The Edge of Justice (25 page)

“I'm Burns. I understand you want to talk to me.”

“Agent Burns, I've been trying to reach you for two days. I'd like to hear an explanation.”

I feel my pulse once again picking up its pace, the temperature of my blood rising. “I've been busy,” I say rudely. “I'm investigating multiple murders.”

“I'm afraid that's not good enough. Are you going to make me go over your head again?” he threatens. “Would you like me to call your Attorney General to find out why you've been ignoring my messages and now are evading my questions regarding your brother's escape?”

I've had enough. “Go ahead, Captain. I've had a rotten week and I really don't give a shit. It's been nice talking to you.”

I begin to close the door in his face. With a quick motion Tobias presses one foot against the door and starts to push his way into the room with his free left hand.

The anger that's been simmering in my chest suddenly knocks the lid off the pot. In a grab equally quick, I snatch the wrist of the captain's gun hand where it's reaching across his chest to the shoulder holster and pull it out. It comes out without the gun. Using the captain's momentum as he tries to push forward through the door, I step out of the way, pull on the wrist with both hands, and neatly flip the captain over my hip. The small man's upper back thumps down hard on the unpadded carpet. Air escapes his lungs in a rush. Bending to him, I whip the gun out of its holster just as Tobias makes a long moan, trying to force air back into his chest. A moose call, I remember my brother calling it.

I feel a refreshing release.

With a malicious grin, I place the pistol high up on a shelf in the open closet where it will be out of the small man's reach. Then I sit on the bed, over Tobias, as the man rolls up into a kneeling position, then rests his forehead on the carpet. Slowly the air is coming back to him.

“You're under . . . arrest,” he pants. “I'll . . . have . . . your badge. . . . I'll . . . have your ass!”

“I'm not even going to ask how you're going to arrest me, Captain, seeing as how you're laying on my floor without a gun. Because a more important question is what are you going to arrest me for?”

“Assault on a peace . . . officer.”

I laugh. “You must not have seen that sign as you were driving into town. About thirty miles back it says, ‘Welcome to Wyoming.' You've got no jurisdiction here, asshole. You aren't a peace officer here and you can't arrest anyone.”

When he looks up, his face is red. The look he gives me is meant to penetrate like a bullet, but I have taken far tougher blows lately.

“All right, Captain. You said you had questions. Go ahead and ask them.”

After a long, embarrassed minute he gets up off the floor and sits in a chair. I can see he's struggling to keep himself under control.

“Where were you Tuesday night?”

“I was camping, in the Big Horn Mountains.” I don't immediately explain further.

He smiles meanly, the hope that I'm un-alibied gleaming in his eyes. I let it build for a second, then dash his hopes. “You can call the Sheriff's Office there in Johnson County and verify that. Ask for Sergeant Sorrel. I found a body in the mountains and phoned it in. If you check around, you'll learn that I also had lunch at the Moonbeam Café and bought a bunch of stuff at a climbing shop.”

My seesawing emotions waver again. I'm beginning to feel sorry for the captain. He has made countless phone calls in pursuit of me and driven all the way up from Colorado. Now he's been embarrassed and told his efforts were in vain. I, the missing brother, had probably been his only lead. In my weakened, exhausted state I momentarily feel bad for him. “Look, Captain, I did get a voice mail from Roberto. You tell me the details of his escape and I'll play it for you.”

Wisely, Tobias doesn't tell me I have a duty to play the message for him. In clipped speech he explains that my brother somehow scaled a sheer, thirty-foot brick wall, then climbed a ten-foot fence topped with rolls of razor wire. They found chalk marks on a corner where the brick walls met, then tracked him through rolling hills of chaparral and cottonwoods to a highway. That was as far as they got.

I suspect Roberto had one of his many girlfriends pick him up, and say as much to Tobias. I also say that I don't believe they will catch him. As uncontrollable and impulsive as Roberto is, he's also very, very smart. And more than willing to take great risks. What I don't tell the captain is that my brother has property and a sizable trust in our ancestral home in Argentina. We each inherited one from our maternal grandfather, who was a cattle baron there, in a country from which Americans will not be extradited. By now Roberto is probably on a plane, never to return.

