Point of Law (29 page)

FORTY-ONE

“Y
OU EVER HEARD
that expression, the ‘bowels of the earth’?” Roberto asks as he wriggles last out of the hole.

“Yeah?”

“If these are the bowels, then what are we, crawling through them?”

“Anton,” Kim says, “please tell your brother to shut up.”

The small chamber is crowded with the four of us in it. All three of them came through the rock without apparent trauma. Even Sunny made hardly a sound as she squirmed out of the tunnel with Kim close at her heels. But the claustrophobia still has a hold on my chest, and I sweat heavily as I chip away at the dirt near the starlit opening with a softball-size rock. It’s not the warm sweat that comes of exertion, but the sick, chilling sweat of lingering fear.

I’m grateful when Roberto pushes me out of the way and takes over with a rock of his own. I’m even more grateful when Kim, somehow sensing my unreleased panic, puts her arms around my waist and pulls me down to huddle between her and Sunny. Whenever Roberto pauses in his work, we can hear the chirp of crickets in the night outside.

“What time is it?” I ask, finally regaining some of my composure.

Kim pulls her jacket up over her wrist and illuminates it with the light. “Three in the morning, if this thing’s still working. Those assholes must have been bluffing about the dynamite. They probably think they can starve or freeze us out, then ‘discover’ the cave in a few days or weeks when the deeds are exchanged and the swap can’t be reversed.”

It will be dawn in a few hours. If we’re in the valley somewhere like I suspect—we can’t be far—then we’ll have to hustle to get far enough away to be safe from Fast and his pals.

Something we don’t discuss is staying down in our hole throughout the coming day and until the night comes again. Sooner or later, Dad would come looking for us. We have enough food and water in the pack that we’d pulled through the hole using the rope, but I think everyone shares a little of my desperation to get out from under the earth.

Roberto’s making a lot of noise as he pounds his handheld rock against the tiny opening in the wall. It can’t be helped. The stone he’s cutting through is the same crumbly sandstone that makes up the red cliff by the entrance to Cal’s ruin. Every now and then he tosses over his shoulder a piece he has hacked free. I can see that the hole is slowly widening when I aim the headlamp’s beam around him. It’s now big enough for maybe a large rabbit.

“Can you see anything?” Sunny asks him. They’re her first words since she screamed about the bones. I take it as a good sign.

Roberto turns to us, his face streaked with dirt and his black hair tangled and filthy, and grins. “You aren’t gonna like this, kids, but it looks like another tunnel.”

Fresh fear floods through me. I don’t know if I can handle another coffin-crawl. And if we meet solid rock, we’re doomed. There’s no way in hell we’ll have the strength to crawl back through the slot and find another passage.

“Just kidding. We’re almost out.”

I can’t decide whether to punch or hug him. So I just lie limply in Kim’s arms while Roberto goes back to work.

When he tells us he’s finished, I slither out first. The night caresses my filthy face like a lover. The darkness of it is so different from that inside the cave. It seems to welcome me.
Come out, come out and play.
Overhead the sky is so filled with beautiful stars that just a glance at it makes me dizzy. There are several pine trees on the rocky slope where I stand, and I want to hug them all. Strangely, the crickets aren’t chirping anymore.

I don’t take the time to hug the trees or wonder where the crickets have gone. We need to get the hell out of here as quick as we can. I close my eyes and take one deep breath, then stoop to help pull Sunny out of the ground. And right behind her Kim and Roberto. It takes just seconds before we’re ready to run.

I hear a sound behind me. A boot brushing through grass. Just as I turn, something strikes my ankle with enough force to kick my leg out from under me and send me sprawling in the grass. The blow may have even broken my ankle. I fall on my back, trying to stifle a shout of warning and pain. Looking up, I see a huge shadow blocking out the stars overhead.

“Is that how it felt, motherfucker?” Burgermeister repeats my last words to him in his dead man’s voice. “Is
that
how it felt when I shot your dog?”

Two more shadows step up behind him. One big—Fast—and the other very small. A higher-pitched voice says, “You dumb hippies sure make a lot of noise.”

