THIRTY-FIVE
R
OBERTO PULLS HIMSELF
back up on our precarious ledge. His teeth are like tiny white cubes in the night. “Found it,” he says. “We’ve got to traverse down and to the left ’bout a hundred feet. No sweat.”
“Kim’s not a climber, ’Berto.”
“Guess it’s a good time for her to learn.”
I dump the rope out of my pack then put together the small selection of gear I’d brought. Roberto wordlessly takes the gear while giving me a long, significant look. Then he takes one end of the rope and disappears once again.
“There’s no time to do this right,” I tell Kim, helping her back into her harness. “Just try and follow the rope to the left. Use whatever hand- and footholds you can. Roberto’s going to set some pro along the way, so if you fall, you won’t swing too far. But the trick is that you have to unclip the rope from any gear you pass. I’ll be right behind you. Do you understand?”
She starts to nod, then shakes her head. So I run through it again.
“What about you?” she asks. “If I’m taking the rope, then what’s going to protect you?”
“Don’t worry. I can handle it.”
“Why don’t you tie in to the rope, too?”
“Because then if I fell, I’d pull you off. And both our weights might be too much for this skinny rope. And it might be too much for the shitty belays Roberto likes to set.”
“Are you as good a climber as he is?”
“Actually, I’m better. Trust me one more time.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she too disappears into the darkness over the side of the ledge.
I pull on my backpack, tightening the chest and shoulder straps but leaving the waist loop undone. I don’t want it to pull my shoulders down. For a moment I listen to Kim panting in the darkness just a few feet away. While the long hike up the mountain’s side had been nothing for her exertion-wise, the fear now is causing her heart to race and her lungs to accelerate as if she were sprinting, even though she’s only moving at a sloth’s pace. The suck of gravity can do that to you. I feel my own pulse speed up a notch as I lower myself over the side after her.
The holds are good. I find fat flakes for my hands and feet. Below and to the left, I can hear Kim breathing like she’s in a race. She’s silhouetted by the starlight, just ten feet away. “I’m right behind you. You’re doing fine.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“Remember the rope, Kim. If you fall, it will catch you.”
Gamely she keeps moving down and left, following the rope into the night. I try to stay just ten or so feet behind her. The rocks are getting looser—we’re getting to a rotten part of the wall, and it has me worried. One protruding flake Kim had just used as a handhold comes off in my hand. With a shiver, I put it back instead of dropping it. We keep moving.
“Anton!” Kim says. “What do I do?”
The part we’re on has turned vertical and I’m afraid to look too hard at the holds she’s gripping. Leaning back to look beyond her, I see that the cliff inverts. A part of the rotten wall has fallen away as if some gigantic ice cream scoop has gouged out a portion of the mountain. And the rope leads on into the night just above the scooped-out part.
Fucking Roberto,
I think unreasonably.
There’s a sort of rim that the rope trails laterally across. A kind of huge upthrusting flake that must be solid or it would surely have fallen away with the rest of the face years ago.
“Okay, Kim, here’s what you do.”
There’s white all the way around her single eye when I quietly explain that she needs to grip the edge with her hands, then hook her right heel up there, too. With the stronger muscles of her leg she can take some of the weight off her hands. “Just go across hand-over-hand, keeping as much weight as you can on that heel. You’ll be fine.”
“You’re kidding.” There’s just a trace of delirious humor in her voice.
“No. Are you having fun yet?”
She spits out a short laugh. I realize that she’s having an epiphany of sorts, that she’s feeling the bite of the Burns family’s first drug. Noradrenaline. The depth of the void beneath us is incalculable in the night.
I cling to a couple of lousy holds and watch her make her way across. I have to struggle to keep from shouting out encouragement. And then shouting in fright when her heel slips off the edge.
For a sickening moment she’s floating in space. Her hands alone battle gravity while her feet kick above the dragging weight of the darkness beneath her. She swings like a child from monkey bars, only there’s no soft playground sand to catch her if she falls—only jagged rock, far below. I try to see if Roberto has managed to put in some protection nearby but all I can see is the thin purple line running on to the left and into the night, hanging free. Obviously he hadn’t found any cracks to plug in gear.
If she comes off, she’ll drop, picking up speed, until the rope catches on a distant piece of pro. That will jerk her to the left and slam her into the side of the scoop, wherever that is. I tense and pray, waiting for her to swing off into the night, already hearing the sound in my head of her body smashing against stone.
But once again Kim is game. She gets her right heel hooked back up on the edge with her hands. Her breath is coming now like a bellows. Then she starts moving away from me, until she slowly follows the rope into the blackness.
