Carnosaur Crimes (28 page)

Chapter 36

“The rain falls on the just and unjust.”

Hopi

Ansel awoke violently and struck her head on the boulder pressed against her back. The poncho was gone, swept away by the wind. Through the swirling dust and darkness, she could see no sign of it. Overhead, lightning zig-zagged across the sky-crack, and illuminated the ravine for a several seconds.

As she rubbed her head through gritty hair, she saw that the air-borne dust had thinned considerably along with the gale-force winds. Excitement and relief coursed through her. The dust storm was abating, and the thunderstorm Parker told her about was right behind it.

Ansel turned and prodded the man, whose head and body was also covered with several inches of dust. He hadn't stirred in hours, but his chest was moving. Lightning and thunder clashed again.

“Parker, wake up,” she yelled.

He groaned and turned his head, causing dust to avalanche off his hat and down his face. Ansel wiped away the excess powder as best she could. Her motions prompted him to open his eyes at last. He coughed, spitting out dust through chapped lips and gagging up grit-filled phlegm.

“Ansel,” he croaked. “What happened?”

“A dust storm. It's almost over. How do you feel?”

“Like sandpaper.”

Ansel smiled. “If you're joking, you'll live.” She picked up the dust-buried canteen. “Drink some water.”

Parker weakly brushed powder off his chest. “Water? From where?”

“I found it. Probably some hiker lost it,” she lied. Parker knew nothing about Rusty, and she didn't have time to explain things. He looked at her dubiously but didn't argue.

With her assistance, Parker didn't waste a drop of water this time. She let him drink several gulps before taking it back. “Drink what you want but in small quantities.” Next she pulled some edible puffball from her purse. “Eat this.”

He scrutinized the canteen, the clothes-covered ladder crossways over his head, and then the white, spongy lump in his hands. “What is it?”

“Mushroom. It won't hurt you.”

He shook his head. “You're amazing.”

“I've got to look at the wound.” Ansel lifted his leg a bit and began unwrapping the dirt-laden bandages.

“It doesn't hurt as much. I guess I passed out on you. Sorry. “

Ansel shrugged. “I'm not surprised. It looks better though. I found plant medicine that helped the blood to clot, but you shouldn't move too far. I don't know how good this temporary fix is.” She rewound the bandages.

Parker bit into the puffball and chewed hungrily. “Miracle medicine, too? The FBI should recruit you on a permanent basis.”

“No, thanks. It's going to rain. I've got to get moving.”

Parker's attention riveted to her. “You're leaving again?”

“We need help. Beyond this bluff there's two ranch roads.” Ansel got her legs under her and crawled on her hands and knees from under the shelter. She stood stiffly and swatted great mounds of dust off her clothes, hat, and exposed skin and hair.

Parker stared hard. “How do you know that? I didn't see anything on the BLM maps.”

“Ranch roads aren't on those maps. Besides, I saw them from the air before we crashed. They'll lead to people.”

Raindrops fell into the wash through the sky-strip and pattered lightly on the dust-choked ground, dimpling the gully with mini-craters. Ansel looked up between the bluff walls as lightening flickered. Soon, the need for water would be solved by a capricious Mother Nature.

“I've got to go.” She took nothing with her this time, the urgency to find help was her only interest.

“Take a poncho.”

Since he didn't know that she'd left one poncho with Rusty, she couldn't mention the fact the only one left had blown away. “I have one in my purse. Don't worry,” Ansel replied, feeling comfortable with the white lie.

Parker eyes grew hard. “Damn, I feel so useless. Listen to me, Ansel. Promise you won't mess with Dixie or the poachers. There's no way to beat them without weapons.”

“I'll be careful.” She pecked him on the cheek before he could say anything else, then turned away.

Never looking back, she headed down the wash, moving several quick paces whenever lightning revealed the twists and outcrops of the brush and rock-strewn path before her. As she walked, it seemed that the more the dust dissipated, the more the rainstorm increased. The thunder came closer and closer, as if trailing her along the ravine top. Raindrops changed from gentle splatters into large, heavy drops falling in a cold, gushing curtain.

Soon Ansel was sloshing through ankle-deep dust turned into a gooey quagmire. From above her, dust-storm ravaged ponderosa limbs and pine needles began washing down on her along with sandy grit. Once clear rainwater turned brown as it coursed down the bluff walls into the crack where she moved like a wet specter spotlighted by intermittent flashes of fiery orange hue.

Luck provided her with a break, however. Twenty minutes after leaving Parker she found her yellow poncho. It was snagged on a small boulder. She put it on, heedless of its muddy interior and proceeded. Soon after, the sound of gurgling water rivulets across stone filled Ansel's ears along with the chattering of her teeth. Hours of scorching heat had been replaced by the new torture of frigid water against her sand-blasted skin. Her face, neck, and hands stung with pain. She pushed forward, determined to reach the southern Badlands opening to freedom.

