Effigy (34 page)

John knew exactly where Eva was going with this. “Mr. Gaspar was looking for the power of Quetzalcoatl,” he said.

Eva nodded. “Something must have convinced him to search
Utah
. He must have found something that contradicted Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl’s fate in the legend.”

“Like what?” Lori asked.

“I don’t know, but I get the feeling Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl didn’t flee to the east. He went north instead—”

A light flickered in Lori’s eyes. “Into the land of the Anasazi,” she said, finishing Eva’s thought.

“So it may have been Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl himself who developed the legend of Awanyu among the Anasazi which was later passed on to the Hopi,” John added.

Lori’s eyes were wide with a new revelation. She appeared excited and yet cautiously reserved at the same time. Something was brewing in that head of hers.

“It couldn’t be,” she mumbled.

John and Eva waited expectantly.

“What?” he finally asked.

“You don’t suppose…” Lori glanced up at him, but he could only stare back, unsure of what to expect.

“The skeleton buried with the effigy,” Lori continued. “He wasn’t an Anasazi trader at all.”

John felt the dawn of his own surprise as he waited for her to finish stating what was only beginning to dawn within his own mind.

Lori’s smile wasn’t about to be held back any longer.

“The Trader is Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl himself!”

Pyramids And
Temples

There was a reason the pyramid was named after the sun, Derek decided. Each stone step seemed to lead directly toward that glaring orb of heat, and he hadn’t even reached the midway point to the top yet. Derek was hot and growing more irritable, a disposition that had quickly deteriorated when he realized that Lori had chosen to stay behind with Eva and Friedman.

Why in the world was he following Quickie Peet to the highest elevation in hell? Sure there were fantastic photo opportunities from their vantage point, but the late morning light was all wrong and it was highly unlikely they were going to find any clues leading to the effigy from way up there. He stopped for a breather.

Peet, apparently realizing he was no longer being followed, paused to glance over his shoulder. “You’re not giving up on me already, are you sport?”

“Keep going if you want to,” Derek said, removing the cap from his camera lens. “Everything’s just going to get smaller the higher we climb, and that includes Shaman Gaspar’s cave.”

Peet hesitated, and then as if to acknowledge Derek’s logic, he stepped back down and stopped beside him.

Aspiring journalist—one, dimwit professor—zero.

Derek scanned the ruins below. The wide swath of bare ground marked the Avenue of the Dead, extending into the distance to his left, stretching past the Pyramid of the Sun and ending abruptly in a square plaza lying before the base of the Pyramid of the Moon just to his right. People were exploring the ruins like little ants attending their mound. Nowhere was there any sign of a cave or tunnel entrance.

Derek stepped aside as a small group of tourists pushed past them on their way back down the pyramid. He watched them go, a bit put off by their lack of attention to his personal space. But as they continued down, his eye shifted to a woman making her way up. The plunging neckline of her blouse exposed all her secrets to his higher vantage point, allowing him an eyeful of flesh and a trickle of sweat gleaming down her cleavage.

“You can’t deny the view from up here, eh, professor?”

“You got a telephoto lens on that thing?” Peet asked.

“Sure do.”

“Then why don’t you start using it?”

Derek readily obliged, zooming in on the secrets spilling from the blouse below. Then, as if suddenly realizing what he was up to, Peet slapped him across the back of the head.

“Not on her,” he scolded. “Look for a tunnel entrance!”

“All right, chill,” Derek said testily. He turned the lens toward the plaza near the Pyramid of the Moon. “Although I could have gotten a great pin-up for you.”

Sweating between the sun and the heat radiating off the pyramid, Derek wasn’t particularly interested in looking for features that weren’t there. Surely if Gaspar used a tunnel leading into the Pyramid of the Sun, then there was a good chance that dozens of other curious visitors had already swarmed the cave and it was doubtful Shaman Gaspar would have left the effigy where it was so easily accessible.

But, to keep Quickie Peet satisfied, he feigned cooperation and scanned the plaza below for any other fortuitous blouses. He quickly realized the absurdness of his search, however. The plaza was just too far away. He did manage to spot a very leggy, very tan girl in very short shorts scaling the steps of a small temple below. He followed her taught posterior to the top where she disappeared among the shadowed frescoes, but by then, he’d been distracted by another sight—the giant stone head of a lone dragon perched above the stairs, snarling out to the plaza below.

“Check that out,” Derek said, handing the camera to Peet and pointing toward the temple ruins. “The statue at the top of the stairs.”

Peet looked. “You think that’s the serpent’s mouth?” he asked.

Derek could only answer with a question of his own. “You think the effigy can fit in there?”

“Hard to tell from here. It’s worth looking into.”