FORTY-TWO

S
UNNY IS CURLED
in a fetal position in the grass. Burgermeister had knocked her down with a brutal shove when she was unable to kneel with the rest of us. She’d been too scared to follow his commands, totally paralyzed and unbelieving that she was suddenly back in the hands of her tormentors. The giant laughed at her. “Welcome home, honey,” he said. “I knew you couldn’t keep that sweet young ass of yours away from us. You had to come back for more, didn’t you? Just like your friend Ms. Walsh, although it took her a little longer. Twelve years, right, Dave?”

Fast doesn’t reply.

Everything is crystal clear in the night. Horrifyingly clear. We hadn’t gone anywhere by crawling through the mountain. It had all been for nothing. All that darkness and terror. Above and behind us is the steep field of broken red stone that has shed off the cliff’s face over thousands of years. I know that if I turned and looked, I could probably spot the ledge that holds the secret entrance to Cal’s ruin just a hundred feet up. We’re in a grove of widely spaced pines just yards from the meadow.

Fast and Burgermeister have a new friend with them. I guess that the others with the rifles have been sent away—Burgermeister is smart enough to limit the number of witnesses. Even in the dark the new man is vaguely familiar. He is short and stocky with a bristling haircut. I don’t place him immediately because of the dark and the fact that he’s not in uniform.

His name only comes to me when Roberto asks from where he’s kneeling to my right, “Doing a little moonlighting, Blow Job?” It’s Deputy B. J. Timms, the sheriff’s half-pint sidekick.

He responds to my brother’s question by raising an oversized automatic and pointing it between Roberto’s eyes. I know he’s about to shoot but then Burgermeister intervenes.

“He’s mine,” the big man says. He’s standing behind my brother with the wicked silver gleam of a Buck knife in one hand. Without another word, he raises it high, then slams it down, butt-first, on the top of Roberto’s head. In the sickening crunch, I can hear both the tear of skin and the impact of steel on bone. My mad, unstoppable brother collapses forward into the grass.

Timms’s pistol wavers, then swings to the side until its thick barrel is pointed at me. It stays on my head while the deputy walks around to stand behind me. In a way I prefer him there—in my state of heightened awareness I don’t want to see the muzzle flash before the bullet rips through my skull.

David Fast stands with his back to the meadow, facing Kim and me over Sunny’s prostrate form. He’s resting the barrel of his rifle in the girl’s exposed ear. She shivers violently at his feet, pinned to the grass by the gun, and makes no sound. I think I know what she’s feeling—she’s suffered enough and just wants it over with. Escape and capture, escape and capture, escape and capture. She’s probably praying for a bullet right now. I’m feeling a little of the same thing.

Burgermeister stands beside Fast. He grins at us with his big white teeth glowing in the dark. “Y’all sure make a lot of noise for people being hunted. You couldn’t have made it any easier for us to find you, screaming and hammering away down in there. What did you expect, carrying on like that?”

None of us answer. I fight an urge to close my eyes.

“Just look what crawled out from under a rock,” he laughs. “That cave must really be something for you to get all the way down here. I guess that’s Dave’s and my cave now. We decided not blow it up after all. Once the papers are all signed, it might make us a couple of extra bucks.”

I’m on my knees facing them. Timms is right behind me with the muzzle of his pistol pressed against the back of my neck. I can smell his fetid breath blowing into my hair. My hands are on top of my head, inches from the gun, but it’s jammed so hard into my neck that I know the deputy’s finger must be tight on the trigger. I can’t risk even a flinch.

Kim is to my left, kneeling too with her hands on her head, with one sharp elbow against the inside of one of mine. Roberto is to my right. He’s facedown in the dirt and grass. Burgermeister steps over and kneels on his back. I can hear my brother struggling to breathe from under the big man’s weight. I can’t tell if he’s conscious. The giant has the blade of the knife against the skin to one side of Roberto’s neck. From the forced breathing, I know my brother is alive. For the moment.

“It’s kind of funny,” Burgermeister continues. “You all coming out of the ground like that. Funny ’cause you’re going right back in, if you know what I mean. But I don’t think you’ll be coming back out this time.”

I speak to Fast instead of his partner and my voice sounds surprisingly strong, full of an assuredness I certainly don’t feel. “People know where we are. They’re going to come looking for us.” I’m thinking of my father and his last thrilling words to me.
I’m coming.
I remember telling him we were headed for the red cliff. At least he’ll know where to dig.

