Tyrannosaur Canyon Page 2

  He rounded the great rock pillar marking the entrance. Thousand-foot canyon walls of aeolian sandstone soared above him, the majestic Entrada Formation, the compacted remains of a Jurassic desert. The canyon had a cool, hushed feeling, like the interior of a Gothic cathedral. He breathed deeply the redolent air, perfumed by salt cedar. Above, the light in the hoodoo rock formations had turned from electrum to gold as the sun sank toward the horizon.

  He continued into the warren of canyons, approaching where Hanging Canyon merged with Mexican Canyon – the first of many such branches. Not even a map would help you in the Maze. And the great depth of the canyons made GPS and satellite phones useless.

  The first round struck Weathers in the shoulder from behind, and it felt more like a hard punch than a bullet. He landed on his hands and knees, his mind blank with astonishment. It was only when the report cracked and echoed through the canyons that he realized he'd been shot. There was no pain yet, just a buzzing numbness, but he saw that shattered bone protruded from a torn shirt, and pumping blood was splattering on the sand.

  Jesus God.

  He staggered back to his feet as the second shot kicked up the sand next to him. The shots were coming from the rim above him and to his right. He had to return to the canyon two hundred yards away – to the lee of the rock pillar. It was the only cover. He ran for all he was worth.

  The third shot kicked up sand in front of him. Weathers ran, seeing that he still had a chance. The attacker had ambushed him from the rim above and it would take the man several hours to descend. If Weathers could reach that stone pillar, he might escape. He might actually live. He zigzagged, his lungs screaming with pain. Fifty yards, forty, thirty–

  He heard the shot only after he felt the bullet slam into his lower back and saw his own entrails empty onto the sand in front of him, the inertia pitching him facedown. He tried to rise, sobbing and clawing, furious that someone would steal his find. He writhed, howling, clutching his pocket notebook, hoping to throw it, lose it, destroy it, to keep it from his killer – but there was no place to conceal it, and then, as if in a dream, he could not think, could not move...

  Chapter 2

  TOM BROADBENT REINED in his horse. Four shots had rolled down Joaquin Wash from the great walled canyons east of the river. He wondered what it meant. It wasn't hunting season and nobody in his right mind would be out in those canyons target shooting.

  He checked his watch. Eight o'clock. The sun had just sunk below the horizon. The echoes seemed to have come from the cluster of hoodoo rocks at the mouth of the Maze. It would be a fifteen-minute ride, no more. He had time to make a quick detour. The full moon would rise before long and his wife, Sally, wasn't expecting him before midnight anyway.

  He turned his horse Knock up the wash and toward the canyon mouth, following the fresh tracks of a man and burro. Rounding a turn, a dark shape sprawled in front of him: a man lying facedown.

  He rode over, swung off, and knelt, his heart hammering. The man, shot in the back and shoulder, still oozed blood into the sand. He felt the carotid artery: nothing. He turned him over, the rest of the man's entrails emptying onto the sand.

  Working swiftly, he wiped the sand out of the man's mouth and gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Leaning over the man, he administered heart massage, pressing on his rib cage, almost cracking the ribs, once, twice, then another breath. Air bubbled out of the wound. Tom continued with CPR, then checked the pulse.

  Incredibly, the heart had restarted.

  Suddenly the man's eyes opened, revealing a pair of bright blue eyes that stared at Tom from a dusty, sunburnt face. He drew in a shallow breath, the air rattling in his throat. His lips parted.

  "No... You bastard..." The eyes opened wide, the lips flecked with blood.

  "Wait," said Tom. "I'm not the man who shot you."

  The eyes peered at him closely, the terror subsiding – replaced by something else. Hope. The man's eyes glanced down at his hand, as if indicating something.

  Tom followed the man's gaze and saw he was clutching a small, leather-bound notebook.

  "Take..." the man rasped.

  "Don't try to talk."

  "Take it..."

  Tom took the notebook. The cover was sticky with blood.

  "It's for Robbie . . ." he gasped, his lips twisting with the effort to speak. "My daughter... Promise to give it to her... She'll know how to find it..."

