Badwater Read Free

twice the size of the opposite one I stood panting on. The cliff was actually an enormous boulder. To the south—left—side of the cliff was a beach composed of round stones, and on it raged two screaming boys. Both were being physically restrained by a beefy state patrolman. The other trooper—a tall, thin guy—was thigh-deep in the river, his head pivoting rapidly as he stared into the gold-and-green water in front of him. There was a pale young man in an orange life jacket in the river, too. He was charging around in the water like a maniac. Downstream floated a raft that was fighting the current—a man on board rowing hard, and a passenger, a woman with black hair, who was sobbing.
    “What happened?” I yelled over the shouts of various people.
    The tall trooper in the river jerked up his head.
    “Who the heck are you?”
    “Antonio Burns. DCI.” DCI is my employer, Wyoming’s statewide Division of Criminal Investigation.
    The trooper, who’d immediately gone back to scanning the water after asking his question, popped his head up again. He looked at me with surprised eyes and an open mouth. Then the eyes narrowed suspiciously. I knew it was my name, not the name of the agency I worked for, that caused the reaction.
    “They call you QuickDraw, right?”
    I stared hard at him, not answering, as a bloom of heat spread outward from my chest. He quickly looked back down at the water, muttering, “Oh. Sorry.”
    “What happened?” I yelled again in what I hoped was an even voice.
    “Kids say that guy in the life jacket pushed their cousin—a ten-year-old boy—off that cliff over there.”
    The maniac in the life jacket stopped splashing around. Now he looked up, and I saw the silver flash of a pierced eyebrow, gelled spikes of blond-tipped hair, and noticed the tattoos on the man’s neck and arms.
    “It was an accident! I told you! He went in right there!” He pointed a thin arm at what looked like deep water beneath the stone cliff. “Yell if you can see anything from that angle, okay?” Then he went back to splashing and peering through the golden shallows that rimmed the darker water beneath the cliff.
    I didn’t try to make sense of it. The most basic fact was obvious.
    “How long’s he been under?” I yelled as I shrugged off my pack and kicked off my shoes.
    “Don’t know,” the tall trooper said. “Ten minutes, maybe. Might be fifteen.”
    “Oh my God!” the other man cried.
    I turned around and began to lower myself down the bank, holding on to loose rocks and roots. I paused to hiss,
“Paranda que!”
to Mungo where she was still concealed by the willows. I didn’t want her jumping down after me, or getting shot by the cop, who might be surprised to notice a wolf on the bank. The water below looked fairly deep, but I knew better than to dive. Looks can be deceiving, and I was trying to be very careful about my neck these days. Both figuratively and literally.
    “We got a 911 call maybe five minutes ago from the lady in the raft,” the cop was saying. “She saw the whole thing and has a cell. We were running a trap on the highway just a mile away—”
    I didn’t hear the rest. Halfway down the bank, a stone I was gripping with one hand ripped out of the dirt at the same time a slippery root did in the other. I fell five or six feet, landing first on my bare feet and then my ass as I rolled all the way onto my back in ankle-deep water, banging both elbows hard on submerged stones. Embarrassing for a climber, but it was a good thing I hadn’t jumped. The depth certainly was deceptive. And the water was outrageously cold—pure glacial meltwater running out of the Absarokas, its temperature only a degree or two above freezing.
    But that’s good,
I told myself as I struggled to reclaim my breath and scramble to my feet on the slippery rocks.
Ten minutes, maybe fifteen
. I thrashed forward into deeper water near the river’s center, thinking that the frigid water would slow