Ropeless and unprotected, I make the same moves. And as usual, I can’t help but smile to myself as Death tugs at my free ankle. In my mind I kick him in his bony face.
Soon I’ve caught up to Kim again, who’s scrambling sideways on thankfully solid rock. After another twenty feet I can see Roberto’s shadow taking in the rope from a starlit notch in the ridge. Kim and I both drop into a small platform in the notch with relief.
“Nice job,” he tells me quietly as I step past him and study the valley on the other side. I think about how just a few days before, Wild Fire Valley had seemed like the glorious temple of my father’s youth. Now it looks much more ominous, especially now that I know that Cal’s tales of caves and Indian ruins are true. The valley has a dark and hidden life below the earth. It’s a temple full of secrets, one that occasionally demands blood sacrifices to nurture its soil.
Roberto was right about this being a good passage across the ridge and down. A long field of large talus leads all the way down the west side of the mountain to tree line. We’re looking out over the dark valley from somewhere near the peak’s summit. From two thousand feet below us and a little to the right comes the distant hum of a gasoline-powered generator. I can see lights on in one of two white construction trailers parked near the burnt-out remains of Fast’s mid-mountain lodge. A couple of trucks gleam in the moonlight nearby. One of them looks like Fast’s black Suburban.
I hear no tortured screams, which I guess is a good thing, but I’d sure like to know if Sunny is alive.
“You see that?” Kim asks.
She and Roberto stand on either side of me. Like me, they’re both staring down into the valley. I follow the outline of Kim’s pointing arm to the treeless expanse of the meadow, and close to it, the darker shadow of the crumbly red cliff on the hill. A few flashlights wink among the trees near the hill’s base.
“I saw Sunny and Cal rappelling down that cliff the first day I got here,” I say. “That’s it. The cave’s somewhere on it.”
The cliff is invisible in the night, but the flashlights appear to be slowly working their way up the hill from the side.
“Let’s go,” Roberto says.
He leads the way down Wild Fire Peak, hopping from one boulder to the next on the long talus field. He seems to float above the ground like a phantom. And Kim follows right behind him. She too is amazingly surefooted now in the night. As I descend after them, my pack’s zippers jingle softly. I wish I’d had the forethought to tape them. While it had taken us hours to climb the peak’s back side, it seems like just minutes until we’re back below tree line.
We enter the dark pines and the bone-white trunks of aspen groves, skirting well clear of the trailers and the burnt-out lodge. At the point when we’re closest to them, just a hundred or so yards away, I can hear country music playing from inside. And the sounds of rough laughter. I’m tempted to peek in the windows but I don’t think Sunny will be there—she’ll be where the flashlights are ascending the small hill, guiding them to Cal’s Bad Cavern.
Roberto finds a hiking trail and we jog carefully down it, trying to plant our feet as softly as possible and not trip over exposed roots.
The meadow is eerily quiet and vacant. It’s hard for me to believe that just days ago it was swelling with activity. The environmentalists have been forced to end their vigil by the approval of the land exchange. They probably would have left anyway—there’s been too much violence and death around here. And there’s about to be more.
The flashlights are above us now, moving through the trees toward the hill’s summit. They’re about eight hundred feet up the gently sloping hillside. I call a halt in the trees after we sprint across the meadow.
“Here’s the plan,” I tell them as we huddle together, all three of us panting lightly from our rapid descent. “The cave is somewhere on the cliff face, but it’s hidden enough that they need Sunny to show it to them. So they’re going to set up a rappel on the top, the way Cal and Sunny did. When they find it, they’ll dynamite it.” Probably with Sunny inside, but I don’t say it because I don’t want Kim thinking about it.
“So this is what we’re going to do. I’m going to go up the hill alone. With my gun. You two wait about halfway down. The three of us going all the way up together would make too much noise.
“I’m going to sneak up on them and pull my gun. I’ll shout when I’ve got whoever’s up there covered. Then you’ll come up. Roberto will take any weapons and throw them off the cliff. Kim will go immediately to Sunny. Then we’ll disappear into the woods and hopefully not see those fuckers again outside of a jail or a courtroom.”
“Give me the gun. Let me be the one to go up,” Roberto says. “You crash through the trees like a fucking rhino, bro.”
“No, it’s got to be me. You’re on bond, ’Berto. Can’t have a weapon, remember?” Besides, I know that Roberto has even less faith in the legal system than I do. A part of me is afraid he’ll just shoot them all and spare the courts any trouble.
