on her face. Oso is not so polite. He’s poised on the edge of the ski boat, sniffing the air and straining to lick the wet skin on Sunny’s back.
“Kim!” Sunny says again, grasping at her friend and resoaking the front of Kim’s jeans and shirt. “How . . . How . . . How did you find me?” Before Kim can answer, Sunny takes a deep, gasping breath and begins bawling.