Canyon Sacrifice (20 page)

Chuck's chest tightened and his breath came in horrified gulps. He looked on in shock as the figure at the end of the wye crumpled to the ground before the sound of the shots faded away into the trees. He leaned forward, ready to rush to the aid of the shooting victim. But helping the victim would bring him directly into the shooter's line of fire.

The dogs' cries were wild and unrestrained in the aftermath of the gunfire. The acrid smell of spent gunpowder rode the evening breeze. The figure lay unmoving between the tracks on the far side of the steel bumper.

Chuck's body quaked, making the image in the goggles before him swim disconcertingly. He willed himself to stillness as his thoughts caromed inside his head.

What should he do?

Trapped by uncertainty, he did not move. A beat passed. Another. Then a second human figure detached itself from the
trees, this one from the spot where the gunshots had sounded. The shooter crossed the clearing to the end of the wye, climbed the gravel embankment, and knelt beside the prostrate victim. In the blurry green glow of the goggles, Chuck discerned that the shooter wore a light-colored shirt and had what appeared to be a man's frame. The shooter held a pistol in his right hand. Would he put his gun to the head of the victim and finish the job? Should Chuck show himself, and risk being shot, in an attempt to scare off the shooter before he could deliver any
coup de grace
?

It was all Chuck could do, unarmed, to stay where he was. The shooter patted the downed figure, his left hand moving along the victim's torso. Then he stood and looked around the clearing. After turning a full circle, the shooter stepped away from the figure on the ground, descended the embankment to the clearing, and disappeared into the stand of trees in the direction of the village.

Seconds passed with no more movement in the clearing. The cries of the kenneled dogs subsided. The figure sprawled between the tracks groaned. The moan was deep and liquid. The dogs resumed their frantic howls.

Chuck worked his way to the edge of the trees, positioning the steel bumper between himself and the spot at the far side of the clearing where the shooter had disappeared. Chuck sprinted from the cover of the trees, across the grassy opening, and up the embankment. He knelt behind the bumper and peered between its horizontal beams.

The figure came into focus in Rachel's goggles. The man, his eyes closed, wore a ranger uniform. His badge shone bright green on his chest and his potbelly pressed at his shirt. Donald. The downed ranger was Donald Podalski.

Donald's legs twitched. He groaned again as the dogs howled from their pens. A stream of blood, black in the goggles' viewfinder
against the eerie light green of Donald's face, ran from the corner of the ranger's mouth to his ear.

“Donald!” Chuck whispered. “It's Chuck.”

Donald opened his eyes. He lifted a hand, reaching toward the bumper. Chuck rounded the steel beams and took Donald's upraised hand in both of his.

Donald's hand was cold and clammy. His breaths were labored. He turned his head to the side and gagged. A thick clot of blood fell from the side of his mouth to the gravel between the tracks.

Chuck tore off his daypack and settled it under Donald's head. He reached beneath Donald, feeling for wounds.

Donald looked up at Chuck. The ranger's body tensed and his eyes widened. Chuck shoved the infrared goggles up on his forehead. He no longer could make out the details of his friend's face, but he felt Donald relax in his probing hands.

“Chuck,” Donald gasped.

“Don't try to talk.”

“The girl,” Donald said. Then, his words barely coherent, “Don. Have . . . to . . .”

Donald was referring to Carmelita. And himself. Somehow he had known Chuck was to make the exchange at the end of the railroad wye.

Donald reached up with one hand and took hold of the front of Chuck's shirt. He twisted the cloth in his fist with a firm grip.

“
Girl,
” Donald repeated forcefully. “Don. The music . . .” His voice faltered and his grasp loosened. He was slipping away, hearing things, some sort of song. His hand fell from Chuck's shirt and his body slumped to the railroad ties between the tracks.

