The Edge of Justice (6 page)

Like Heller, Chris Braddock also is on probation for Possession with Intent to Distribute out of Teton County. The DOOs, date of offenses, are the same. That means they were doing a little dealing together. Sierra Calloway, if it's the same girl, had been charged with prostitution in Boulder, Colorado, but received a deferred judgment that's basically the same as a dismissal as long as she stays out of trouble. As for Cindy Topper, Kristi can find no criminal history for anyone with a similar name and within the scope of the birth dates I've given her.

I write down what she's told me and ask for the addresses given for Chris Braddock and Billy Heller in the probation paperwork. Not available by computer are the addresses for the out-of-state charges against Bradley Karge and Sierra Calloway, but Kristi promises to send out some faxes requesting them. I ask her to print out everything she has found and courier it to me at the Holiday Inn.

“I'll do better than that—since it's so slow around here I'll drive it out. Everyone is just sitting on their butts, glued to the television, waiting for a verdict in the Lee case. And it's just an hour from the office anyway.” DCI's headquarters are in Cheyenne, Wyoming, just fifty miles over the low mountains to the east. “Besides, buddy, I haven't seen you in a while,” she adds.

I tell her it isn't at all necessary, but thank her. I'm not thrilled with the idea of her coming. I'd just barely escaped having a relationship with her when I was assigned to the main office in Cheyenne. At a party we both drank too much and she clung to me the entire evening, demonstrating her availability by lifting her shirt to show me the faint ridges of gym-earned muscles on her stomach and the lower edges of her black lace bra. Only with great difficulty had I managed to elude the temptation that night and go home alone. Now, eighteen months later and emotionally damaged, I don't know if I'll have the will to ward off a second assault.

There's no answer at the number I had gotten out of the phone book for Cindy Topper. On the map at the front of the directory I find the street where she lives, mark it, and tear out the page. While I'm at it I look up the address of a local mountaineering shop. I will need a climbing guidebook in order to figure out directions to the rock from which Kate Danning fell.

Outside my window the reporters are beginning to frolic in the pool. When Oso and I go out the door, I feel the wind, warmer and stronger still, heated and gathering speed from its short journey across the dry plains on the way to Laramie. I wonder if I'll have time today to return to Vedauwoo and climb shirtless again with the sun on my back. The thought is too hopeful for the trouble the wind is blowing my way.

FIVE

T
IM
'
S OUTDOOR STORE
is just a half block off Third Street on Grand Avenue, almost directly across the street from the sandstone courthouse. Activists, protesters, and the curious are already gathered there on the lawn. Curious myself, I glance at the crowd to see if the Klansmen are back before going into the store. They aren't; apparently one of their numbers had embarrassed the Klan enough the night before. The fact that they can be humiliated restores a little of my faith in humanity.

Inside, amid crowded racks of clothes, bikes, packs, and gear, I recognize the small, slender figure sorting climbing shoes and hiking boots against one wall. Lynn. She's wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a too-large V-necked shirt. Her small feet are bare beneath thin brown ankles. I smile at another girl behind the counter as I walk toward the shoes. It's the third time I've come across Lynn in just two days. Maybe my luck is changing.

She looks up and sees me as I wander over, and smiles. “Hey, Anton. You stalking me or what?”

“You're the stalker. You watched me climb, gave my dog a lei, even came up to me in the bar last night. Now you show up when I go shopping.”

She laughs and says, “Well, don't become a stalker then, I already got one.” The corners of her lips drop a quarter inch or so.

“What's that about?”

She looks back at the shoes she's arranging and doesn't answer my question. “So what are you doing here?”

“Shopping for a Vedauwoo guidebook. You work here?”

“Yeah, man, I run this place.”

“Do you give discounts to climbing partners?”

“You're not a partner.”

“Maybe I will be soon.”

She looks back up at me, amused and speculating.