I pick up the phone and dial the numbers to retrieve my brother's message. Tobias listens intently, taking notes on a small leather-bound pad. He writes down the numbers on the outside of my phone as well, so he can subpoena the phone company for a tape of the message.

Then he asks suspiciously, “What does that mean, feed the Rat?”

“It means a sort of fix for adrenaline junkies like my brother. And about Christmas, I can't even guess. I haven't seen him over the holidays in nine or ten years.” But I suspect Roberto had meant that he'll see me in Argentina, as I plan to see my parents there. He might have learned that in one of my mother's unanswered letters. “I don't think you'll be seeing Roberto again, Captain.”

I reach up onto the high closet shelf and get Tobias's gun for him so he won't be further humiliated by having to ask or use a chair. Before I hand it over, I eject the clip and pop the round out of the chamber. I give those back to him separately, in another hand.

Before he leaves for his return trip to Colorado, the captain wants to talk to Ross, just as I do—I want to know the result of his meeting with Karge. So I call McGee's room and find that he's back from the meeting. I lead Tobias there, past the pool that's once again filled with splashing and tanning reporters. They're back from the murder scene in Buford, believing it's just another bizarre Wyoming tragedy, not connected with the sensational Lee case.

McGee has left the door unlatched. I push it wide and allow Tobias to enter ahead of me. Like a soldier, Tobias marches directly to where McGee slumps at the hotel's small desk. He's wearing a clear plastic oxygen mask, which he pulls off irritably with quaking hands. I should have knocked. There's an audible hiss from the steel bottle turned on high.

“Mr. McGee, my name is Captain John Tobias of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. I want to file a complaint against Agent Burns. He assaulted me in his room just minutes ago. I ask that you relieve him of his duties immediately, pending an investigation and the filing of charges.”

McGee's thick and grizzled eyebrows pinch together in either puzzlement or pain. He tries to turn on the hard seat to directly face the straight-backed captain but doesn't have the strength. “A big fucking pleasure . . . to meet you as well, Mr. Tobias. . . . What's this about, Anton?” A wet cough rumbles from his chest.

I step toward him in concern, then stop, remembering the indignant look he gave me on the courthouse stairs when I tried to take his arm. I shrug and say, “He pushed his way into my room uninvited. I took away his gun before he shot himself or me—”

The captain interrupts. “I really can't imagine why you'd allow a man such as this to be working as a law enforcement officer. He has a murderer for a brother, now an escaped convict no less, and may be one himself, as well as a history of excessive-force complaints and improper shootings. I've read up on him, you see.”

Still coughing, McGee chokes out, “The complaints . . . were unsubstantiated . . . and the only thing improper . . . about the shootings . . . was the type . . . of ammunition used. . . . You must also have seen . . . that Agent Burns . . . is considered one of the finest . . . peace officers . . . in the state.”

From where I stand, slightly behind Tobias, I roll my eyes at McGee. He's laying it on thick.

Tobias is red in the face again. Nothing is going as he planned. “Well, now he's a suspect in the escape of his brother.”

McGee looks at the captain hard, then focuses on the obvious bulge near the captain's breast. “And you . . . Mr. Tobias, are a suspect . . . in the carrying of a concealed weapon. . . . Surely you realize your carry permit . . . is no good outside of Colorado?”

Good one, I think. I hadn't thought of that.

“I—” Tobias begins to sputter.

“Now you listen to me . . . you arrogant little prick,” McGee says, dropping any pretense of civility. His voice is like a wounded lion's roar. “You don't come to me . . . and accuse one of my troops . . . of something like that . . . without some damn good evidence. . . . Now get the fuck out of my state.”

Without a word the captain spins around and starts toward the door. He hits me with his shoulder as he passes. In the doorway he pauses and turns back to us. “Your Attorney General will be hearing from me. The governor too. And if either one of you ever sets foot in Colorado—” I shove the door shut in his face before he can finish.

