Bone Hunter Page 29

  We heard static, a garbled answer, the sounds of a handheld two-way radio.

  “It had me cornered! Had to!” the man whimpered.

  Now the voice on the hunter’s handset came through clearly: “Manti, you stupid shit! You done it this time.” The voice was angry and lethal, yet curiously close and intimate, like the voice of a gnat in my ear; a miniaturized voice on a radio turned down low in an attempt that we not hear it.

  “What was I supposed to do?” the gunman whispered urgently to the radio. “Let ’em see me? I was right by the backhoe, Nephi!”

  “You had to,” drawled the voice over the radio. “Just like you had to kill George. Then I got to clear up your mess and make us another contact to get our manna. You God-cursed moron. Now we got another mess to clean up. You ain’t even explained yourself for the first. You think you can get away with murder? God and all His angels will punish you, boy!”

  In terror, the man above us shrieked, “It wasn’t murder! George blasphemed! He had to atone!”

  “Blasphemed, hah! You miserable tick on my hide! I saw what was left. You ripped him to shit. You call that blood atonement? I call it pissed off, man! Our contact to the manna! What he ever do to you?”

  The reply from above our heads was a whine, as pathetic as a child who’d dropped his ice cream in the dirt. “All that time, and he’d never bred her once!”

  “Who?”

  “Nina!”

  The voice on the radio growled, “So she’s barren. How’s that blasphemy, you idiot?”

  “No, he lied to us! Took God’s chosen and … and didn’t touch her!”

  Nephi paused before his reply. “How you know that?”

  Manti whimpered, “That man told me. The one from the university.”

  “That fool with all the keys?”

  In the darkness of my hiding place, I thought, Lew?

  “No! The big one with the fish line on his glasses.”

  Sherbrooke! So they had met out there in the desert, the Yale-educated paleontologist in search of the answers to riddles and the half-wit cult follower looking for the bones of the damned to trade for manna. What could they have talked about?

  “I told you you shouldn’t talk to him! Outsiders is only good for business, and you leave that to me!”

  Manti’s voice wailed on: “He said George only messed with people’s heads, that he never did breed with no one, not women, not men, not no one. He said it was all a big joke to George. And I asked Nina. I had to beat it out of her, but she told me … .”

  Nephi’s voice came back over the radio, crackling with rage. “That scheming, conniving … faggoty …” His voice trailed off into a froth of venom, but then suddenly the radio rasped with laughter. “Nina?” Nephi roared. “Wait, you mean you killed him over Nina? She was nothing. The least of my spawn.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. George had been killed out of jealousy? No, I realized. Blasphemy runs deeper than jealousy. Blasphemy is that name you have for something that brings humiliation to the depths of your soul—that deep, visceral sense of betrayal that comes when someone tells you that you sacrificed yourself for a sham.

  I could see the picture in its entirety now. This Manti had followed his brother into the desert and toiled for him, humbled himself before his brother’s charisma, stood by, blinding himself to his loss of dignity and reality, all the time telling himself it would be worth it because there would be a prize. And then he’d stood by as that prize, his precious, coveted niece, was bartered away. Brother Nephi had fashioned himself to be a god in his own kingdom, but he knew that a kingdom needed to be fed. I could see it now: desperation and malnutrition, and then along came George, looking for the bones of dinosaurs, and an alliance was rekindled. He could control Manti and the others with food, but how to control George? He had a plan for him, too: If he lured George to indulge in that ultimate in control games, the sexual corruption of a child, it would forge a guilty, titillated addiction to his covert clan. But George had been more clever yet, and had not indulged. Was he just being shrewd? Or had George kept hidden within his twisted soul a heart that no one but Nina knew.

  Whimpering, the man who stood above us said, “She … she was s’posed to be mine!”

  “We needed new blood. I told you.”

  Manti sobbed piteously. “But she didn’t have no babies, and it wasn’t her, like you said; it was him. He was—” He broke off with the effort of thinking. “You were lying to me!”

  “Never mind that now!” snapped the voice on the radio. “You kill everyone on board?”

