Bone Hunter Read online

  We deflected now down the last valley the buses had driven, flitting over the rounded badlands hills and broken sandstone ledges that formed the strata that time and process had laid down over the Morrison. I directed the pilot to retrace our steps, to pass known landmarks to more quickly find the site. Now we reached the place where the buses had stopped. I pointed to the left, and we rose up over the ramp and east-facing cliffs formed by the Dakota Sandstone, a cliff-former above the Morrison. I could see the trail we had beaten into the ground with our footsteps, a dark scar of disturbed soil snaking over the varying terrain, barely visible in the dying light. Joan swung the helicopter smoothly over the trail, slowing slightly, still covering in minutes what had taken fast-hiking paleontologists half an hour to transit. Now we were hard over the site, in the shadow of the Dakota cliffs, deep in that broad, dark basin—hovering now, our pilot still leery of power lines, even with no poles in sight. She turned the ship slowly this way and that, choosing her spot, staring through the Plexiglas floor underneath her feet as she at last bled off her lift and settled the craft onto the ground. “Shall I shut it off?” she asked through the headphones.

  “Leave it running,” Bert answered. “I’m not here for a natural-history lesson; I’m here to scope for tracks.”

  Joan looked at me. “Just pop the door and keep your head down,” she said, “and remember, don’t you even think about taking a stroll aft of the passenger compartment. There’s a second rotor spinning back there.” She smiled, her rosy lips and well-scrubbed cheeks a picture of healthy youth framed by her helmet and boom microphone. I realized that she was younger than I, and felt uncomfortably responsible for her. In that moment, the full gravity of my decision regarding Nina came home to me as well. Had I lured her into harm’s way, too?

  “Thanks,” I said, and unlatched my door. It popped open on a pneumatic strut, like the back door of a hatchback car. I took off my helmet, ducked my head, stepped down over the skids, and scuttled out toward the dig site. Bert and Ray met me there. “This is the spot,” I shouted. “You can see where the teeth of the bucket bit in, like here, here, and here. Dan and his crew had taken their tents so it wouldn’t be as conspicuous. You can see where the camouflage tarps were attached, and here is some of their digging equipment. They always drove in from the south, there … but it looks like the backhoe came from the north.” I pulled out the BLM map Not Tom had given me. “I don’t know how that trail hooks up to the roads. We’ve got the BLM maps, which would show all their bladed roads, but little double-track jobs like that are ranch trails and wouldn’t be on it. But look here; they can’t go too far in that direction without running into the San Rafael River.”

  “Ranch trails?” Ray asked incredulously. He looked out of place, as if his pristine white running shoes repelled the sticky clay soil on which he stood.

  “Yeah, the BLM manages rangelands, and a lot of them are under long-term leases to the ranches. It’s thin forage through here, but you can see the occasional cow pie.” I pointed to an old one, grayed with dryness. “Looks like someone used this area for spring pasture but then moved the herds on. There’s a little regrowth. The grass is probably waiting for winter moisture to come back. The ranchers generally own very little of the land they use. They prove out a few hundred or a thousand acres at best, or their grandparents did—just the good bottomland, land with water, where they can raise their winter hay—and they rely on government rangelands to rent for summer grazing. It’s the ranchers who find most of the bones. While they’re out searching for lost calves.” Or send their child brides to search for them, I thought to myself. I could see George leading Nina over this ground, making a game of spotting bones.

  Bert had drawn a bead on the receding backhoe tracks. “Let’s get cracking, kiddies,” he said. “I can hardly see my hand in front of my face.”

  WE LIFTED BACK out of Vance’s valley, as I had come to think of it, and glided over the fading tracks. It was not long before they led over a thin outcropping of limestone and faded out.

  “Bring us into a low hover!” said Bert.

  “You know I don’t do low hovers,” Joan said irritably. “They call that ‘going under Dead Man’s Curve.’”

  “Aw, screw your curves, Joany, honey, scuh-rew your curves!” Bert’s cackling again filled my ears.

  I thought of saying something protective of this fresh-faced pilot I had drawn out into this situation, but Bert was still yakking through the earphones. “Hey, Emmy, what you make of those dark cruds there?”

  I saw what he was seeing. “What you’re seeing is clods of mud that dropped off his treads onto limestone.”

  We moved forward but quickly lost them.

  “I can’t see anything in the dark here,” said the pilot. “You want me to put her down again? Or maybe switch on the light?”

  “No!” said Bert. “No lights! At this altitude, they could see us for miles!”

  “And you don’t think whopping around out here with old thunder blades isn’t drawing their notice?” she quipped irritably.

  “Ya gotta strike a balance, sister. Risk over reward, risk over reward. Nah, shit, just rise up and make an arc off there toward the center of the swell, like you’re heading back to Price, but sort of taking your time turning.”

  “You got it, cowboy.”

  Joan raised the collective again, lifting the craft higher over the desert floor as she pushed the cyclic forward. We gradually gathered speed, moving through the night air at thirty, now forty miles per hour. The western sky had reached the ultramarine blue of late sunset, and the shadows among the draws and gullies beneath our feet had grown black as pitch. We slowly traversed the mile or so width of the Morrison outcrop, glancing to the east in search of houses, but spotted none. I looked at the map, scanning for the tint that indicated private lands.

