Blind Descent-pigeion 6 (24 page)

  Big Manhole was a cave on BLM land adjacent to the park, an unprepossessing hole more than fifty feet deep, the entrance a mere crack beside a low brow of stone. About ten feet down, the aperture widened abruptly into a bell-shaped cavern. On its own, Big Manhole had little to recommend it, but there were a number of people who believed it would prove to be a second entrance into Lechuguilla Cavern. Toward that end, various tunnels had been bored into the bottom of the cave. Some were dug with the knowledge and blessing of the Bureau of Land Management. Some were not. Holden had once remarked to Oscar that he always carried an extra padlock when he visited because, often as not, the last lock used to secure the gate closing the cave would have been pried off.

  North of the park the country was beautiful only to an eye acclimatized to the desert's idiosyncratic allure. Broken hills, scabbed with rock and cactus, spread out to a horizon composed of faint blue mountain silhouettes. Dry washes, ancient stream- and riverbeds, slashed through, exposing the bones of the earth in stratifications of gray, white, and dun. Nothing eased the eye: no green trees, sparkle of water, or carpet of grasses. The sky failed to soften the blow. Cold and scoured by the icy winds, its blue was as unyielding as lapis lazuli.

  North northwest of the park boundary Anna ran out of pavement. Turning off Highway 137, she edged the sedan over a gravel road. For a dirt track it was in good condition, recently resurfaced and leveled. Potholes, massive and unannounced, suggested heavy use. That and dust forced her to slow to an irritating creep. Dust was ubiquitous. Anna had spent a lot of years in a lot of deserts, and she couldn't remember seeing dust this bad. It was as if the land had been ground exceedingly fine, pulverized into white powder that settled over everything. Rocks, bushes, the few stalks of sparse grass were featureless under a suffocating blanket of grayish white. Clouds boiled from beneath the sedan's tires.

  Suddenly a wind sucked the powdered earth up and wove it into veils, wings, plumes, fantastic blinding shapes. Anna stomped on the brake, and the car shuddered to a halt. The whirling devil wind that engulfed her in earthen fog pummeled the car, velvet fists pounding first one door, then another. The radio antenna whipped so hard she could hear its high faint singing over the wind. With a last, playful swat, a broken sage bush rolling tumbleweed fashion over the car's hood, the tiny tornado moved on.

  Anna watched its progress, a jaunty white funnel skipping over the catsclaw. A dust devil in the steady winds that had raked the desert since morning was unusual but not the greatest of the natural phenomena spawned by the rugged landscape. The twister carried off only a drop in the ocean of dust that continued to pour across the roadway in a steady stream.

  A rough track forked to the south. No signs marked the way. Anna guided herself by counting. Unless she'd missed a road during the bizarre storm, this was the third; the road that would carry her to Big Manhole.

  Seconds after she left the gravel the dust was gone. Winds raged unabated. The road began to deteriorate. Zeddie had warned her she'd need a high-clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicle to navigate the backcountry. Anna would have preferred it. What she had was a 1993 Chevrolet and she would have to make do. Had it been her own car, she would have been more circumspect. Muttering a quick apology to the taxpayers, she forced the car over an imbedded spine of limestone that threatened to disembowel it.

  Twenty minutes later she knew she'd have to abandon the car and walk the last couple of miles or risk having to walk the entire sixty back to Carlsbad. Despite her leather jacket and another of Zeddie's sweaters, wind found ways into her bones. Leaning into it, she shoved her hands in her pockets, lowered her head, and barged up the bleak hills. By the time she reached the last bump in a line of thick places along a low ridge, she felt a kinship with a baked Alaska. Exertion had raised her body temperature till, beneath her layers, she'd begun to sweat, but the bite of the wind had nearly frozen the flesh from her cheeks and ears.

  Over the years she'd nearly forgotten the unceasing winds of a Trans-Pecos winter. Moaning, godless winds that ripped through, carrying away sanity. Jason's harpies could have taken lessons from the Texas wind. Relentless, it tore at human nerves, snatching hats, doors, packages, whipping people with their own hair, scouring with sand and cold, never letting up, never letting go, sawing at the eaves in the night and the mind in the day.

