Borderline: A Novel Part 14

"Hah," Gerry said, and, taking a drink, looked at him over the edge of her winegla.s.s, up through her heavily mascaraed eyelashes. The trick had probably worked like a house afire when she was eighteen, and it was still working. Maybe it was the half-laugh of self-mockery that sparkled in her eyes. Then the reporter winked and Darden knew she'd seen the exchange between Kevin and Judith and knew why he had decided to take Kevin for a short walk outside.

Gerry laughed and, turning away, said, "Don't let the lizards get you."

The gift shop had stayed open to accommodate any shoppers of the party and Darden smiled at the girl behind the cash register as he took his agent out into the parking lot behind the lodge.

Kevin had morphed from smug to scared to sheepish to belligerent in the time it had taken Darden to excise him from the party. Defensiveness had him puffed up like a toad in the clear glow of the desert moon. Darden had no time for theatrics.

"You know, son, every now and then I like a little Bible study," he said kindly. "It's good to know your Bible, don't you think?"

Caught off guard, Kevin deflated some and managed an: "Uh, yeah, I guess so."

"I can't quote you chapter and verse but there's a real important part where it says, 'If thine eye offends me I'll pluck it out.' You remember that part. If you ever forget your Bible studies again, I will pluck it out with a dull Boy Scout knife. You got it?"

Kevin gawped, his lips moving like a fish looking for air or an underling looking for an excuse, but he had the good sense not to let any words escape.

"Good man," Darden said, and slapped him on the back hard enough the agent had to take a step forward or lose his balance.

Darden watched the young agent walking back toward the lodge. Some of the swagger was gone, but not enough. Darden's Bible study cla.s.ses usually instilled more humility in his underlings. Either he was slipping or Kevin was bedding Judith and it was giving him a sense of invulnerability. Judith could be counted on to tell Darden pretty much everything. Pretty much. Her bedroom and Charles were off limits. Once upon a time that would have been fine. Darden was old school. Unless it was with enemy spies, where politicians slept should be none of the public's business. Now that the public was addicted to tabloid t.i.tillation, as happy with the s.e.x life of presidents as they were with starlets, he was going to have to make it his business.

He wasn't looking forward to it. There were definite downsides to clients ons teige had read bedtime stories to.

Once upon a time.

Darden thought about the age-old lead-in to fairy tales, to better times when magic was as common as the west wind and, unless one read the German tales, ogres never prevailed. True love won out every time.

The good old days were a fairy tale. There'd never been a time the world was a safer, kinder, better place. There'd only been a time human beings were young and strong and ignorant.

A slight drizzle had started, so fine it would take a while to get wet, but it woke Darden from his musings and he shook his head like a blind old dog. More and more he was slipping into his own thoughts, mentally, if not physically, abandoning his post. Maunderings of an old man, he chided himself, but a sharp fang of anxiety bit deeper: Alzheimer's. There was a genetic component.

He thought of Lou Bearing, a hit man he'd come to know during his White House years. Maybe he'd call Lou and give him a pa.s.sword, have Lou phone him every day and ask what it was. If he forgot the pa.s.sword three days in a row, Lou could take him out. The black whimsy cheered him and he started back to his duty station. Judith would be starting her speech soon and he didn't want to miss it.

The automatic doors to the lodge slid silently open and rangers began leaking out from the gift shop: the chief ranger, the deputy superintendent-both off duty and out of uniform-and two uniformed rangers whom Darden didn't know. Their radios were out and crackling and worried looks clouded their faces.

"Bernard," Darden addressed the chief ranger, Bernard Davies. Darden didn't have to dig for the name. Memorizing names was the cheapest and easiest form of public relations. "What brought on this exodus?" He smiled to show he wasn't prying, but one in the circle of those who need to know.

"There's been some trouble on the river," Bernard replied. He wasn't much younger than Darden but he was of the tall, long-boned, wiry-muscled type Texas was known for. Darden was of the German peasant type, strong and squat and doomed to go to fat in later years. "The river rose pretty fast and some rafters got caught."

There was more to it than that. Lawmen didn't abandon free food and drink and the promise of a terrific row because a handful of tourists got their bottoms wet. Darden waited for the rest of the story.

"We don't have all the details yet," Bernard said, responding to the open expectant look Darden cultivated with a degree of success. "Apparently a couple of them were killed or badly injured. It shouldn't have any effect on your doings up here."