“You seem to have a talent . . . for making friends, lad.”

“People keep telling me that. Why don't I believe them?”

His coughing becomes uncontrollable again. “Ross, I'm going to call an ambulance. You need to be in the hospital.”

McGee shakes his head angrily and ignores my suggestion. His hands are shaking so badly he has trouble reattaching the oxygen mask. I'm unsure what to do. I'm frightened for him—I honestly believe McGee's at Death's door. I know I should call an ambulance whether he likes it or not. But then this little giant of a man, who survived Korea and thirty or more years as an honest and respected prosecutor, deserves to call his own shots. I'm not going to take that away from him. If he wants to battle on his own I will let him.
Do not go gentle
. . . Dylan Thomas's poem comes unbidden into my mind.

After a few minutes he pulls the mask back down. “That's not a man to piss off lightly. . . . He's the third-in-command of . . . Colorado's state investigative agency. . . . I don't think . . . we'll be getting much cooperation . . . from them for a while.”

“What happened with Karge?” I ask.

“He won't continue the sentencing. . . . He says I can't prove . . . he doesn't have the right killers. . . . He says the cord's . . . a bunch of bullshit. . . . He says he's got the Knapps' . . . fingerprints at the scene . . . and their confession to Sheriff Willis. . . . And he says he's got a conviction. . . . Then he threw me out of his office.”

I'm stunned. I thought that game was up. Now Karge is playing chicken with us. “He's going to go ahead with the sentencing, even after learning we have exculpatory evidence, that we're going to get a warrant for his son?”

“It's his career, his future. . . . Our Nathan Karge . . . is an ambitious man. . . . The way he sees it . . . our jury said those boys . . . did it beyond a reasonable doubt . . . and the press believes it too. . . . I think he's gambling right now . . . betting he can get the AG to shut us up. . . .”

“Well, we can't wait around to find out,” I say. “I'm going to get a warrant. Today. As soon as I get back from court. I'll do everything I can to get Heller and Brad picked up tonight. Once they're in custody, the game will be over for Mr. Karge.”

“And I'll be in court . . . in the morning . . . no matter what the office does. . . . Tell the judge everything. . . . She knows me, an old friend . . . trusts me. . . . She'll continue it . . . or declare a mistrial.” He is again racked with a cough so fierce he nearly slides out of the chair.

There's a soft knock at the door, too soft for Tobias to be returning, and I open it. Rebecca stands outside, dressed in an expensive-looking cream-colored silk suit. She's looking down the corridor as if a stranger there had said something dirty. It turns out to be true—she'd passed Tobias, who was muttering profanities.

When she sees me she says, “There you are. I called your room like you asked but just got the answering service. Then I checked and you weren't there. I was worried . . .” Then she sees McGee at the small littered desk beyond me and rushes toward him.

“Oh, Ross,” she says, kneeling by his chair. “You look horrible. Anton, we need to call an ambulance.”

“I tried—he won't let me.”

McGee is trying to pull the mask down again, his gray skin turning red from a new fit of coughing. “No . . . don't . . . fucking . . . call! I'm . . . going . . . to your . . . hearing.”

Rebecca looks at me, torn by the same indecision I feel.

“He's the boss,” I tell her sadly.

“Then I'm coming too,” she says. “I was going to anyway.”

I pull the Land Cruiser as close as I can get it to McGee's room. After I load his oxygen and medical kit into the truck, he allows Rebecca and me to help him into the backseat. She sits there with him as we drive, Oso's hair quickly pasting itself to her light-colored clothes, and barely appears to listen to me as I fill her in on what McGee told me about his meeting with Karge. She's staring at him with soft eyes, and I feel my heart expand in my chest once again while my throat constricts.

TWENTY-SIX

M
ORRIS CASH FILED
the suit on behalf of the three families just days after the shooting. Because it involves an alleged civil rights violation, the federal courts have jurisdiction. The plaintiffs claim that I killed the three young Hispanic men in cold blood. The original pleading, and the many amended pleadings that followed, boldly state that I lied when I said the gang members pulled their guns on me first, that I planted the weapons on their bodies after I shot them in cold blood. How else could I have come out of that ranch house alive?

