Tyrannosaur Canyon (6 page)

"Anything else you can think of?"

"This 'treasure' of his might have been an Indian ruin. There are a lot of Anasazi ruins back up in there. Before I knew better I used to dig around some of those old sites, sold the arrowheads and pots I found. Nowadays a nice Chaco

black-on-white bowl might fetch five, ten thousand. That's worth troubling about. And then there's the
Lost
City
of the Padres."

"What's that?"

"Tom, my boy, I've told you that story."

"No you haven't."

Peek sucked on his pipe, with a gurgle. "Back around the turn of the century, a French padre named Eusebio Bernard got lost up there somewhere on Mesa de los Viejos on his way from Santa Fe to Chama. While wandering around trying to find his way out, he spied a huge Anasazi cliff dwelling, big as Mesa Verde, hidden in an alcove in the rock below him. It had four towers, hundreds of room blocks, a real lost city. No one ever found it again."

"A true story?"

Peek smiled. "Probably not."

"What about oil or gas? Could he have been looking for that?"

"Doubt it. It's true that the Chama wilderness lies right on the edge of the
San Juan
Basin
, one of the richest natural gas fields in the Southwest. Trouble is, you need a whole team of roughnecks with seismic probes for that game. A lone prospector doesn't stand a chance." Peek stirred the ashes of his pipe with a tool, tamped it down, relit it. "If he was looking for ghosts, well, they say they're quite a few up there. The Apaches claim they've heard the T. Rex roar."

"We're getting off the subject, Ben."

"You said you wanted stories."

Tom held up a hand. "I draw the line at ghost dinosaurs."

"I suppose it's possible this unknown prospector of yours found the El Capitan hoard. Ten thousand ounces of gold would be worth ..." Peek screwed up his face, "almost four million dollars. But you have to consider the numismatic value of those old Spanish bars stamped with the Lion and Castle. Hell, you'd get at least twenty, thirty times the bullion value. Now we're talking money . . . Anyway, you come back and tell me more about this murder. And I'll tell you about the ghost of La Llorona, the Wailing Woman."

  
“Deal”.

9

IN THE FIRST-CLASS cabin of Continental Bight 450 from LaGuardia to Albuquerque, Weed Maddox stretched out. Easing his leather chair back, he cracked his laptop and sipped a Pellegrino while waiting for it to boot up. Funny, he thought, how he was just like the other men around him, wearing expensive suits and tapping away at their laptops. It would be rich, really rich, if the executive vice president or managing partner next to him could see what it was he was working on.

Maddox began sorting through the batch of handwritten letters-illiterate letters laboriously written out on cheap lined paper in blunt pencil, many with grease stains and fingerprints. Clipped to each letter was a snapshot of the ugly bastard who had written it. What a bunch of losers.

He pulled the first letter out, smoothed it down on his tray table next to the computer, and began to read.

Dere Mr. Madocks,

Im Londell Franklin James A 34 year old White Aryan Man from Arun-dell, Ark. my dick is 9 inchs rock hard all the way and Im lookenfor a blond lady no fat ass back talking bitches please just a lady who likes 9 inchs right up to the hilt plus im 6foot two pure pumped up rock hard mussle with a tatoo of a deaths head on my right deltoid and a dragon on my chest Im looken for a slim lady from the Deep South no niggers quadroons or New York femminatzi bitches just an oldfashoned White Aryan Southern Girl who knows how to please a man and cook chicken and grits Im doing five to fifteen armed robbery the DA lied about the plea bargin but I got a parole hearing in two yeares 8 months I want a hot lady waitenfor me on the outside reddy to take it right up to the hilt.

