The Precipice (10 page)

“Did the girls drink any?” Charley asked.

“They did. I remember everyone making a big deal about it because the girls had never tasted alcohol before they started hiking the trail.”

“Did this McDonut seem especially fixated on them?”

“Not that I noticed, but I was pretty busy that night. Steffi says I’m oblivious.”

Charley tilted his head at me. “Mike, maybe you can show Ross the names you got out of the trail register and see if he remembers any of them.”

In my early years as a game warden, I’d often gotten myself into trouble by meddling in matters that were none of my concern. It was an impulse I was trying my best to curb. My career finally seemed to be on the right track, and I didn’t want to risk derailing it again.

“Maybe we should leave those questions for the investigators,” I said. “I’m sure Pinkham will want to talk with Mr. and Mrs. Ross himself.”

The old pilot frowned at me. “What happened to your curiosity?”

Three bearded young hikers entered the dining room and Ross sprang into action. “Good morning!” he said to the trio. “How many, and how do you like them?”

Charley was scowling again.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m not sure I like the new you.”

“You mean the one who’s not always on the verge of being fired?”

Charley appraised me for an uncomfortably long span of time.

During his tenure in the Warden Service, my friend had acquired the reputation of being a maverick. He’d been an excellent officer in every other respect, but he seemed to delight in pushing boundaries whenever he ran up against them. It was one of the reasons he’d taken a liking to me when we’d first met. Charley had never possessed my insatiable appetite for self-destruction, but he enjoyed taking risks, and I think he saw me as a kindred spirit.

But that was more than three years ago, and I was no longer that reckless kid.

“What?” I said again.

“We should be getting over to the command post.”

He got up and bused his dirty dishes, leaving me alone to finish my impossible breakfast. I got out my phone and checked my e-mail to see if there was a message from Stacey. She tended to be an early riser. I was troubled that there was no word from her.

11

Charley and I gathered our packs and said good-bye to Ross in the kitchen. It was a hot, airless room with a dishwasher, two stoves, three refrigerators, and five freezers wedged into it. The smell of frying bacon hung in the air, and Ross was already sweating over a cast-iron pan the size of a trash can lid.

“Steffi will be sad she missed you,” he told Charley. “You know how it is, though. I’m the morning shift, and she’s the evening shift.”

“Give her a hug for me, Ross.”

“Just a hug?”

“Anything more and she’d slap me.”

We were greeted with birdsong when we stepped outside—the rapid whistles of robins. The sun hadn’t yet cleared the hills in the east, but the sky above the lake was streaked with pink and gold, and there wasn’t a breath of wind to stir the leaves of the maples. The lake, visible between the sleeping houses, was as flat and blue as stained glass. We walked across the lawn to my truck and climbed inside.

I watched the fuel gauge rise when I started the engine and thought ahead to the many miles I was likely to travel that day. “I should get some gas if the station is open.”

Charley made no response. He rolled down the window and hung his arm out. It irked me that he disapproved of my wanting to follow protocol. The old fart was just sulking because I didn’t want to be his partner in mischief anymore. Stacey was the same way: not happy unless she was misbehaving.

He put on the dark sunglasses he wore in the air. He’d told me once that he didn’t like polarized lenses because they interfered with his ability to see the displays on his control panel. The Serengetis had been an expensive Christmas present from me.

I hadn’t asked him where he’d tied up his plane for the night, but as we drove toward Main Street, I caught sight of the Cessna floating beside a dock across the lake.

“Whose dock is that?”

“Someone who owes me a favor.”

We passed the run-down Lake of the Woods Tabernacle. The resident pastor must have been an early bird himself, because he had changed the sign in front of the dilapidated building to read
PRAY FOR THE LOST.
The choice of words unnerved me:
lost,
not
missing.
The implication was of souls gone astray.

The general store at the edge of the downtown area was open and already busier than I would have expected at such an early hour. An orange electric company truck was parked beside a blue Ford shuttle bus, and there were vehicles at all but two of the six gas pumps. A sign on the cinder-block wall announced that hunters could register their kills inside at the tagging station. My guess was that this little convenience store was the most profitable business in an otherwise-unprofitable town.