“How soon, Anton? You want to meet my friends and me up at the 'Voo? Like tomorrow morning, early?”

“I'd like that. You guys can show me the good stuff. Top-rope me up the hard ones. But I think I'd want to have you holding the rope, not your pal Heller. He didn't seem too friendly, and I'm a little out of shape.”

“You didn't look it the other day when you were soloing.” She blushes a little as she says it, then looks around again and sees the girl behind the counter watching us intently. Lynn stops smiling and stares at the girl until she looks away and pretends to busy herself with the magazines stacked there.

“How 'bout meeting us at Reynold's Complex, like at eight o'clock?”

“Sell me a guide so I can find it and I'll be there.”

She leads me over to a rack of guidebooks and hands me one called
Heel and Toe—Climbs of Greater Vedauwoo.

“How come they call it
Heel and Toe
?”

“After you do a few fat cracks up there you'll find out, man. They should call it
Bloody Knees and Elbows
or
Gnarly Fucked-up Off-Widths.
”

I groan. “Off-widths.” Climbing off-widths means sticking in just one elbow and a knee, wedging them tight, then wiggling up sideways. There is no more physical, feared, or painful type of crack climbing. Vedauwoo is famous for them.

Lynn rings the guidebook up on the register while the girl who'd been standing there keeps sneaking mirthful looks at the two of us. I notice Lynn takes twenty percent off the listed price. I guess I'm now a partner.

“I'll see you in the morning, Anton,” she says, her brown eyes smiling.

From there I drive to a pet store at the south end of town not far from the hotel to get a new bag of food for Oso. After parking outside on the street, I stand enjoying the sun and the wind for a moment while I flip through the pictures in the guidebook with it propped open on the hood. Just when I think I've found a picture that matches the coroner's, I hear a voice behind me.

“Hey,
cabrón
.”

The word raises the hair on my arms with a gentle sting. I turn and look at the four Hispanic youths who've gathered around me on the sidewalk. Oso thrusts his head through the window, a low growl vibrating from his throat. One stands before the loose half-circle of the other three with his hands clenched at his sides. I can see the homemade gang tattoos across his knuckles. All of them wear too-large red-checked plaid shirts with only the top buttoned and baggy pants. Above the shirts they each have an ornate “13” tattooed on the skin of their throats. I recognize a couple of them only vaguely as junior members of the gang I'd investigated in Cheyenne eighteen months before, but can't remember any names.

I toss the book through the open window beside Oso's head. I give the kid a puzzled look but don't say a word.

“I said hey,
cabrón
. Fucking
joto.
”

Oso growls louder at the words. The youth looks at the beast in the truck's window and perhaps sees that the dog is too big to get through it. But he may not even notice or care. I can see that his pupils are just pinpricks. He's on something strong. His jaw is locked and beads of sweat run down his face. Behind him a middle-aged woman inside the store is watching the scene through the plate-glass window and punching numbers into a telephone.

“Remember me, motherfucking Burns?”

“No.”

“Remember
mi hermano,
Dominic,
quebrachon
?”

I blink slowly with an inward wince. I'd put a bullet through his brother's head. And through the flesh of the two other Sureno 13 gang leaders with him. Last year in the shoot-out north of Cheyenne.

I become aware of my gun's warm metal on my skin where it's clipped inside the back of my pants but don't touch it as the boy turns slightly and holds his hand out to one of the others behind him. One steps forward and holds his own hand open, exposing his palm. A concealed two-foot length of pipe slides down from his baggy sleeve. The one who's been talking, Dominic's little brother, snatches it from him and faces me again.

That sunlight seems as brilliant as a spotlight from where I stand. All sound disappears—the cars moving on the street, the birds in the trees, my big dog's growl. Time and the wind slow until they don't exist. Images are reeling up in my mind and I'm powerless to choke them back down. Then the boy slaps the pipe against his palm. One of the others behind him shouts something I can't make out.