Maddox grinned. Now there was a mother who was going to spend the rest of his life in prison-parole or no parole. Some people were just naturally born to it. He started typing into his laptop:

My name is Lonnie F. James and I'm a thirty-four-year-old Caucasian male from
Arundell
,
Arkansas
, doing five to fifteen years for armed robbery, with parole expected in less than three years. I am in superb physical condition, six feet two inches tall, 190 pounds, a serious weight lifter and body builder. Ladies, I am very well endowed. My sign is Capricorn. I have a tattoo of a death i head on my right arm and a tattoo of St. George killing the Dragon on my chest. I'm looking for a petite, blond, blue-eyed, old-fashioned Southern Belle for correspondence, romance, and commitment. You should be trim and shapely, twenty-nine or younger, sweet as mint julep-but at the same time a woman who knows a real man when she sees one. I like country music, good country cooking, pro football, and holding hands on long walks down country roads in the misty morning.

Now that was inspired, thought Maddox, reading it over. Sweet as mint julep. He read through it again, deleted the "misty morning" bit, saved it on his computer. Then he looked at the photograph that came with the letter. Another ugly mother-this one with a bullet head and eyes set so close together they looked like they'd been squeezed in a vise. He would scan it and post it all the same. In his experience looks didn't count. What counted was that Londell Franklin James was in there and not out here. As such, he offered the right woman a perfect relationship. A woman could write him, exchange sex-letters, make promises, swear undying love, talk about babies and marriage and the future-and none of it would change the fact that he was in there, and she was out here. She had ultimate control. That's what it was all about-control-plus the erotic bang it gave some women to correspond with a chiseled-up guy doing serious time for armed robbery who claimed he had a nine-inch dick. Yeah, and who was to prove otherwise?

He clicked on a fresh screen and moved to the next letter.

Dear Mr. Maddox,

I am looking for a woman to mail my jizum to so as she can have my baby-

Maddox made a face and crumpled that one up, shoving it into the seat pocket in front of him. Christ, he ran a dating service, not a sperm bank. He had started Hard Time while working in the prison library, where there was an old IBM 486 computer being used as a card catalog. His days in the Army as a gunnery sergeant had taught him all he needed to know about computers. In this day and age you could hardly fire a projectile bigger than a .50-caliber round without a computer. Maddox was surprised to find he had a major talent for computers. Unlike people, they were clean, odorless, obedient, and didn't haul around a bullshit attitude. He started off collecting ten bucks from cons for posting their names and addresses at a Website he had created, soliciting female penpals on the outside. It had really taken off. Maddox soon realized the big money was to be made not from the cons, but from the women. It amazed him how many women wanted to date a man in prison. He charged twenty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents a month to belong to Hard Time, $199 a year, and for that you got unlimited access to the personals-photos and addresses included-of more than four hundred real cons doing serious time for everything from murder and rape to kidnapping, armed robbery, and assault. There were now three women subscribers to every con, almost twelve hundred ladies, and after deducting expenses he was pulling down three bills a week, free and clear.

A "prepare for landing" announcement came over the intercom and a flight attendant came through, nodding and smiling, murmuring for all the businessmen to shut down their laptops. Maddox stowed his under the seat and looked out the window. The brown landscape of
New Mexico
was passing by as the jet approached Albuquerque from the east, the land rising to the slopes of the
Sandia
Mountains
, suddenly dark with trees and then white with snow. The plane passed the mountains and they were over the city, banking toward the approach. Maddox had a view of everything, the river, the freeways, the Big I, all the little houses climbing up into the foothills. It depressed him to see so many useless people living such pathetic lives in those ant boxes. It was almost like being in prison.

No, he took that back. Nothing was almost like being in prison.

His mind drifted to the problem at hand, feeling a sudden rush of irritation. Broadbent. The man must have been waiting for his moment up there in the Maze. Just waiting. Maddox had done all the work, popped the guy, and then Broadbent stepped in, helped himself to the notebook, and split. The son of a bitch had wrecked a perfect finish.

Maddox took a deep breath, closed his eyes, said his mantra over a few times in his head, tried to meditate. No sense in getting all worked up. The problem was fairly simple. If Broadbent was keeping the notebook in his house, Maddox would find it. If not, then Maddox would find a way to force it out of him. The

man simply had no idea who he was dealing with. And since Broadbent was up to his neck in it, it was unlikely he'd call in the cops. This was going to be settled between them privately.

