Crime of Privilege: A Novel (19 page)

McFetridge could have been considering the many different possibilities for using
that word. He was trying to get me to look at him, trying to read my eyes. “So you’re
what, just doing your job, Georgie? Going around talking to possible leaks?”

I didn’t answer.

“That sucks, Georgie.”

“I know it does,” said George Becket, who was not just doing his job, who didn’t even
have an assignment, who had come across the country to exploit a friendship, quiz
his old roommate about his possible involvement in a murder.

The silence grew oppressive again. I wanted one of us to say something reassuring
to the other. It didn’t happen. I wondered if I could just get up, tell McFetridge
it was good seeing him, slap hands, ask what the rafting was going to be like tomorrow.

“Look,” he said after about three very long minutes had passed, “I think I’m gonna
stay here a little longer. Why don’t you go back now, catch your dinner, let those
guys clean up.”

The message was clear: Fraternity brothers or not, my company was no longer desired.

At this point, I didn’t even desire it myself.

I
PUT ON MY SHIRT AND SHOES AND WENT UP THE HILL TO THE
trail, hiked the trail along the creek, past the bridge that led to the fishermen’s
camp and the airstrip, and was so occupied with my thoughts that I barely even noticed
the ground under my feet. I tried to remember what Paul McFetridge could ever have
possibly liked about me. He was the guy who made things happen; I was the guy who
tagged along. And now I had used everything he had ever given me, done for me, shown
me, to put myself in a position where I was making him hate every moment he had ever
been nice to me. And why was I doing it?

Nobody wanted me to investigate the murder of Heidi Telford, nobody except her father.
I could have done as everyone else had. Told Bill Telford there was nothing new, told
him I had other things to do.
Do you know how many drunk drivers there are out there endangering our streets and
highways, Mr. Telford?
I was sorry his daughter was dead. Everybody was. But it wasn’t up to me to investigate
my friends just because they happened to be in the area at the time the girl was killed.
Just because they happened to like girls and girls liked them and things came easily
to them and people protected them.

I thought about the grin on the Senator’s face as he looked back over his shoulder
at us when he was dancing with his sister. So different from Jamie’s grin, and yet
so much the same. Each was the grin of
a man who could do anything he wanted and be praised for it. The Senator, at least,
had earned his pass, but what had Jamie ever done to deserve a grin like that? Was
that what I hated most? Was that why I was doing what I was doing?
You have broken my heart … please go a-way!

I reached the bend in the trail, the turn where it angled away from the Loon and headed
upstream on the Salmon. There was a hill on my left, but I paid no attention to it.
I was only aware of it because I had to circumnavigate it. Go around the hill and
enter that field of small blue spruces that had reminded me of a Christmas tree lot.
There was water on the path ahead of me, the runoff from a trickle of a stream coming
down from the hill. The trees to the left of the trail seemed slightly smaller, the
ground slightly more sloped than to the right, where the field of spruces went all
the way to a ridge and then dropped precipitously to the river. I was vaguely aware
of all these things simply because there was water ahead of me on the trail and a
part of my brain was wondering where it came from and why it seemed to gather where
it did, and while I was wondering about the water and thinking about the Senator’s
grin there was an enormous bite taken out of the ground near my foot and an almost
simultaneous cracking sound.

How does one’s body know it’s being shot at before it even registers in the mind?
All of a sudden I was diving into the spruces.

Something whizzed by my shoulder, whizzed through tree branches. Did it come at the
same time as the second crack? It made no difference. I was already facedown. I was
on my chest, crawling on my elbows, trying to get as deep into the little spruces
as I could, cursing them for being so far apart, for having so much space between
them. Spruce needles, rocks, sharp leaves, all dug into my skin as I sprint-crawled
over the ground. None of it mattered because there was a third crack and I was absolutely
certain I was never going to be able to get away. I was the only thing moving in a
field the size of a football stadium, trying to get protection from skinny tree trunks
and even skinnier branches. I needed to get back to my feet, I needed to run, I needed
to zigzag, to get all the way to the ridge and then jump as far out as I possibly
could.