  I stopped breathing. My mind swam with the horror of the stunted, medieval people who so automatically wished for my death.

  Pause. “No. Got two of ’em. The other two are in the rocks.”

  The radio answer was garbled.

  “But Neph, you—”

  The voice over the radio cleared. “God sent you a tough challenge this time, didn’t he? All right, let’s see what we can salvage of your pathetic little ass! What’s it say on the helicopter?”

  “P-O-L-I—”

  “Police? You hit a police helicopter? You don’t know Satan’s wrath till one of them comes down on you! You say two of ’em got away?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ray drew breath and held it.

  “They make any calls before they leave?”

  “What do you mean, calls?”

  “Over the helicopter’s radios, shithead!” The voice over the radio was rising, soaring into a panicky anger.

  “I—no. One of ’em had a mike to his face, but I shot him.”

  I wondered grimly whether it would have made a difference had he known he was shooting a woman. I began to shake, the reality of death sticking to me like the blood that covered my hands. It was my idea, my vanity, that led us to this trap, that killed this woman. And Bert, another fool for the truth, just like me.

  “I’ll be right there,” came the voice over the radio. “Where did you say they are?”

  The man above the rocks was beyond panic. That could only mean that he feared Nephi even more than he feared us. “They’re in the rockfall on the south side of the canyon, down in those cracks where Nina always goes. I got ‘em pinned. They can’t get in there too far, and there ain’t no way out of there ’cept I can see ’em.”

  “Right.”

  My heart sank into the ground. Were they right? Was there no way out?

  Manti said hopefully, “Should I burn that helicopter?”

  “No! That would be like setting a flare. Leave it! But wait—there’s a little box on board that’ll be transmitting a distress signal. Should be in the left-front corner of the cockpit. If you can find that, put a bullet through it.”

  “Okay … .” The gunman sounded doubtful, edgy. But, like a bull cornered in a corral, he was all horns and brute force, ready to do what he had to. I heard him shift as he prepared himself to climb down off the rocks above us and move toward the helicopter.

  As the voice on the radio faded away with increasing distance, it took on an oily, soothing tone. “Now, don’t worry, boy; this is just another test of your faith. Reload that rifle and stop your whining; Heavenly Father’s on your side.”

  THE SHOT THAT silenced the emergency location transmitter in the helicopter rang out moments after the second man arrived, grinding up the canyon in a truck with a slipping fan belt. At the sharp report, I jerked back from the aerie I had at last found my way to near the top of the rockfall, then eased back to a position from which I could keep watch while Ray faced the other way and searched for a route out of the canyon. Manti had been wrong. We had found a route through the rocks. Nina had only ever looked for cover beneath the tumble of rocks, not passage through it. Coming out another exit would have only put her right back where she’d started, in the hands of this strange tribe with its contorted set of beliefs.

  Ray had managed to make it through the labyrinth with his teeth gritted against fears I could only guess at. The dense
st part of the tumble had thinned, until we had emerged onto a cladding of scattered boulders lying directly on the shaley slope. We had inched sideways and upward, until we now crouched three-quarters of the way up the slope, perhaps seventy feet above and one hundred feet laterally from the helicopter. Above us jutted the source of the boulders, an overhanging lip of sandstone perhaps fifteen feet thick. We huddled behind a stone not much larger than a hay bale, kinked and aching, gingerly rubbing camouflage dirt onto our faces as we scanned the cliff face for a route up past this last pitch of the climb.

  “Manti, you imbecile!” Brother Nephi called. “The guy in the backseat is still alive!”

  Ray’s face swung from looking up to looking down. I fought to control a gasp. With terror, I realized that there was nothing we could do to help Bert. The thin starlight barely illuminated the whites of his eyes.

