Ill Wind (29 page)

One explanation of the Cliff Palace incidents was that the ruin was exhaling poisonous vapors, perhaps the dying breath of the fabled underworld blowing through the sipapus. Stacy had been reaching toward the entrance to that world with his last dying gasp. Or so the corpse had appeared. Anna put no credence in the underworld as a mythical entity but there had been cases of poisonous gas, naturally generated, escaping to the detriment of humankind. Could that be the rationale behind the sudden and complete departure of the Old Ones? A phenomenon that for some geological reason was just now reasserting itself?

Another solution was coincidence. Two asthmatic kids with similar medical histories collapse within a few weeks of one another on a Tuesday morning. Not really much of a coincidence. It wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow with Anna had it not been for Stacy and the rest of the Tuesday Morning Club.

Anna was stuck with the facts: something or someone was causing people to collapse in Cliff Palace on Tuesday mornings. Not random, not coincidental, not paranormal, but cause and effect. Anna figured the culprit or culprits were individuals with greater material desires than your average ghost.

She turned her mind back to her solitaire game. Reshuffling hadn’t broken a single space loose. She gathered up the playing cards and reboxed them. Miss Mouse had gone to bed. Anna would follow suit.

She’d just swallowed the last of the dry red sleeping draught when the phone rang. In the dead of night it was always a sickening sound, though at Mesa Verde nine times out of ten it was a false alarm from the concessions facility. The new motion detectors were so sensitive, the least vibration set them off, sometimes two or three times in a night. Anna often wondered how much money the hapless taxpayers had forked out in overtime so fully armed rangers could shoo mice out of the Hostess Twinkies. With the monies concessions pulled in they could easily afford Pinkertons.

Again the phone rang. Anna threw herself on it as if it were a hand grenade. Half the night she’d been up, and if there was any overtime to be had she was damned if she’d let anyone else get it.

“Mesa Verde.”

A short silence followed, punctuated by a sharp intake of breath. “What?” came a faltering voice.

“Mesa Verde National Park,” Anna elaborated. “You’ve reached our emergency number.”

“This is an emergency?” the voice said uncertainly. It was either a very timid woman or a small child.

“What can I help you with?”

“A car’s gone off the road down here. I think somebody’s still inside.”

Anna felt her stomach tighten and her mind clear. “Where are you calling from?”

“A phone by the road.”

There were only two, one at Delta Cut and one at Bravo Cut, two places where the road to the mesa top sliced through the side of a hill. “Are you closer to the bottom of the mesa or the top?”

“The top, I think.”

“Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so, I mean no, I’m not. We... I was out on the point looking at the lights when we... I saw the headlights go over. They’re way down. Somebody drove off. That’s all I know.” There was a click and the interview was over. Whoever had called had been out frolicking under the stars, Anna guessed, with an inappropriate “we” and, now that the altruism brought on by shock had worn thin, had thought better of involvement.

Delta Cut was sheer on one side, a dirt-and-stone bank rising vertically from the roadbed. The other side dropped off precipitously in a jungle of serviceberry and oakbrush. Unless traveling at impossible speeds, a passenger car wouldn’t have the clout to break through the iron and concrete. A vehicle over the edge would’ve had to run past the railing on one end or the other.

Anna changed phones and put in a call to Frieda from the bedroom as she pulled on her uniform trousers. Frieda would wake up someone to bring the ambulance and call out helitack in case a low-angle rescue was needed.

The call completed, Anna banged on Jennifer Short’s bedroom door. No one grunted. Jennifer slept like the dead. Anna pushed open the door but the room was empty. Either Jennifer was partying late or had gotten lucky and found a more entertaining bed for the night.

Stars hung close to the mesa, not dulled by moisture or atmosphere. A half-moon spilled enough light to see by. Garbage was strewn over the walk, and as she walked to the car Anna saw a big brown rump vanishing into the underbrush. When she returned she’d clean up the mess and not mention the marauder to the brass. At Mesa Verde the solution to problem bears might be to shoot first and justify later.

As she backed the patrol car out of the lot and started down the main road the three miles to Delta Cut, she ran through her EMS checklist. Rehearsing emergency medical procedures and inventorying available equipment calmed and centered her.