Fast says nothing. He just stares down at Sunny, so Burgermeister replies for him. “They aren’t going to look too hard, I bet. Not for a couple of squirrelly ecoterrorists and an escaped convict.”

“They’re going to look for me,” I tell him. “I’m a cop.”

“We know all about you, Special Agent Antonio Burns. We know you’re suspended. For the second time, too. Tsk-tsk, boy. They’re probably gonna figure you thought you were going to get seriously busted this time. Especially after having helped your brother jump bail, which is what they’ll believe when he doesn’t turn up. Nah, they aren’t going to look too hard for you.”

He’s wrong. My immediate boss and my colleagues know the suspension is bullshit. But he wouldn’t believe me if I told him that. I again try talking to Fast’s quiet form. He still has the rifle barrel touching Sunny’s head where it lies in the grass.

“It isn’t going to work,” I tell him, trying not to plead. “It isn’t going to work in the end. You can’t murder the four of us—five, including Cal—without paying a price. And it’s not worth the cost of the land.”

I’ve sensed a reluctance in him all along. A bit of remorse for what he’d done to Kim all those years ago. And a distaste for his partner’s violent tactics. I feel a tiny glint of hope. I try to will his gun from where it points directly into Sunny’s ear. I will him to lift it up until it’s pointed at Burgermeister.

Fast looks back at me for a long moment. I think all of us, even Burgermeister, who is armed only with a knife now, hold our breaths.

“This should never have happened,” Fast says slowly. “All this, because of a stupid prank and an accident twelve years ago. Jesus, Kim, I can’t imagine what’s going on in your head.” His hands twitch on the rifle. Then he snuffs out my hope. “There’s no going back now. I’d lose everything. I’m sorry, truly sorry, but you brought this on yourself, Kim.”

“It’s time for the four of you to say good night,” Burgermeister rasps, laughing.

“Not yet, Alf,” Timms says behind me, his nasty breath still blowing on me and the pistol’s muzzle still screwed into the back of my neck. “You promised that I could have a little fun first.”

“That’s true,” Burgermeister explains to Kim and me, as if making an apology of his own. “I did promise him that. And he’s earned it. After all, that was his cousin you knocked off the cliff up there. And he’s had his eye on you for a while, Ms. Walsh. I’ll bet Dave can tell us that the honey is sweet. And I’ve been thinking I ought to have some fun with you, too. I’d like to see what I missed by not going to college.”

“Fuck you,”
Kim spits. But at Fast, not Burgermeister.

Fast shakes his head mournfully. “Blame yourself, Kim. You’ve fucked yourself.”

“Man, I sure do like my women feisty,” Burgermeister says with another laugh. He gestures at Sunny’s prostrate form. “Not like that one. She’s like dead meat.”

Beside me Kim makes a hissing noise with a sharp intake of breath.

“Hear that, bitch? I’m owed. I’m getting my piece, too.” Timms has pulled the gun from my neck and reached around in front of Kim with both his gloved hands. His free hand grabs at one of her breasts while with the other he shoves the pistol down the front of her baggy pants. “Your one eye’s gonna meet mine.”

They’re making a terrible mistake but they don’t know it. Their threats strike a match in my chest. Before they’d said that about violating Kim once again, I’d almost been ready to let him put a bullet in my head without a fight. I was just too weary. But no one’s going to touch Kim. Not that way. The match flares with a brilliant white heat, so fierce it’s nearly an explosion.
That will not happen. Not without him paying whatever maximum price I’m able to charge.

I look out past Fast at the night sky and try to exhale, to blow the searing flames from my throat. The fire goes out in an instant. It’s like it had never even been there. Instead what I feel is a great emptiness, cool and calm and easy, filled with the night, the sky, the trees and mountains. I’m a part of it all. Something in my brain breaks loose with an enormous yawn that sucks the whole world in. I’m going to make a final struggle. It’s better to die fighting than to surrender, to let the woman I maybe love be violated for a second time in her life. The cells of my body are going to begin their reentry into the elements that made me. And it’s okay.

I have no strategy. And the way I’m feeling, that’s okay, too. I’m beyond fear and pain and worry and guilt. I’m soaring into another place entirely.

