“That’s good,” al-Kalli said. “That’s very good.”
“Mercy!” Rafik cried out. “Have mercy!”
But the creature had come to the trunk of the tree now, and did just as al-Kalli expected it to do. Rising up on its stubby back legs, it stretched its long scaly body to its full length—nearly fourteen feet—and lifted its head toward Rafik’s dangling heels. He yanked them up, just out of reach, and the beast let out a guttural blast of fury. Today, it was tired of the game already.
Its long tongue shot out, flicking at Rafik’s ankles, and its fangs snapped at the empty air.
Rafik clung to the top of the tree.
“Please!” Rafik cried. “I’ve told you everything I know!”
“I believe you,” al-Kalli said. “I believe you have.”
And then he waited. The beast stretched, with its powerful limbs, another foot or two up the trunk, enough to catch one of Rafik’s feet in its jaws. And to drag him, shrieking in terror, back down to the ground. He sprawled in the dirt and managed to free himself, bleeding and torn. He ran wildly, in a wide circle, and when he came within a few yards of the cave, the beast suddenly sprang, with the power of a lion but the splayed legs of a lizard, on top of him. Rafik was crushed under its mighty bulk, and before he could scream again, the creature’s jaws had fastened on his throat.
Al-Kalli sighed; from here on, it became far less interesting.
Rafik’s legs kicked out, his heels digging into the dirt.
The monster shook him, like a plaything, and sank its fangs deeper. The legs stopped kicking, the feet flopped to each side.
“You got it all?” al-Kalli asked over his shoulder.
“Yes,” Jakob said. “I will send the information to our people tonight.”
Good. It shouldn’t be hard to find the girlfriend . . . and from there . . .
As al-Kalli watched, the beast dragged the body by the throat toward its lair. It liked to dine in privacy. It climbed up onto the rock ledge, never letting go of its limp prize, and then, flicking its thick tail, disappeared into the cave with it.
Al-Kalli was happy to see it acting so much like its old self again.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“I’VE ASKED THE police to move them back another hundred yards, but they say they can’t do it,” Gunderson fumed, glaring out the window at the picketers chanting and beating their drums on Wilshire Boulevard.
“The street is public property,” Carter said.
“Not the sidewalk in front of the goddamn museum!”
As Carter followed Gunderson’s gaze, he saw a TV station truck pull up outside. No doubt there’d be another evening news story, focusing on the tragic death of the unidentified victim they had dubbed “the Mystery Man,” a Native American driven to violence by the desecration of his people’s remains. Ever since the accident, the local news had been featuring the story prominently, following the search (so far unsuccessful) for the man’s body, along with lots of talking heads debating the pros and cons of anthropology: “Where does science end,” as one fatuous commentator had intoned, “and respect for the dead begin?”
Carter could only listen to so much of this gibberish. These were bones he excavated—not people. These were fossils—not souls, or spirits, or sacred vessels. Whatever immortal elements they might ever have possessed—and he wasn’t a true believer there, either—it was long gone, into the air, into the ether. There was nothing deader than a petrified bone.
“We’ve had another interview request,” Gunderson said, wheeling away from the window as if he couldn’t bear to witness that spectacle another second.
“The Vorhaus Report.”
It was a serious-minded cable TV show—so serious almost no one watched. “I said you’d do it.”
“You said what?” Carter blurted out.
“I said,” Gunderson explained coolly, “that the head of our paleontology field unit—the man who not only discovered the remains of the La Brea Man, but who was in the pit when this unfortunate man fell to his death—would be happy to represent the museum and explain our interests.”
“Why did you do that?” Carter said. He’d been ducking reporters, interview requests, even mikes shoved in his face when he got out of his car in the museum parking lot, for days.
“Because I’m tired of taking the heat, and because, frankly, this is your mess.”
Carter had to bite his tongue, or he knew he’d say something fatal. What had really happened here, he could see, was that Gunderson, who’d been only too happy to stand in front of the cameras initially, with a sorrowful face and a beautifully folded silk pocket square, had gotten burned. He’d thought this would be a little blip of a story, a chance to make his own name and face synonymous with the museum, but it hadn’t gone that way. The story had “legs,” it wasn’t going away overnight, and the more Gunderson talked, the more trouble he got himself, and the museum, into. Finally, he’d come to see that, and now he wanted to set up a new fall guy—Carter.
“But that’s not why I sent for you.”
Carter waited for the rest.
“I want to know what’s happening in Pit 91 now. How long is it going to be until we find that man, that Geronimo’s, body?”
Nobody liked calling him Geronimo—and on the air, and in public, they simply referred to him as “the victim,” or even “the Mystery Man”—but in private, they reverted to the early shorthand.
“We’re doing everything we can,” Carter said, “but it’s extremely difficult, for reasons I’ve already gone into.” And reasons Gunderson kept conveniently forgetting.