The federal courthouse in Cheyenne is full of security. Obviously someone informed the federal marshals about the trouble with Sureno 13 earlier in the week at the Albany County courthouse. The local press has gotten the word too, and they're out in force. Although the case pales in comparison to the sensational Lee trial, its validity has been hotly debated in Wyoming since the shooting, and Monday's assault on me in Laramie's courthouse has increased the interest. A few national reporters have even shown up, eager for entertainment as they await the Lee sentencing.

One of the reporters there is Don Bradshaw, the
Cheyenne Observer
columnist who coined my nickname, QuickDraw. In his article he meant it sarcastically, as if it were impossible for me to have walked away alive from three armed gangbangers who intended to kill me. He ridiculed the notion that I could have fired five shots, taking the lives of three men, before they were able to put even a single bullet in me. Apparently he didn't believe in quick reflexes, a lifelong education in shooting from a father who commanded a Special Forces team, and a hell of a lot of luck.

QuickDraw, he had mocked. According to him I was a liar as well as a killer, and the people who believed me were fools who had seen too many
Rambo
movies. His columns railed at Wyoming law enforcement in general and me in particular, embarrassing state officers from the governor and Attorney General on down to the deputy sheriffs patrolling the streets. I had gotten away with murder and the state had allowed it by not prosecuting me.

Other columnists and commentators picked up on the theme. They openly discussed my brother and his manslaughter conviction, theorizing that we were cut from the same cloth. Devastated by the lives I'd taken and my brother's incarceration, I read the articles with a horror that finally culminated in a simple numb depression. For the last year and a half I had felt as if a low-pressure system, the kind so intense that it sucked tornadoes from across the plains, had settled over me. For a long time now I have fantasized about punching Don Bradshaw in the face and releasing the storm.

But when I pass him in the aisle of the packed courtroom, I repress the urge even though my anger is undiminished. I'm just too weary. So I hit him with my mouth instead of my fist.

“Hi, Don. Your boy out of rehab yet?” I ask. Even before I arrested him for dealing ecstasy, he had a juvenile conviction for sexual assault. Bradshaw's son was a stereotype for his generation: a selfish, narcissistic, spoiled young man. And he got a better deal than any other kid in his position simply because of the influence and fame of his journalist father. A deferred judgment would forever dismiss the case as long as he completed a rehabilitation program.

Bradshaw responds in kind. “Howdy, QuickDraw. Kill anyone lately?”

“Not lately. But who knows, maybe I'll have to come by your house with another arrest warrant sometime. . . .”

He blanches at the threat, and I immediately feel like an ass. McGee overheard the short exchange from where Rebecca seated him in the front of the courtroom. He whacks me across the ankle with his cane before pulling me down beside him with a quaking hand.

“Christ, Burns. . . . What are you trying to do . . . set back the reputation of . . . Wyoming law enforcement . . . fifty years?”

I roll my eyes. “If only they knew, Ross.”

He grunts to silence me. The quiet ride from Laramie had improved his color. The coughing is still fierce but not as frequent. Rebecca sits close by him, holding his other heavy paw. I know this is a bad sign, just as was his allowing us to help him into the truck. That McGee is accepting support and pity means he is close to the edge.

My attorney approaches us. Clayton Wells looks about eighteen years old and now wears a pathetic goatee in an attempt to make himself look older, more masculine, more assured. But it's an obvious mask. No one looking at his nervous, unblemished face could mistake him for anything but a scared kid right out of law school. I've never asked him how many cases he's tried. I didn't really want to know, but I expect this is his first. I heard that none of the other civil trial attorneys in the AG's Office wanted to touch this case.

“You've been doing good, Agent,” he tells me with a smile, attempting to be funny, to be one of the boys. “See if you can get them to attack you again in the courtroom here, in front of the judge.”