The old Neil Young lyric floats through my head as I tense myself for a suicidal lunge to the side.
Better to burn out than to fade away
. Above me in the night sky is a leathery flutter like a giant bat’s wings.
Weird,
I think. Since my childhood I’d pictured Death as the Grim Reaper—bony hands and a cloaked face and blazing red eyes reaching up beneath me on an alpine wall to snatch at my ankles. Weird that it’s more like a winged Angel of Death coming out of the sky, like something out of a medieval painting, something that I never imagined before. Weird that after all the time I spent fighting him on the rock, he can just sweep in like this and grab me.

As I start to raise a knee in order to get a foot beneath me, I look up to catch a glimpse of the monster. I want to smile in his face. Give him the finger one last time. But there’s nothing up there but a thousand tiny pinpricks of light and Death’s vast black shape sweeping across them. No one notices me brace my right foot against the solid earth that’s soon to hold my decomposing flesh. They’re all staring at the sky, too. He must be coming for more than just me. That makes me smile.

I spin and lunge to the left, driving with all the power in my good leg. My shoulder smashes into Timms’s ribs down low beneath his arm. I rip him off Kim’s back and take him down hard into the dirt and the grass. My hands grasp at his face and throat, tearing flesh and hair, seeking the soft gelatinous meat of his eyes. He’s screaming with his hands flailing on my wrists. I realize he’s lost the pistol—it most have gotten tangled in Kim’s pants with the initial impact when I knocked him off her.

In my strange, expanded state of mind the others are clear around me despite Deputy Timms’s screams. Kim still kneels in the grass with both her hands down her pants. She’s trying to untangle the gun. I want to tell her to forget it, to run, but the words are buried by all the other noise.

Fast is hollering before us. He’s pulled the hunting rifle’s barrel from Sunny’s ear and is aiming it at Timms and me. But he’s unable to get a clear shot with the off-duty deputy writhing before me. Maybe he’s unwilling to pull the trigger. But it doesn’t matter. The way I’m feeling, it will take more than a few bullets to stop me before I’m done.
You’re next.

Fast makes it easy, coming at me now quick across the grass. He’s reversed the gun and is raising the butt to smash at my head. I whip Timms back and forth as my fingers tear at his throat and face. Fast strikes once and the hard wooden stock cracks off the deputy’s forehead when I use it to parry the blow.

To the right, Burgermeister is also caught up in the battle’s frenzy. He’s reaching under my brother’s throat with the long knife. But Roberto has managed to grab his wrist. Even on his face in the dirt, with one hand awkwardly twisted before him, his maniacal strength is slowing the big man’s stroke.

Then the night is split wide open when Fast strikes a second time. In slow motion I watch the rifle butt swinging in a short jab toward my temple. It’s like a flashbulb goes off in my face. Night becomes day. My fingers lose their grip on Timms’s face and throat. I sit back on my ass, unable to lift my arms to ward off a second blow. My arms just won’t work.

But Fast hesitates. Through the brilliant light I see the deputy slumped at his feet. He’s not moving. Fast glances down at him, too, then reverses the rifle a second time so that its muzzle is aimed at my face. The black hole in the barrel looks huge. It pulls at my starred vision, seeming to drag my very being into it.

A new sound overwhelms all the screaming and hollering. It sounds like the earth is opening up beneath us. Dirt and mud and sticks tear through the air, stinging my face. The sound of automatic weapons, I realize with a sudden jolt, and I’m almost disappointed when Fast’s gun wavers off my chest. Around me I see three orange flames coming from three different directions, converging on our deadly little battle, but shooting short into the grass and the small pine trees. Fast still has the gun pointed in my general direction as he looks around wildly.

It takes a few seconds before my eyes clear of the blinding light. Then I’m aware of three shadows, darker than the night, loping toward us. Behind one of them billows an even larger black shape. It takes me a minute to realize it’s a parachute trailing behind the running shadow. And it takes a moment for me to recognize the shadow’s steady lope. That hadn’t been Death fluttering overhead. Just Dad.

My father is dressed entirely in black. Even his face has been painted with charcoal or tar. The only things not black are a pair of slender white parentheses on each side of his irises. The two other shadows circle us to the sides with ugly short rifles gleaming in the starlight.