I pushed to my hands and knees and took off with my legs driving and my upper body
parallel to the ground. I made it to the first tree to
my right, cut sharply to one on my left, cut back to the right, and then dove into
the dirt and rolled. I was on my feet again, trying to outsmart the shooter as I went
from side to side, using no pattern but what appeared in front of me as I ran, my
heart pounding, my breath searing my lungs. I was yelling my name as I dove, tumbled,
got up again. Except I wasn’t yelling. That wasn’t me. Somebody else was yelling.
And coming after me. Coming hard and fast in my direction.

I looked toward the river. It was still thirty yards before I could get to the ridge,
before I could jump, and I saw now how high that jump was going to be. I looked back.
There was a flash of color, a ball of hair, and I realized it was McFetridge. Coming
to kill me. He couldn’t run and shoot at the same time. Not accurately. So I made
the dash. I didn’t bother going from tree to tree anymore, I just bolted to the ridge
and launched myself off it in full stride.

I was probably less than a second in the air before I realized the mistake I had made.

“
I
GOTCHA, MAN. I GOTCHA
.”

The voice was McFetridge’s. It was straining, but it was comforting, too. It kept
saying the same thing over and over.

I opened my eyes. The trees above me were at a funny angle. They were growing out
of my feet. It took me a moment to realize I was looking at their tops, from the bottoms
up. Blood was in my head. But it wasn’t loose blood. Not wet blood. I blinked and
listened to McFetridge cooing to me. I listened to him grunt, curse, reassure me all
over again, and I realized I was upside down. I was on a steep slope and my head was
lower than my feet. But where were my arms? Where were my hands? What was holding
me?

I remembered now. I remembered jumping, seeing I wasn’t going to reach the water,
trying to find a place to land. I had hit feetfirst and then pitched forward, head
over heels. I had gone back into the air, seen the boulders below me as I flipped,
and grabbed for whatever I could. And now I was lying upside down, not feeling anything
in my limbs. Except I could feel my feet. I just didn’t want to move them because
they were caught on something, holding me in place.

“Hang on there, buddy. I gotcha. I gotcha. I’m almost there.”

I could sense McFetridge more than I could see him. He seemed to be swinging from
one handhold to another. I concentrated very hard
on moving my left arm. It moved and I had a rush of exultation. I tried my right arm
and it moved as well.

“I’m okay,” I said. I meant it only in terms of how bad I might have been, but it
was enough.

McFetridge stopped his descent. I could hear him breathing hard. I could hear despair.
Why despair? Because he hadn’t killed me right away? Or because I was broken?

How broken could I be? I could feel my arms. I could feel my feet. If I could feel
my feet and I couldn’t move them, what did that mean? I began to hyperventilate. Noises
were coming out of my chest. They weren’t noises I had ever made before. They weren’t
noises I had ever heard any human being make before.

“It’s okay, buddy, I’m gonna get you.”

He was going to get me.

“You sonofabitch,” I said, because I was scared, because I did not want him to see
how scared I was. “Come near me and I’ll fucking kill you.” I did not explain how
I was going to do that and McFetridge wasn’t listening anyway.

“Wait, wait, wait, buddy, don’t move!”

But I wasn’t moving, was I? If I couldn’t move my legs that meant I couldn’t dig them
into anything. Which meant I would slide. Plummet. Go headfirst into the boulders,
ricochet into the water and get carried downstream. I lay very still for a moment,
trying to get my thoughts under control.

“Look,” I said, “if I sit up, am I going to dislodge anything?”

“I got nothing to haul you up with,” he said, which wasn’t really an answer.

I tried again. “If I swing my legs around, am I going to be all right?”

“Do it slowly. Move them one at a time, just a little to your right. You’re on about
a forty-five-degree pitch, Georgie.”

Except I couldn’t move my legs. Unless, possibly, I swung them from my hips. I pictured
it in my mind. A right angle—forty-five degrees was half a right angle. I could swing
my legs as a unit.