  "The wind is my friend," Anna remembered a conservationist in Guadalupe telling her. "It blows the tourists away."

  Sensible tourists, she thought as she pushed over the nub of the last hill. The sight of a four-wheel-drive Blazer rewarded her. If, after all the effort, Brent had stood her up, she might have been less than perfectly gracious when next they met.

  Caves were well camouflaged in New Mexico. The entrances blended in with the scenery. One could easily pass within a foot of a major cavern and never notice it. Anna followed Zeddie's directions to the letter. She walked to the middle of the barren knoll where Brent had left the Blazer, pulled out her compass, and turned till she was facing south southeast. If she'd done it right, park headquarters should be several miles away, hidden by a swelling of the ground. Crossing to where the knoll rounded down into one of the shallow ravines that carried away water from the short but fierce monsoons, she looked for the cave.

  Gray-brown hillsides rolled away in all directions, marked only by fragments of lichen-speckled stone and the unwelcoming beauty of desert plants. Anna turned her attention to the ground at her feet. At first nothing presented itself, but she was used to that. The desert was a mosaic; changes were subtle. After a moment a faint trail began to emerge as her eye picked out minute changes in color and texture. The experience was not unlike staring at a 3-D pattern. First there's nothing; then, once the picture forms, it's unmistakable. Enjoying the childlike delight this simple magic never failed to produce, she ran lightly down the trail, the wind at her back threatening to give her wings.

  Fifty yards later the trail didn't so much stop as dwindle to nothing, and still Anna couldn't see anything suggesting a cave. What finally tipped her off that she was in the right place was a boot, an old hiking boot, protruding from the snarly fingers of a catsclaw bush. Beyond this unnatural formation she saw Big Manhole. Tucked up beside a low serrated bench of stone the entrance was right out of The Patchwork Girl of Oz, a place designed for the incarceration of flesh-eating ogres. Flush with the ground, a hole roughly the size of a hope chest leaked black shadow through whitened limestone. Rusted iron bars cemented into the rock formed a grid over the opening. A trapdoor of the same rusted iron was welded in, a heavy hasp wanting a padlock to secure it. To see the hairy knuckles of a giant poking elephantine fingers through the grid didn't take too great a stretch of the imagination.

  "Brent?" Anna hollered as she stepped around the grabbing thorns of catsclaw. The wind snatched the words from her lips and hurled them over the desert. As it happened, they would have fallen on deaf ears anyway. The battered boot was not an ancient artifact. It was firmly laced to the foot of Brent Roxbury.

  There are postures that the human body does not adopt in life.

  Roxbury had the broken-doll look of someone struck down from a standing position and dead or unconscious before he hit the ground. His feet were splayed at uncomfortable angles, legs bent when the knees buckled. He'd landed on his hip, his left arm flung back from his torso and falling behind him. His right was trapped beneath; his face pressed against the grid over the cave.

  "Brent?" Anna said again, but she was talking to herself. Crouching over his inert form she felt for a carotid pulse. Finding none, she took the liberty of rolling him onto his back. Spinal injuries were the least of his worries. Her hand came away from his navy windbreaker dripping with blood. Not marked or smeared but dripping as if she'd dipped it in a bucket. She could feel the salt sting of it in the myriad scrapes and cuts her Lechuguilla adventure had left on her knuckles.

  "Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" came a line from Shakespeare's Scottish play, one in which her husband had carried a spear. Brent's soul had been gored from his body by a bullet from a high-powered weapon. No neat black hole between the eyes had let his life leak away. A furrow chewed up from his clavicle into his neck, severing the carotid artery on the left side of the pharynx, then continued up till it blew away the point of his jaw, much of his dental work, and his left cheekbone.

  Due to the severe facial trauma there was no way Anna could have effected an airtight seal to begin rescue breathing. It was a moot point. Without blood to carry it, oxygen had no way of reaching the vital organs. The throat wound no longer spurted but merely seeped. No heart left to push the blood, no blood left to flow.

  Feeling mildly insensitive, Anna wiped the gore from her hands on the dead man's trousers. Nothing else was available, and she sure as hell wasn't going to wipe it on her own.