He owed it to Corvus; Jesus, he owed him his life.

He settled back as the 747 came in for a landing, nice and soft, the plane barely kissing the ground. Maddox took it as a sign.

10

THE NEXT MORNING Tom found his assistant, Shane McBride, at the hot walker, eyeballing a sorrel quarter horse trudging around the circle. Shane was an Irish guy from South Boston who went to Yale, but he'd picked up western ways with a vengeance and now he looked more cowboy than the locals. He stomped around in roping boots and sported a bushy mustache, with a dented Stetson with a scoop-brim jammed on his head, a faded black bandanna tied around his neck, his lower lip packed with chaw. He knew horses, had a sense of humor, was serious about his work, and was loyal to a fault. As far as Tom was concerned he was the perfect partner.

Shane turned to Tom, pulled off his hat, wiped his brow, and screwed up one eye. "What do you think?"

Tom watched the horse move. "How long's he been on there?"

"Ten minutes."

"Pedal osteitis."

Shane unscrewed his eye. "Naw. You're wrong there. Sesamoiditis."

"The fetlock joints aren't swollen. And the injury is too symmetrical."

"Incipient, and sesamoiditis can also be symmetrical."

Tom narrowed his eyes, watched the horse move. "Whose is it?"

"Noble Nix, belongs to the O Bar O. Never had a problem before."

"Cow horse or hunter-jumper?"

"Cutting horse."

Tom frowned. "Maybe you're right."

"Maybe? There ain't no maybe about it. He just came back from competing in Amarillo, won a saddle. The workout, combined with the long trailering, would do it."

Tom stopped the walker, knelt, felt the horse's fetlocks. Hot. He rose. "I still say it's pedal osteitis, but I'll concede that it might be pedal osteitis in the sesamoid bones."

"You should've been a lawyer."

"In either case, the treatment's the same. Complete rest, periodic hosing with cold water, application of DMSO, full leather pads for the feet."

"Tell me something I don't know."

Tom grasped Shane by the shoulder. "You're getting pretty good at this, eh, Shane?"

"You got it, boss."

"Then you won't mind running the show today, too."

"Things go a lot better when you're not here-cold cerveza, mariachis, bare-assed women."

"Don't burn the place down."

"You still looking for that gal whose daddy was killed in the Maze?"

"I'm not having much luck. The police can't find the body."

"It ain't no surprise to me they can't find the body. That's a big damn country back up there."

Tom nodded. "If I could figure out what he'd written in that journal of his, it would probably tell me who he was."

"It probably would."

Tom had told Shane everything. They had that kind of relationship. And Shane, despite his garrulousness, was implicitly discreet.

"You got it on you?"

Tom pulled the notebook out of his pocket.

"Lemme see." He took it, flipped through it. "What's this? Code?"

"Yes."

He shut it, examined the cover. "That blood?"

Tom nodded.

"Jesus. The poor guy." Shane handed him back the notebook. "If the cops learn you held out on 'em, they'll weld the cell door shut."

"I'll remember that."

Tom walked around behind the clinic to check the horses in the stalls; he went down the line, patting each one, murmuring soothing words, checking them out. He finished up at his desk and sorted through the bills, noting that some were overdue. He hadn't paid them, not through lack of money but through sheer laziness; both he and Shane hated the paperwork end of the business. He dumped them back into the in-box without opening any. He really needed to hire a bookkeeper to handle all this paperwork, except that the extra expense would put them back into the red, after a year of hard work getting themselves to the breakeven point. The fact that he had a hundred million dollars in escrow didn't matter. He wasn't his father. He needed to turn a profit for himself.

He shoved the papers aside and pulled out the notebook, opening it and laying it on the table. The numbers beckoned-in there, he felt sure, was the secret to the man's identity. And of the treasure he found.

Shane poked his head in.

"How's that O Bar O gelding?" Tom asked.

"Doctored and in his stall." Shane hesitated in the door.

"What is it?"

"You remember last year, when that monastery up the
Chama
River
had a sick ewe?"