The Same End (The Lamb and the Lion Book 3)

by Gregory Ashe

  “I’m really not—”

  “Eat it, and finish the hash brown that you desecrated by asking for no salt, or I’m shaving your head and painting a butt on it.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  Jem raised his eyebrows as he pulled out his phone.

  After a moment, still watching Jem, Tean took a bite of biscuit. “Who are you calling?”

  “Russell.”

  “Who’s Russell?”

  “The kid from the lodge.” Jem held the phone to his ear.

  “Pinyon-Pine Lodge. This is Linda.”

  “Yes, hi, I’m trying to get in touch with Russell.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. Russell’s not working right now. He’s on his video games, I bet.”

  “I bet I’m talking to Russell’s mom,” Jem said.

  “That’s right. And who’s this?”

  “I don’t think you know me; my name’s Jem. I’m one of Russell’s friends—well, we met at the lodge, and he seems like a good guy. I wanted to invite him to go on a hike with me and my friends.”

  “Oh. Oh. Well, yes. Russell would absolutely love to do that. Yes, that would be fantastic. He’s such a nice young man, but he just has trouble meeting the right kind of friends. They’re all online. I think some of them might be foreign.”

  Jem struggled to keep his eyes from rolling out of his head. “Yes, he is a very nice young man.”

  “And a little sun would do him a world of good. It’s the Vitamin D, you know.”

  “Yes, some sun would definitely do him some good.”

  “I’m so glad you hit it off. I think his sense of humor puts people off. He’s such a jokester.”

  “Yes, he does have a very good sense of humor.”

  “Jim—” Nerves twisted her voice. “Jim, are there going to be any girls on this trip?”

  “Well, I don’t want to lie to you. But I promise we have a chaperone. Brother Jefferson will be there.”

  “Uh huh, uh huh, yes, well, I just worry about Russell and girls. He gets his heart smashed into a million pieces by blond girls. I don’t know if the poor boy can take it anymore.”

  “Yes, I will make sure he doesn’t get his heart broken by any blond girls.” To Tean, he whispered, “Why blond girls?”

  Tean scratched fingers through Jem’s hair. “Because blonds are evil.”

  Slapping away Tean’s hand, Jem scowled. He pulled down the visor and checked himself in the mirror as Linda said, “I’ll get him right now.”

  “What the hell?” Jem whispered to Tean when the line went quiet. “You’re a real jerk.”

  “I’m a morally bankrupt homosexual.”

  “Why can’t you be the fun kind that just cares about ass play and bonking? Jesus, Tean, now I’m going to walk around all day looking like you and Scipio played beauty parlor with me.”

  With a tiny smile, Tean reached past Jem to open the glovebox. He held up a sandalwood comb. “Emergency comb. Just like you taught me.”

  “You’re still a jerk,” Jem said, snatching the comb.

  “Hail Satan,” Russell said on the phone.

  “Russell, it’s Jem.”

  “Who?”

  Jem eyed the part in his hair, trying to repair the damage. “Your buddy from the other night. You wouldn’t help me check in for my bachelor party, remember?”

  “What the heaven?”

  “Is this the part where I’m supposed to ask what that means, and you tell me that because you worship the Dark Lord, you use heaven and angels as swear words?”

  After a moment, something scuffed across the mouthpiece on the other end of the call, and Russell mumbled, “We still say fuck too.”

  “Listen, I need to know where this guy Jager lives. He’s local. He works for the BLM. Some sort of special-agent spooge.”

  “I’m hanging up,” Russell said.

  “I’ll ask your mom to help me set you up on a blind date.” Jem drew the comb smoothly through his hair and added, “With a brunette.”

  “God bless you.”

  “Thank you. What do you say?”

  “I need to think about it.”

  “Great, stay on the line while you’re doing your thinking. My friend wants to talk to you about this absurdist play where everybody is a giant cupcake and they cannibalize each other at the end.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?” Tean asked.

  “No,” Russell said, a little too quickly.

  “Help me out here, Russell.”

  “He’s got a cabin on BLM land. It’s up past Porcupine Rim. That’s where he lives.”

  “What does he drive?”

  “He’s got a jeep and a truck.”

  “Keep going.”

  “It’s a BLM jeep; you can’t miss it.”

  “And the truck?”

  “A white one. Small. That’s all I know.”

  “Thank you, Russell. Now, are you sure you don’t want to go hiking?”

  Russell was still ranting when Jem disconnected.

  “Well?” Tean said.

  “Something about dark angels and infernal masters and having my guts pulled out through my pucker.”

  “Sounds like a level-ten cosmic orgasm.”

  Jem had to fight to hide the smile.

  The GPS showed Porcupine Rim and a forest service road. They headed out of Moab and into the pinyon-pine and juniper wilderness. By day, Jem had to admit, this corner of the world was impressive. He’d seen so much of it by night that he was shocked by the vibrant colors: rock red in places, orange, but also pink and tan. In one spot, grayish green. In another, a black that might have been blue. Scrubby shrubs and brush somehow found a way to live in this hard land. Dusty green bristled across buttes and mesas.

  They drove up into the mountains, and the landscape shifted around them: more pines, fewer scrubby junipers. The road was dirt, and a plume of dust followed them. When they crossed a cattle guard, the bars singing out under the Ford, a wooden sign welcomed them to Manti-La Sal National Forest. North of them, a valley spread out below the mountain, a blanket of scrub running toward another line of red cliffs.

