Canyon Sacrifice (3 page)

The firefighters and rangers were gathered at the head of the promontory, a good fifty feet beyond where Chuck had buried his fist in the oversized gut of the guy in the Isotopes sweatshirt. That had been hours ago. No way, Chuck assured himself, was this scene related to his earlier altercation. Looking closer, however, he saw that the rangers surrounded a large, black, plastic sack half-enclosed in wire mesh. A body bag, that's what it was, encased in a tub-style search-and-rescue litter—and whoever was in the bag filled it to near-overflowing.

T
HREE

11 a.m.

Chuck squeezed his eyes shut. Could he have killed the guy he'd punched on Maricopa Point? As quickly as the question formed in his mind, he knew the answer. After all, his first fight very nearly had been his last.

He'd snuck into a Durango bar as a teenager and wound up drunk and shooting pool in the back room. In short order, he'd found himself down several hundred bucks to a gas-patch roughneck in worn jeans and a grease-stained T-shirt. Chuck displayed his empty pockets to the roughneck, who proceeded to jump him when he left the bar an hour later. A kick to his stomach ruptured his spleen; he'd required life-saving surgery. Chuck's broken nose, crooked to this day, was the visible reminder of the beating he'd taken that night.

What if something had ripped open inside the guy's gut when Chuck had punched him? Possible. Except the timing didn't fit. The guy would not have died right away. Any serious injury would have sent him to the hospital in Flagstaff, eighty miles to the south. But the ambulance and other emergency vehicles were still here at the scene, a good four hours after the confrontation.

Chuck sucked a breath through his compressed lips. He hadn't hit the guy hard enough to kill him. This was a coincidence, nothing more, the park vehicles, the flashing lights. Had to be. The rangers and firefighters were conducting a training exercise, that was it, and the body bag was filled with coils of ropes to provide ballast for the litter.

The shuttle bus trundled past the park-service cars and trucks lined along the pullout. In breaks between the vehicles, Chuck caught glimpses of the park staffers gathered on the
point before a screen of piñons and junipers blocked his view.

The bus slowed when it approached Powell Lookout, half a mile past Maricopa Point. Chuck spoke over his shoulder to Janelle, leaving no time for her to break in. “I bet I know just about everybody back there.” He gestured out the rear of the shuttle in the direction of the point. “It'd be good for me to say ‘hey,' see if somebody could show us around tomorrow, give us a behind-the-scenes tour.” He stood as the shuttle bus came to a stop. “You three go on out to Hermit's Rest. I'll catch the next shuttle and meet you there.”

“But—” Janelle began.

Chuck wagged what he hoped was a friendly finger to cut her off, then tousled Rosie's hair, as if ditching Janelle and the girls in the middle of the first day of their first-ever vacation together was the most reasonable thing in the world. He made his way down the aisle and off the bus and set off at a jog along Rim Drive beneath the scorching sun, careful not to look back as the shuttle pulled away behind him.

He slowed to a walk when the overlook came into view. He was sweating hard, the front of his shirt sticking to his chest. He pulled his baseball cap low over his eyes and hung his thumbs in the front belt loops of his jeans with fake casualness while he peered anxiously ahead.

The firefighters had finished stowing their gear and were hauling their full duffels to the fire-rescue truck. The rangers still encircled the body bag in the mesh litter. Chuck noted that the distinct form of a human body, not coils of ropes, pressed outward from inside the bag—the broad outline of shoulders, arms tucked at the sides of a large stomach, feet pointing upward. He stopped at the edge of the road. He never should have left the shuttle.

He took a step backward, but before he could make his getaway, a ranger climbed from an idling patrol sedan parked at
the head of the line of vehicles.

“Chuck? That you? Christ, how long's it been?”

The ranger, tall and in his late forties, had a graying, bushy blond mustache. His wide stance supported a compact potbelly that pressed at the buttons of his shirt. He stood with his elbows cocked outward like the wings of a bird, his hands resting on the bulky sidearm belted to his right hip and extra magazine pouch strapped to his left. Purple splotches marked the ranger's face, the result, Chuck knew, of years of heavy drinking.

“Donald,” Chuck answered. Ranger Donald Podalski had been assigned to oversee Chuck's work in the park on several occasions. Chuck indicated the firefighters and rangers on the promontory. “What's going on?”

“Guy took a tumble.” Donald gave a descending whistle and imitated with his hand someone falling off a cliff. “Girlfriend says it was an accident, buuuut . . .”

Cliff-jump suicides weren't uncommon at the canyon, though it always amazed Chuck that such despondency could remain unaffected by the canyon's beauty. Accidental cliff falls were a regular occurrence at the canyon as well, one or two a year. Reported as suicide or accident, however, there was always the question whether a push might have been involved.

Chuck tugged his sweat-dampened shirt away from his chest. “Witnesses?”

“A bunch of Jap tourists, but they hardly spoke any English, and their guide, she was too freaked to do much translating. Doesn't sound like they saw much, anyway. The girlfriend was the only one close, taking his picture way out at the end of the point.”

Chuck put a hand to the scratches on his neck. So. The guy in the Isotopes sweatshirt was dead—and, thankfully, Chuck's punch wasn't the cause. But had the girlfriend reported the fight with Chuck that had preceded the fall?

“Where is she?”

“Begay let her go.” Donald pointed at one of the park staffers gathered around the litter: Grand Canyon National Park Chief Ranger Robert Begay.

Fiftyish, smoothly professional, always impeccably groomed, Robert had been handpicked by park-service honchos in D.C. for the chief ranger post. His first year as head ranger at the park had overlapped with Chuck's most recent contract at the canyon, assessing and digging the site of a new solar latrine at Hermit Creek Backcountry Campground.