“Why not capture them? Tie them up or something?” Kim asks.
“We’d never get them out of here. Remember, the sheriff’s men, Fast’s men, are blocking the only road into the valley. And there’s no way the three of us can get a bunch of prisoners out the way we came in. We’ll have to deal with them later.”
Kim gives my hand a squeeze before I move off. Her fingers are trembling, but I can’t tell whether it’s with anger or fear.
THIRTY-SIX
T
HE FOREST FLOOR
is covered with a thin layer of yellow aspen leaves. They crinkle beneath my boots as I make my way up the slope with my flat little Beretta in my hand. Worse, the bright fallen leaves reflect the moon and starlight, illuminating everything in the forest with a ghostly glow. As I creep closer to the top of the hill and ponder the very real possibility that I may be about to get shot—that I might get us all killed—I feel a twinge of regret that I hadn’t given Roberto the gun. There’s no doubt in my mind that he would be willing and able to use it against the men who are holding Sunny. That he’s capable of pressing the .22 to a temple and pulling the trigger, which is the only sure way to end things with such a small gun. He certainly wouldn’t have any of my or Kim’s qualms about keeping them alive so we can bring them to justice.
Roberto has his own brand of justice. And although right now I’m inclined to agree with him, I’m still too much of a cop to turn my approval into up-close, very personal action.
Distant voices drift down in the night from the hill’s summit. Men’s voices. I hear Burgermeister issuing orders in his deep bass and Fast responding, but I can’t make out the words. I grip the little gun tighter in my sweaty palm and check for the fifth time to be sure the safety is switched off.
Sunny’s high voice is clear, cutting through the dense forest. “Please. Don’t do this. Please.”
The last word is cut off by the sharp slap of a hand striking flesh. “This better be the right place, bitch. I’m not coming up here twice,” Burgermeister says.
As my pulse starts racing, I struggle to move slowly, quietly. I measure my breaths, inhaling and exhaling with a steady rhythm. I focus on moving like some night creature, like Roberto, a coyote on the hunt, gliding soundlessly through the trees. Stalking.
The flashlights are visible now through the foliage above and ahead of me. And the voices are louder. I move forward at irregular intervals, hoping that the crunch of leaves under my boots will seem innocuous in the night. I can smell the strong odor of a burning cigar wafting down on the late summer breeze. Just ahead, the forest ends near the hill’s summit, which has been swept almost clean of trees by another season’s harsher winds.
The two men stand near Sunny in the sparse clearing. In the glow of a flashlight, I can see the three figures gathered near a single bent shrub. Sunny is awkwardly pulling a climbing harness over her legs. Even in the dark I can see that her limbs are visibly shaking. But despite the sobbing and quivering, she puts on the harness with jerky, mechanical motions. Burgermeister’s huge form is obvious. He’s looping a rope around the shrub, setting up a rappel. A red ember burns in front of his face, giving his features an evil orange glow. In one hand he holds the flashlight. David Fast stands nearby. There’s the shape of a gun in his hand.
I crouch behind some brush, scanning the clearing and finally spotting Burgermeister’s twin-barreled shotgun propped against the shrub. It’s within his easy reach, leaning on the same plant he’s just finished tying the rope to. Staring at it, I think,
That’s what he used to shoot my dog
. I let the memory of last night roll over me like a cold wave. The anger washes away my fear.
Sunny, in a harness now, lies collapsed on the grass. She’s speaking to the earth, the sounds pleading but at the same time flat and weak. “Please. Don’t make me go down there. Please. Don’t destroy it. Please. I swear I won’t tell anyone . . .” It sounds almost like a chant, a useless mantra, that she’s been mumbling for hours.
The drone of her pleas makes it clear that her mind has all but fled from here. In the last forty-eight hours she’s been beaten, seen her lover brutally murdered, been told her remaining friends had been shot, and probably been raped. Animals like Burgermeister would need to play with and torture their prey.
“You’re right about one thing, honey,” the big man’s deep voice growls from behind his cigar. “You won’t tell anyone about it.”
“Let’s just get this over with, Alf,” Fast says tiredly.
Burgermeister reaches down and grabs Sunny by her neck. He lifts her to her feet. “Get on down there. This had better not be some wild-goose chase.” He pushes the rope through the belay device on her harness and shoves her toward the cliff.
Sweat is running into my eyes, stinging and burning. I wipe it away with my sleeve, then take three deep breaths.
Time to move.
