I turned and peered back down the slope. I could make out the silhouette of each boulder, could see the faint glow of the instrument panel lights on the face of Brother Nephi as he reached around inside the cockpit of the downed helicopter. I had found him striking—even riveting—when I had seen him
in the van, but now, moving about the wreckage, he was a gaunt assemblage of swaggering hips and tumbling beard, an eerie mutation of sensuosity. His deep-set eyes glared as if set in a naked skull—quick bullets of intelligence reflecting the instruments’ glow. He scanned the cockpit systematically, scavenging for useful equipment with the hands of one who had known this machinery before. He knew we were there, knew he’d have to find us, but he seemed unconcerned, unhurried in his movements. This more than anything inspired me to fear him: he clearly knew something I didn’t.
“Take ye to the devil!” he roared, and fired again, dispatching what was left of the dying detective. Nephi threw back his head and howled like a wolf, his triumph filling the canyon. Then, almost abstractly, he added, “Now we got to bury this mess.”
Ray’s hands squeezed my shoulders, catching me before I fell forward with the urge to vomit. We huddled together, stifling the sound of our breath.
When I next looked, Brother Nephi was half inside the cockpit and cabin. He extracted two pistols from the passenger area, and from the front cockpit he took a flashlight, some pens, and the elastic straps off the pilot’s knee board. As he jostled the pilot to remove it, her head lolled with a disturbing semblance of life, and her face swung into view.
“Nice move, Manti,” Nephi muttered bitterly, the intimacy of his voice carried to us by the crisp, close acoustics of the rocks, the desert air, the night. “You ruined a perfectly good helicopter. And you shot a woman.” To himself, he said, “We could have
used
a woman.”
“A woman? How was I to—”
“Shut up and keep searching.”
“I
been
searching. I—”
“
Patience,
Manti. Use your
head.
Shut up and
listen
for them. They’re in there somewhere; I
feel
it. Now, don’t you worry.
Ma will be here any moment with the dogs. Remember, they found Nina that time she tried to hide.”
Dogs?
So that’s why he’s so confident. Even if we get free of the rock pile, he can track us faster than we can run. A home-court advantage.
I felt Ray tense beside me. I put my lips to his ear and whispered, “Are you armed?”
His return whisper was bitterly angry. “No.”
Brother Nephi asked Manti, “You get a good look at ’em?”
“The female was that one I followed in the car.”
Nephi’s teeth flashed with a grin. “Ah … Little Emily! Come on
out,
sweet thing!” He threw his head back and howled with laughter, the sound echoing off the canyon walls. “Brother Nephi’s got a
surprise
for you!”
I pressed my lips together, hoping I would not vomit.
Suddenly, the lights went off in the cockpit, returning Brother Nephi to a moving bit of darkness. Satisfied in his urge to scavenge, he had thrown the master switch and now was returning to the greater task of dealing with us. He stretched, surveyed the canyon walls, and said, “Fire up that backhoe, Manti.”
“But I got to watch the rocks, like you said.”
“No,
I’ll
do that. You get that bucket raised and start crushing that cockpit. Come
on,
man. Use your
head.
All our hard work to build this kingdom, and you think I’m going to give it up over a little screwup like this?” He laughed, a big high-pitched howl of mirth. “That big guy from the university dug us up those bones. Dug ‘em up all pretty, just like George said he would. Saved us the trouble.” Suddenly, his voice was hard with rage. “Of course you had to bust them all to hell with the backhoe getting them out!” His voice calmed again with disturbing swiftness as he continued, talking to himself now, soothing himself: “But we got enough. We got enough. Smeely’s gonna do us. Don’t need that George anymore nohow, no sir; ol’ Nephi’s gonna be fine … .”
The last piece of the puzzle snapped into place. Brother Nephi had ransacked George’s house to find the name of his sales contact, not me. But by then, I knew enough to be dangerous. I had left my motel room before they could find me there, and then had seen Nephi and Smeely together. I had to be eliminated. And now I had delivered Ray to the same fate.
