Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 03] (18 page)

Theodora Adams. Was she the third? The Buffalo Society evidently had planned to dramatize the deaths of eleven Kiowa children from a century ago by taking eleven Boy Scouts hostage. They’d known this would launch an international orgy of news coverage, would make for nationwide suspense. There would be television interviews with weeping mothers and distraught fathers. The whole world would be watching this one. The whole world would be asking if an Indian named Kelongy simply wanted to recall an old atrocity or if his sense of justice would demand a perfect balance. Leaphorn was wondering about this himself when he heard the dog. It came from above him on the cap of the mesa— an angry, frustrated sound something between a snarl and a bark. He had forgotten the dog. The sound stopped him in his tracks. Then he saw the animal almost directly above him. It stood with its front paws on the very edge of the rimrock, shoulders hunched, teeth bared. It barked again, then turned abruptly and ran along the cliff away from him, then back toward him, apparently looking frantically for a way down. The creature was even bigger than he remembered it, looming in the yellow firelight of the night before. At any minute it would find a way down—a rock slide, a deer trail, almost any break in the cliff which would lead to the talus slope below. Leaphorn became aware of a cold knot of fear in his stomach. He looked around him, hoping to see something he could use for a club. He broke a limb from a dead juniper, although it was hopelessly inadequate to stop the animal.

Then he turned and ran stiffly back toward the main-stem canyon. It was the only place where having hands could give him an advantage over an adversary with four legs and tearing canine teeth. He stopped at a twisted little cedar rooted into the rock about six feet from the lip of the cliff. Behind it he hurriedly unlaced his boots. He knotted the laces securely together, doubled them, and tied the strings around the trunk of the bush. Then he whipped off his belt, looped it, and tied it to the doubled bootstrings. As he tested its strength, he saw the dog. It had worked its way along a crack in the cap rock, and was bounding down the talus slope toward him, baying again. Last night it had attacked without a sound, as attack dogs are trained to strike, and even after it had cornered him had only snarled. But he must have hurt it with a rock and it had apparently forgotten at least a little of its training. Leaphorn hoped fervently that in its hate for him it had forgotten everything.

He picked up his juniper stick and trotted out across the cap toward the dog, his untied boots flapping on his ankles. Then he stopped.

The worst mistake would be going too far, waiting too long, and being caught away from the edge of the cliff. He stood, the stick gripped at his side, waiting. Within seconds, the dog appeared. It was perhaps a hundred fifty yards away, running full out, looking for him. Leaphorn cupped his hands. “Dog,” he shouted. “Here I am.”

The animal changed direction with an agility that caused Leaphorn’s jaw muscles to tighten. His idea wasn’t going to work. In a matter of seconds he would be trying to kill that huge animal with a stick and his bare hands. Still, the cliff edge was his best hope. The dog was racing directly toward him now, no longer barking, its teeth bared. Leaphorn waited. Eighty yards now, he guessed. Now sixty. He had a sudden vision of his laceless boots tripping him, and the nightmare thought of falling, with the dog racing down on him. Forty yards. Thirty. Leaphorn turned and ran desperately in his flapping boots toward the cedar. He knew almost at once that he had waited too long. The dog was bigger and faster than he had realized. It must weigh nearly two hundred pounds. He could hear it at his heels.

The race now seemed almost dreamlike, the looped belt hanging forever outside his reach. And then with a last leap his hand was grabbing the leather, and he felt the dog’s teeth tearing at his hip, and his momentum flung him sideways around the bush, holding with every ounce of his strength to the belt, feeling the dog fly past him, its jaws still ripping at his hip—knowing with a sense of terror that their combined weight would pull his grip loose from the belt, or the nylon strings loose from the tree, and both of them would slide over the cliff and fall, the dog still tearing at him.

They would fall, and fall, and fall, tumbling, waiting for the hideous split second when their bodies would strike the rocks below.

And then the teeth tore loose. In some minuscule fraction of a second Leaphorn’s senses told him he was no longer connected to the dog, that his grip on the belt still held, that he would not fall to his death. A second later he knew that his plan to send the animal skidding over the cliff had failed. The dog’s hold on Leaphorn’s hip had saved it. The animal’s back legs had slid over the edge as it had turned, but its body and its front legs were still on the cap rock and it was straining to pull itself to safety. There was no time to think. Leaphorn flung himself at the animal, pushing desperately at its front feet. The hind paws dislodged stones as the beast kicked for lodging. It snapped viciously at Leaphorn’s hand.