I just stare at him until he looks away and busies himself with the papers on his desk. Young attorneys who work for the state or a local prosecutor's office are all too often frightened to take on the defendant, his attorneys, and a system of justice that is partial to everyone but the police. They're willing to sell their souls to avoid a trial. Once they become experienced and more cynical, they leave to make more money as defense or plaintiff's attorneys and take advantage of those they were once like.

“How come you never called me back?” he says, trying again at conversation as he shuffles nervously through his papers. “We might have been able to settle this. We still might be. The office has authorized me to offer up to fifty thousand to each of the families.”

“Clayton, do you really think Mo Cash would take that? He stands to make more from the state just for his attorney's fees, even if he loses.”

At the table just ten feet away sits Morris Cash, popularly known as Mo Cash, who represents the Torres, Lopez, and Gallegos families in their suit against the AG's Office and myself. He's a florid man, dressed sharply in a suit too fancy and stylish to have been bought in Wyoming. Armani, I guess. And Cash can afford it. It's rumored that in this case, like his others, he keeps forty percent of any damages as his contingency fee. And even if he loses, even if no money is awarded to his clients, a federal law allows him to recoup his attorney's fees from the state. He has quite a racket going, and he's said to be quite good at it.

Cash notices me looking at him and winks. That's his style. In court, on the record, he is both ferocious and contemptuous. But in person he can be as amusing a man as I have ever met. Once, in a simple distribution case where I testified as the arresting officer, he offered me the “services” of his client, who also worked as a stripper when she wasn't selling brown heroin. For that, all I had to do was change my testimony a little. At the time I laughed but knew he wasn't joking. She was standing next to him when he made the extraordinary offer, and she'd smiled at me.

The bailiff pounds the gavel and calls out, “Hearye, hearye, hearye. The United States District Court for the District of Wyoming is now in session, the Honorable Judge John S. Upton presiding. God save the United States and this honorable court!” I move up to the table and stand beside my attorney. The judge comes out and allows us to sit.

McGee has told me about Judge Upton. He was a corn-fed Wyoming cowboy, literally, before becoming a lawyer. Appointed to the bench by a liberal president who is despised across the state, the judge is unaffected by politics because unlike state judges, as a federal judge he's appointed for life. Rather than a former cowboy, he looks like a recently retired professional football player, easily six foot five and with a build to fit.

“Gentlemen, I've read the pleadings and the amended pleadings and the amended, amended pleadings.” He shakes his head at the amount of paperwork he has been made to read. “Do you have anything
else
to add by way of oral argument? You first, Mr. Wells. It's your motion.”

My attorney looks at me, his eyes wide in fear. The judge has just taken the bench and already things are moving too fast for him. I nod at him encouragingly, then finally poke his leg under the table with a pen. When he gets to his feet he is visibly shaking. He steps behind the podium and grips its upper edge until his knuckles turn white. When he begins to speak, his voice squeaks. Mo Cash catches my eye and again winks at me.

In a quavering voice, Clayton starts to repeat exactly what he wrote in the pleadings he filed with the court to support the motion for summary judgment. I suppress a groan. The judge displays his agitation, tapping his fingers on the bench before him, the sound amplified by the microphone, but my attorney is oblivious to it, caught up in his own nervousness. After a few more sentences the judge cuts him off.

“Mr. Wells, I told you I read the pleadings, amended pleadings, et cetera. If you don't have anything new to add, then sit down and shut up.”

I want to slump lower in my seat. Not only is Mo Cash grinning at me, but so are his clients—the parents of the men who tried to kill me. Clayton apologizes to the court in a sudden rush and sits down. He doesn't look at me again.

“Mr. Cash, anything you want to add?”

Cash doesn't even bother to rise out of his chair. “No, your honor,” he says smugly. Motions for summary judgment are only rarely granted. Only if there are absolutely no facts in dispute will the judge rule to dismiss the case.

I'm surprised and relieved to see Cash lose his grin when the judge tells him, “Good, because I have some questions for you. Exactly what evidence do you intend to present to show that Agent Burns here wasn't acting in self-defense?”