I pulled up to a pump and turned to Charley. “You want anything inside?”

“See if they have any Beemans.”

This chewing gum was favored by pilots of the Chuck Yeager generation. Our private joke was that Charley always asked me to get some, but no stores carried it anymore.

I smiled at him, and he smiled back. Whatever disappointment he’d felt in me was gone. We were friends again.

A battered red Toyota 4Runner pulled up to the pump opposite us while I was filling my tank. It was one of the boxy older models, customized with aftermarket tires for mud running and equipped with a row of spotlights across the cab, perfect for jacklighting deer. The quintessential poacher’s truck. A rack of deer antlers was mounted to the grille, as if to hammer home the point.

The driver had a shaved skull and a reddish blond beard. He stared defiantly at me through the window and gave the idling engine one last rev to show me what he thought of my badge. Law-abiding people have a knee-jerk request for law-enforcement officers, but criminals—men and women who have been in and out of jail—learn the limits of our authority and don’t worry about being arrested, since it’s such a routine occurrence in their lives. I met jokers like him nearly every day in the field.

He hopped out of the elevated cab, giving me a better look at him. He wasn’t tall, but he was burly. His skin seemed almost abnormally pale for someone who looked like he spent most of his life outdoors; his head was as white as a goose egg. He wore oil-smeared jeans, a red flannel shirt, and a fleece-necked denim jacket, too hot for this humid weather. A sheathed hunting knife hung from his belt.

“How’s it going, Officer?” he asked in a voice that sounded like a bulldog speaking.

I squeezed the handle of the gas pump harder. “Good.”

He grinned and, in the process, revealed that one of his canine teeth was missing. “You guys must be up here looking for those two girls.”

“That’s right,” I said with as much friendliness as I could muster. “I don’t suppose you know anything about them.”

“Just what came over the radio.” Felons living in the backwoods always owned a police scanner. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say there was a game warden convention in town.”

The passenger door swung open and a boy jumped to the ground. I hadn’t noticed him before. He had the flattened facial features and upward-slanting eyes of someone born with Down syndrome, which made it hard to guess his age. His skin had a pink tint, and his hair was as fine as rusty threads of corn silk. He wore a Monson souvenir T-shirt and jeans patched with different color fabric at the knees.

“I want to pump,” the boy said.

The driver kept his eyes locked on mine. “Get back in the truck, Toby!”

“Gram said I could.”

The boy named Toby tugged on the man’s sleeve. I couldn’t begin to guess the relationship between the two, but they didn’t seem like father and son.

The bearded man tore his gaze free. “You’ll just spill it again.”

“Gram said I could pump.”

“OK, Dummy.”

Inside my truck, Charley had removed his sunglasses and was watching the driver with a hawklike intensity.

The gas handle jerked in my clenched fist, telling me the tank was full. I shoved the nozzle back inside the pump. The credit card function was broken; a note said I needed to pay inside.

When I stepped through the door, I was hit in the face by a blast of air-conditioned air. The checkout counter was a narrow space between lottery ticket displays, novelty lighters, and shots of high-caffeine energy drinks. A tall man peered out from beneath the overhead cigarette rack. He had iron gray bangs, deeply set eyes, and a rhinestone stud in his ear. He was wearing a blue uniform that didn’t fit him. His nameplate said
BENTON.
He glanced at me silently while nibbling his fingernails.

Two linemen in orange coveralls were gabbing beside the coffee dispensers. They saw my uniform and the gun at my side, and both of them nodded, the way certain men do when they encounter a police officer. I slid a two-liter bottle of water out of the curved shelf in the cooler.

When I returned to the checkout, I found that the old woman who had been making egg sandwiches behind the deli counter was now standing beside the door, looking out through the plastic window. She wore the same shapeless blue uniform as the tall man behind the register. A measuring tape ran along the door frame so that the clerk could estimate a robber’s height as he ran outside. It told me that the old woman was exactly five-eight. Her attention seemed to be riveted by something in the parking lot.

“Oh, God!” she said suddenly, putting a plastic-gloved hand to her mouth.