"If there's anything we can do to help . . ." Darden offered, safe in the knowledge one law outfit would eat their own guns before they would accept help from another law outfit. At least at the outset of an incident.

"We've got it covered," Bernard said curtly. Then added: "But thanks."

1em"1em" width="1em" align="justify">The four of them walked out into the drizzle. Darden waited, listening to the radios and the uniformed rangers. Shots had been fired. A paramedic had been called. The report of gunshots surprised Darden. Of the things that could kill a person in a national park, one didn't put bullets at the top of the list. He remembered the shootings by the Mexican kids years back-didn't remember them happening, but remembered Judith talking about it when she was a.s.sembling what she called her "emotional factors" for her argument. Stories that would scare the pants off people in a close personal way.

Darden couldn't help hoping this was a repeat. Judith would make hay with it.

His Judith could make hay with anything.

When he turned to go inside to watch the show, Gerry was standing under the eaves of the lodge putting a scarf over her determinedly blond hair. With her uncanny sense of where the story was, she'd followed the green and gray out of the party.

"Give the mayor my regrets," she said. "Bigger fish to fry." And she followed the rangers into the drizzle.

NINETEEN.

For a while Anna and Freddy Martinez sat in silence. The lanky ranger continued to be as unthreatening as Smokey the Bear without his shovel, and Anna relaxed enough she could feel what the day had robbed her of, at least physically. Her muscles didn't ache yet but they would, come morning. At the moment they were warm and had lost their elasticity. It was hard to lift her arm to give drops of water to Helena.

"Anna Pigeon," Freddy said.

"That's right,"

"Out of Rocky Mountains?"

"Yes."

"You're the one got tangled up in that mess on Isle Royale this winter?"

"Me all over," Anna said. She wasn't surprised Martinez knew of the incident. The Ranger Report was on the NPS website. Parks entered items they were proud of or thought would be of general interest to other Park Service employees. The "mess on Isle Royale," as Martinez put it, would have been well disseminated and discussed.

Anna didn't want to talk about it.

Freddy Martinez was looking at her differently than he had before two and two had come together in his brain, like she was no longer quite respectable or viable or trustworthy. Or maybe she was projecting what she feared onto his face, which was blank and mostly unreadable in the silvery light.

"Scuttleb.u.t.t was there was going to be a big federal investigation. What's happening with that?"

"Nothing," Anna said. She focused her attention on Helena so "Homeland Security is doing something, but it's all on their side. Nothing to do with me," she added, sounding evasive if not outright defensive. She didn't feel defensive, she felt belligerent but, if Anna was on her sister Molly's black leather couch in her psychiatrist's office in Manhattan, she'd probably be informed that belligerence was defensiveness in one of its nastiest forms.

She forced herself to look at Martinez. She didn't know what she was expecting to see in his face, maybe fear because she was dangerous, maybe revulsion because she was a killer. What she saw was pity, and all at once she saw herself through his eyes. Freddy Martinez wasn't seeing a bad-a.s.s renegade, he was looking at a sad middle-aged woman with graying hair, small and tired and pathetic and maybe crazy to boot. Not a vision she welcomed in any mirror. In the mirror of another ranger's eyes, it was almost unbearable.

"Want to tell me what happened today?" he asked kindly.

"What time did you get here?" she asked instead of answering him. Time for being defensive had pa.s.sed. She intended to be as offensive as circ.u.mstances permitted. It was Freddy, not she, who had been at the rim of Santa Elena Canyon when shots were fired. This mess, at least, was not hers.

For a second she thought he wasn't going to answer her but he did. "A couple of hours ago, maybe less," he said easily. "Why?"

"Was anyone here when you arrived?"

"n.o.body." Again he asked: "Why?"

"Shots were fired," she said. "They weren't from the Mexican side of the river." Instead of looking alarmed or guilty, Martinez looked relieved. Relieved of what? she wondered. Had the shots somehow been fired from the other side and she'd miscalculated? Was he relieved that she hadn't figured that out? Given he was the man they'd found in the shooter's place, she would have thought the opposite answer would be the one he was hoping for.

"Did you hear the gunshots?" she asked him.

"I didn't, but then the river was making a lot of noise throwing rocks and rafts around."

It was a believable answer. The grinding of the immense shale molars as they chewed through another layer of the world had been stunning. Still she looked hard at him to see if he would waver, admit to hearing something like a shot, anything that would mark a man trying to sound believable when he was lying through his nice white teeth.