All the while a primal panic threatened to consume her. The wetness, the darkness, and the cold attacked all her senses. It was like being in the stock pond all over again. But she could breath, and when she thought of Cyrus dying or already dead near the box canyon so far behind her now, the horrible flashback trigger in her brain eased up substantially. For now her childhood demon had been pushed behind a scabrous, closed door, and that was a first considering the environmental conditions. Maybe her psyche was finally healing.

Ansel trudged onward, sometimes with light, other times blindly using her outstretched arms against both claustrophobic walls. Time dragged and distances stretched into surreal lengths that didn't seem physically possible. Once she glanced at her wristwatch as lightning flickered. It had stopped at nine-ten pm. She didn't know how long ago that had been, and still there was no exit point in sight.

Ansel halted abruptly. A red glow pulsed from behind a thick mass of scrub brush plugging the wash. Her view of what lay behind the wind-battered foliage was partially blocked by a sudden right-hand passage turn. She moved closer to the bushes while the mysterious neon light clicked on and off. What the hell was it?

Then it dawned on her. The emergency strobe light that Parker had mentioned. It was in his duffel. Was Dixie just around the turn waiting to shoot her? Why had the woman wasted the strobe battery by activating the light between two walls of stone where no one could see it?

Angel moved closer to the brush as quietly as she could through the slimy water at her feet. It was like slogging through a streambed. She listened, but could hear nothing but pummeling water and thunder. Still the strobe flashed at her between the limbs and leaves of the scrub bush, beckoning in a rainbow of kaleidoscopic colors as the crimson light reflected off every drenched thing around it.

Freezing and unable to stand still for long in the drenching curls of water cascading from above, Ansel parted the brush and peered around the ravine corner. The sight before rooted her to the spot.

Dixie was sitting against one cliff wall while water rose over her splayed legs. Parker's open duffel and Outerbridge's briefcase lay near her. Her face beneath a thick patina of pasty wet dust was deathly white, eyes open and staring toward nothing, mouth agape. On her lap sat a huge coiled rattler. It's head swivelled toward Ansel and the horny, multi-ringed tail rose shaking like a pebble-filled gourd. The strobe, near Dixie's blue, grossly swollen left hand, streaked over everything. Ansel could guess what happened.

Dixie's last act had been to set the light beacon when she knew she was going to die from snake venom. Perhaps she'd hoped to be found before it was too late. When the water got high, the snake had climbed upon her body for refuge and to recline in the last reserves of her dying body heat. It was the kind of death she'd warned Parker about before giving him the walking stick.

Ansel backed through the bushes and began breaking small limbs away from a scrub trunk. The rattler's ire increased. It coiled tighter on Dixie's lap and whipped the rattle faster than the eye could see. She worked while keeping one eye on the angry serpent. Soon she had a long weapon which she snapped away from the scrub base with the heel of her boot.

Her mind was calm and focused. No snake was going to stand between her and Parker's duffel containing all the electronics or Outerbridge's briefcase. Ansel carefully moved through the bushes, stick outstretched. The snake's body shifted left to right upon coils that looked black and oily in the rain. Yellow eyes glowed like amber. She paused very close to the snake, trunk tip poised several feet from the snake's head. When lightening flashed, she made her move.

Between flickers, Ansel jabbed the branch forward and down behind the snake's head and effectively smashing the reptile's neck against Dixie's fleshy thigh as hard as she could. Before the lightening ceased, she'd rushed forward and used her left hand to snatch the snake in a vise-like grip behind the rear of the skull. The snake went wild, uncoiling and twisting as the heavenly fires died and blackness crept back into the ravine. Only the faithful strobe gave Angel her bearings in relation to the slippery snake's gyrating, muscular form.

She lifted the six foot long rattler and stood. Its jaws opened, and two-inch long fangs scythed outward, dripping venom. Her grip was strangling tight, and her left hand never budged as the rattler whipped its thick corded body in twisting loops around her arm. Angel tossed the stick aside and headed for Parker's duffel, snake in hand, and making sure the deadly head faced away from her.

She bent carefully and pulled out Parker's gun with her right hand. She made sure the safety was off and the pistol seated properly in her palm. Licking her lips, Ansel shook the snake's body from her arm and threw it as hard as she could at the wall to her right. It smacked the sandstone like a wet mop. She watched as it slid down into the ravine, leaving a bloody smear behind. Before the rattler could even twitch on the ground, Ansel fired a bullet into it's massive head.

Cordite flared and Ansel winced as the gun rapport deafened her and rebounded off the ravine walls as a crackling echo. The rattler's head evaporated into a ruddy mist. Soon there was nothing but the pummeling rain and the hellish strobe again. She lowered the gun along with her head as a soul-deep weariness crept over her.

