Mountain Rampage (2 page)

Bullets were odd things. A slug could plow into a creature dead-true, only to nick a rib and spin sideways through the lungs, bypassing the heart despite the outward perfection of the shot. In such a case, the mortally wounded animal might cover half a mile or more during a final, all-out run as its undamaged heart pumped and its lungs bled out.

Not this time.

The dawn breeze swallowed the clatter of the departing herd's hooves as the ram toppled off the ridge and rolled down the steep face of the mountain into a granite-walled couloir. The falling ram set off a cavalcade of loose scree, its heavy body a brown raft afloat in the gray river of rock. The bighorn slid fifty yards down the couloir to where the pitch of the face lessened. The flowing gravel streamed to a stop and the animal came to rest, half-buried, in the deep shade of the north-facing ridge.

The shooter shouldered his rifle and side-hilled off the ridge into the drainage and across the face of the mountain to the
dead ram. He stood over the animal. The scent of blood and musk filled the air. The ram's tongue draped from its mouth. Its big eyes, round as marbles, stared up at him, milky and unseeing.

The curl of the ram's heavy horns rounded well past full. The shooter took a firm grip on one of the curls and tugged the ram down the drainage and into the forest, the animal's body sliding behind him on its slick coat. Grunting with effort, he wound between tree trunks and ducked beneath low branches until he reached a small opening in the woods. He pulled a hacksaw from his rucksack, cut through the ram's neck just at the back of its skull, and lowered its severed head into doubled plastic trash bags.

The shooter settled the bagged head of the ram in his pack and set off downhill through the trees toward Fall River Road in the valley below. He left the bighorn's body to rot, confident in the knowledge that, within a few weeks, nothing of the ram but an unidentifiable scattering of picked-over bones would remain in the small meadow, deep in the forest below the summit of Mount Landen.

T
UESDAY

O
NE

Rosie's cry jolted Chuck Bender awake. He blinked, blurry eyed, and sat up, focusing on his six-year-old stepdaughter sprawled before him, her arms and legs jerking in violent spasms, her eyes rolled back in her head.

Rosie had been asleep in her twin bed in the cabin's tiny back bedroom, her forehead warm to the touch but her breathing calm and steady, when he, too, had drifted off, chin to chest, slumped in a ladder-back chair cadged from the kitchen table.

Chuck checked his watch. 2:30 a.m. He'd dozed for no more than fifteen minutes, but a different Rosie now lay before him.

Janelle hurried into the bedroom, a damp washcloth clutched in both hands.

Rosie cried out a second time. Only the whites of her eyes showed between her fluttering eyelids. Her arms and legs thrashed, spilling the sheets to her waist.

“Rosie.
M'hija
,” Janelle whispered, her voice laced with fear. “Darling girl, my darling girl.”

She crouched at the side of the bed and put the cloth to her younger daughter's forehead. Chuck leaned forward and mindlessly kneaded Janelle's shoulders, his gaze fixed on Rosie.

Janelle turned on him. “You fell asleep.”

Stung, Chuck lifted his hands from her shoulders. “
She
fell asleep. Finally. I thought we were in the clear.”

“You thought wrong.”

He pressed his palms together between his knees. Rosie's fever
had built until midnight. When, finally, it had receded, he'd figured they had simply to last out the night, that Rosie would be better by morning.

But what did he know about childhood illnesses? What did he know about children at all, for that matter?

He reached past Janelle and caught the nearest of Rosie's convulsing arms. He pressed it gently to the bed. The soft skin of her bicep was blotchy and scalding to the touch. Her fever was back, fiercer this time. As soon as he released her arm, it lashed about.

“More Tylenol?” he asked Janelle.

She put the back of her hand to Rosie's cheek. “Too soon. We already gave her two doses.”

“Some ibuprofen? Isn't that allowed?”

Janelle shrugged, her back stiff.

On the opposite side of the small room, eight-year-old Carmelita rolled over in her matching bed and settled back to sleep.