Struggling to concentrate, I see the boys' heads turn to where a police car is pulling up to the curb. The light reflecting off the windshield conceals the driver. Instead of dropping the pipe and running, the boy's tiny pupils turn again to me, unconcerned with the new presence, but the others begin to back away.

The boy raises the pipe and snarls again,
“Chupatame, año!”
then swings high and hard, two-handed.

I watch the pipe coming toward the side of my head as if it's something happening to someone else far away. The memory of another young man's face, Dominic's, floods my vision. The face is grinning, holding the glinting barrel of a shotgun out just below the chin. And then the face jerks back as a hole appears through the bridge of his nose and red mist erupts in the air. With only that year-and-a-half-old blood in my vision, I finally duck, more to escape the red spray in my mind than anything else, and hear the pipe sweep the air above me.

My eyes and mind clear as I stagger back away from the boy. The deputy has gotten out of the car and is holding his pistol braced on the roof, shouting. Oso is rocking the Land Cruiser on its axles as he roars and throws himself against the too-small window. The boy has his back against the store window, the pipe raised again, but now his rage seems to explode. He begins shouting back at the street cop. Screaming really, madly and for revenge. I can almost feel the drugs pumping through him, upping the volume. As he screams he whips the pipe through the air in short, savage swings.

The three others are long gone as more police cars arrive. Soon a number of officers are on the sidewalk surrounding the boy, just ten or so feet away, their guns drawn and pointed. I stand behind them telling them to wait, just wait, the kid will put down the pipe.

“Go ahead, fuckers! I kill you all!”

The officers are all yelling for him to drop the pipe. Their fingers are on the triggers. Safeties off. You don't touch the trigger unless you're going to shoot. That was the first rule we'd all learned in the police academy. The boy's neck with its “13” tattoo is swollen with rage.

The tall, thick form of Sergeant Bender suddenly enters the fray, gun in one hand and a charge of pepper spray in the other. He steps between two officers and fires a chemical blast. The kid swings wildly but is too far away to strike anyone, howling obscenities. Miraculously, no one pulls a trigger. I hear myself shouting, “Don't shoot, don't shoot!”

As the pipe comes around in a full swing I launch myself forward, springing hard with all the power in my hips. My shoulder hits the boy's middle like an ax, cutting him in half, and the two of us slam into the storefront window. The glass bursts under the pressure and we topple over the low wall into the pet store.

A heavy hail of glass shards rain on my back as I fight to pin the boy while my shoulders take the blows from the end of the pipe. I head-butt him in the face just as the other officers manage to holster their weapons and move into the fray.

When I'm able to step back and collect my senses, the boy is kneeling on the broken glass with tears streaming from his wild eyes, blood running down his still-snarling mouth, and a tooth hanging, over his lower lip, that's held only by a stringy root. I can see the backs of his fingers reaching up over his shoulders from behind where the deputies have them pinned.

I feel a hand grip my shoulder. I turn and Sergeant Bender leans toward me to whisper, “You fucking pussy. You should have shot him. For a second I thought I could get away with shooting you.”

I stare into his eyes, only inches away. Then I knock his hand off my shoulder hard enough to fling it into the air and walk back to the truck to calm Oso.

Bender laughs and says louder, “Gee, I wonder how they knew you're in town? You got a lot of friends, Agent. Keep it up.”

SIX

I
T
'
S AFTER NOON
before I finish answering questions and writing out my witness statement. When McGee comes in from court I'm sitting alone on a table in an empty interview room, eating a slice of cold pizza I can't even taste. But it has the texture of rubber. The small, depressing room consists of cinderblock walls with peeling paint, a steel door, and the ever present one-way mirror. For furniture there are only three wooden chairs and the scarred table on which I sit. I've been thinking about the night I shot Dominic “Dice” Torres and two others. That night eighteen months ago has haunted me ever since. It has left me in a daze that just yesterday I thought I was finally shaking off. Then this morning the ghosts came to life. My hands are trembling when I lift the pizza to my mouth for another bite.