  Seeing what I was doing, Joan reached over and touched the boom microphone that jutted from my helmet. A miniature flashlight came on, casting a tiny red glow that reached just to my lap. “Lip light,” she said. “Hit that switch if you prefer green light, or white.” She grinned. She clearly loved her equipment.

  As I stared down past the map, I saw something odd pass beneath the Plexiglas panel by my feet. “Wait!” I said. “Did you see that?” We were crossing over the western edge of the Morrison outcrop again, right where it fetched up underneath its westward-tilting cap of the Dakota Sandstone. Deep in a small, narrow canyon cut into that sandstone, I thought I’d seen a machine.

  Joan slowed the forward motion of the craft and pivoted, swinging the fuselage underneath the rotors like a pendulum. I wondered how Ray was taking this, hoped his stomach was as athletic as the rest of his body.

  We neared the canyon. “I think I see the backhoe,” I said. “There’s something parked in that slot canyon, right where you’d only see it if you flew over low or rode past on horseback!” Excitement rose in my heart. “Wow, this is great! You can turn this bucket anywhere you want, can’t you!”

  I heard Bert’s low chuckle through the headphones. “Take us on in there low and easy, sister, and switch on the light.”

  I saw Joan’s hand twitch on the cyclic. The ship slowed its forward motion. “It’s dark and it’s narrow,” she said. “I don’t like it. It can’t be more than a hundred feet top to bottom.”

  “I don’t give a damn,” Bert replied. “That’s an order. You take us in there and switch on your damned light!”

  “The ground rises. I won’t have my altitude, and I’ll have to bleed off my airspeed. You know what the height-velocity diagram looks like, Detective!”

  “Fuck your diagram. I want to see that backhoe!”

  The pilot hesitated. “Okay, I can give you a hover just at the rim, flick on the lights, but I’m not going below that rim, and I’m not going to land in there.”

  “That will do, darling.”

  Joan set the helicopter in a dead hover and looked at me. “I’m giving you the controls on the light. The man
ufacturer calls it the Night Sun, and they aren’t just a-woofing. It packs thirty million candlepower. Up to now, we could have passed for sightseers, but only cops are nuts enough to carry spotlights. If I raise it much above the rim here, we’re gonna light up like Rudolf’s nose on Christmas Eve—you get it? The idea is to light up the canyon—on, off—get your glimpse, and get out. I could control it from the cyclic here, but I’m going to be concentrating on keeping us away from the sides of those cliffs.” She handed me a control box and threw a switch on the cyclic. “Take a good look. That toggle gives you left, right, forward, back. That one’s focus; wide area or fry your guy. That’s on, off. Try the toggles, but don’t turn that on until I tell you to. I don’t like setting my belly up for target practice.”

  I figured out how to hold it in my bandaged hand, then fiddled with the toggles while she maneuvered the helicopter slowly over the canyon. I could just make out the looming shapes of boulders tossed about a water-scoured floor, and, hulking in the deepening shadows of night, a shape that could only be man-made. I thought about saying it was a backhoe for sure, that I didn’t need the light.

  “Now,” she said.

  I flicked the switch, and was momentarily blinded as the light flooded the canyon and my retinas. I hit the focus, swiveling the Night Sun toward my target. A backhoe, sure enough. But to my surprise, as I swiftly swiveled the light around the remainder of the tight canyon, I spotted also a crude lean-to, a pickup truck, and … a man. He looked familiar, an eerie copy of the distantly glimpsed bearded man who had followed me two nights earlier through the downtown streets of Salt Lake City. I opened my mouth to tell Bert, but the man in the canyon had a gun, was raising it—

  “Get out of here!” I shouted, fumbling to extinguish the light.

  Joan yanked up the collective and back on the cyclic, but it was too late. In the darkness that once again cloaked the canyon, I saw the bright flare of muzzle flash. I blinked to clear my retinas. A dark blue blotch tracked in my vision.

  Red lights had erupted all across the top line of the instrument panel. A horn yelped mercilessly in my ears. I heard the high whine of the turbines wind down, watched helplessly as the turbine needle plummeted toward zero, saw the rotor needle whip sickeningly after it. Joan jammed down on the collective, counted, “One, two,” yanked it back up, said, “Oh shit,” and we hit, slam. My head jammed down on top of my spine as the rotors followed us to the ground, still spinning. They snapped downward and bashed into the canyon floor, snapped us into a spin as the aft rotor collided with the tail boom, threw us lurching into a sickening tilt against a rock.

  Everything had gone ghost-quiet. I tried to orient myself. The lights of the radio console still glowed red around a wide blue patch of blindness left by the flash of the gun. I saw Joan’s hand jerk down toward it, spin one dial to 121.5, the international distress frequency, heard her gasp, “This is—”

  The Plexiglas beside her shattered with the impact of the next bullet, silencing her last call.

