“Why?”
I could have answered diplomatically, offering some timeworn excuse, but a serving of bullshit was not what Magritte had asked for. So instead, I told him the truth: “Because I need someone more stable than I am.”
Magritte looked deep into my eyes. “So do I,” he whispered sadly back. “So do I.”
THE DRIVER OF the second bus was standing on the sidewalk, eyes shut, her hands slowly caressing an unseen form in front of her. Allison Lee stood beside her, arms folded across her chest, watching.
“What’s going on?” I asked, looking over my shoulder to
make sure Magritte had made it back into the club. He had.
“Artemis here is clearing the bladder meridians of a
Camarasaurus,”
she answered.
“Come again?” A bus driver named Artemis? In Utah? She didn’t look Greek.
“Its aura,” Allison explained. “She’s rolled it onto its back so she can work with it.”
“It’s so sweet,” said the bus driver. “Like a golden retriever!”
I wondered if the din inside the Mecca Club had done something to my ears. “We don’t have this sort of stuff in Wyoming. What’s a meridian, and why’s she stroking it?”
Allison explained, in her Lawn Guyland glottal drawl, “It’s Chinese medicine. The subtle energy pathways of the auric body get clogged.”
“In whose aura?” I asked. I was beyond subtlety myself. I was reeling. Having just had my emotions hit by a truck wearing MAGRITTE license plates, I wasn’t sure I could handle a dinosaur aura in the middle of Main Street.
“This dinosaur here,” Allison said, pointing into the empty space in front of the driver.
“But there’s nothing there,” I said doggedly. “Come on, Allison; the last dinosaurs died sixty-four million years ago.
Camarasaurus
almost a one hundred and fifty million years ago.”
“Time means nothing in metaphysics,” said the bus driver. She giggled. “I’m stroking a dinosaur tummy, so I should know.”
“No, you’re—”
“Sure, the animal’s body died a long time ago. I’m hip,” said the driver. “But it got stuck thinking its soul was dead, too. But the soul never dies. This one needs to go on to the astral plane, where it can get what it needs.” To the invisible dinosaur soul, she said, “There now, sweetie, can you find
some friends to help you through? Here, I’ll open a passageway for you.” She rotated her hand clockwise, waited, then rotated it counterclockwise. Then she turned to Allison. “Okay, the big long-neck is on its way; now let’s go after that pack of carnivores.”
“What are you
talking
about?” I persisted.
Allison said, “Aw, I went on one of the preconference field trips, and we visited the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry. This camarasaur died there, and at least forty-four allosaurs. The big leaf-eater was being hunted by the fang guys when they all got trapped in the mud at the bottom of a lake. Nasty way to die.”
“They all died in terrible fear,” said the driver soberly, “and couldn’t let go of the earth energy.”
Allison said, “So I been feeling kinda tired ever since. Artemis here did a bioenergy scan on me and found out I kinda sucked their auras up or something.”
“She felt sorry for them,” the driver explained.
“So she’s clearing them out of me and sending them on their ways. So they got stuck in the mud, but what
killed
them, Artemis?”
The bus driver squealed, “Ooo! Earthquake!”
“Oh, you mean the mud went thixotropic?”
Artemis’s eyes opened and closed again. “They don’t know that word.”
Allison said, “It turned to soup. Sucked ’em down. They’re drowning.”
The driver nodded. “Some of the females are pregnant.”
This was too much for me. “They were egg layers!” I argued.
The driver smiled sweetly. “Carrying fertilized eggs, same thing,” she said patiently. “Mmm, the energy of the carnivores feels different from the little leaf-eater.”
“Camarasaurs weren’t so little,” I prattled on. “They were
as long as a football field and probably weighed twenty tons.”
“You wouldn’t know it from its aura,” Artemis replied serenely.
I rocked my head back and stared up into the sky, wondering what parallel universe I had just fallen into. First Mormons with loaded decks and now New Age bus drivers with midget dinosaur auras. I watched darkening clouds drift across the infinite heavens and admitted, deep down inside and only to myself, that I was scared.
TOWARD LATE AFTERNOON, the FBI agent slipped away down the street to acquire a car, and the party at the Mecca Club began to cycle their beer-distended bladders through the rest rooms preparatory to loading onto the buses and heading back to Snowbird. My stomach churned with hunger and the urgency of my plan. I needed salt and water against dehydration and food energy for desert travel. I headed into the café and ordered a hamburger and a packet of potato chips, the perfect foods, swilled some black coffee, and settled in to wait.
There was a small commotion as Lew and Vance all but dragged Dan Sherbrooke in from the bar and poured him into a booth. A waitress hustled over to them with a pot of coffee and they began to pour it into him cup by cup. Just as the FBI agent reappeared through the front door of the café, Dan bawled dramatically, “Thank you, Lew. You’re always there for me. My friend.”
“Some friend,” Vance seethed, his own liquor loosening his tongue. “You
knew
that site had been hit, and did you tell us? No!”
“What are you talking about?” Lew whined.
“I saw your boot prints on top of the backhoe tracks when I first got to the site. Maybe you even drove that backhoe in there yourselfl”
Lew lunged toward the wiry little man and yanked him up by his shirtfront.
Vance dangled from Lew’s fists, screaming, “Go ahead and hit me, you thieving shit!”
Lew dropped Vance and staggered backward until he fetched up against the counter. “Okay, so maybe I was there before the field trip. But I didn’t trash it! It was already like that when I got there.”
Dan had turned and begun to rise from his seat, swaying. “Lew? Lew, you
knew
?”
Lew jammed his hands into his pockets and shrugged, a boy caught playing with matches. “Yeah. Okay, so I was coming back from fishing on Sunday and thought I’d check on the site. But fossils was already gone!”