  I turned and peered back down the slope. I could make out the silhouette of each boulder, could see the faint glow of the instrument panel lights on the face of Brother Nephi as he reached around inside the cockpit of the downed helicopter. I had found him striking—even riveting—when I had seen him in the van, but now, moving about the wreckage, he was a gaunt assemblage of swaggering hips and tumbling beard, an eerie mutation of sensuosity. His deep-set eyes glared as if set in a naked skull—quick bullets of intelligence reflecting the instruments’ glow. He scanned the cockpit systematically, scavenging for useful equipment with the hands of one who had known this machinery before. He knew we were there, knew he’d have to find us, but he seemed unconcerned, unhurried in his movements. This more than anything inspired me to fear him: he clearly knew something I didn’t.

  “Take ye to the devil!” he roared, and fired again, dispatching what was left of the dying detective. Nephi threw back his head and howled like a wolf, his triumph filling the canyon. Then, almost abstractly, he added, “Now we got to bury this mess.”

  Ray’s hands squeezed my shoulders, catching me before I fell forward with the urge to vomit. We huddled together, stifling the sound of our breath.

  When I next looked, Brother Nephi was half inside the cockpit and cabin. He extracted two pistols from the passenger area, and from the front cockpit he took a flashlight, some pens, and the elastic straps off the pilot’s knee board. As he jostled the pilot to remove it, her head lolled with a disturbing semblance of life, and her face swung into view.

  “Nice move, Manti,” Nephi muttered bitterly, the intimacy of his voice carried to us by the crisp, close acoustics of the rocks, the desert air, the night. “You ruined a perfectly good helicopter. And you shot a woman.” To himself, he said, “We could have used a woman.”

  “A woman? How was I to—”

  “Shut up and keep searching.”

  “I been searching. I—”

  “Patience, Manti. Use your head. Shut up and listen for them. They’re in there somewhere; I feel it. Now, don’t you worry. Ma will be here any moment with the dogs. Remember, they found Nina that time she tried to hide.”

  Dogs? So that’s why he’s so confident. Even if we get free of the rock pile, he can track us faster than we can run. A home-court advantage. I felt Ray tense beside me. I put my lips to his ear and whispered, “Are you armed?”

  His return whisper was bitterly angry. “No.”

  Brother Nephi asked Manti, “You get a good look at ’em?”

  “The female was that one I followed in the car.”

  Nephi’s teeth flashed with a grin. “Ah … Little Emily! Come on out, sweet thing!” He threw his head back and howled with laughter, the sound echoing off the canyon walls. “Brother Nephi’s got a surprise for you!”

  I pressed my lips together, hoping I would not vomit.

  Suddenly, the lights went off in the cockpit, returning Brother Nephi to a moving bit of darkness. Satisfied in his urge to scavenge, he had thrown the master switch and now was returning to the greater task of dealing with us. He stretched, surveyed the canyon walls, and said, “Fire up that backhoe, Manti.”

  “But I got to watch the rocks, like you said.”

  “No, I’ll do that. You get that bucket raised and start crushing that cockpit. Come on, man. Use your head. All our hard work to build this kingdom, and you think I’m going to give it up over a little screwup like this?” He laughed, a big high-pitched howl of mirth. “That big guy from the university dug us up those bones. Dug ‘em up all pretty, just like George said he would. Saved us the trouble.” Suddenly, his voice was hard with rage. “Of course you had to bust them all to hell with the backhoe getting them out!” His voice calmed again with disturbing swiftness as he continued, talking to himself now, soothing himself: “But we got enough. We got enough. Smeely’s gonna do us. Don’t need that George anymore nohow, no sir; ol’ Nephi’s gonna be fine … .”

  The last piece of the puzzle snapped into place. Brother Nephi had ransacked George’s house to find the name of his sales contact, not me. But by then, I knew enough to be dangerous. I had left my motel room before they could find me there, and then had seen Nephi and Smeely together. I had to be eliminated. And now I had delivered Ray to the same fate.

  Nephi’s voice snapped again with anger. “So what you waiting for, Manti? You think we can just leave this hulk out here for the cops to find? We got to get this thing buried!”

  “But what if they bring another helicopter? They’ll see my spoils pile,” Manti replied, advancing his first quick thought of the evening.