Nephi’s voice snapped again with anger. “So what you waiting for, Manti? You think we can just leave this hulk out here for the cops to find? We got to get this thing buried!”
“But what if they bring another helicopter? They’ll see my spoils pile,” Manti replied, advancing his first quick thought of the evening.
Nephi moved over to the truck. “You ain’t making no pile of dirt, brother. You’re gonna crush that chopper and push it up against the rocks. Then I’m gonna have me a little fun with some of this fine C-four.”
Explosives!
Brother Nephi was going to tumble the pile of rocks onto the helicopter. We had to move, and move quickly.
As soon as he starts that backhoe, we’ll have the cover of noise … .
Nephi hoisted a box out of the pickup bed and moved up onto the rocks toward us, as if he somehow knew where we were perched. It was time to move, but where?
He set down the box. I heard a match strike, saw a flare. His bony face was again visible, eyes aimed straight our way, glowing like embers as he cupped his tiny fire in his hand to stifle the gentle breeze that still rose up the canyon. With the cooling of the desert night and the coming storm, the air would soon condense and flow downward, and with it, our scent; but for now, the sweet smell of marijuana curled past my nostrils. For all his bravado, Brother Nephi was calming his nerves.
“Nephi!” came a new voice, low and urgent. “This ain’t no time for visions!”
I glanced down the canyon. A scrawny woman was arriving,
leading two small hounds. Their approach had been unnervingly quiet.
“Hush, woman!” Nephi replied, and then, in the most reasonable of tones, he informed her, “Heavenly Father revealed the need for me to smoke. Wouldst thou question His word?”
“No … .”
He laughed unkindly. “Besides, this joint is laced with the power of angels.”
Angel dust. Quiet dogs, high-powered rifles, and people who move like specters through the dark. They lived off the grid, just as Not Tom had said, without the decadent support of electricity. They knew the dark intimately, were at ease in it. The light of a single match was brilliant to them. They knew this terrain as if by braille—knew its every rock and hollow without seeing—and were used to moving through it in the darkest night.
Ray squeezed my hand, gave it a tiny tug. I swiveled around and pointed toward a notch in the cliff above us. We could brace ourselves in there while we searched for a route up over the canyon rim, and pray that the explosives did not knock us loose.
We eased our ways up over the rocks, slithering like snakes, hesitant to breathe for fear of being heard. Beneath us, the dogs started sniffing. One yelped. I glanced down over a boulder as we slid past it. The dog was sniffing inside my abandoned helmet, had caught my scent, pulled toward the rock pile.
Ray swung into the notch. There was a tumble of rocks leading to within six feet of the top. We could get out! He climbed onto the top and lifted himself up onto the capstone of the canyon and motioned for me to follow, but I knew that his move had taken more strength than I could hope to muster. I ran my earth-chilled hands up over the rough surface of the rock in search of hand- and foot-holds. I found none. The
dogs barked and scratched, their sharp claws skidding as they climbed the rocks. I reached, praying to the gods of the rocks and the sky to lift me.
Ray’s hands closed around my wrists. He gave three small tugs, a deft message that said, Jump on the count of three. I looked up. He crouched above me with his chin almost down to the rock, his arms making up the distance I could not reach. I eased my feet to the highest clefts I could find, tugged once, twice, and, on three, jumped. He lifted with amazing force, fell backward, and rolled silently deeper onto the top of the cliff.
He did gymnastics, too,
I thought numbly as I tumbled after him.
As I rolled my head this way and that to get my bearings, Ray whispered, “Which way?” his voice barely louder than the sigh of the wind.
“West,” I whispered.
“Which way is that?”
“Which—” At that instant, it hit me that Ray was lost. Away from his city, away from the orderly grid of streets and the mental map of his known universe, he was not oriented to the earth I knew so intimately. “But how did you shadow me through the city?” I asked.