Chuck tilted his head forward, cradling Donald's upper body in his arms. “We've got to get you—”

Three rapid shots rang out from edge of the trees just as Chuck dipped his head to speak to Donald. The high-pitched
whine of the small-caliber bullets filled Chuck's ears as the shots passed above the back of his neck, piercing the air where his head had been an instant earlier. One of the shots clanged off the steel bumper and ricocheted into the night.

Chuck threw himself sideways across the tracks. He reached over Donald's torso and yanked the ranger's heavy .45 from its holster. Sliding the night-vision goggles back down over his eyes, he released the pistol's safety, chambered a round, and squeezed off four quick shots into the trees in the general direction of the shooter. Donald's beefy gun kicked hard in Chuck's hand. The pistol roared and the flashes from its muzzle blinded him. He rolled away from Donald down the far side of the embankment to the grassy clearing as the shooter fired an errant shot in return.

Chuck stayed low and sprinted away from the end of the tracks, digging for the cover of the trees. He reached the grove and looked back around the trunk of a small ponderosa. Relying on his peripheral vision to scan the far side of the clearing for movement, he spotted at the edge of the goggles' viewfinder a bobbing green blur deep in the trees—the shooter, running away from the wye.

Chuck leveled Donald's gun and fired twice at the running figure, again blinding himself. He waited for his eyes to clear, then fired a third and fourth time with greater care, emptying the gun's eight-shot clip despite the fact that, with so many trees between Chuck and the retreating shooter, the shots stood virtually no chance of reaching their target.

Chuck blinked the muzzle flashes from his eyes and watched as the shooter disappeared into the depths of the grove. Chuck left the cover of the trees and hurried to the end of the railroad wye, the .45 hanging from his hand. He knelt at Donald's side, ready to grab the extra magazine from Donald's waist belt and give chase.

But that would mean leaving Donald behind. Chuck hesitated.
The shooter was gone now. That was enough.

Chuck dialed 911 on Janelle's phone. He bent close over his friend after making the call and was relieved to find that Donald was still alive. Donald tried to speak, but his mouth moved only in silence.

The wail of approaching sirens reached the clearing seconds after Chuck completed the emergency call. He slipped his pack from beneath Donald's head, removed Rachel's goggles, and took Donald's spare magazine from its stiff leather pouch. He stuffed the goggles, magazine, and .45 into his daypack and flung the pack to the edge of the trees at the back of the clearing. He knelt again at Donald's side and held his friend in his arms, his hands growing wet and warm with Donald's blood, as the headlights of the oncoming park vehicles lit the clearing.

Chuck drew a sharp breath. Shots meant for him were taking Donald's life. And what of the shooter? Would he panic? Would Carmelita be his next victim?

Chuck fought to remain calm. He whispered reassurances in Donald's ear. The smell of creosote from the wooden ties beneath the tracks mingled in the night air with the musky odor of Donald's blood. The vehicles bounced down the tracks, an ambulance followed by a string of ranger patrol cars. Donald turned his head with great effort and looked up at Chuck, his body shivering in Chuck's arms. The headlights of the ambulance washed across Donald's ashen face. Donald's breath left him in a long, drawn-out sigh. His body slumped to the railroad ties.

Chuck checked Donald's neck for a pulse. Finding none, he bent over his friend's inert frame and began chest compressions. The ambulance slid to a stop twenty feet up the tracks, its headlights illuminating Donald with Chuck bent over him, compressing the ranger's chest. Two paramedics leapt from the vehicle as the sound of its siren died away. They hurried to Donald's side, gear boxes in hand, but even as Chuck made way for
them he knew they were too late. Donald's face was tinted white now. His eyes were fixed and unseeing.

One of the paramedics placed a plastic mask over Donald's mouth and squeezed an attached air bag while the second took over for Chuck, pressing on Donald's chest. Chuck rose and stood on unsteady legs, looking down at the ranger's lifeless body.

Donald's death was Chuck's fault. Chuck had insisted on coming here alone. He'd told no one where he was headed, but his friend somehow had stumbled upon the site of the exchange.