  I wrenched my way free of my harness and crumpled onto the floor, then reached for her wrist to take her pulse. Dead. A scream rose in my throat and jammed as I thought, I killed her. This was all my idea. I—I glanced about the tight corner I had wedged myself into, trying to make my blotched eyes work in the dim light from my microphone boom, trying to make sense of the explosions I was hearing. Gunshots.

  The door popped open behind me. For one terrible instant, I feared that I was alone with the gunman. Hands grasped me by the hips and yanked me backward, jerking my head as I rolled onto the ground and my helmet reached the end of its wire tether. Something popped it off. A hand took mine and tugged me hard toward the nearest boulder. In the last instant before I tripped, rolled, and helplessly followed the hand, I looked into the backseat of the helicopter and saw Bert’s staring eyes, glassy with death, an image that burned itself into my memory in the split second I beheld it. His eyes seemed to stare through me, almost apologetic in their softness, as if to say, You were right—my brusqueness was all an act. I was just as lost as you are. Good luck where you’re going.

  I fell backward and fetched up against a heaving chest, a warm, firm body. Ray.

  “Bert’s dead,” he whispered. “The pilot?”

  “Dead.”

  A chunk of sandstone exploded inches from my face, spraying me with shards of cutting quartz. One eye filled with grit. I blinked, filling my face with pain. Tears welled up around the hostile object, blinding me in one eye.

  “Can you run?” Ray whispered.

  “I think so.”

  “Come.”

  He lifted me backward up onto my feet, wrapped an arm tightly around my back and tugged me into a run. We scrambled upslope toward a jumble of truck-size boulders. I wondered how I could suddenly see them, then realized that we were running down a beam from a flashlight, escaping its source.

  Crack! Another shot from the rifle. We dived in behind another boulder, squeezing into a hole that deepened, giving down into cold earthy air. I scrambled downward into a maze of passageways between the rocks, squeezing like a blind spelunker into the narrowing openings, badgered by the patch of brightness that confounded my blindness.

  “In here,” I urged. “I can smell a cavern.”

  We squeezed down into the rocks, feeling our way toward the dampening air. The tight embrace of the stone opened suddenly into a low room, barely big enough for a fox to stand, but enough for us to sprawl, gasping for breath.

  “We can’t stay here,” Ray whispered. “He’s coming.”

  “Follow me,” I whispered back.

  “It’s so narrow … .” I heard the fear in his voice, a rising pitch.

  “Ray, follow me! Hold on to my ankle.” I groped onward, following the ground upward, sniffing like a badger for musty air. It freshened in a place where outside sounds grew louder, less muffled. I squeezed away from the unseen opening, continued to climb. I reached a place where the space between the boulders was narrower than the length of my thighs. I could no longer go on hands and knees, instead had to push myself along with my toes. Instinct screamed in my ears, telling me not to go into a space that confining, but I had no choice. I was pushing along blindly, going by scent and touch alone, and there was no larger opening through the tumble of rocks. I had to pray that the sheer weight of the stones would hold them in place, and that the shifting and pressing of my own tiny weight would not send them tumbling farther down the slope.

  As I pressed and pulled my way through the narrow passage, Ray let go of my ankle. Fear shooting through me like an arrow, I scuttled up into a larger space, where I could turn around and reach back for him, groping in the darkness. I felt his hand. It was stiff and wet with nerves. “I can’t do it,” he said so softly that I had to strain to make certain I had not imagined hearing him. My ears still rang from the gunshots, and now they pounded with the closeness of my own pulse.

  “It’s the only way,” I whispered back.

  Above my head, slivers of light played through gaps in the boulder pile through which we were climbing. The man who hunted us was scanning, playing his flashlight through the rocks that carpeted the slope, searching for his prey. I braced my feet, grabbed Ray by the wrist with both of my hands, and pulled with all my might. I heard a scuffle as he pulled with his other hand. Emerging into the space beside me as helpless as a newborn child, he lay a moment, curled up, his head lolling onto my thigh. I touched his face. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving in silent prayer.

  The flashlight beam played through the gaps in the rocks over our heads again and we moved onward through the rock catacombs. I tried to reckon how far we had come up the canyon wall. Twenty-five feet? Forty? We had had to make so many turns that I was uncertain. A moment later, we hit a dead end, turned, moved to our right, stopped as the light found my hand. For the first time since the helicopter had fallen to earth, I saw my own flesh. It was not tan, but red, red with blood, drenched by the spray from Joan’s rupt
ured body, a stain made as death blew past me in a cordite wraith.

  I dared not move. I stopped breathing and prayed deep inside my mind. Heavenly Father, or whatever Your name is, hear me now. I don’t want to die. Not yet, not like this … .

  The light moved on, and I heard the man outside stumble farther away over the surface of the rocks. I inhaled slowly, thankfully, and felt the earth embrace me, a solidity of ground supporting my body and soul. Ray’s hand found the crown of my head and cradled it, protective even in his fear. I could hear his pulse meld with mine where the curve of his wrist arched over my ear. I let myself breathe.

  The man returned, stumbling over the tumbled surface of the rockfall. And now we heard his voice, a fearful, gasping voice, still frighteningly close, no more than ten feet away above our rock tomb: “I shot a helicopter!” it whispered.