I come out of the trees and walk quietly toward them. The brilliance of each star in the sky above seems to intensify; the air seems full of sound and scent. I can feel every stone, blade of grass, and twig beneath my boots. The world condenses to just this place.
At the first sign they’re aware of my presence, when Burgermeister’s cigar jerks in my direction, I squeeze the trigger of the small Beretta. I hear the hammer fall on the bullet, the explosion of gases, and the .22 caliber projectile spinning out of the short barrel to slice through the night above the men’s heads. A thunder strike breaks open the cloudless black sky like a sign from God.
“Federal agents!” I shout. “You’re surrounded! Put down your guns!”
The two men leap as if they’ve been electrocuted. Sunny’s small form remains heartbreakingly still.
Fast, with the pistol still in his hand, hesitates.
“Drop it! Now!” I scream at him. I fire a second shot just over his head. The pistol bounces on the soft earth at his feet.
“Who the fuck are you?” Burgermeister asks in his dead man’s voice. There’s not a trace of fear in it.
I can hear Kim and Roberto thrashing through the leaves as they run up the hill.
“Shut up. Move away from her.”
“Sure thing, partner.” And he shoves Sunny over the edge of the cliff.
She screams as she falls, her white arms windmilling in the air before she disappears from sight. A second later the shrub gives a violent jerk as the rope around it goes taut. Sunny’s belay device had automatically stopped her fall.
“Watch the rope!” I shout as Kim and Roberto burst out of the trees. Then, without thinking, I aim the Beretta at Burgermeister’s left thigh and pull the trigger. In my sensory-enhanced state, I think I hear the bullet smack flesh before the explosion echoes through the night. He goes down without a sound. I’m disappointed the tiny bullet didn’t have the force to blow him over the edge, too.
“Where’s Sunny?” Kim’s shouting from behind me.
“She went over the cliff—but she’s tied in. Check on her.” My gun is pointed at Fast’s chest now, my index finger tight on the trigger.
Kim runs to the edge. Roberto stalks up to where Burgermeister’s massive form is curled on the ground. He’s acting like he’s dead. But I don’t believe it—a single .22 caliber bullet wouldn’t kill a man that size, even if I’d hit him in the chest. And my aim isn’t that bad. His cigar smolders in the grass an inch from his lips.
“Remember me?” I hear Roberto ask him.
“Sunny!” Kim’s yelling.
“Get out of my line of fire!” I yell at my brother.
Roberto’s boot blasts into Burgermiester’s face with lightning speed. Sparks and burning ash explode from the cigar. If it hadn’t been for that and the big man’s head snapping back, I wouldn’t have even seen my brother’s leg move.
“Cut it out, Roberto!” I shout. Then at Kim, “Do you see her?”
My brother has moved on until he’s standing before Fast. I start to yell again, “Get out of my line—” but my command isn’t finished before Roberto punches Fast in the face. Fast sags backwards into the grass, sitting down hard and holding his nose.
“There’s a gun by his feet—kick it off the cliff,” I tell my brother, hoping for once he’ll listen. He doesn’t. He bends and picks up the gun.
“Kim?” A small voice calls from the darkness beyond the cliff’s edge.
“Sunny! It’s me! How far down are you?”
“Oh, Kim!” comes the sobbing reply. “I can’t tell. I don’t know.”
“Ask her if she can climb back up,” I order.
Headlights flash on near the trailers and the burnt-out lodge halfway up Wild Fire Peak. Two different pairs. I can hear the roar of racing engines as they begin to bang and weave their way down the mountain. Toward the meadow. Fast’s and Burgermeister’s men must have been alerted by the gunfire.
Shit
.
“We’ve got to get the fuck out of here, bro,” Roberto tells me.
Almost at my feet and still curled in a massive ball, Burgermeister grunts a painful curse. Finally his voice has some feeling in it. He’s holding his thigh with both hands. “That’s how my dog felt,” I tell him. “You shot him in the leg, too.”
I walk to the shrub with the rope tied to it. I feel the knot—it’s tied securely. And all three of us still have our harnesses on. I take Burgermeister’s shotgun by the barrel and sling it out over the edge.
“We’ll rap it. You go down first and get Sunny,” I say to Roberto. “I’ll hold them while you guys get to the ground. If the rope doesn’t reach, we’ll find a ledge or something and traverse from there.” I have an image in my head of the three of us—four with Sunny—gliding silently down to the meadow and then disappearing into the forest. There’s no other way. With more of Fast’s men coming, there’s no time to haul Sunny back up and run from here.
“Fuck holding them,” Roberto advises. “Just shoot ’em.”