With no traffic to slow her, she reached Delta Cut before she’d played out more than a few possible scenarios. Not surprisingly, no car waited at the pull-out. The phone box hung open as if deserted in haste. Anna pulled the Ford into the left lane, switched on her spot light, and cruised slowly along the guardrail.

Serviceberry grew thickly down the bank, camouflaging drops and ravines. Late blooms glowed white. Beyond, the thickets were impenetrable in their darkness. Anna rolled down the car’s windows and listened but nothing was audible over the hum of the engine.

A crank call? It hadn’t sounded it. Crank calls were usually accompanied by a background of party-animal noises. A trap? The thought made the little hairs on the back of her neck crawl. Could someone have lured her out in the dead of night for sinister purposes? Highly unlikely, she soothed herself. For one thing, there was no guarantee she’d be the one to answer the ’69 line, for another, who could’ve guessed she’d come alone other than Jennifer and whom-ever she was with? The only reason for making her a target was the Meyers investigation and she hadn’t exactly been burning up the turf in that department.

Reassured by her own sense of inadequacy, she left the patrol car to walk the same ground. Free from the distraction of machinery, she found what she was looking for. Eighty or a hundred feet down the bank, almost hidden by the thick foliage, was the yellow glow of automobile headlights. To the left of the lights she could just make out the pale shape of a vehicle’s body and adjusted her thoughts: not a car, a pickup truck, white or yellow in color.

Having radioed in the exact location of the wreck, she collected the jump kit and a flashlight, backtracked to the end of the barricade, and shone the light into the brush. A barely discernible trail of broken branches and scarred earth showed where the truck had left the pavement. There were no skid marks, no deep cuts in the sod indicating the brakes had been applied.

Hunching up like a woman in a windstorm, she forced her way through the brush, following the broken trail. Four or five yards down the steep bank the ground fell away. A cliff, maybe thirty feet high, was cut into the hillside where the undergrowth had let go of unstable soil during the previous winter’s snows. Dirt and scree dropped down to a rubble of boulders scattered on a shoulder of land. Past that was a sheer drop to the valley floor, where the lights of Cortez twinkled invitingly.

The pickup had cut through the brush at the point where she stood, then hurtled over the embankment. Boulders stopped its fall. The nose of the truck was crushed, the windshield and both side windows smashed. Either time was of the essence or all the time in the world would not be enough. Whoever was inside would be lucky to be alive.

Anna’d been carrying the orange jump kit in front of her like a shield. Now she strapped it on her back. Eroded soil made the bank soft enough she could work her way down crablike, heels and butt breaking the descent. Prickly pear sank disinterested fangs into the palm of her right hand and she swore softly. Tomorrow, without adrenaline for an anesthetic, the barbs would itch and burn.

From above, she heard the whooping cry of the ambulance approaching and was glad of the company.

At the bottom of the broken bank, the ground leveled out in a litter of rocks from fist- to house-size. Anna leaped from one to another, her balance made uncertain by the moving flashlight beam.

The truck was wedged between two rocks. One beneath the front axle, the other crumpling back the hood and holding the vehicle at an angle almost on its right side. Both rear wheels and the front left tire were free of the ground. The front tire still turned slowly. The crash had been recent and Anna felt a spark of hope that she was not too late.

“Anna!” It was Hills on her radio.

“Down here,” she responded, flashing her light up to the road till she got an answering flash.

“What’ve we got?” Hills asked.

“Stand by.”

Between her and the cab were two boulders roughly the size of Volkswagens and woven together by a tangle of oak brush. For lack of a better place, Anna shoved the flashlight down the front of her shirt, then, hands free, scrambled to the top of the first boulder and jumped the crevice to the second.

The tilted cab was on a level with the rock, the driver’s door parallel with the top of the stone where she stood. Heat radiated from beneath the hood; the engine was still running. Anna rescued her flash and surveyed the scene. Broken and hanging in fragments, the safety glass of the side window fell in ragged sheets. Isolated pieces sparkled in the beam. From the interior came strains of country-western music. A faint green glow emanated from the dashboard lights. All else was lost in a darkness fractured by moonlight through fragmented glass.