Now Cash rises. “Your honor, it's all there in the pleadings and in our answer to the defendant's motion.”

“Exactly where, Counselor?”

Cash's face becomes shiny in the courtroom's fluorescent lights. He begins rifling through papers on his desk while the judge again impatiently taps his fingers near his microphone. Finally Cash stands erect again and proudly holds up a sheaf of paper. “In our answer to the defendant's motion, you can see on page thirty-two that I intend to call two friends of the victims. Both of them will testify that Dominic Torres, Luis Gallegos, and David Lopez had absolutely no intention of harming Agent Burns that evening. Their affidavits are attached at the end.”

Cash has recovered his composure. But not for long.

“Tell me if I'm wrong,” the judge asks, “but aren't your witnesses in prison?” He puts on a pair of glasses and reads, “Let's see, for robbery, sexual assault on a child, kidnapping, et cetera? Crimes that were committed the night of the shooting?”

Cash smiles weakly. “Unfortunately that's true, your honor.”

McGee leans over from the first row of the spectator benches and hisses to my red-faced attorney, “It's also hearsay.” I understand what he means—with a few limited exceptions, one witness cannot testify to the words or intentions of another. In this case they shouldn't be allowed to testify that the deceased did or did not intend to kill me.

But Clayton ignores McGee.

“Tell the judge that,” I say to him, again poking him in the leg with my pen. He shakes his head and continues staring down at the legal pad in front of him.

I push back my chair and stand. “Excuse me, your honor, but I don't believe his witnesses can testify.” The entire courtroom turns to stare at me. The judge's bailiff looks aghast that a nonlawyer would dare speak uninvited in her courtroom. Despite the judge's frown, I go on, “Their testimony would be hearsay.” Exhaustion has emboldened me.

There's a long silence, then the judge says with a smile he tries to suppress, “Mr. Burns, you sit down too. You let your attorney speak for you, understand? Now, Mr. Wells, do you have something to tell me?”

Clayton gets unsteadily to his feet. He gives me a dirty look before saying, “Your honor, the testimony Mr. Cash is referring to would be hearsay.”

“Good point, Counselor,” the judge says. Clayton nearly collapses back in his chair with relief. “Mr. Cash, I believe defense counsel here has a point. How do you intend to admit this testimony of your felons?”

Cash looks beseechingly at the row of his paralegals that sit just behind the plaintiff's table. None of them will acknowledge his silent plea. I speculate that Cash has so many cases going on at any one moment that he lets his paralegals and junior associates handle everything but the trials, hearings, and public appearances. And his assistants don't look much older or much more experienced than my lawyer. “Well, Judge,” he finally says, “I believe that some of the hearsay exceptions will apply.”

“Oh? Which ones?”

Cash looks again to his paralegals unsuccessfully. I hear a couple of the reporters in the back of the room snicker and McGee begins to cough. Even Clayton raises his head from the legal pad and smiles. I don't, though. I know the judge will turn it back on us. The rare, good judges like Upton pride themselves on being tough but fair. What goes around will come back and slap us in the face. They are equal-opportunity punishers, brutal in their treatment of sneaky, pompous, or incompetent lawyers.

“Even if you are somehow able to get around the hearsay rule, Counselor, do you really expect a jury is going to buy the story of your two felons who kidnapped and raped an eight-year-old girl that very night?”

“There's also Agent Burns's testimony, your honor. I plan to cross-examine him.”

“Oh? Hasn't Mr. Burns already testified under oath during the depositions that he acted in self-defense? How will that help your case?”

Cash is really grasping now. But instead of being amused, I hate him for what he says next. “I'll impeach his credibility, your honor.”

“With what?”

“His brother is an escaped convicted killer—”

Even Clayton knows enough to leap to his feet and loudly object to that. But Cash goes on over Clayton's high-pitched voice, “And when he filled out his application to become a law enforcement officer, he signed an affidavit saying no one in his family had ever been convicted of a crime.”