Read Online Badwater by Clinton McKinzie - Free Book Online
Authors: Clinton McKinzie
Tags: Fiction
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matter of fact. No, I just gathered the facts and evidence and presented them to the prosecutor. I wasn’t qualified for anything else. Not according to the main office, and, lately, not according to myself.
Just do your job, Ant. Nothing more.
Luke flipped his cigarette onto some dry grass beside the drive. Taking out a small cylinder from his pants pocket, he sprayed a blast of wintergreen Binaca into his mouth. Then he sprayed it on the shoulders of his suit.
“Be at the courthouse in the morning for Strasburg’s appearance, okay? I want you with me every step of the way. The community needs to know we’re taking this one seriously.”
He gave my shoulder a whack, adding, “Glad to have you back on board, Ant. We’re gonna have some fun.”
Before heading back to Mungo and the Pig, I carefully ground out the orange ember in the grass. That family didn’t need another tragedy that night.
nine
H e’s going to feel a lot lousier.
The words kept intruding into my thoughts as I drove up the highway, higher into the mountains.
They’re not going to make him too welcome in the jail.
All I wanted to do was get to my camp. Stronger than the grind of hunger in my belly—a hunger Mungo shared and was expressing by repeatedly pressing her cold snout into the side of my neck—was the need to get away from all this. From the job. From the tragedy. From people, too. Even people I knew and liked.
I’d had more contact today than I’d had in weeks. Maybe months.
The place where I’d been camping was no more than twenty or thirty minutes away. It was in a seldom-visited canyon, beneath an overhanging granite wall that concealed what just might be the hardest wide-crack climb in the world—a crack I was determined to be the first to climb. The secret project had been a gift from an old friend, who had decided to give it up after more than a decade of torn muscles, ruptured ligaments, and flayed skin.
He’d refused to name it until it was climbed, but I was less modest. I named it before I even saw it. I called it Moriah, after my six-month-old daughter. Both Moriahs were proving to be the greatest challenges I had ever faced. I figured maybe if I could win the heart of one of them, I might learn the secret to the other.
We could be there in just a half hour, then I could cook a late dinner of rice and beans and tofu dogs over an aspen fire. I could drink a little wine. I could howl back at the coyotes. And, most important, I could make the phone call that was the culmination of my dedicated daily training.
But I turned the truck around. I wouldn’t be able to sleep, much less phone my infant daughter, with Luke’s veiled threats about Jonah’s “welcome” echoing around in my skull. Mungo, who seemed to understand that dinner had been again postponed, let out a long, low groan.
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
I reached back to pet her, but she shied away from my touch.
The men’s jail in the sheriff’s department basement was more than fifty years old and contained only six cells. The overflow—caused by an increase in population and the availability of cheap narcotics like meth—was housed in bunks around the central “rec” room. All of it was dark and quiet when I walked past in the corridor outside the bars.
Two deputies were in the monitoring station. One was the blonde woman who’d escorted Jonah from the interview room earlier, and the other was a gray-haired man with a buzz cut. They were playing chess and eating microwaved popcorn. The butter smell was so strong it made my stomach cramp. I had to wonder what it did to the inmates. To one side of the deputies was a table with a coffeemaker, a microwave, and a large TV. The screen showed an angle of the darkened rec room. The speakers crackled with only the occasional inmate’s cough.
“Hey. This is that guy I was telling you about,” the young deputy, seeing me, said to her partner. “His name’s Burns. He might not look like it,
Just do your job, Ant. Nothing more.
Luke flipped his cigarette onto some dry grass beside the drive. Taking out a small cylinder from his pants pocket, he sprayed a blast of wintergreen Binaca into his mouth. Then he sprayed it on the shoulders of his suit.
“Be at the courthouse in the morning for Strasburg’s appearance, okay? I want you with me every step of the way. The community needs to know we’re taking this one seriously.”
He gave my shoulder a whack, adding, “Glad to have you back on board, Ant. We’re gonna have some fun.”
Before heading back to Mungo and the Pig, I carefully ground out the orange ember in the grass. That family didn’t need another tragedy that night.
nine
H e’s going to feel a lot lousier.
The words kept intruding into my thoughts as I drove up the highway, higher into the mountains.
They’re not going to make him too welcome in the jail.
All I wanted to do was get to my camp. Stronger than the grind of hunger in my belly—a hunger Mungo shared and was expressing by repeatedly pressing her cold snout into the side of my neck—was the need to get away from all this. From the job. From the tragedy. From people, too. Even people I knew and liked.
I’d had more contact today than I’d had in weeks. Maybe months.
The place where I’d been camping was no more than twenty or thirty minutes away. It was in a seldom-visited canyon, beneath an overhanging granite wall that concealed what just might be the hardest wide-crack climb in the world—a crack I was determined to be the first to climb. The secret project had been a gift from an old friend, who had decided to give it up after more than a decade of torn muscles, ruptured ligaments, and flayed skin.
He’d refused to name it until it was climbed, but I was less modest. I named it before I even saw it. I called it Moriah, after my six-month-old daughter. Both Moriahs were proving to be the greatest challenges I had ever faced. I figured maybe if I could win the heart of one of them, I might learn the secret to the other.
We could be there in just a half hour, then I could cook a late dinner of rice and beans and tofu dogs over an aspen fire. I could drink a little wine. I could howl back at the coyotes. And, most important, I could make the phone call that was the culmination of my dedicated daily training.
But I turned the truck around. I wouldn’t be able to sleep, much less phone my infant daughter, with Luke’s veiled threats about Jonah’s “welcome” echoing around in my skull. Mungo, who seemed to understand that dinner had been again postponed, let out a long, low groan.
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
I reached back to pet her, but she shied away from my touch.
The men’s jail in the sheriff’s department basement was more than fifty years old and contained only six cells. The overflow—caused by an increase in population and the availability of cheap narcotics like meth—was housed in bunks around the central “rec” room. All of it was dark and quiet when I walked past in the corridor outside the bars.
Two deputies were in the monitoring station. One was the blonde woman who’d escorted Jonah from the interview room earlier, and the other was a gray-haired man with a buzz cut. They were playing chess and eating microwaved popcorn. The butter smell was so strong it made my stomach cramp. I had to wonder what it did to the inmates. To one side of the deputies was a table with a coffeemaker, a microwave, and a large TV. The screen showed an angle of the darkened rec room. The speakers crackled with only the occasional inmate’s cough.
“Hey. This is that guy I was telling you about,” the young deputy, seeing me, said to her partner. “His name’s Burns. He might not look like it,
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