The impulse to weep rolled over Ansel as a mini-waterfall thundered onto her boots from the Stetson's artificial ledge. How nice to be able to let all the frustrations consume her and just sit down in the rain like Dixie. To give up. To rest forever. The thought of going on seemed too much to endure.

But she had the duffel and the briefcase. Whatever secrets were on that surveillance disk, they were safe now and could potentially bust a fossil poaching ring. People had died for that evidence, including Dixie. And somewhere farther west her father waited to see her, even if only for one last time. She had to go on. Had to keep moving. At least now, she had a snake to eat.

When she lifted her head, she was surprised to see another person standing in the ravine with her. She squinted, not sure her eyes weren't playing tricks on her through the pouring rain. No, it wasn't her imagination.

Ansel took a step forward. “Reid?”

Her relief evaporated. No, not Reid. Somebody else. Someone pointing a nasty-looking semi-automatic weapon at her.

Chapter 37

“When man moves away from nature his heart becomes hard.”

Lakota

“Nice shooting. Now lose the gun,” Hillard Yancy ordered.

Ansel didn't move a hair. “I get it. No more pretending. I have to admit, you're quite an actor. All that indignant rage about being labeled a fossil plunderer really had me fooled. Tell me, when did you find that pilfering precious bones was more enjoyable than preserving them?”

“You don't know what you're talking about. Put down your gun, Miss Phoenix.”

Ansel had to comply. She laid Parker's gun on top of the nearby duffel so it wouldn't be submerged in the rising gully water, already an unsettling depth just below her knees. Torrents of liquid poured down from the bluff rims as the thunderstorm raged.

Yancy stepped out of the shadows into the crimson wash of the beacon, and she saw that he wore a cowboy hat and an oil-skin duster. She watched anxiously as he used one hand to push her weapon into the duffel, zipped it, then grabbed it up. The steel briefcase got wrenched up in the same hand. His rain-splotched glasses gleamed gold as he looked at Dixie with mild interest.

“You and Dixie were working together?” Ansel asked through clacking teeth.

His gaze darted back to her. “Hardly. I'm a victim of this mess just like you.”

“How's that?”

“I owe the mafia money. A gambling debt. I'm just cleaning fossils for them until I pay it off. I'm not destroying anything,” he protested.

Ansel thought of the preparatory work she'd seen at his shop. Good work. Professional. “So what did Dixie do?”

“She was a lackey for some guy in Helena. Told Cyrus and the other diggers where to get the best fossils. I never met her, but I heard about her.”

It made sense, Ansel considered. Dixie located the bones via her access to national, state and BLM databases and fed the info to the poachers under instructions from Cody Masterson. She also remembered the maps of northern Montana she'd seen on Yancy's workshop desk and Dixie's folder on the Medicine Line. After he cleaned the fossils, they were shipped into Canada for sale overseas.

“So you had fossils stolen from your shop by Cyrus to make it look like you were innocent of any local poaching crimes.”

The surprised look on Yancy's face was unexpected, but Ansel relished it. Then she took a look behind her as inconspicuously as possible. A quick dash down the gulch and toward Parker might save her life. The blast of water from above was worse, and the fear of being crushed by the weighty run-off terrified her more than Yancy's gun. She took a step away from the center of the ravine toward a more protected wall.

“Don't move,”yelled Yancy. He hastily re-sighted the pistol on her with a desperate determination. His fingers gripped and re-gripped the gun nervously. “If I'm going to make this as painless as possible, I need a clean kill shot.”

His hesitation gave Ansel hope. “That's murder. Crossing another line, Yancy, or just scuffing it away so you don't have to see the difference between right and wrong?”

Yancy shook his head violently. “You think I want to shoot you? I don't, but I have to.”

“Even if you kill me, you'll never get a copter off the ground,” she yelled above the wind.

“Then neither of us will leave here alive. I'm sorry, Miss Phoenix. I really am.”

Suddenly a thunder clap exploded. A massive, blue-white bolt filled the air above the towering bluff, and the smack of electricity hitting trees above resounded like the static-leaden finger of God poking the Earth. Electric energy filled the air as a palpable force, raising their hair on ends. Ansel covered her ears. Yancy fearfully threw himself back against the opposite wall.

From behind Ansel, a vibrating rumble suddenly became audible above the horrendous power of the storm. She turned. A roaring, dissonant wave of slapping noise cascaded from the northern side of the crevice. In an instant, the roiling smell of black water slammed into her face. It was the acrid, organic smell of black dirt, pulverized trees, and decaying animals.

A wash-out, Ansel acknowledged with horror. Just when she thought there wasn't anything left to shock and demoralize her, nature proved her wrong.