Chuck stared at Rosie, his every muscle tense. He was twelve months into parenthood, still a newcomer to the world of sleepless nights and sick little girls. “The doctors' offices are all closed,” he said. “The only thing open at this hour will be the emergency room.”

“Then let's go.”

He hesitated. “Yeah.”

Janelle skewered him with a hard look over her shoulder. “Don't tell me you're worried about money.”

Chuck pushed himself back in his seat. “With our deductible, we'll get slaughtered.”

Janelle's voice shook. “This is not a baby-medicine type of thing, Chuck. Not anymore.”

“It'll pass,” he said, his voice revealing his uncertainty. “Won't it?”

“She's having some sort of a seizure. I've never seen her like
this.
Nunca
. Neither of the girls.”

Rosie's eyes were closed now, but her arms and legs continued to stir.

Chuck ran a hand over the top of his head, passing his fingers through his short hair. “You're right.”

Relief flooded Janelle's face.

He looked into her frightened eyes. “She's my darling girl, too,” he said.

Minutes later, gravel pinged off the undercarriage of the pickup as Chuck sped down the two-track from the cabin, familiar after seven weeks with the narrow, descending drive through the trees to the flat valley floor a mile south of downtown Estes Park. He slowed as he left the forest and turned onto the gravel road behind two massive log buildings—Lodge of the Rockies and, next door, Mills Conference Center. The matching, three-story, historic structures faced onto the open greensward at the center of the Y of the Rockies resort complex.

A glance in the rearview mirror showed Rosie slumped in her seat, strands of dark hair stuck to her sweaty forehead.

Rosie was her grandfather Enrique in miniature: short, stocky, and—normally—full of life, with thick, wiry hair and round, rosy cheeks. Carmelita sat opposite her little sister on the rear seat, her head against the side window of the truck, her eyes half-closed. Carmelita was thin and delicate like her mother, with Janelle's heart-shaped face and long, straight hair.

Dread coated Chuck's insides like heavy syrup. He swallowed grit from his throat as he fishtailed around the near side of the conference center. He slung the truck east onto the main road leading out of the resort, only to be greeted by a car rocketing down the open slope from the Y of the Rockies entrance two hundred yards ahead.

Chuck jammed the brakes, skidding the pickup to a stop in front of the lodge and conference center. Janelle tumbled from
the rear seat of the crew cab to the floor between the seat-belted girls. A cloud of dust rose in the truck's headlights, mixing with thin tendrils of the summer's first rain.

Chuck kept his foot pinned to the brake as the oncoming vehicle—an Estes Park police cruiser, siren silenced and emergency lights extinguished—flashed past. Janelle clambered back to the bench seat between the girls. Ignoring the police car, she pointed through the windshield at the resort entrance ahead.

Chuck accelerated before sliding to a stop once more when a shiny, blue, single-cab pickup, the words “Y of the Rockies, Estes Park, Colorado” stenciled on its side, shot around the far corner of the lodge in pursuit of the police car. As the truck passed, Chuck caught sight of its driver hunched over the steering wheel.

“Parker,” Chuck said. He watched over his shoulder as the truck chased the police car across the Y of the Rockies compound.

Janelle pulled Rosie close and stroked the girl's damp forehead. “Not your concern,” she said. “Not now.”

Chuck punched the gas. The rear tires spat loose rocks as the truck sped up the sloping drive and out of the shallow valley. The pickup bounced onto the paved road leading to Estes Park, the gateway tourist town at the east entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, high in the mountains northwest of Denver.

Chuck gunned the truck toward the center of town and glanced out the side window to see, through breaks in trees, the police cruiser and Parker's pickup racing along the far side of the broad rectangle of well-tended grass play fields, more than a quarter mile across, that marked the center of Y of the Rockies, the former Young Men's Christian Association training center turned rustic resort and corporate retreat. The cruiser and truck sped down the row of buildings lining the west side of the fields.
The buildings, catty-corner across the expanse of grass from the lodge and conference center, included the resort's gift shop, outdoor-gear rental center, and log cabin museum. Beyond the museum were the resort's two dormitories.