  "It?"

  "...the treasure..."

  "Don't think about that now. We're going to get you out of here. Just hang in–"

  The man violently clutched at Tom's shirt with a trembling hand.

  "It's for her... Robbie... No one else... For God's sake not the police... You must... promise." His hand twisted the shirt with shocking force, a last spasm of strength from the dying man.

  "I promise."

  "Tell Robbie... I... love..."

  His eyes defocused. The hand relaxed and slid down. Tom realized he had also stopped breathing.

  Tom recommenced CPR. Nothing. After ten futile minutes he untied the man's bandanna and laid it over his face.

  That's when it dawned on him: The man's killer must still be around. His eyes searched the rimrock and the surrounding scree. The silence was so profound it seemed that the rocks themselves held vigil. Where is the killer? There were no other tracks around, just those of the treasure hunter and his burro. A hundred yards off stood the burro itself, still packed, sleeping on its feet. The murderer had a rifle and the high ground. Broadbent might be in his sights even now.

  Get out now. He rose, caught his horse's reins, swung up, and dug in his heels. The horse set off down the canyon at a gallop, rounding the opening to the Maze. Only when he was halfway down Joaquin Wash did Tom slow him to a trot. A great buttery moon was rising in the east, illuminating the sandy wash.

  If he really pushed his horse, he could make Abiquiú in two hours.

  Chapter 3

  JIMSON "WEED" MADDOX hiked along the canyon floor, whistling "Saturday Night Fever," feeling on top of the world. The .223 AR-15 had been field-stripped, wiped clean, and carefully secreted in a crevice blocked with stones.

  The desert canyon took a turn, then another. Weathers, attempting the same ploy twice, had tried to lose him in the Maze. The old bastard might fool Jimson A. Maddox once. Never twice.

  He strode down the wash, his lanky legs eating up the ground. Even with a map and a GPS he had spent the better part of a week tramping around lost in the Maze. It hadn't been a waste of time: now he knew the Maze and quite a bit of the mesa country beyond. He had had plenty of time to plan his ambush of Weathers – and he had pulled it off perfectly.

  He inhaled the faintly perfumed air of the canyon. This was not so different from Iraq, where he had done a stint as a gunnery sergeant during Desert Storm. If there was a place the opposite of prison, this was it – nobody to crowd you, nobody in your face, no faggots, spies, or niggers to spoil the peace. Dry, empty, and silent.

  He rounded the sandstone pillar at the entrance to the Maze. The man he had shot lay on the ground, a dark shape in the twilight.

  He halted. Fresh hoofprints in the sand headed to and from the body.

  He broke into a run.

  The body lay on its back, arms by its side, bandanna carefully spread over its face. Someone had been here. The person might even have been a witness. He was on horseback and would be heading straight to the cops.

  Maddox forced himself to calm down. Even on a horse, it would take the man a couple of hours to ride back to Abiquiú and at least several more hours to get the police and return. Even if they called a chopper it would have to fly up from Santa Fe, eighty miles to the south. He had at least three hours to get the notebook, hide the body, and get the hell out.

  Maddox searched the body, turning out the pockets and rifling the man's day pack. His fist enclosed over a rock in the man's pocket and he pulled it out and examined it by flashlight. It was definitely a sample, something Cor
vus had pointedly asked for.

  Now the notebook. Oblivious to the blood and entrails, he searched the body again, turned it over, searched the other side, kicked it in frustration. He looked around. The man's burro stood a hundred yards off, still packed, dozing.

  Maddox undid the diamond hitch, pulled off the packsaddle. Yanking off the manty, he unhooked the canvas panniers and emptied them into the sand. Everything fell out: a jury-rigged piece of electronic equipment, hammers, chisels, U.S.G.S. maps, a handheld GPS unit, coffeepot, frying pan, empty food sacks, a pair of hobbles, dirty underwear, old batteries, and a folded-up piece of parchment.

  Maddox seized the parchment. It was a crude map covered with clumsily drawn peaks, rivers, rocks, dotted lines, old-time Spanish lettering-and there, in the middle, had been inked a heavy, Spanish-style X.

