Read Tyrannosaur Canyon Online
Authors: Douglas Preston
Tyrannosaur Canyon (15 page)
He paced his office, turned at the window, and paused to look out. The evening rowboats were just venturing out into the pond, and he found himself looking for the father and son. But of course they weren't back, why would they?-once was enough.
5
, THE sun had fallen below the canyon rim and the heat of the day was going down, but it was still stuffy and dead between the sandstone walls. Wilier, trudging up yet another endless canyon, suddenly heard an eruption of baying from the dogs from just around the bend, followed by Wheatley's high-pitched shouting. He glanced at Hernandez, met his partner's eye.
"Looks like they found something."
"Yeah."
"Lieutenant!" he heard Wheatley's panicked voice. "Lieutenant!"
The hysterical baying of the dogs and Wheatley's yelling echoed down to him distorted by the narrow canyon walls, as if they were trapped in a giant trombone. Even though he was fed up with searching, Wilier had dreaded this moment.
"About time," said Hernandez, his short legs churning him forward.
"I hope to hell Wheatley's got those dogs under control."
"Remember last year when they ate that geezer's left-"
"Right, right," said Wilier hastily. When he rounded the last bend, he saw that Wheatley did not have the dogs under control. He'd lost the leash of one and was unsuccessfully trying to haul back the other, both dogs frantically trying to dig into a patch of sand at the base of a tight curve in the canyon wall. Hernandez and Wilier rushed forward and snatched up the leashes, hauling the dogs back and tying them up to a boulder.
Huffing and red-faced, Wilier examined the scene. The bed of sand had been disturbed by the dogs, but it was no great loss, considering that the hard rain of the past week had already swept it clean of any traces. As he examined the area he could see nothing that indicated anything lay under the sand-beyond a faint,
unpleasant odor that the breeze wafted past his nostrils. Behind him, the dogs whined.
"Let's dig."
"Dig?" Hernandez asked, his round face showing alarm. "Shouldn't we wait for the SOC team and the M.E.?"
"We don't know we've got a body yet. Could be a dead deer. We can't chopper a whole SOC team out here until we know."
"I see your point."
Wilier heaved off his backpack and slipped out the two trowels he had brought, tossing one to Hernandez. "I doubt it's very deep. Our killer didn't have a hell of a lot of time."
He knelt and began scraping the trowel across the loose sand, removing one layer at a time. Hernandez did the same at the opposite end of the area, making two careful piles that the forensic team would later sift through. As he swept the sand aside he kept an eye out for clues-clothing or personal articles-but nothing came to light. The hole deepened, moving from dry sand into wet. There was something down there, for sure, Wilier thought, as the smell intensified.
At three feet his trowel scraped against something hairy and yielding. A sudden wave of stench, thick as soup, hit his nostrils. He scraped a bit more, breathing through his mouth. It had been buried five days in wet sand in ninety-eight-degree heat and it smelled the part.
"It's not human," said Hernandez.
"I can see that."
"Maybe it is a deer."
Wilier scraped some more. The fur was too coarse and matted to be a deer, and as he tried to clear more sand off it to see clearly the fur and skin began coming away in patches, exposing slimy, brownish-pink flesh underneath. This was no deer: it was a burro. The prospector's burro, the one that Broadbent mentioned.
He stood up. "If there's a stiff it'll be next to it. You take that side, I'll take the other."
Once again they began scraping away the sand, piling it carefully to one side. Wilier lit a cigarette and held it between his lips, smoking it that way, hoping to chase off some of the stench.
"Got something."
Wilier abandoned his side and went over to where Hernandez was crouching. He troweled some more sand away, exposing something as long and swollen as a boiled kielbasa. It took Wilier a moment to realize it was a forearm. A second foul
wave of odor seemed to strike him bodily, a different and far worse smell. He inhaled a lungful of smoke, but it did no good: he could taste the dead body. He stood up, gagging, and backed off. "Okay. That's good enough. It's a stiff- that's all we need to know."
Hernandez beat a hasty retreat, only too eager to get away from the makeshift grave. Wilier moved upwind, smoking furiously, inhaling a. lungful of smoke with each breath as if to scour his lungs free of the odor of death. He looked around. The dogs were at their rock, whining and eager. For what? A meal?
"Where's Wheatley?" asked Hernandez, looking around.
"Hell if I know." He saw Wheatley's fresh footprints going farther up-canyon. "Find out what he's doing, will you?"
Hernandez hiked up the canyon and soon disappeared around the corner. He returned a moment later, a smirk on his face. "He's puking."
6
FRIDAY MORNING DAWNED a flawless blue, with flocks of jays squawking and
fighting in the pinons, the cottonwoods casting long cool shadows across the meadow. Tom had fed the horses that morning, given them an hour to eat, and now he led his favorite horse, Knock, over to the rail to be saddled. Sally joined him with her buckskin gelding, Sierra, and together they worked in silence, brushing out their coats, picking the hooves, saddling and tacking up.
By the time they set off, there was only a memory of coolness in the green cot-tonwood shadows along the creek. The flanks of
"Where to, cowboy?" Sally asked.
"Barrancones Spring."
"Perfect."
"Shane's got everything under control," Tom said. "I don't have to get back at all this afternoon."
He felt a twinge of guilt. He'd been relying on Shane far too much this past week.
They reached the bluffs and began climbing the narrow trail to the top. A hawk circled above them, whistling. The air smelled of cottonwood trees and dust.