I remember nearly every word of the four-hour deposition I gave about that night. For some reason it seems more real than the actual event. With my back straight in the chair and cold tears of sweat running down my flanks beneath a hot wool suit, I was questioned by a flamboyant attorney named Morris Cash, who was unfortunately but appropriately known as Mo Cash, and two of his associates. Cash makes a good living suing police officers and police departments in federal courts all across the western states. It's a good enough living for him to drive a Mercedes SUV and wear ostrich-skin boots with his Armani suits. According to Ross McGee, Cash pursued the families of the men I'd killed as if they were “shitting dollars.”

I'm not at all confident that the attorney assigned to defend me and the office, a rookie Assistant Attorney General fresh out of law school, is up to the task of taking on Cash and his minions. I've learned through friends in the office that it will be his first solo trial. That means either that someone senior in the AG's Office has determined that the case is very one-sided, for or against me, or that no one with any experience wants to taint himself politically by defending the killer of three Hispanic men. My attorney, Clayton Wells, is a skinny, prematurely balding young man whose eyes constantly slide away from mine whenever we speak. He is scared, I can see. Of me, of the case, of the attention it has garnered. I know the judge and jury will be sure to pick up on that fear.

Mo Cash was friendly with me during the deposition I gave, laughing easily and attempting to establish some sort of camaraderie. But I've been around defense lawyers long enough to understand that he will be far different in court. With the jury looking on, there in the actual courtroom, he will treat me with disgust, as if I really am the cold-blooded killer that his filings in the case claim.

After the court reporter had me swear to tell the truth, I explained to Cash and his associates that at the time, as I was a relatively new agent with a face that was still unrecognized in Wyoming drug circles, I was assigned to infiltrate a Cheyenne-based gang that had been dealing methamphetamine throughout the state. They supplemented their income with half-baked extortion schemes, pawnshop snatch-and-grabs, and the occasional violent home invasion. My “vehicle” into the gang was a confidential informant named Jimmy Hernandez. Although a twice-convicted felon, he was, I believed, a criminal by unfortunate circumstance rather than as the result of an immoral calling. I actually liked him, although I didn't say that at the deposition. The AG's Office had him cold on some distribution charges that would make for his third strike, meaning he would be going away until he was an old man. For a generous plea bargain from the AG's Office, he'd agreed to risk his life and introduce me into Sureno 13.

Things went well for a long time. I was actively working my way into the gang's inner circle and getting the names of suppliers in three states and buyers across Wyoming. The fact that I wasn't more noticeably Hispanic didn't hurt my association with the gang. Unlike big-city gangs, Wyoming's have a more liberal race policy. They will accept anyone they think is sufficiently cool. And I was likable. I could talk the talk and wear the right clothes. It was something I'd learned from a military childhood of attending different schools almost every year, always being the outsider, always trying to charm my way to acceptance. Early on I became skillful at ingratiating myself with all types of people, from the jocks to the nerds to the skateboarding hippies. My graduating yearbook lists me as having been voted “Most Likable.” With the Surenos, it also didn't hurt that I was fluent in Spanish, thanks to my mother's mestizo heritage.

Jimmy had introduced me as his ex–brother-in-law, recently released from prison in California after serving a stretch for bank robbery. At first I just hung out with him and the other gang leaders, laughing and joking with them, pretending to smoke their marijuana, drinking cheap beer. After a few weeks they asked me if I wanted to take the position of one of their dealers who'd been shot by an irate customer. I refused, telling them I wasn't going to risk going back to the can to make a few bucks slinging crack. But I was always willing to help out in other ways, like working on cars or helping someone move. Soon I was invited to make some money by just protecting the deals, standing by as muscle in case something went wrong. That was a job I accepted.