Freddy didn't embellish.

The last shot, the one that killed Lori, had been fired in the late afternoon while they were still at the bottom of the slide. If the shooter had taken off right after that, he would have been gone before Martinez admitted to coming on the scene.

"Which direction did you ride in from?"

Freddy pointed upriver. "West. The road runs along the rim of the canyon from Lajitas."

Anna had noticed the rugged dirt track when she'd stolen the saddle blanket from the back of Freddy's horse but it hadn't registered on her consciousness. She remembered it now. "Did you pa.s.s anybody?"

"n.o.body."

"Where does the road go?"

"It cuts back up and joins Highway 170 just outside the park boundary."

Anna hadn't heard the sound of a car or truck engine but then she might not have, given the constant racket of the river tearing up its bed. The shooter could have left that way, unseen by Freddy and unheard by the people struggling up from the killing grounds.

"How long would it take to drive out that way?" she asked.

"Depends. An hour or two. Help will be coming in from the Lajitas side," he said, mistaking-or pretending to mistake-her questions for concern about how long it would be till rescue reached them. "They should be here in a little while. We do have a helicopter but with fires so bad this early in the year, the park detailed it to Big Thicket. A lot of our LE rangers are there too."

Everything he said made sense. He seemed to be precisely what he said he was: a ranger who was patrolling on his day off because the river was raging and who happened to come upon them by chance. Freddy might even have saved their lives if the shooter had seen him coming and stopped the carnage to save his own skin.

"Are you going to tell me what happened here?" Martinez asked.

Anna couldn't think of any reason not to. "Sure," she said. Helena had stopped taking water and was sleeping. At least Anna hoped she was asleep. She fought down the urge to disturb the baby by lifting her and pressing her ear against her chest for the umpteenth time that day.

Filling the time with the tale so she wouldn't humiliate herself by falling asleep while on prisoner watch duty, Anna started at the beginning. In her mind the beginning was Easter, back when they were all still alive and having fun. Martinez was annoyingly unsurprised by their daring rescue of the stranded cow.

"We haul one or two out every season. Leave it to Carmen to lower one down a cliff, though." He laughed, and Anna felt bad that she had to tell him Carmen was dead. She had forgotten how tiny worlds were. Boatmen knew boatmen. Of course Martinez knew Carmen. Anna chose not to blurt it out but to let it come at its natural time in the story. Partly, she was putting off the moment, but mostly she wanted to see Freddy's reaction to events as they unfolded. Maybe he wasn't the shooter-she'd been charmed or lulled or convinced of that for the time being-but it didn't mean he knew nothing about the shooting.

A weird sense of shame came over her as she was approaching the telling of how they'd wrapped the raft around a rock. She spent too much time explaining how Lori and Chrissie and fate had conspired to keep them too long, push them too far toward the American bank, how the girls' panic had turned the situation more serious when they'd leaned into the current and the raft had taken on all the tonnage of water slamming down from upriver, and it came to her that she was afraid, actually frightened, that he would think her a rotten ranger because she hadn't been able to navigate the slide without falling victim to a great hungry rock, that she would rather blame the dead than appear inept in front of her fellows. This was not who she'd once been, not who she was before she'd gone to Isle Royale.

It was not who she wanted to be.

"So, we lost the raft and the gear, saved the cow and ourselves," she summed up quickly, and waited for Martinez to tell her how it should have been done, what mistakes rookies make.

"It's easy to do," he said. "I wrapped a canoe so bad once we spent a half a day rigging zigzag winches to pull it off. Finally we had about ten zigs and nine zags to increase the power of our pull and ended up shifting the rock. The canoe sucked under and is probably buried about forty feet deep by now." He laughed easily.

Rather than feeling relieved he had no need to make her feel small, she felt small for caring, for once again projecting her fears on a stranger. Her mind flashed back to the bitterness with which she had thought of Dr. Vincent James, the psychologist who had tried to help her in Boulder. Little broken people were the ones with the sharp edges, the ones who needed to saw bites out of others to feed themselves. The pit, the nightmares, the administrative leave-she'd let something cut her down to little. She laid her fingers against Helena's cheek as if to comfort the child. In reality she was comforting herself.