  An honest-to-God treasure map.

  Strange that Corvus hadn't mentioned it.

  He refolded the greasy parchment and stuffed it into his shirt pocket, then resumed his search for the notebook. Scrabbling around on the ground on his hands and knees, combing through the spilled equipment and supplies, he found everything a prospector might need – except the notebook.

  He studied the electronic device again. A homemade piece of shit, a dented metal box with some switches, dials, and a small LED screen. Corvus hadn't mentioned it but it looked important. He better take that, too.

  He went back through the stuff, opening up the canvas sacks, shaking out flour and dried beans, probing the panniers for a hidden compartment, ripping away the packsaddle's fleece lining. Still no notebook. Returning to the dead body, Maddox searched the blood-soaked clothes a third time, feeling for a rectangular lump. But all he found was a greasy pencil stub in the man's right pocket.

  He sat back, his head throbbing. Had the man on horseback taken the notebook? Was it coincidence the man had showed up – or something else? A terrible idea came to him: the man on horseback was a rival. He was doing just what Maddox had been doing, trailing Weathers and hoping to cash in on his discovery. Maybe he'd gotten his hands on the notebook.

  Well, Maddox had found the map. And it seemed to him that the map would be as important as the notebook, if not more so.

  Maddox looked around at the scene, the dead body, the blood, the burro, the scattered mess. The cops were coming. With a great force of will, Maddox controlled his breathing, controlled his heart, calling up the meditation techniques he had taught himself in prison. He exhaled, inhaled, quelling the battering in his chest down to a gentle pulsing. Calm gradually returned. He still had plenty of time. He removed the rock sample from his pocket, and turned it over in the moonlight, then took out the map. He had those and the machine, which should more than satisfy Corvus.

  In the meantime he had a body to bury.

  Chapter 4

  DETECTIVE LIEUTENANT JIMMIE Willer sat in the back of the police chopper, tired as hell, feeling the thudding of the rotors in every bone. He glanced down at the ghostly nightscape slipping by underneath them. The chopper pilot was following the course of the Chama River, every bend shimmering like the blade of a scimitar. They passed small villages along the banks, little more than clusters of lights – San Juan Pueblo, Medanales, Abiquiú. Here and there a lonely car crawled along Highway 84, throwing a tiny yellow beam into the great darkness. North of Abiquiú reservoir all lights ceased; beyond lay the mountains and canyons of the Chama wilderness and the vast high mesa country, uninhabited to the Colorado border.

  Willer shook his head. It was a hell of a place to get murdered.

  He fingered the pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket. He was annoyed at being roused out of his bed at midnight, annoyed at getting Santa Fe's lone police chopper aloft, annoyed that they couldn't find the M.E., annoyed that his own deputy was out at the Cities of Gold Casino, blowing his miserable paycheck on the tables, cell phone turned off. On top of that it cost six hundred dollars an hour to run the chopper, an expense that came straight out of his budget. And this was only the first trip. There would have to be a second with the M.E. and the scene-of-crime team before they could move the body and collect evidence. Then there would be the publicity... Perhaps, thought Willer hopefully, it was just another drug murder and wouldn't garner more than a day's story in the New Mexican.

  Yeah, please make it a drug murder.

  "There. Joaquin Wash. Head east," said Broadbent to the pilot. Willer shot a glance at the man who'd spoiled his evening. He was tall, rangy, wearing a pair of worn-out cowboy boots, one bound together with duct tape.

  The chopper banked away from the river.

  "Can you fly lower?"

  The chopper descended, slowing down at the same time, and Willer could see the canyon rims awash in the moonlight, their depths like bottomless cracks in the earth. Spooky damn country.

  "The Maze is right down there," Broadbent said. "The body was just inside the mouth where the Maze joins Joaquin Canyon."

  The chopper slowed more, came back around. The moon was almost directly overhead, illuminating most of the canyon bottom. Willer saw nothing but silvery sand.

  "Put it down in that open area."

  "Sure thing."