With that, Peet turned to glance back down the pyramid and with two fingers depressing his tongue, he gave a shrill whistle that caught the attention of Lori, Eva and Friedman below. Peet pointed toward the plaza as he hollered, “Go check the serpent’s mouth!”

* * * *

“Why is he sending us to the Pyramid of the Moon?” Eva wondered aloud. “The sunstone led us to the Pyramid of the Sun.”

“Unless we’ve misinterpreted the sunstone entirely,” John said. “There are underground caves located around the Pyramid of the Moon near the
Temple
of the Quetzal Butterfly.”

Lori glanced back at Eva, and then turned back to John. She shrugged her bare shoulders. “Wouldn’t hurt to look, I guess.”

With that, John led the way along the Avenue of the Dead until they reached a collection of ruins on the far side of the plaza in front of the Pyramid of the Moon.

“This locale makes a little more sense for someone trying to hide something,” he said, tugging the brim of his straw hat down against the glaring sunlight. “The Pyramid of the Sun attracts too much public attention. Besides, the entrance to a cave may be more accessible somewhere behind these palace ruins.”

They split up. John started south along the cobbled walls while Lori went north. Eva, with her father’s words repeating on her lips, climbed the steps toward the facade of the low-lying temple.

“...find the smoke in the serpent’s mouth. In the place behind the sunstone. Find the smoke…the smoke…”

John absently listened to her murmurings as he searched the ruins below her. He was vaguely aware of her feet shuffling to a stop at the top of the steps, her voice trailing off in the hot breeze.

“This is it!” she suddenly exclaimed.

John turned just as Lori spun around, finding Eva standing over a large stone carved in the shape of Quetzalcoatl’s head. John returned to the bottom of the stairs, looking up at her.

“You found the cave?” he asked as Lori raced up the steps.

“No,” Eva said. “But this has to be it.”

John scaled the temple steps, huffing and puffing and finally joining the women at the top. With a pant, he swiped at his sweating forehead with the back of his arm and glanced down at the statue.

“Are you sure this is it?” he asked, still sucking for air.

“Remember the sunstone?” Eva asked excitedly. “There were fiery butterflies on each segment of Xiuhcoatl’s body. And my father’s story said Quetzalcoatl manifested his power through a fire of butterflies. Well, this is the temple of butterflies, and here’s a serpent with an open mouth!”

John studied the massive sculpture. It appeared more dragon-like than snake—eyes vigilantly watching the Avenue of the Dead below, a blunt snout, a row of menacing teeth on each side of the gaping mouth. At the back of the serpent’s head the block of stone had been carved with glyphs curling back like a ram’s horn. In all appearances, it looked like a massive stone version of the effigy, without the turquoise feathers blooming in the back.

“I told you my father wasn’t clever enough to create riddles,” Eva said. “This has to be the serpent’s mouth he was talking about.”

Lori knelt down and glanced into the statue’s dark, gaping maw. “The mouth isn’t large enough to hide the effigy,” she observed.

Eva braced her hands on her hips. “Were you not listening to me? This isn’t a riddle.”

“I don’t see any smoke coming out of the serpent’s mouth either,” John countered lightheartedly.

Eva persisted. “I’m telling you, my father wants us to find something, and that something is in the snake’s mouth!”

John knelt down beside Lori. They both peered into the dark interior of the mouth.

“It’d be handy to have a flashlight,” he said.

Eva watched them, her eyes intense. “Who’s going to reach in there?”

John looked at Lori who stared back just as blankly. He glanced down at his beefy hands, then shifted his gaze toward Lori’s bare arms and slender wrists. Lori caught the hint.

With a sigh, she leaned into the serpent, her hand lighting upon the stone just within the hole. Her palm slipped deeper inside. John held his breath as she reached blindly, her arm plunging further along the surface until she was shoulder deep.

John licked his lips in anticipation. He felt Eva crowding in behind him. They watched Lori expectantly, like pirates unearthing buried treasure.

“Well,” John asked, impatiently.

Lori’s chest pressed against the blunt nose of chiseled stone, the full extent of her arm now swallowed by the serpent.

“I can feel something inside,” she said.

Equinox Killer

Mateo De Ramos handed over his last eighth and slammed the door on the smiling greaser with the missing left pinky. Thankfully it would be for the last time. Thankfully, he now had his palm-sized radio transmitter. It cost him two full grams more than the original agreement, but his supplier had him over a barrel.

In the end, it would all be worth it.

He crossed the hotel room now floating in a smoky blue haze of weed and added the transmitter to the collection of wires, blasting caps and dynamite spread across the bed. He was out of his realm of expertise, but he’d been given explicit instructions, details he could now perform with his eyes shut.