I tried to peek past the deli lady’s head. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t, Trevor!” she shouted through the door.

The bottle of water dropped from my hand and rolled across the linoleum. I had to push the old woman aside to get through the door. Outside, head-spinning gasoline fumes floated in the morning air.

Charley Stevens had the much younger, much heavier man—whose name, evidently, was Trevor—pinned face-first to the asphalt. He was kneeling on the redneck’s spinal column, twisting his right arm around his back. Trevor bucked and kicked his legs, but he couldn’t dislodge the wiry old pilot.

“Get off me, you old fucker!”

“Now, are you going to settle down?” Charley said calmly. “Or do I have to break your arm?”

“Fuck you!”

Before I could unholster my pepper spray, the boy, Toby, rushed at Charley, trying to pull him loose. I leaped forward and got the kid in a bear hug. He came free with almost no effort on my part. His body felt as soft as a loaf of Wonder bread.

“What’s going on?” I said to Charley.

“The boy spilled gas on the ground, and Hay Face started hitting him.”

“Fuck you!” Trevor said from the pavement.

“You shouldn’t talk that way in front of a child,” Charley said. “Now, are you going to settle down or not?”

“Yes!”

“You won’t take a swing at me again?”

“No!”

“You’re not a very convincing liar. Does the warden have to handcuff you, or are you going to take it down a notch?”

“No! I mean yes!”

With a surprising nimbleness for someone his age, Charley Stevens sprang away from the straw-bearded man. Trevor twisted himself into a sitting position and ejected a brown stream of spittle.

“You made me swallow my chew!”

I decided to risk setting the boy free. Toby just collapsed to the pavement, sobbing. I reached for the capsicum canister on my belt. “Put your hands in the air, Trevor.”

One side of his head was dented with pebbles, and his beard was powdered with sand. He coughed up more tobacco spit. “Fuck you.”

“It’s all right, son,” said Charley. “I think this feller has learned his lesson. He knows it’s too nice a day to spend in jail.”

“But he assaulted you,” I said.

The old pilot scratched the side of his head and gave me a sheepish look. “It was more the other way around.”

I heard a man behind me let out a howl of laughter.

“Do you think this is funny?” Trevor shouted. Angry purple blotches had appeared all over his pale head.

I followed his line of vision and saw that everyone who had been inside the store had spilled out to watch the fight.

“It ain’t funny at all, Trevor,” the deli lady said. Her voice was parched-sounding. She had the sunken eyes and cracked lips of someone whose vices have aged them beyond their years. Her nameplate said
PEARLENE
. “Apologize, Benton!”

“Sorry,” the tall clerk said, unable to suppress a smile.

She scowled and turned again to the straw-bearded man. “Are you OK? Do you need a Band-Aid?”

“No!”

Trevor pushed himself to his feet. He staggered until he had regained his balance. He swept the sand off his jacket and pants with violent motions of his big hands.

“You sure you don’t want me to arrest him?” I asked Charley.

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary. Will it?”

Trevor pointed his index finger at my friend, not needing to speak the words to make his threat known. Then he clambered back into the 4Runner. I had a momentary fear he might try to run Charley down, but instead he began revving the engine over and over. He spun the tires until black smoke billowed from beneath them, jerked his foot off the brake, and peeled out. The Toyota bounced over a curb and swung around until it pointed south. We could hear it a long time after it had disappeared down the road.

The air stank of burned rubber.

“I don’t believe Hay Face paid for his gas,” my friend said.

I shook my head in disbelief. “How in the world did you manage to take him down? He was half your age.”

“Half as slow, you mean.”

“I had no idea you were a master of the martial arts, Charley.”

“In my day we called it ‘Indian wrestling,’” he said.

The old woman came up and slapped my shoulder, hard enough to hurt. “You assholes!”

I stepped away from her attack. “What?”

“They’re going to burn down my store!”

“Who is?”

“The Dows!” she said. “You can’t just beat up Trevor Dow and think nothing’s going to happen. That family is crazy. They don’t care if you two are wardens. They don’t care about anything. They’re going to come back here after dark and burn down my store!”