"When we got everybody fished out we were missing Chrissie," Anna went on with her story. "We heard her screaming a ways downriver. She'd found a woman caught in a strainer and started shrieking. When you meet Chrissie, this won't seem as farfetched," Anna told Martinez.

Freddy knew there had been shots fired and he knew not everybody had survived, yet the mention of the woman in the strainer brought him up rigid, his back pulled away from the log he'd been leaning against. "Pregnant?" he demanded.

Anna stiffened and felt Helena stir in the crook of her left arm. Pregnant wouldn't be her first a.s.sumption when told of a person caught in a strainer. Anna was a bit past the age when Helena would automatically be a.s.sumed to be hers, but there was no reason not to a.s.sume she belonged to a deceased member of the party.

"Yeah," Anna said warily.

"Did she live?" Martinez's eyes were too wide. Even in the vague light of the moon, Anna could see them spark black against the whites surrounding them. The liquid lines of his muscles were frozen now and he looked a man made of angles and edges.

"No," Anna told him. "She died."

"G.o.d dammit!" Martinez cried. "Mexican?" he demanded.

"Mexican."

"G.o.d dammit!" and he started to his feet, his fists clenched as if he planned on battering Anna until she changed her story.

"Sit down." Anna had the Glock in her hand and the muzzle pointed unwaveringly at his chest, the biggest target and nearly impossible to miss at this distance.

Martinez stopped cold, his hands still bunched into fists at his sides, the knuckles big and gleaming white in the reflected light from the desert floor.

"Sit down," Anna said again. "You're going to wake the baby."

For a long miserable second Martinez stared down at her and Anna worried that, if she shot him, he would fall on Helena. Finally he sat, folding down with all the grace of a broken chair collapsing. He dropped his head in his hands with more drama than Anna thought the pa.s.sing of a stranger, pregnant or not, called for.

"Did the baby die too?" he mumbled through his fingers.

It crossed Anna's mind that the guy was psycho, had stolen Martinez's gun, radio and horse and wandered Texas killing people. It wasn't unheard of, not even in Anna's limited experience with murderous psychopaths.

"The baby did not die," she said carefully and without taking the Glock off Martinez. "I delivered her by C-section after the mother died. Helena-this baby-is the child of the dead woman in the strainer."

Martinez lifted his face from his hands, his eyes glowing with a fanatic light-or that of a man pardoned at the eleventh hour. "No kidding?" he said, and the bizarreness was as if it had never happened. He spoke with the joyous clarity of a nice park ranger hearing the most fabulous news.

"This is the baby," he said in a voice close to awe. "Venus, the child from the sea."

"Helena. From the river," Anna said tersely. It annoyed the stuffing out of her that he was messing with the name, as if he had a claim on the baby. She liked him better as a crazed killer. At least she could shoot him in that persona.

"I've got a new baby," he said. "My wife gave birth to Edgar Allan Martinez six weeks and two days ago."

A new father. That could explain the manic-depressive episode but Anna didn't quite buy it. She wasn't sure she bought the bit about his wife having a baby. Edgar Allan? Not an auspicious name, not to mention not exactly a Spanish name.

"Can I hold her?"

"Would you stop with yofy"that?" Anna snapped. "No baby. No gun. You sit and stop being weird. I'm too tired and hungry for anything but nice, ordinary, sane people. Or dead people," she added, and was gratified to see that the pity was gone from his face and alarm had taken its place.

They fell silent. The small fire in the metal fire ring had gone out and a cool breeze was coming down from the Chisos. Anna wrapped the rags of T-shirt and sleeping bag closer around Helena. Without the sun the air had an edge to it and Anna wished she'd thought to drag the horse blanket back with her. Cold was seeping into her, mixing with fatigue and beginning to set up like concrete in her joints. Paul should be getting back now, Chrissie and Steve and Cyril with him. Regardless of the hazards of four people ascending the slide with a single flashlight, Anna knew there was no way Paul would be able to keep Chrissie on that rock overnight short of lowering a feather bed and shower down to it.

"Sorry about the outburst," Freddy said finally. "When Homeland Security closed the border they killed a lot of people in one way or another, killed their hope, killed their income, some it just plain killed. Closing the border was a crime of violence. This woman was probably trying to cross so her baby could be born in America, in a hospital with proper medical care. The river came up and she got carried down canyon. Because she wanted the best for her child, we killed her. Jesus."

Anna said nothing. She didn't have a dog in this fight.