But the effort cost it an inch. Leaphorn pushed again at a forepaw.

This time the dog’s teeth snapped shut on his shirt sleeve. The creature was moving backward, pulling Leaphorn over the edge. Then the cloth tore loose. For a second the animal stood vertically against the cliff, supported by its straining front legs and whatever grip its hind paws had found on the stone face of the canyon wall. It was snarling, its straining efforts aimed not at saving itself but at attacking its victim. And then the hind paws must have slipped for the broad, ugly head disappeared. Leaphorn moved cautiously forward and looked over the edge. The animal was cartwheeling slowly as it fell. Far down the cliff it struck a half-dead clump of rabbit brush growing out of a crack, bounced outward, and set off a small rain of dislodged rocks. Leaphorn looked away before it struck the canyon bottom. But for luck, his body too might be suffering that impact. He pulled himself back to the cedar and inspected the damage. His pants were bloody at the hip, where the dog’s teeth had snapped through trousers, shorts, skin and muscle and had torn loose a flap of flesh. The wound burned and was bleeding copiously. It was a hell of a place to fix. No possibility of a tourniquet, and putting on a pressure bandage would require securing it around both hip and waist. He took tape from his first-aid kit and bandaged the tear as best he could. His other wounds were trivial. A bitten place on his right wrist from which a small amount of blood was oozing, and a gash, probably caused by the dog’s teeth, on the back of his left hand. He found himself wondering if the dog had been given rabies shots. The idea seemed so incongruous that he laughed aloud. Like giving shots to a werewolf, he thought.

The laugh died in his throat. On the mesa, not far from where he had first seen the dog, sunlight flashed from something. Leaphorn crouched behind the cedar, straining his eyes. A man was standing back from the mesa rim, scanning the rocky shelf along the canyon with binoculars. Probably Goldrims, Leaphorn thought. He would have been following his dog. He would have heard barking, and now he would be looking for the animal and for its prey. Leaphorn contemplated hiding. With the dog out of the picture he might succeed, if he could find a place under the rim of the cap rock where he could hang on. And then he realized the man had already seen him. The binoculars were turned directly on Leaphorn’s cedar.

There would be no hiding. He could only run, and there was no place to run. He would climb down the cleft again. That would delay the inevitable and perhaps in the cover and loose boulders of that steep slope the odds would improve for an unarmed man. Improve, Leaphorn thought grimly, from zero to a hundred to one. The man didn’t seem to have a rifle, but Leaphorn kept under cover as well as he could in reaching the place where the canyon wall was split. As he lowered himself over the cap rock, he saw the man emerging on the talus slope under the mesa, using the same route the dog had taken.

Leaphorn had maybe a five-minute lead, and he used it recklessly— taking chance after chance with his injured leg, with precarious handholds on fire-blackened brush, with footholds on stones that might not hold. He had no accurate sense of time. At any moment Goldrims might appear at the top of the slot above him and end this one-sided contest with a pistol shot. But the shot didn’t come.

Leaphorn, soot-blackened, reached the sheltered place where he had survived the fire. He would give Goldrims as much excitement as he could for his money. He would climb once again up behind that great slab of stone to the place where he had lain when the fire was burning. Goldrims would have to climb after him to kill him. And while he was climbing, Goldrims might leave himself momentarily vulnerable to something thrown from above. A small cascade of stones slid down the cleft with a clatter. Goldrims was beginning his descent. It would be slower than his own, Leaphorn knew. Goldrims had no reason to be taking chances. That left a little time.

Leaphorn looked around him for rocks of the proper size. He found one, about as big as a grapefruit. The binoculars would also make a missile, and so would the flashlight. He began to climb. It was easy enough. The face of the cliff and the inner surface of the slab were less than a yard apart. He could brace himself between them as he worked his way upward. The surfaces were relatively smooth, the stone polished by eons of rain and blowing sand since some ancient earthquake had fractured the plateau. Above him Leaphorn saw the narrow shelf where he had jammed himself and huddled away from the fire. His heart sank. It was too narrow and too cramped to offer any hope at all of defence. He couldn’t throw from there expecting to hit anything. And it offered no cover from below. Goldrims would simply shoot him and the game would be over. Leaphorn hung motionless for a moment, looking for a way out. Could he squeeze his way to that source of air which had kept him breathing during the fire? He couldn’t. The gap narrowed quickly and then closed completely. Leaphorn frowned. Then where had that draft of fresh air originated? He could feel it now, moving faintly against his face.