Like Donald and the other rangers, Robert wore park-service slacks and shirt and a wide-brimmed, Smokey Bear hat. The chief ranger was stout and broad-shouldered. His sleek sidearm barely protruded from his hip. The hard kick of Donald's beefy .45 had surprised Chuck when he'd fired it with Donald at the park shooting range a few years ago, while Robert's slender handgun looked as if it would deliver its shots with the same silky efficiency with which he performed every aspect of his job.

“She just left,” Donald continued. “Waited to make a visual when they got the body up to the rim, then took off. I went over to check it out.” He made a face. “Guy's hamburger, but she didn't even flinch. Tough bird. She's supposed to stick around ‘til the body's shipped.”

“Flagstaff?” Chuck asked.

“Yep. Tomorrow, probably, by the time all's said and done. You know me though, always the last to know. They've got me on perimeter, like anybody's gonna sneak up on ‘em. But hey,” he aimed a thumb at the idling sedan, “I've got A/C.”

“And 92.9,” Chuck added. He moved toward Donald even as he struggled to come up with a way to justify making his escape.

“KAFF-FM, Flagstaff
Coun-try
,” Donald crooned in agreement. He sat back against the hood of the patrol car. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway? What's it been? A couple years,
at least. Figured you were all done with park contracts now that you're sucking on the tribe's teat.”

Chuck ignored Donald's good-natured jab. “I'm with my wife and kids.”

“Wife?
Kids
?”

Good. He'd managed to throw Donald. “Got myself one of those insta-families. All the rage these days.”

“She cute, your new wife?”

“'Course she is.” Chuck appreciated the opportunity to answer with complete conviction. “Knock-down, drop-dead gorgeous.”

“I'd expect nothing less of you.”

“There's plenty out there for you, too,” Chuck said, covering territory he and Donald had gone over many times. “Get your butt out of your La-Z-Boy, throw away the bottle—”

“And run my ass off like you every day? Fat chance.”

“Fat's what I'm talking about.” Chuck eyed Donald's gut. The ranger had put on a few pounds since they'd last seen one another.

“Hey,” Donald said defensively, covering his stomach with his hand.

“I was wondering if maybe you could show us around tomorrow. I said I'd find out.”

“As if you knew I'd be here.”

“You or somebody else.”

“Like Rachel, maybe?”

Chuck shuddered. “I heard she transferred to the Everglades.”

“She only lasted there for, like, six months. She's been back here quite a while now.” Donald smirked. “Guess she forgot to tell you.”

Chuck kept his tone even. “Guess so.”

The ranger moved on. “These insta-kids of yours, any daughters?”

“Two.”

“Teenagers?” Donald leered.

“Sorry.” Chuck held out a hand palm-down at his waist. “Five and seven.”

“Damn. How ‘bout this wife of yours, any sisters?”

“Nope.” Chuck couldn't hold back his smile any longer. “You never change, do you?”

“A little,” Donald admitted, patting his belly.

Donald was divorced and likely to remain that way. The marriage rate for park rangers was near the lowest of all professions in the United States, and Donald was no exception. With its postings far from bright lights and big cities, the job attracted autonomous individuals set on their own paths through life. Fellow staffers in each national park served as a de facto family for most rangers, an ever-changing community gathered in the middle of nowhere by a shared love of the outdoors and by something else—the desire not to be sentenced to a life in suburbia “doing the deadly,” as rangers referred to the nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday routine. But the tradeoffs of park-service life—working nights, weekends, and holidays far from hometowns, relatives, and lifelong friends—were significant, and they exacted a toll. Those tradeoffs certainly had taken their toll on Donald.

Chuck first met Donald upon winning his initial Grand Canyon contract to assess and dig the route of a proposed connector road out of the village to meet up with the park's South Entrance Road. That was twelve years ago. At the time, Donald was freshly split from his high-school sweetheart; she wanted kids, Donald did not. Fed up with Donald's refusal to embrace parenthood by the time they'd reached their thirties, Donald's now ex-wife had decamped for their hometown of San Diego.

Donald was hard on the prowl when he and Chuck first met, trolling among female rangers and the unattached women who
made up the bulk of the retail workforce in the village. Donald's playboy ways cooled as Scotch took over as his mistress of choice. For a time, Chuck considered confronting Donald about his drinking. But it never reached the point where it affected his on-the-job performance, at least not overtly so. If and when it rose to that level, Chuck told himself, he would act. In the meantime, he did what came naturally and kept his mouth shut.

Chuck glanced down at his own flat stomach. “You don't have to run your butt clear off, you know.”

“A life of denial's not for me. Never has been.” Donald returned his hand to the butt of his .45. “There are certain finer things in life that call my name. Far be it for me to reject them.”

“You count French fries and pizza as ‘finer things in life'?”

“Like I'm gonna gorge myself on caviar on what they pay me around here.”

“Still on the ‘oh, poor me' jag, are you?” Chuck had listened to Donald complain of living paycheck to paycheck for as long as he'd known him. “You've got benefits far as you can see. Health insurance, free housing, paid vacations, overtime. You name it, the government's throwing it at you. And still you're bitching about how broke you are?”

“You try getting by on what I make each month.”

“There's nothing to spend your big bucks on out here. Look around. You see a Ferrari dealer anywhere? You should be drowning in money.”

Donald studied the ground at his feet, causing Chuck to wonder what his friend might have added to his off-duty routine over the last two years—not that he was going to ask. How many evenings had the two of them hung out together in Donald's park-service duplex while, night after night, Donald sipped himself into whisky-fueled oblivion? And never once had Chuck said a word. He wasn't about to start now, having run into Donald for the first time in more than two years, and
with the full body bag waiting fifty yards beyond Donald's shoulder.

The rangers on the promontory were lining up on either side of the litter. “Looks like they could use your help,” Chuck said.