  The pilot went into a hover and began the descent, the chopper whipping up a whirlwind of dust from the dry wash before touching down. In a moment they had come to rest, dust clouds billowing away, the thudding whistle of the rotors powering down.

  "I'll stay with the chopper," said the pilot. "You do your thing."

  "Thanks, Freddy."

  Broadbent piled out and Willer followed, keeping low, his eyes covered against the flying dust, jogging until he was beyond the backwash. Then he stopped, straightened up, slid the pack out of his pocket, and fired one up.

  Broadbent walked ahead. Willer switched on his Maglite and shined it around. "Don't step on any tracks," he called to Broadbent. "I don't want the forensic guys on my case." He shined the Mag up the mouth of the canyon. There was nothing but a flat bed of sand between two walls of sandstone.

  "What's up there?"

  "That's the Maze," said Broadbent.

  "Where's it go to?"

  "A whole lot of canyons running up into Mesa de los Viejos. Easy to get lost in there, Detective."

  "Right." He swept the light back and forth. "I don't see any tracks."

  "Neither do I. But they have to be around here somewhere."

  "Lead the way."

  He followed Broadbent, walking slowly. The flashlight was hardly necessary in the bright moonlight, and in fact it was more of a hindrance. He switched it off.

  "I still don't see any tracks." He looked ahead. The canyon was bathed from wall to wall in moonlight, and it looked empty – not a rock or a bush, a footprint or a body as far as the eye could see.

  Broadbent hesitated, looking around.

  Willer started to get a bad feeling.

  "The body was right in this area. And the tracks of my horse should be plainly visible over there . . ."

  Willer said nothing. He bent down, snubbed his cigarette out in the sand, put the butt in his pocket.

  "The body was right in this area. I'm sure of it."

  Willer switched on the light, shined it around. Nothing. He switched it off, took another drag.

  "The burro was over there," Broadbent continued, "about a hundred yards off."

  There were no tracks, no body, no burro, nothing but an empty canyon in the moonlight. "You sure this is the right place?" Willer asked.

  "Positive."

  Willer hooked his thumbs into his belt and watched Broadbent walk around and examine the ground. He was a tall, easy-moving type. In town they said he was Croesus – but up close he sure didn't look rich, with those crappy old boots and Salvation Army shirt.

  Willer hawked up a piece of phlegm. There must be a thousand canyons out here, it was the middle of the night – Broadbent had taken them to the wrong canyon.

  "Sure this is the place?"

  "It was right here, at the mouth
of this canyon."

  "Another canyon, maybe?"

  "No way."

  Willer could see with his own damn eyes that the canyon was wall-to-wall empty. The moonlight was so bright it was like noon.

  "Well it isn't here now. They're no tracks, no body, no blood-nothing."

  "There was a body here, Detective."

  "Time to call it a night, Mr. Broadbent."

  "You're just going to give up?"

  Willer took a long, slow breath. "All I'm saying is, we should come back in the morning when things look more familiar." He wasn't going to lose his patience with this guy.

  "Come over here," said Broadbent, "looks like the sand's been smoothed."

  Willer looked at the guy. Who the hell was he to tell him what to do?

  "I see no evidence of a crime here. That chopper is costing my department six hundred dollars an hour. We'll return tomorrow with maps, a GPS unit – and find the right canyon."

  "I don't believe you heard me, Detective. I am not going anywhere until I've solved this problem."

  "Suit yourself. You know the way out." Willer turned, walked back to the chopper, climbed in.

  "We're out of here."

  The pilot took off his earphones. "And him?"

  "He knows the way out."

  "He's signaling you."

  Willer swore under his breath, looked out at the dark figure a few hundred yards off. Waving, gesturing.

  "Looks like he found something," the pilot said.

  "Christ Almighty." Willer heaved himself out of the chopper, hiked over. Broadbent had scuffed away a dry patch of sand, exposing a black, wet, sticky layer underneath.

  Willer swallowed, unhooked his flashlight, clicked it on.

  "Oh, Jesus," he said, taking a step back. "Oh, Jesus."

  Chapter 5