But not from ahead. It came from beneath him. Leaphorn moved downward, crabwise, as rapidly as he could shift his elbows and knees. It was cooler here, and there was dampness in the air. His boots touched broken rocks. He was at the bottom of the split. Or almost at the bottom. Here the stones were whitish, eaten with erosion. They were limestone, and seeping water had dissolved away the calcite. Below Leaphorn’s feet the split sloped away into darkness. A hole. He kicked a rock loose and listened to it bouncing downward. From above and behind him came the sound of other rocks falling. Goldrims had noticed the crack behind the slab and was following him. Without a backward glance, Leaphorn scrambled downward into the narrow darkness.

The watch hands and numerals were suspended, luminous yellow against the velvet blackness. It was 11:03 A.M. Almost fourteen hours since the dog had first attacked him on the canyon floor, more than twenty-four hours since he had eaten, and two hours since the thundering fall of the boulders Goldrims had dislodged to block his exit. Resting, Leaphorn had used those two hours to assess his situation and work on a plan. He wasn’t happy with either. He was caught in a cave. Two quick inspections with his flashlight told him that the cave was extensive, that it sloped sharply downward, and that—like most large caves—it had been leached out of a limestone deposit by ground water. Leaphorn understood the process. Rain water draining through soil containing decaying vegetation became acidic.

The acid quickly ate away the calcite in limestone, dissolving the stone and forming caverns. Here when the canyon formed it had drained away the water, and checked the process. Then an earth tremor had cracked open an entrance to the cave. Since air flowed through it, there must be another entrance. Leaphorn could feel the movement now: a cool current past his face. His plan was simple—he would try to find another exit. If he couldn’t, he would return here and try to dig his way out. That would involve dislodging the boulders that Goldrims had rolled into the hole, causing them to tumble downward. Doing that without being crushed would be tricky.

Doing it without noise would be impossible, and Goldrims would probably be waiting. Leaphorn flicked on the flashlight again and began edging downward. As he did, a blast of air struck him, and with the concussion, a deafening explosion of sound. It knocked him from his feet and sent him tumbling down the limestone slope, engulfed in a Niagara of noise. He lay on the cool stone, his ears assaulted with slamming echoes and the sound of falling rock. What the hell had happened? His nostrils told him in a second as the stench of burned dynamite reached them. The flashlight had been knocked from his hand, but it was still burning just below him. He retrieved it and aimed its beam upward. The air above was a fog of limestone dust and blue smoke. Goldrims had dropped dynamite into the cave entrance to kill the policeman with concussion, or crush him, or seal him in. There’d be damn little hope now of getting out the way he’d come in. His hope, if there was hope, lay in finding the source of the air which had moved upward through this cavity.

Leaphorn moved cautiously downward, his ears still ringing with the aftereffects of the blast. At least there was no worry now of Goldrims or Tull following him. He was, from their point of view, dead or neutralized. The thought was small consolation, because Leaphorn’s common sense told him such a theory was probably accurate.

The cavity sloped at about sixty degrees, angling toward the face of the canyon cliff. As he lowered himself deeper into it, it widened.

At places now the space overhead rose at least a hundred feet. The luminous dial of his wrist watch read a little after three when he first detected reflected light. It originated from a side cavern which led upward and to his right. Leaphorn climbed up it far enough to conclude that the light leaked in from some sort of split in the canyon cliff. The approach to it was too narrow for anything larger than a snake to navigate. Leaphorn let his head slump against the stone and stared longingly toward the unattainable light. He felt no panic— only a sense of helpless defeat. He would rest for a while and then he would begin the long, weary climb back up to the entrance Goldrims had dynamited. There’d be almost no chance he could dig his way out. The blast must have dislodged tens of tons of stone. But it was the only possibility. He backed out of the crack into the cavern itself, and sat thinking. The silence was complete.