  Blood had become toxic waste. Paper trail: if she played out the paranoia, there'd be reports and doctors' offices visited to leave a record in case she tested positive for HIV after the incident. Every class, every lecture drummed precaution into the brain. The greater danger of being mowed down by a drunk driver did not worry the public. Maybe because it did not carry with it the horror of death by inches.

  A crack of sound and the sting of needle-fine pieces of stone sown into her cheek jerked her back to more imminent danger. What with one thing and another, she'd overlooked the obvious. The shooter was not necessarily gone, nor was he necessarily finished. Not daring to look around for the rifleman, she flattened herself on top of Brent Roxbury. Blood, warm as bathwater, drenched her face and neck. He couldn't have been dead more than a minute or two. A second shot cracked, then sang high and angry off the rock inches beyond Anna's skull. She could feel-or imagined she could-the stirring of its wind in her hair.

  She had two choices for cover: behind Roxbury's corpse or down through the rusted bars wiring the jaws of Big Manhole. As tempting as Brent's company was, a wall of flesh and bone would scarcely slow a bullet down. Unpleasant images of WWII executions clicked behind her eyes.

  Quick as a wounded snake, she writhed over to the iron-barred trap and dropped through. The black enclosed well of the cave held no terrors for her. She figured the fall would kill her before claustrophobia could set in. Knuckles wrapped around the grid, she looked down expecting to see nothing but darkness. Today the gods were kind-or in a playful mood. The neck of the immense limestone bottle was not neat and sheer but a ragged crevice with plenty of ledges upon which a small and determined woman could find footholds.

  Where Anna dangled, the aperture was no more than three feet across. Jamming both boots on a ledge eight inches wide, she planted her back against the opposite wall. Wedged in, she could wait a good long time. Confident she was secure, she peeled her hands from the metal of the bars. Her fingers weren't slippery with Roxbury's blood. The man was a good coagulator. His plasma glued her skin to the iron.

  Two more shots rang out, lending the scream of lead and limestone to the shriek of the wind. Both times Anna winced, though she knew her cover was complete. In the security of the newfound shelter, her mind changed gears from instinct to intellect. Who would shoot Brent Roxbury? In the Southwest, particularly New Mexico, local militia groups had threatened to shoot BLM rangers on sight. Militia. Bubbas with IQs lower than the caliber of their handguns. Guys who felt cheated because "varmint hunts," the senseless competitive slaughter of coyotes that lived so far out on the desert they'd never so much as tasted chicken or lamb, had been interfered with. Men dispossessed because bicycle trails were infringing on traditional shooting ranges, and the government, afraid a few of the Spandex-and-ponytail set would catch a stray bullet, had closed more than one.

  As near as Anna could remember, most of the ill will was centered in northern New Mexico, near Farmington. Southern New Mexico had been spared that particular ugliness. At least it had in the past.

  That train of thought derailed. She loved the novels of Thomas Hardy and was a great believer in coincidence. But never when one needed it. Two members of the survey team meeting untimely ends from unrelated sources was highly unlikely.

  Brent had been with them when Frieda died. He had been much distraught by her death. He'd wanted to speak with Anna and had foolishly left a message to that effect on the answering machine at Zeddie Dillard's. Everyone there-all the members of the core group, with the exception of Sondra-had heard it, right down to where and when he and Anna could meet. Zeddie had conveniently pointed out that it was an easy walk from park housing to Big Manhole. Before Brent had an opportunity to talk, he'd been killed. It didn't take a great thinker to trace the thread. Brent knew something about Frieda's "accident." Possibly he'd seen or suspected who had made Anna's cherished butt-print. That person had decided Brent was to carry his secret to the grave. A one-way ticket had been provided.

  Lost in thought, Anna let a minute's silence tick by, then two. The shooter had given up. She would wait till he'd gone, then come out of hiding. Minute three passed and with it Anna's illusion of safety. She had no reason to believe the rifleman would slink away in defeat. Why should he? A glance disabused her of any hope she might have harbored regarding cover or alternative egress. The slot where she hid was eight feet long, two to four feet wide, and bottomless. Anna had incarcerated herself in the ideal trap. No place to hide, no place to go but down, and no way to get there but fall. Big Manhole, having no cause for regular visitation, didn't boast a standing line, and Brent had been gunned down before he'd rigged a descent.