“Just
thought
you’d take a look,” Vance sassed. “Just
happened
to drive by!”
Lew pursed his lips and made his appeal to Dan. “I come out here for years with you, and what do I get? You finally find something good and take
this
little shit down there to lift it instead of me! I wanted to
see
it was all. So yeah, I was here, but it was already gone! Just tracks, like today!” He flailed his arms wildly, trying too late to express nonexistent horror and loss. “What was I supposed to do?”
I turned and glanced at the FBI agent to make sure he was getting all of this. He was.
“What were you supposed to do?” Dan drawled, lumbering to his feet. “I’ll tell you what you were supposed to do. You were supposed to tell me, for starts! I would have canceled the trip!” He leaned forward and bellowed, “What were you dreaming of, letting me come ahead on down here? You sniveling bottom-feeder! You whore’s offal!” With sudden ferocity, Dan swung a huge pudgy fist into Lew’s jaw.
Lew staggered and fell. His head hit the floor like a ripe melon. He lay still a moment, stunned, then drew his hands
over his face and howled, “It was
George
’at stole the thing, Dan! You
know
that!
George
did it!”
“Do you think me cretinous?” Dan bellowed. “George had not clue
one
where that site was!”
“Did too!” Lew squealed from the floor. A practiced sniveler, he knew better than to rise while his opponent was still riled. “His stoolie told him! That beard-o freak with the rifle!”
Everyone looked at Dan expectantly. He looked back at each of us, his eyes alert with something he was not saying.
The FBI agent moved swiftly into position, deftly placing his hands under the fallen man’s shoulders, as if Lew’s safety and comfort were all he cared about. “This sounds important, gentlemen,” he said, mollifying all parties present in the time-honored way a sober man handles drunks. “
Tell
us about this, Lew. Tell us about George’s stoolie.”
Lew said, “Aw shit, George always had his little informants. Losers. Geeks. These ones were no different. Shit, Dan, it was that beardo guy led you to this
Allosaurus
site in the first place. You remember him!”
Dan popped his eyes in assumed outrage.
Vance stared at his professor in shock. “But you told me
you
found that site!”
“Well, I …”
Lew sat up, wobbled, and touched a hand gingerly to his lip, which was beginning to bleed. “Since when does Dan move an inch when he can con someone else into walking a mile for him? Your
hero
here paid him in food, Vance. Beardo led him to that site and Dan paid him in
food
.” He laughed, a high, tittering schoolgirl giggle, and winced when it made his lip hurt.
I said, “Canned food?”
Lew looked at me, his mouth sagging in hurt surprise that I had information he hadn’t given me yet. “Yeah. Number-ten cans of dried fruit, egg mix. Beef jerky. Those bones were worth
hundreds of thousands—millions!—and he pays them in
dried fruit
! I couldn’t believe it. Best deal since Sir Francis Drake bought New York from the Indians for twenty-two bucks.”
“That was Peter Minuit and Manhattan Island,” Sherbrooke corrected haughtily. “And it was trinkets, not cash. Twenty-
four
dollars’ worth.”
Not Tom and I exchanged looks. The glint in his eyes seemed to say, Questioning drunks is fun, huh?
I said, “So Dan, you bought the canned food from George. Did he maybe introduce you to this finder, too?” About then, nothing that had ever occurred between George Dishey and Dan Sherbrooke would have surprised me.
Dan said nothing.
Lew said, “I saw them sitting with George right here in this café!”
“Never!” Dan protested.
Vance screwed up his face and said, “George was
here
?”
Lew looked from face to face, recovering his sense of self-importance swiftly. “Sure.” He looked both ways, artlessly covering his complicity. “He said he was just driving through, but
I
knew better. The waitress here knew him by name.”
Dan’s face reddened. To Lew he roared, “You told me you’d just stumbled across this guy in the café. And all the time, you were in bed with George?”
Lew stuck out his lower lip petulantly.
“Which waitress was here?” I asked.
“That one,” Lew answered.
The FBI agent turned toward the woman behind the counter, who had lit a cigarette, the better to enjoy the show. “Yeah, that was me,” she said. “But they wasn’t all together. That TV guy with the bushy beard was here with this guy and that other with the long beard first.” She pointed at Lew with her cigarette. “Then George goes out the back door and this one comes in the front.” She pointed at Dan.
So George had engineered the whole thing. What better way to know what Dan was up to than to set up his digs?
Dan stared at Lew, his mouth agape. Lew shrugged.
“What did the other two man look like?” asked the agent.
She flicked at the cigarette and said, “Oh, he was a skinny fellow with a long beard like Moses. Kinda creepy. Didn’t want no coffee or beer—that type. He set down there by the back booth, real nervous like, with George. Didn’t seem to like it when he kept him waiting there. But I liked that George. He always tipped
good.”
She sniffed at Dan, as if to say, Unlike
you,
fella.
The agent stepped toward the counter. I had to move quickly to get a look at the picture he slipped out of his breast pocket to show to the waitress. It was an enlargement of the helicopter pilot from the picture in George’s study, computer-enhanced to show the man aged and bearded. I was amazed by how much it looked like the man I had glimpsed in the van.
“Yep. That’s the one,” said the waitress.
I grabbed the picture from the FBI agent as he attempted to palm it back into his shirt pocket and maintain his cover as Tom Latimer the dinosaur illustrator. I stuffed the picture under Dan Sherbrooke’s nose. “Know him?” I asked furiously. “Ever maybe tell him where I was staying?”
Dan looked stupidly at the picture. “No.”
“Then who
did
you tell, Dan?”
“Tell what?”
“Where I was staying. What motel. The police told you Monday morning, and unless you hit my room yourself, you sent someone else in your place. Now, who was it?” I demanded.