The Edge of Justice by Clinton McKinzie Read Free Book Online Page B

wrists. Her dirty blonde hair is mostly tucked behind her ears except for the few loose tendrils that sweep around her face. The young men around the table all steal glances after her as she bounces away. The only exception is the big, ponytailed one she'd been closest to. He looks at the others in challenge and annoyance.
    I meet his eyes in the mirror for a moment and glance away. Then I look at my own. They seem to have recessed back in my head over the past year and a half, as if my withdrawal from the things I loved has withdrawn my ability to see the world. The sockets around them are tight and dark. People used to comment on my eyes, tell me what a surprisingly dark color they are, almost like coffee, against my lighter skin and hair. But no one's said that in a long time. Not since things started to go wrong.
    A voice beside me says, “You climb solo and drink solo, huh?” She speaks with a Dead Head's lilt.
    I turn and try to give her a smile. “Thanks for the flowers. My dog felt like a prince.”
    “I thought he'd either like it or eat me, man, when I put them around his neck. But he just ignored me the whole time.”
    “That's because he was busy, giving me a spot.”
    She laughs at that, her eyes wrinkling slightly at the corners where, like mine, too much exposure to the sun and wind has prematurely carved thin lines. “He's big enough to spot. Falling on him wouldn't hurt either one of you much.”
    The mirror shows me that the ponytailed man from the booth is approaching. I can almost feel the air around us becoming denser. He moves up close behind the girl and me, looming over us.
    “I know you from somewhere, dude. Where's it at?” he asks.
    I'm enormously tired of the infamy that resulted from the shooting. And just hours before, on the rock again at Vedauwoo, I'd thought that maybe I was finally learning to deal with it. With great reluctance I turn to look up at him and try to think of how to answer his question.
    The man is huge in every way. He's at least several inches over six feet tall, nearly half a foot taller than me, and at a minimum of 220 pounds he outweighs me by 40. His powerful jaw muscles are barely contained by taut, tan skin. He wears his glossy black hair pulled back so tight that it looks like a helmet. Ropes of thick brawn bulge down his neck and disappear into his shirt. The hand he lays on the bar between the girl and me is scabbed and callused. It's also the size of a boxing glove. Seeing his paw, I realize that this guy, who I now recognize as an almost-famous climber, probably doesn't know me from that notorious Cheyenne event. The hands don't look like the type that regularly turn the pages of a newspaper.
    “I don't know. But you're Billy Heller, right?” I hope that saying his name, establishing his identity, might make him forget about mine and appease his obvious hostility.
    Heller's fame is limited to hard-core climbing circles. He was first noticed when he developed super-gymnastic routes at Tahquiz and Suicide. Then he spent a couple of decades as a wall rat in Yosemite before coming to Vedauwoo a few years ago in search of new material. I've heard he is the master of off-width cracks—the recesses in granite too wide to jam with a clenched fist and too narrow to crawl in and chimney with feet and hands on one side and one's back braced against the other. He developed intensely powerful techniques known as the arm bar, chicken wing, knee jam, and the kick-through. People say that he knows the physiology of musculature, joints, and bones better than a medical student. I've heard about how he can lead a rope up the blank roofs that jut sometimes more than fifty feet from cliff faces, roofs that contain only a single, wide fissure like a jagged earthquake fracture across a high-beamed ceiling. He will hang with his elbows and palms wedged in the crack and with his feet dangling over dead space, then fold his entire body like a jackknife to shove his feet into the