The body of the Mystery Man had been sucked down into the pit in a way Carter had never before seen, and even now could not explain. The tar normally didn’t work that way; hell, it hadn’t worked that way for tens of thousands of years. It
trapped
animals, it didn’t devour them. But something had changed; maybe it was a result of the high-power suction hoses (insisted on by Gunderson) or the steel sectioning plates that Carter had installed, or something else entirely—there was a theory that heavy construction work on nearby Curson Street had altered the underground geology—but whatever it was, it had caused the pit to behave in a totally anomalous fashion. And now, just when he was about to excavate one of the most fascinating and important finds of his career—the bones of only the second human being ever to be discovered in the La Brea pits—Carter had to find a way first to recover the body of a man who had somehow, impossibly, become its only modern prey.
“I simply do not understand this,” Gunderson went on. “Why can’t they just dredge the pit? How far down does it go? How far down can the body be?”
“We don’t know,” Carter said, as calmly as his growing impatience would allow. “Nothing here is going according to form. The pit has been agitated in a way we have never seen, and it’s possible—though unlikely—that the body has somehow shifted laterally.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means, the body may have been dragged sideways, into a subterranean pocket or asphalt seam that we didn’t even know was there.”
Gunderson ran his hand over his carefully groomed gray head. “So how do we ever find it then?”
Carter had wondered about that himself. “It’s possible,” he said, “that we could try some kind of ground-based sonar.” He’d actually started investigating the possibility, just in case everything else failed.
“Good Lord,” Gunderson muttered, more to himself than Carter, “what’s that going to cost?”
Plenty, Carter thought. But there was no point going into that now. He knew that there was a new Emergency Rescue Team, on loan from the San Bernardino Fire Department, down at the pit today, and he was due there to help oversee their activities. In fact, glancing at his watch, he realized that he was overdue.
“I’ve got to go down there now,” Carter said.
“When you leave the building, try not to call any undue attention to yourself.”
What would they have to do next, Carter thought—wear masks?
THE MOMENT HE
left the air-conditioned confines of the museum, the pounding of the drums became louder. It was another painfully hot and arid day, and in the pit it would be at least ten degrees hotter. He didn’t relish what he would have to do there.
As he walked past the pond of black asphalt near the entrance to the museum, where the life-sized replicas of a family of mastodons stood, someone shouted, “Grave robber!” at him. What grave? Carter thought. The La Brea Man had died a terrible, and probably solitary, death, either stuck in the tar and dying slowly of dehydration, or torn to pieces by predators, who had likely then died with him. For all anyone knew, he might have been happy to be found.
The LAPD had set up barricades that allowed visitors to the museum to go in and out, but blocked off all access, for now, to the parklike grounds where Pit 91 was located. Carter had to show the official pass that hung on a laminated card around his neck before the cop at the barrier would let him pass.
The pit, from here, looked like some kind of triage site. Where there was usually just one trailer, for changing and showering, there were now several, for coordinating the work of outside agencies, dealing with media requests, community outreach. The coroner’s department had a person there at all times, to make sure the body of the Mystery Man was handled with kid gloves, whenever it might finally be found. To Carter, it was all a massive case of overkill.
Down in the pit, there were maybe a dozen workers now, none of them his usual crew. Rosalie and Claude had been relieved of duty for the foreseeable future, and even Miranda—the poster girl for enterprising UCLA graduates—had been informally banned. The workers now were postdoc paleontologists, and even a retired professor or two, who knew how to do the painstakingly close labor that the extraction of the La Brea Man now required. This was delicate, highly skilled work that was tough to do right under the best of circumstances. But to do it now, with fire-men and cops and coroners looking over your shoulder, and rescue workers trying to figure out how to dredge a nearby quadrant of the site for a recent victim, was nearly impossible.
Carter could tell there was no news as soon as he started down the ladder into the pit. The San Bernardino crew had installed some kind of rope and tackle assembly, and their generator rested precariously on one of the wooden walkways; its operator, dripping with sweat, had stripped down to his navy, SBFD T-shirt and suspendered overalls. It made Carter sick to his stomach to think of what damage all this equipment might be doing to the as-yet-unrecovered finds that lay below.
The operator glanced up at Carter, and it appeared he knew who he was. Carter was having to get used to that, people knowing who he was without his ever having met them. “Nothing so far,” the guy called out over the thrumming of the motor.
Carter nodded.
Several neighboring sections of the grid had men and women with piles of tools and paraphernalia all around them. Most were on their knees, using chisels and hand picks and stiff brushes to isolate the fossils that had been partially revealed. Others were carefully applying the burlap strips, soaked in plaster of paris, to the areas already exposed; once the cast had hardened, the fossil would be removed, hopefully intact, to the labs, where the finer work would be done.
A couple of the workers looked up as Carter approached, but under their hats and headbands, and with their goggles over their eyes, it was tough to tell who was who. His friend Del, however, he could always pick out. A middle-aged guy with a mane of prematurely white hair (tied up today, quite sensibly, with a thick rubber band), he leaned back on his haunches and pushed his goggles up onto his head.