Bile rose in Chuck's throat. His hands, wet with Donald's blood, hung at his sides. He stumbled down the gravel embankment and across the grass to the edge of the trees as the ranger sedans that had followed the ambulance from the village careened off the tracks and down the embankment into the clearing. The cars swung around one by one and came to a stop in the meadow with their headlights directed at the working paramedics.

Chuck bent double at the edge of the woods, retching. He wanted nothing more than to grab his pack and run. But he owed it to Donald to tell the rangers what he knew. He straightened and nudged his pack deeper into the forest with his toe, then followed after it. He glanced back to make sure he was out of sight among the trees before picking up the pack and heaving it as far into the woods as he could.

He reemerged into the open, wiping his mouth with one hand and clutching his stomach with the other. He entered the circle of light created by the parked patrol cars. Rachel was bending over the paramedics to check on Donald. She approached Chuck, her eyes wide. Chuck spoke softly. “We can't say anything about Carmelita. Not yet. Look what he did to Donald. He'll kill her, too.”

“What happened?” Rachel asked, her voice shaking.

“He must've thought Donald was me.”

“Donald,” she said. She put a hand to her mouth. “You.
They were after you.”

“I was trying to make the exchange. Donald stepped into the middle of it. He never had a chance.”

Rangers gathered in front of their cars in the center of the clearing. Most wore street clothes, having responded from off duty. Among them was Hansen Conover, the ranger-in-training who had rescued Chuck in the canyon. Chuck stepped backward at the sight of Hansen and the rest of the rangers huddled together looking his way. But Rachel grabbed his arm.

“Someone just tried to kill you,” she said. “You have to tell us everything you know. I'm with you on the girl, okay? But everything else.”

“What ‘everything else'? This is about getting Carmelita back. It's only about getting her back now.”

Opposite Chuck and Rachel, Hansen bent his head to speak into the ear of a uniformed ranger.

Chuck thought of his pack, filled with incriminating evidence, less than a hundred feet away in the trees. What had made him think he could hide it, and the story of Carmelita's kidnapping as well?

Robert Begay's white Suburban bounced into the clearing and braked to a stop behind the ambulance. The chief ranger climbed out of his car.

“The phone calls,” Rachel urged Chuck. “Where you went today. Tell Robert everything you know about what's going on. For Donald.”

Robert left the Suburban with its door open and headlights shining and marched past the ambulance. He headed straight for Chuck, with barely a glance at Donald lying motionless between the two paramedics. Robert's steps were deliberate, his dark eyes menacing.

Chuck's heart hammered in his chest. How often was a national park ranger killed on duty? Essentially, never. Yet that's what had
happened on Robert's watch. The National Park Service bosses in D.C. would want this incident off the front pages as quickly as possible. That meant naming an initial suspect, any suspect, to create closure in the public's mind.

And that suspect undoubtedly would be Chuck.

Robert could report that while, yes, one of his rangers had been shot and killed in Grand Canyon National Park, a suspect was in custody. The park would remain open and tourists would continue to visit. The park service would be subject to far less scrutiny than an open murder case would engender. No matter that the initial suspect wasn't the actual perpetrator of the crime; finding Donald's true killer could come later. Robert's first order of business would be to reassure the public on behalf of the park service, and that meant arresting Chuck right here, right now, at the scene of the shooting.

Chuck had Donald's blood all over him. Donald's gun, covered with Chuck's fingerprints, was stowed in Chuck's backpack a few feet away in the woods. A single sweep by Robert's rangers through the trees would divulge the pack with the gun inside, and the necklaces from Cope Butte as well. Chuck would be locked away for weeks, perhaps months, while he sought to prove his innocence. Janelle would be faced with trying to win Carmelita's release on her own. And Miguel would get what he wanted: Chuck away from Janelle. For her part, Janelle would see Chuck as a failure. She might well see him as a murderer, too.

Chuck took another step backward. Rachel clung to his arm. Robert picked up his pace. Chuck wrenched himself free of Rachel's grasp, darted across the clearing, and dove into the trees.