Anna unstrapped the jump kit. Cursing her slick-soled Wellington boots, she inched down the boulder where it sloped to within eighteen inches of the truck. Spinning gently, the pickup’s front tire, along with the broken angles of metal and stone, gave her an unsettling sense of vertigo, as if she might topple into the window as into a bottomless well.

At the boulder’s edge she stopped, recovered her equilibrium, and peered inside. From her new vantage point, the cab and a small slice of the passenger door were visible. On the far window, where it had been forced inward, drops of ruby mixed with the glittering diamonds of glass.

Fresh blood was startlingly red—too red for paintings or movies. Comic-book red; believable only in fantasy and real life.

Gingerly, Anna pushed at the truck’s exposed undercarriage with a foot. It held steady. Apparently the truck was wedged firmly between the rocks. How firmly, she was about to find out.

Getting down on her knees, she restored the flashlight to its bruising hammock between buttons and breasts and crawled her hands out onto the door. Bit by bit she transferred her weight from the rock. The truck remained stable. Emboldened, she brought one knee onto the door, catching hold of the handle to keep herself steady.

Moonlight reflected off the white paint. Details, overwhelmed by the hard light of day, were surrealistically clear: a pencil-thin scratch beneath the side mirror, a square patch where a sticker had been inexpertly removed, fading black stenciled lettering, once showy flourishes almost obliterated by time, spelling the initials T.S.

Tom Silva, Anna realized. It was his truck. Better a stranger; no psychological buttons pushed interfering with efficiency.

Pulling herself up to her knees on the slanting metal, she braced butt on heels and took the flashlight from inside her shirt. Silva was crushed down on the far side of the cab, his back to her. One leg trailed behind him, wedged beneath the driver’s pedals. His left arm, the palm turned up, rested on the hump between the seats. She couldn’t see his face. “Tom,” she called clearly. “Can you hear me?” No response.

Having wrested the King from her duty belt she made her assessment out loud, sharing it with Hills. “One individual, white male,” she began, avoiding Silva’s name lest Patsy or the girls should hear in such a manner. “About thirty-five. Unconscious, no seat belt. He’s half on the floor at the far side of the cab nearest the ground. He submarined ,” she added, taking note of where the operator’s pedals had bent and the floor mat ripped when Silva’s unrestrained body was hurled beneath the steering wheel. “His right leg’s broken. The foot caught beneath the clutch and twisted a hundred and eighty degrees from anatomical position. I can’t see his face but there’s a lot of blood on the dash and windows.”

In the minute the climb and assessment had taken, the rubies had pooled into a puddle of crimson. As she spoke it spread, a bright beautiful stream dripping from dash to windshield. “Bring the Stokes, backboard, oxygen, and jaws of life. I’m off radio now, I’m going to try and get to him.” She heard the ubiquitous “ten-four” as she doffed her gunbelt and tossed it back onto the boulder. The radio she kept, using its heavy leather case to knock the remaining glass from the window frame.

“Sorry about that,” she muttered as fragments rained down on Silva’s back, caught shining in his hair.

One hand on either side of the window, she lowered her legs into the cab until she straddled the body of the man inside. Her left foot was on top of the passenger door above the shattered glass. Her right foot she wedged in the angle made by the windshield and the dash inches from where Silva’s head rested.

Hanging on tightly to the outside door handle lest her precarious perch give way, she stretched down and switched off the ignition. Blessedly, the tinny sounds of country pop were silenced and the bizarre party feeling quenched. A click of the headlight button turned on the interior light and she freed up the hand she used to hold the flashlight.

Edging down till her knees rested along the upper edge of the passenger door, she slipped two fingers between Silva’s jaw and shoulder, seeking by touch his carotid artery. Blood, warm and slippery, reminded her she’d forgotten to put on rubber gloves. Rangers with emergency response duties were required to be given hepatitis B vaccinations, but at a hundred and fifty bucks for each ranger, Hills couldn’t bring himself to comply. AIDS, there was no shot for.