The watery rumble shook the ground as speeding, pressurized water rushed through a snaking space too impossibly small to accommodate it toward them. The horrible sound of the undercurrent undermining the rock walls, felling chunks of rock, and filling the ravine with swirling sediments and debris behind them was tremendous.

Just as she processed this frightening information, a wave of water turned the ravine corner. It was only two feet high, but it was a herald of bigger things to come. God, what about Parker, Ansel thought, but there was nothing she could do for him.

Her gaze leaped toward Yancy who huddled against the wall, his face stretched in terror as he watched the preliminary surge of water. His paralyzed form emboldened her, and Ansel rushed him, heedless of the pistol. Before he knew what was happening, she yanked the briefcase from his hand and ran from the onrushing devastation.

Yancy moaned as the briefcase disappeared, but was unable to swivel around and fire the gun. Behind her, the wave struck his knees as an angry elemental force determined to remove everything from its path.

Ansel heard him scream as she splashed through the slippery ravine, dodging shifting piles of rocks, brush, and fallen debris of all types. Other times, she slid out of control and hit the ravine walls hard, only to bounce off running. Behind her, the wash-out waters rumbled and gurgled. The foulness of foam and wet dirt blew against her back like a salivating monster. She was keeping ahead of the surge by only a matter of seconds, and she knew she couldn't outrun it forever.

There was no place to climb up and no place to hide. Her panting gasps filled the path ahead of her as her legs tired with every pounding step. High water surged above her knees. She was losing speed and the safety gap was inexorably closing.

Ansel looked behind her only a for a second and saw a six foot high churning mass of foam only ten feet back. Water sprayed her backside like a warning slap as motivating as a whip crack. And it did spur her on for a bit more despite her near exhaustion. But there was no end to the ravine.

Then the main wave struck her and she lost her balance, knees buckling and throwing her face down on the already water-logged ground. She fell on her chest hard, and the dirty waters rolled over her. Suddenly she was pushed forward in an underwater somersault. Tree limbs, tumbling rocks, and dirt rolled with her, scraping and thumping every part of her body as she held her breath and tried to distinguish up from down. Only the briefcase, still clutched in her right fist, saved her. It was waterproof and buoyant. Her arm was wrenched upwards and she went with it, her head popping out of the rushing water like a cork.

Ansel gagged out water and sucked in air as she was swept along with the surge. The ravine walls rolled by at a dizzying, roller-coaster speed. She tried to grab them with her free hand and hold on, but couldn't. Flotsam tumbled around her head. Once the dead body of a coyote whizzed by her. The worst part was being struck by the ravine outcroppings which protruded everywhere from the bluff walls. They were land mines of pain as they struck her legs and body during the journey.

Ansel didn't have time for fear. It was all she could do to keep her head above the rising water, already well over ten feet high. She held onto the briefcase for dear life. Without it she would drown for sure, a victim of the whirling undertow. She finally managed to clutch the briefcase to her upper chest with arms up and over it like a flotation ring, but she couldn't go on this way for ever. Her weary limbs simply couldn't do it.

Without warning, she was jettisoned forward with tremendous power and the briefcase was almost pulled from her grasp. The feeling of being catapulted out a sling was both nauseating and exhilarating. Then she lost her grip on the case and went under. Water sped into her mouth, and she thrashed toward the air with her last reserves of strength. She never reached the top, but in her spinning, churning watery world, her feet skidded across the bottom instead.

As Ansel bent her knees and pushed off the ground with all her might, the waters above her head receded of their own accord. Once again her head struck air just before she was thrown on her stomach with a mighty slam. She grunted and lay where she fell, hands outstretched and legs splayed, but apparently on solid ground with the ravine waters pooling around her in low gushes. The blinding rain had lessened substantially.

Ansel lifted her head and looked around. To her right, there was a vast flat prairie with nothing but the black, sentinel outline of Yancy's grounded helicopter to spoil the view. To her left, black clouds roiled across the sky, but stars peeked out from behind the two scraggy bluffs through which she'd escaped. Water gysered over a huge pile of water-logged debris also trapped by the ravine entrance. Above, low-level lightning flickered in a tumultuous sky trying to clear itself of dust and rain.

Otherwise, she was too done-in to move. In the calming, six-inch high waters around her, the red emergency beacon floated past, fully upright with crimson strobe pulsing like a hooker's signal of welcome. A sound to the south caught her attention next.

It was a low buzzing noise filled with the rhythmic frequencies of a mechanical whine. The sound grew louder as she listened. Then from the pithy, low-level clouds burst a white object. A bird? she wondered near the point of insensibility. But the bird came lower and grew into a roaring monster with red eyes. It wasn't until the monster flew over her a couple hundred feet above and waggled its wings, that Ansel realized it was a small plane.

Then blackness smothered her.