Through one last break in the trees, Chuck watched as the police cruiser and Parker's pickup truck passed large, new Falcon House, home to the resort's international crew of summer workers. The car and truck slid to a stop facing the second dormitory, ramshackle Raven House, home for the past two months to Chuck's group of field school students.

In the rearview mirror, Chuck caught sight of Janelle staring out the window at the police cruiser and Parker's truck.

She uttered a single, strangled word as she stroked Rosie's forehead: “Clarence.”

T
WO

Rosie whimpered from the back seat as Chuck sped toward Estes Park, his thoughts, like Janelle's, torn.

Why were the police and Parker headed for Raven House? What sort of mischief might Chuck's students have gotten themselves into in the middle of the night? And as for Clarence—Janelle's brother and one of Chuck's two field school team leaders—Janelle's concern was well grounded. It wasn't much of a stretch to think Clarence might have gotten himself in some sort of trouble.

Janelle tapped on the face of her phone as Chuck crossed Elkhorn Avenue and braked to a stop at the Estes Park Medical Center emergency entrance. Already, the smattering of rain was gone, replaced by a cold wind whipping beneath the covered entryway.

“Anything?” he asked Janelle as he threw the truck into park.

She shook her head. “No reply. He must still be asleep.” A beat passed. “Right?”

“Right,” Chuck repeated, agreeing with what they both wanted to believe.

He hurried into the hospital with Rosie in his arms, Janelle and Carmelita close behind. A gray-haired woman in blue scrubs rose from behind a computer at the front of the hospital's compact emergency room—three curtained compartments on one side, portable pieces of medical equipment sheathed in plastic along the opposite wall. The woman's nametag identified her as Irene, R.N. She pressed a button on her computer keyboard before stepping around the counter and putting a hand on Rosie's arm.

At the nurse's touch, Rosie lifted her head from Chuck's shoulder. Despite the drained look on her face, she smiled beatifically at the woman.

Chuck's heart swelled at the sight of Rosie's smile. The nurse
directed him to lay Rosie in a wheeled gurney in the nearest of the three unoccupied compartments.

“You doing okay, hon?” she asked, leaning over the gurney.

“Yeppers,” Rosie declared in her little-girl version of her grandfather's raspy voice. She rose on her elbows. “I'm doing
grrrreat
!”

Janelle dug her fingers into Chuck's biceps.

The nurse turned from Rosie to Chuck and Janelle and asked doubtfully, “Sick little girl?”

“Really sick,” Janelle asserted. “We think she had a seizure.” Her eyes went to Rosie. “Thank God,” she breathed.

“It's good she's doing better now.” The nurse patted one of Janelle's hands, still gripping Chuck's arm. “Why don't we get her checked in for the M.D.?”

Carmelita curled up on a hard plastic seat next to Rosie's wheeled bed, wrapped her arms around her drawn-up knees, and closed her eyes while the nurse set about taking Rosie's temperature and blood pressure. Before the nurse finished, a tall, broad-shouldered young man pushed through double doors at the back of the emergency room. A shock of bleached-blond hair tumbled to just above the man's bright, emerald-blue eyes. A deep cleft bisected his square chin, and a strand of white shells, visible in the V-neck of his scrub top, complemented a blond soul patch perched below his lower lip. A nametag on his left breast read Gregory, M.D.

Chuck straightened to his full six feet, but the ER doc still had him by two or three inches. The doctor looked far too young to be a physician, in the same way Janelle, slender and girlish at twenty-eight, looked far too young to be the mother of a pair of girls six and eight years old.

Unlike the doctor's thick, blond locks, Chuck's sandy-brown hair was thin and sparse, with more than a hint of gray. Crows' feet cut deep into the sides of Chuck's blue-gray eyes, the result
of more than two decades of work outdoors on archaeological digs across the Southwest. His lean build contrasted sharply with the linebacker-like physique of the doctor.