"Damn, I love this country," Sally said.
The trail wound up the side of the mesa into the cool ponderosa pines. In half an hour they reached the top and Tom turned his horse to look at the view. He
never got tired of it. To his left was the steep flank of Pedernal, and to his right the sheer orange cliffs of Pueblo Mesa. Below lay the irregular alfalfa fields along Canones Creek, which opened to the vast
"Not a bad view," she said with a laugh.
They continued on, the wind rustling through the sideoats grama grass that edged the trail. He let Sally ride ahead and watched her on her horse. They continued to ride in silence, the only sound the rhythmic creaking of their saddles.
As the country opened up to high grasslands of Mesa Escoba, she touched her heels to Sierra's flank and moved into a trot. Tom followed suit. They abandoned the trail, riding across the windblown grass, dotted with Indian paintbrush and
lupines.
"Let's go a little faster," Sally said, giving her horse another nudge with her
heel. He broke into an easy lope.
Tom kept pace. At the far end of the meadow Tom could see the cluster of cottonwoods marking Barrancones Spring, at the base of a red cliff.
"All right," cried Sally. "Last one to the spring is a rotten egg! Giddyap!" She gave Sierra one final touch of heel. The horse shot forward, stretching out into a dead run while Sally gave a whoop.
Knock, who always wanted to be in the lead, needed little urging to follow suit, and soon they were tearing across the meadow, neck and neck. Sally began to pull ahead, her hair streaming behind like a golden flame. Tom watched her fly, and he had to admit she was one hell of a rider. The two horses whipped over the grass and into the sudden cool of the trees surrounding the spring. At the last minute, Sally reined in and Tom followed; the horses leaned back and dug in like the well-trained reining horses they were, sliding to a stop. When he looked over, he saw Sally sitting on her horse, her hair wild, her white shirt partly open, having popped a couple of buttons, her face in high color.
"That was fun."
She hopped off the horse.
They were in a small grove of cottonwoods, with an old fire ring in the center
and a couple of logs for seats. Geniza.ro cowboys from days gone by had built a line camp here, with tables shaped from rough-hewn logs of ponderosa, a wooden box nailed to a trunk, a broken piece of mirror wedged into the fork of a tree, and a chipped enamel washbowl hung from a nail. The spring itself lay at the bottom of the cliffs, a deep pool hidden behind a screen of desert willows.
Tom collected the two horses, unsaddled them, watered them at the spring, and staked them out to graze. When he returned, Sally had spread out lunch on a thin blanket. In the middle of the table was a bottle of red wine, freshly opened.
"Now that's class," said Tom, picking it up. "Castello di Verrazzano, '97 Riserva.,”
"I snuck it in my saddlebags. I hope you don't mind."
"It's been dreadfully shakenup, I fear," said Tom in mock disapproval. "Are you sure we should be drinking at lunch? It's against the rules to drink and ride."
"Well now," Sally drawled in imitation of him, "we're just going to have to bend the rules, aren't we?" She tucked into her sandwich,
taking two great bites, and then poured some wine into a plastic glass. "Here."
He took it, swirled it around, and sipped, aping a connoisseur. "Berries, vanilla, hints of chocolate."
Sally poured herself a glass and took a good slug. Tom took a bite from his own sandwich and watched her eat. A green light filtered through the foliage, and every time a breeze blew the trees rustled. When he finished his lunch, he lounged back on the blanket they had thrown down over the soft grass. In the distance, through the cottonwoods, he could see the horses grazing out on the flats, dappled in sunlight. Suddenly he felt a cool hand on his temple. He turned and found Sally was bending over him, her blond hair falling like a curtain.
"What are you doing?"
She smiled. "What does it look like?"
She laid her hands on either side of his face. Tom tried to sit up, but the hands gently pushed him back down into the grass.
"Hey . . ." he said.
"Hey yourself."
One of her hands slid inside his shirt, caressing his chest. She bent down and put her lips to his. Her mouth tasted of peppermint and wine. She leaned over him and her hair fell heavily across his chest.
He reached up to touch her hair, then stroked it and ran his hand down to the strong hollow of her back, where he could feel her back muscles moving. As he drew her down, he felt her slender body and soft breasts glide up against his.
AFTERWARD, THEY LAY next to each other on the blanket. Tom's arm was thrown over her shoulder and he was looking into her amazing turquoise eyes. "Doesn't get much better than this, does it?" he said. "No," she murmured. "It's so good it almost makes me afraid."
7
MADDOX STROLLED
The road passed some old Victorian houses, converted like everything else into gallery space, windows gleaming with Indian jewelry and pots. He checked his watch.
. He still had a little more time to kill.
He wandered in and out of the galleries, amazed at the sheer quantity of silver, turquoise, and pottery there was in the world-not to mention paintings. Art, Maddox felt, was basically a scam, as his eye took in one more window full of Day-Glo-colored canyons, coyotes howling at the moon, and Indians draped in blankets. Another easy way to make money, and all perfectly legal. Why hadn't he seen the opportunities before? He'd wasted half his life trying to make money the hard, illegal way, not realizing that the best moneymaking scams were all legal. When he was finished with this last job, he'd go one hundred percent legit, plow some money back into Hard Time, and maybe even look for investors. He could be the next dot-corn millionaire.
One gallery packed with enormous sculptures in bronze and stone caught his eye. The stuff looked expensive-just moving it would cost a fortune. The door