I groped with my left hand and found something long and thin and secure—a shoot off
a tree root, in all likelihood—and I held it as hard as I could. I dug my right hand
into the dirt and it gave way, sending a
mini-avalanche of stones tumbling down toward the water, scaring me all over again,
making me think the whole hillside was going to collapse beneath me.

“Move it up higher, Georgie. Move your hand a little higher. Reach, buddy. Reach!”

My fingers closed around a branch of some kind, something that bit into my palm but
was anchored to the ground. I started the swing. My legs moved, but not together.

Slowly I worked each one around like the hands on a clock.

“That’s it. Keep going, guy. Keep it up.” McFetridge’s voice had dropped to an encouraging
whisper. “You’re almost there.”

The idea was to spin my body, get my head uphill from my feet.

I inched around until I could see him. He was hanging off a bush himself, hanging
with his right arm, reaching down toward me with his left. If that bush pulled out
of the hillside, he was gone. All of his weight would propel him like a missile into
the boulders below.

Was McFetridge risking his life to save me? But he wasn’t saving me, was he? He was
there and I was here, and at least ten feet of sloped earth was between us.

I had to let go of the root if I was going to get to him. Did I want to do that? He
wanted me to. Why? Because he knew I couldn’t.

I tore into the dirt with my fingers. I balanced one foot on a rock that I had to
trust would stay in place. I pushed the side of my face into the hill and tried to
dig it in as though somehow my skin would create some adhesion, and I spun slowly
and deliberately, and all the time McFetridge kept calling to me, telling me I was
almost there, that I was going to make it.

He reached, I reached. I touched his fingers. Our hands crept over each other and
I grabbed his wrist.

T
HE TWO OF US LAY ON OUR BACKS. STARING STRAIGHT UP AT THE
sky. What we could see of it. In between the branches there were swabs of gray growing
ever darker. Night had not completely fallen, but it was close. We could not stay
here any longer, but we could not move, either. At least I couldn’t.

“Why did you jump, George?”

“Because you were shooting at me.”

“Me? Shoot at you? With what?”

“What did you have in that bag you brought? I heard metal clunking around.”

“What did you think it was, a gun? I brought fucking beers, you asshole. Then you
pissed me off so much I forgot all about them.”

“So where are they now?”

“Where? I imagine they’re where I dropped them when I heard the shots.”

“You heard the shots? All the way back in the hot tub?” I meant to sound cynical.
I was probably too spent to pull it off.

“I was on the trail, coming after you. Because I was sitting there after you left,
thinking why the fuck would you do this to me? Be the family’s little errand boy,
run out here to check on me, see if I’m still being loyal? And I’m saying to myself,
hey, you’re loyal to anyone, it should be to me, for fuck sake.”

Loyal to him. Guy who hadn’t so much as called me since the day we graduated from
college.

“And then I keep thinking about it and I realize, wait, you’re not really accusing
me, so why am I acting the way I am? I mean, it wasn’t as though you lied to me or
anything about what you’re doing here. And suddenly it all started making sense.”

It didn’t to me, whatever he was saying, and I didn’t have the energy to piece it
together. I was thinking about the beers, how much I would like to have one.

“I mean,” he said, apparently wanting some reassurance, “it’s like that Florida thing,
right?”

What was? Did I get that question out? I must have, because he was answering it.

“Somebody makes a claim against them, it’s not as though the family’s going to hire
a hit man or anything. That’s not the way they do things. They got a problem, they
put someone in the right place to take care of it.”

He meant me. Being put in the right place.

“It’s just that this one, you know, I thought this one had been taken care of a long
time ago. And then I’m thinking, okay, so something must have happened besides that
stupid list of crew members the girl’s father was waving around a few years back.
Something’s come up and Mitchell White has got to act like he’s doing something about
it. So he sends you. I mean, that’s the reason the family’s got you working where
you are, in case a problem like this came up.”

I lay even stiller than before. A man in the dirt in a faraway place, having just
been told his function in life.