  Nephi moved over to the truck. “You ain’t making no pile of dirt, brother. You’re gonna crush that chopper and push it up against the rocks. Then I’m gonna have me a little fun with some of this fine C-four.”

  Explosives! Brother Nephi was going to tumble the pile of rocks onto the helicopter. We had to move, and move quickly. As soon as he starts that backhoe, we’ll have the cover of noise … .

  Nephi hoisted a box out of the pickup bed and moved up onto the rocks toward us, as if he somehow knew where we were perched. It was time to move, but where?

  He set down the box. I heard a match strike, saw a flare. His bony face was again visible, eyes aimed straight our way, glowing like embers as he cupped his tiny fire in his hand to stifle the gentle breeze that still rose up the canyon. With the cooling of the desert night and the coming storm, the air would soon condense and flow downward, and with it, our scent; but for now, the sweet smell of marijuana curled past my nostrils. For all his bravado, Brother Nephi was calming his nerves.

  “Nephi!” came a new voice, low and urgent. “This ain’t no time for visions!”

  I glanced down the canyon. A scrawny woman was arriving, leading two small hounds. Their approach had been unnervingly quiet.

  “Hush, woman!” Nephi replied, and then, in the most reasonable of tones, he informed her, “Heavenly Father revealed the need for me to smoke. Wouldst thou question His word?”

  “No … .”

  He laughed unkindly. “Besides, this joint is laced with the power of angels.”

  Angel dust. Quiet dogs, high-powered rifles, and people who move like specters through the dark. They lived off the grid, just as Not Tom had said, without the decadent support of electricity. They knew the dark intimately, were at ease in it. The light of a single match was brilliant to them. They knew this terrain as if by braille—knew its every rock and hollow without seeing—and were used to moving through it in the darkest night.

  Ray squeezed my hand, gave it a tiny tug. I swiveled around and pointed toward a notch in the cliff above us. We could brace ourselves in there while we searched for a route up over the canyon rim, and pray that the explosives did not knock us loose.

  We eased our ways up over the rocks, slithering like snakes, hesitant to breathe for fear of being heard. Beneath us, the dogs started sniffing. One yelped. I glanced down over a boulder as we slid past it. The dog was sniffing inside my abandoned helmet, had caught my scent, pulled toward the rock pile.

  Ray swung into the notch. There was a tumble
of rocks leading to within six feet of the top. We could get out! He climbed onto the top and lifted himself up onto the capstone of the canyon and motioned for me to follow, but I knew that his move had taken more strength than I could hope to muster. I ran my earth-chilled hands up over the rough surface of the rock in search of hand- and foot-holds. I found none. The dogs barked and scratched, their sharp claws skidding as they climbed the rocks. I reached, praying to the gods of the rocks and the sky to lift me.

  Ray’s hands closed around my wrists. He gave three small tugs, a deft message that said, Jump on the count of three. I looked up. He crouched above me with his chin almost down to the rock, his arms making up the distance I could not reach. I eased my feet to the highest clefts I could find, tugged once, twice, and, on three, jumped. He lifted with amazing force, fell backward, and rolled silently deeper onto the top of the cliff.

  He did gymnastics, too, I thought numbly as I tumbled after him.

  As I rolled my head this way and that to get my bearings, Ray whispered, “Which way?” his voice barely louder than the sigh of the wind.

  “West,” I whispered.

  “Which way is that?”

  “Which—” At that instant, it hit me that Ray was lost. Away from his city, away from the orderly grid of streets and the mental map of his known universe, he was not oriented to the earth I knew so intimately. “But how did you shadow me through the city?” I asked.

  “I could sense you,” he replied, painfully aware of what I was asking. “You’re a strong signal.”

  I didn’t have time to consider what he meant by that. I had gotten him into this mess and it was up to me to get us back out of it. “Pay attention to the storm,” I breathed. “It’s coming from the west.” I could feel the wind now strongly in my face, the cold rip of wind that comes before the downpour. I read the clouds, gauging the time before it would be upon us. Lightning flashed. I counted one, two, three … fourteen seconds before I heard the rumble of thunder. Two miles.