The gang members themselves were not that bad individually. I even liked some of them the way I liked Jimmy. But something about their upbringing, whether it was the modern media's celebration of violence or something simpler like poverty and broken homes, I don't know, but something caused them as a whole to lack simple human empathy. They were entirely self-centered. They could not comprehend that hurting another or taking something they didn't own was wrong when it brought them what they wanted, whether it was power or control or money or more drugs.

Late one night I'd gotten a frantic call from Jimmy. He was crying into the phone, almost incoherent. Eventually I got the story out of him. Some of the gang leaders had picked him up from his mother's house and insisted that he come along on what was meant to be the burglary of a local family's residence. It had ended up badly though—the family was home.

They tied up the man, his wife, and his two daughters. Then they held a gun to Jimmy's head and made him have sex with the eight-year-old. “This is a test,” they told him. Another gun was pressed between his buttocks as he complied. Afterward, Jimmy was dropped off back at his mother's house. He said the others were in the hills, celebrating in Dominic Torres's ranch house, where I'd been several times before to meet drug suppliers and provide security during the deals. “I didn't burn you,” Jimmy told me through sobs. “But they
know
!”

Hurriedly dressing in my gang-persona clothes, I verified with the local Cheyenne police that there had in fact been a home invasion and rape, perpetrators unknown. According to them the family was too terrified to talk. I got in my truck and drove by the DCI office to be wired before going out to the ranch. It was arranged for two other agents to follow me out as backup but remain hidden in the sagebrush a few miles away.

The whole drive out there I breathed deep and fast, trying to empty my mind of Jimmy's sobs and what had surely been a little girl's screams. What had been going through her parents' minds as they'd been forced to watch I couldn't imagine.

I stood in the dirt outside the small ranch house for a long time before going in. The winter wind blew in gusts across the frozen chaparral. I knew something was wrong but my judgment was warped by outrage. There were three parked cars, but no lights, no music, no voices. The place looked about as inviting as a steel trap. But I was determined to gather evidence that would convict them no matter the risk. I finally walked in by gently pushing open the unlocked front door.

Dominic “Dice” Torres stood alone in a band of moonlight that ran across the filthy living room from a window. He held a sawed-off shotgun in one hand, flat against his leg. Then two others stepped out from an interior doorway. Luis “Flaco” Gallegos and another I knew only as Smiley. They both had small, cheap pistols down at their sides. True to form, Smiley's teeth flashed in the half-light.

“Oye, ese. Qué pasa?”
Dominic said as he raised the shotgun to just under his chin. My hand snaked down under my jacket and gripped the plastic butt of my 9mm Glock as I stared into the twin voids of the shotgun's barrels. The room erupted with flashes and explosions like lightning and thunder across the plains.

It would turn out that, inexplicably, Dominic still had the safety on. Only one of the other two even got off a shot, which buried itself in a wall of ruined stucco. Dominic went down with a 9mm hollow-point bullet through the bridge of his nose. Luis got one in the shoulder and another in the chest. Smiley took his through the teeth. Somehow I wasn't touched. Besides the bullets and bodies, all there was in the way of physical evidence when my backup arrived was the tape from the wire I wore with Dominic's innocuous words:
“Oye, ese. Qué pasa?”

During the deposition, Mo Cash was at first attentive and polite. He pointed out some inconsistencies. Why would I go in there alone when I knew that my cover had been burned? Why were there no accusations on the tape but simply a harmless greeting? Why would Dominic Torres have the safety on when he raised the gun to kill me? How could I possibly have managed to shoot dead three armed men who already had their guns drawn, who had the drop on me?

Later, Cash's questions became a little harder, like, “Isn't it true, Agent Burns, that the three men were unarmed, that you in fact planted the guns on them after they were dead?” He would wink at me sometimes when he'd ask these things, since there was no jury present, saying in subtext,
No hard feelings—it's just my job, pal.
And I had to answer as my almost prepubescent attorney instructed me, “No sir, that is not true. I did not plant guns on anyone,” instead of responding the way I wanted, which was something like a simple “Fuck you.”