I’m tempted. My brother adds, sliding back and forth the chamber on Fast’s gun with a vicious snap, “If you don’t, I will.”
Kim shouts at us. “No! Remember, Anton! This is mine! I want to see that bastard taken down in court!”
“Fuck that, too.” Roberto lifts the pistol so that it’s pointed at Fast’s forehead. Fast is kneeling just ten feet away, his hands still gripping his own face. “I’m afraid you don’t get your day in court, buddy.”
With my free hand I grab the gun, pulling it toward me instead of Fast. “No, ’Berto. She’s right. This is hers. We do it her way.” I don’t add that if he shoots them he’ll spend years, if not the rest of his life, in prison. They’ll nail him for everything they can, even if it’s only violating his probation. I don’t say it because it won’t do any good—Roberto has no concern for consequences.
There’s a slight tug as Roberto thinks about pulling the gun away from me.
“I want to see him in court!” Kim shouts again. “I want to ruin him. In public!”
“Twelve years ago,” I say softly, talking fast, “he got her so drunk that she passed out. Maybe drugged her, too. Then he and his buddies stripped off her clothes. They touched her, they took pictures. And later that night she lost her eye while retching in a sink. This is her deal, ’Berto. Her call.”
Roberto lets go of the gun.
“You’re wrong, you know,” he tells Kim. “A rich shit like him can afford a different type of law. But like my little bro said, I guess it’s your call.”
I throw Fast’s pistol over the cliff, too. I don’t want it anywhere near us, where it might tempt my brother into changing his mind.
Roberto manages to twist the rope, taut with Sunny’s weight, through his belay device. “How far down?” he asks me. When I tell him I don’t know, he grins at me. We’re both thinking the same thing—we’re breaking one of Dad’s cardinal rules. “Soon as our weight’s off, you come down,” he tells Kim. Then he disappears over the edge.
While I keep my gun pointed at Fast, and Burgermeister remains curled in a massive ball, Kim keeps a hand on the rope, waiting for it to go slack. I explain to her how to push it through her belay device. And how to brake the rope with one hand. It seems like minutes go by as the headlights bounce down the dirt road to the valley’s floor and then across the meadow.
Finally Kim says, “It’s slack!”
“Push it through,” I tell her. “Remember to brake.” She jumps up and shoves the rope through the piece of metal hanging from the front of her harness. Then she backs to the cliff’s edge. I hope Roberto thinks to give her a fireman’s belay from below. If she starts an out-of-control slide, by pulling the free end of the rope tight he can lock it in her belay device.
“Go!” I say. With a final look at me, she disappears over the edge.
I realize that there’s no way I can rappel fast enough to hit a ledge or the bottom before one of my captives can either cut or somehow destroy the rope. Looking at Fast and Burgermeister on the grass before me, I give serious thought to shooting them both. But I can’t. Not just because of Kim’s command, but also because I don’t have my brother’s wild streak. I can’t just shoot them in cold blood.
Below the hill the trucks slow to a stop at the edge of the forest. In a few seconds Fast’s friends will be running up the hill. I hear doors slamming shut.
Burgermeister apparently is thinking the same thing I am. “You’re all dead. You know that, don’t you, Scarface?” I’m sure he’s sneering at me in the dark.
“Bite me.” I touch the rope with my boot and feel some slack. Roberto, Sunny, and Kim are either on the ground or on a ledge. It isn’t easy to do while holding the gun on both men, but I manage to get the rope through my own belay device.
“What makes you think I won’t just shoot you now?” I ask.
“’Cause you’re a pussy. Just like her.”
I fire a shot into the grass in front of him. Then I point the gun at Fast and say, “Start running. And drag that piece of shit with you.” I want them as far away from the ropes as possible to give me at least a fighting chance of making it down. I can hear men crashing through the trees. Fast doesn’t move, so I fire another shot. He bends and grabs his wounded partner’s shirt to start pulling. The bigger man shoves him away and climbs unsteadily to his feet. I guess I’d just winged him earlier.
“You’re dead, fucker,” Burgermeister says to me. He’s evidently collected himself—his voice is once again devoid of any emotion.
The two of them take a few steps back. Burgermeister is limping, holding his thigh with both hands.
“Move!” I shout. I fire my last bullets into the ground at their feet.
Even as I drop over the edge, I can see men with flashlights coming out of the trees. The last thing I see before the dark red cliff obscures my vision is Burgermeister’s smiling face in the beam of a flashlight. The light flashes on a blade in his hand.