“I could
sense
you,” he replied, painfully aware of what I was asking. “You’re a strong signal.”
I didn’t have time to consider what he meant by that. I had gotten him into this mess and it was up to me to get us back out of it. “Pay attention to the storm,” I breathed. “It’s coming from the west.” I could feel the wind now strongly in my face, the cold rip of wind that comes before the downpour. I read the clouds, gauging the time before it would be upon us. Lightning flashed. I counted one, two, three … fourteen seconds before I heard the rumble of thunder. Two miles.
A horrible rending of steel against Plexiglas and more steel told us that the bucket of the backhoe had found the helicopter.
The crushing continued rhythmically. I prayed that they had removed the bodies first.
I tugged Ray’s hand and we began to rise, ready to scuttle over the uneven surface. I could see the far lights of civilization to one side of the nearest storm cell, distant pinpoints of hope.
Lightning flashed again, momentarily bleaching the landscape.
Ray jerked me downward. We dropped flat onto the rock, balling ourselves behind a ledge of stone. I squeezed my eyes shut again, willing my retinas to reset and read the darkness. Opened them, saw what he had seen: the sharp, unnatural silhouette of a rifle flicking across the skyline. The eerie shapes of one, two more hunters were closing on us from perhaps one hundred yards away. They moved closer. Two more rifles, in the hands of a slender boy and a woman with billowing skirts. And, like their kin in the canyon below, they were horrifyingly silent, unheard even with the wind behind them. I wondered how many more were out there, and from what direction they would come.
More of Nephi’s insurance
, I thought bitterly. They had circled around to the west of the cliffs, taking up positions where the ground opened up. A third one appeared, another woman, or perhaps yet a girl.
I tugged Ray’s hand to the north, toward the cover of more rocks, and we moved like crabs, barely lifting our faces from the stone, praying that we would not be betrayed by another flash of lightning. I found a crack that ran across the cliff top and I dropped down into it. Ray followed. Grit blew into my eyes. The crack widened, sinking to a merciful three feet deep, but it was full of sharp stones and the stinging spines of cacti. I clamped my teeth and moved along on my hands and knees, stifling the desire to gasp, to weep, to howl at my misery and fear.
The crack led down into deeper and deeper cover, until we
were able to crouch, pitting our shod feet instead of tender flesh against the desert’s cruelties, but the spines of cacti continued to find their ways through my thin athletic shoes. Something moved under my hand. A snake? A lizard? A rock tilted under one foot, wrenching my ankle to the left. I froze until it stabilized, listened above for sounds of our pursuers, moved onward.
I rechecked my bearings. The crack was guiding us toward the east-facing rim, back toward the wide basin of the Morrison, but north of the canyon where our helicopter lay broken like the fragile bird it was. I willed the crack to swing farther northward, farther from the mouth of the canyon, but I knew in my heart that it would not, that it would instead follow the forces of the earth that had formed it, straight as an arrow. It at last met the cliff face in a chimney of rock three or four feet wide, through which rose the scent of the shale below. I turned, waited until I felt Ray’s breath against my cheek. “We can get down here,” I whispered.
“How?” Ray whispered back. We could both see the drop. Too far to jump without being heard, and no certainty of the softness of our landing.
“Put your back against one wall, feet against the other. Like this.” I jammed myself into the chimney, pushing hard against the opposite side with my feet, and began to walk downward. My shirt quickly rode up, exposing my back to the teeth of the thousand sharp grains that jutted from the stone.
As I reached the bottom, thirty feet below, I arched my head skyward and searched for Ray’s shape. In the next flash of distant lightning, I saw the silhouette of his head and shoulders as he leaned out over the top of the chimney. It occurred to me only then that he might be afraid of heights.
I willed him to descend. Urged him with all my heart.
I saw him twist his head backward, listening, a shape of darkness picked out against the stars that were now being eaten
by the overreaching clouds. He tensed, looked downward, hesitated. One leg swung out, and then the other. He began to ease downward.