The plaintiffs' theory of the case is that I went to the ranch house with the single-minded intention of murdering the three “friends” there. That I walked in, murdered Dominic Torres and his friends in cold blood, then retrieved some stolen weapons out of my truck to plant on them. The complaint states that I was motivated by frustration. According to it, I was discouraged because over the entire period of a three-month undercover investigation, I had failed to obtain reliable evidence of any criminal activity by Sureno 13. That is simply untrue. There are hours of tape and other evidence that could conclusively prove numerous criminal acts by Torres and the other two. But Clayton Wells, my attorney, warned me that we might not be able to go into any of that during the trial. The judge could rule it irrelevant to the central question of whether or not I had acted wrongfully in causing the deaths of the three men. When I snapped at him—
“I thought the purpose of a trial was to find the truth”
—his eyes just slid away once again. I should know better than to make such stupid statements. Without that evidence, my defense will hinge upon just two things: my testimony and that of Jimmy Hernandez, who can tell the jury that I'd been burned. And Mo Cash will ask the jury if they can believe me, when it's my money and the office's at stake, and whether they can believe Jimmy, a twice-convicted felon. I expect to lose the trust account my grandfather left me as well as whatever's left of my professional reputation.

“You don't look so good, Burns. You look frigging beat. . . . We should call you Deadeye instead of QuickDraw,” McGee says, studying me as he comes into the interview room.

“I'd rather we just forget about the nicknames,” I say. I chew slowly on the pizza and concentrate on swallowing.

McGee sits heavily in a plastic chair. “Can't say I blame you, lad. What happened?”

I give him a shrug and explain the run-in with the seventeen-year-old gang member. “I didn't recognize the others, but the one we hooked is Dominic Torres's little brother. They're going to send him to Evanston for a psych eval.”

“It seems a little strange. That he'd just run across you like that. . . . I would have expected him to have stalked you instead. . . . Something like a shot through a window . . . or a bullet in your back. . . . Or just take all your money in that civil suit. . . . They say revenge is a dish best eaten cold.”

“Well, he wasn't. He was pretty damn hot, stoked up on crank, I guess. Anyway, the local cops don't think he was over here looking for me. They say it was just coincidence. His gang, Sureno 13, is out of Cheyenne and Casper. They just come to Laramie to stir up trouble with the cowboys and hippies and look for girls at the university. The cops are out trying to find his buddies. How they knew I'd be here, I don't know. I wouldn't put it past my pal Bender to tip them off, though.”

What was Bender doing there in uniform just hours after the duty sergeant told me he worked nights? I take this to mean something's definitely fishy with the Danning case. Am I paranoid or could this thing with the Surenos have been a setup to get me out of action?

McGee doesn't respond to my accusation. Instead he says, “I got a call from the sheriff. He wants you out of town. . . . He said he didn't want any more trouble . . . with the gangs. I guess I don't have to tell you to watch your ass, lad. . . . Especially when you go to Cheyenne . . . next week for the hearing. Wear a friggin' vest.”

I toss the crust back in the pizza box and pick up another piece.

McGee watches me chew and I look down at the floor. Ever since the shooting, every time I've seen him, I can feel him studying me, as if he can weigh what's in my heart and in my head. McGee has been my sole support among the brass at the AG's Office, but I think his endorsement is somewhat reluctant. Like everyone else, he has questions of his own about that night. The administration had wanted to charge me criminally and see where it led. That would have been good politics for people such as the then–Attorney General, who was running for national office at the time. It would have sent a message that Wyoming will not whitewash the police-related deaths of their minorities, that they take such things as seriously as Los Angeles or New York. I suspect it was McGee and the fact that I'm something of a minority myself that saved me from an indictment. But they can still file a case at any time. There's no statute of limitations for murder.