  Jem glanced at Tean, about to say something, and then forgot whatever it was. Tean’s eyes were wide and bright. His mouth was serious, but his eyes always gave him away—whatever it was out here that he touched or that touched him, whatever it was that transformed him, whatever it was that, once or twice, Jem had felt too. Jem had visited a grandmother once—his or someone else’s, he wasn’t sure because he’d been too young to really understand—and he remembered being left alone with a prism. He hadn’t known the name for it then. He liked the way light played through it. The old woman had put Barney on TV, and the music had played in the background, and he’d turned the glass in his hand until it caught the sun. Then the glass and the sun became one, a piece of living fire, the whole world burning in a crystal vessel. And then he’d turned the prism again, and the fire was gone.

  Jem tried to find it, but he saw only red rock, dust, the broken branches of an aspen.

  “What is it?” Jem asked, voice sounding rough and too loud.

  Tean shivered before he answered. “What do you—”

  “Whatever it is you’re seeing out here.”

  A long moment passed. “The light. The sky. The rock. Life, even though it seems impossible. And even more impossible, that it finds a way to be beautiful.”

  “Can you show me?”

  Tean slowed the truck. Then they stopped altogether. “I don’t know. I’ve never tried that before.”

  Jem licked his lips. His throat was suddenly very dry.

  “Part of it’s what you bring with you,” Tean said slowly. “Inside you, I mean. Isaiah talks about the desert. He says God stretches out the line of confusion upon it, the stones of emptiness. It’s the land of owls and ravens, dragons and ostriches, the bittern and the cormorant. It’s some of that. The stones of emptines
s.” He was quiet for a moment and said, “There’s something in that phrase that I understand, even if I can’t put it into words.”

  More silence, broken only by the engine’s rumble. Jem nodded.

  Wiping the corners of his mouth, Tean seemed to struggle for the next part. “The Lakota believe that a spiritual landscape exists within the physical landscape. That the physical is, in a sense, the spiritual. That the divine or the transcendent, whatever we want to call it, is immanent, infused in the rock and the trees and the air. It’s in the hoodoo stones, the spires, the sandstone fins, the quicksand washes, the goblins, the balancing rocks. Even the badlands. When we go somewhere physical, we go somewhere spiritual as well. And for me, out here, it’s that the desert is so strange. It’s alien. It might as well be Mars. And that strangeness helps me remember that the world is strange, that there’s so much to wonder at, so many things we don’t understand but that we come into contact with every day. It’s good to be reminded of that, I think. We take the world for granted. We look past it and through it. The desert makes you stop and really look, really see.” He hesitated. “And the strangeness of it is an analogue, I think. For me. I look at it, and I don’t understand it, but somehow I’m part of it and not, all at the same time. That’s what I mean about the spiritual landscape. The desert reminds me of how I feel around people: I can see them, touch them, be right up next to them, and I know I’m part of their world, but at the same time I’m not.”

  And for a moment, Jem glimpsed it: the talus, the striped sandstone, the scrub brush, the broken rimrock. He’d been staring at the same things for days, and now it was like seeing them afresh. It was more than that. It was like seeing a new world, everything for the first time. He remembered, once, getting high and saying the word drawer again and again, until the sounds had become something beyond a word. This was like that, only without the weed, and it made his heart thump in his chest and his eyes sting.

  “I’m not explaining it very well,” Tean said. “And I guess that sounds really weird.”

  Blinking rapidly, Jem heard the scratchiness in his own voice as he said, “It’s not weird. Everyone feels that way, at least sometimes.” He cleared his throat. “It’s called being human.”

  Tean glanced over, and he must have seen some of it in Jem’s face, because he smiled, and that was new and strange and wonderful too.

  They found the cabin after trying several dead ends: trailheads, campsites, a defile that snaked between columns of stone. Then they came around a bend, the dust fanning out behind them, and spotted the small structure of logs and chinking. The chimney had a dangerous-looking tilt to it, and it was made of sandstone and shale that was the same color as the cliffs. Thin curtains hung in the windows. The jeep was parked under an aluminum awning—protection against the sun more than anything else.

  “No truck,” Jem said, scanning the land surrounding the cabin: rock, rock, rock, hey—scrub oak. “Why the hell would somebody live up here?”

  “Lots of reasons, I think, but the top two are probably loving nature and wanting people to leave them alone.”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to let you move off into some weird cabin and grow a gross beard and raise my goddog in a place like this.”

  Tean smiled as he parked the truck and killed the engine. “Noted.”

  They got out of the truck. The heat and the dry air made Jem feel like a leaf caught in an updraft. They made their way to the cabin. Jem unfolded the tube sock from his pocket, filled it with rocks, and joined Tean on the porch. He took up position to one side of the door and nodded. Tean knocked.

  The sound echoed over the valley and died into silence.

  “What now?”

  “What would a morally bankrupt homosexual do?”

  Tean’s eyes narrowed. “A morally bankrupt homosexual would be thinking about putting a gopher snake in someone else’s bed. They look like rattlesnakes.”

  “You know what?”

  A pair of crazy, bushy eyebrows rose into arches.

  “I’m going to be very nice to you,” Jem said.

  “That would be a pleasant change.”

  Jem headed around the side of the cabin. The foundation was a cement slab that looked like it had been mixed, poured, leveled, and finished by hand. The building itself showed the same characteristics: logs cut with hand saws, raw-edged wood that had been sanded down by time, and unevenly applied adobe chinking. Even the windows looked ancient and custom glazed: thin, wavy glass that threw back funhouse reflections of the high desert, gaping maws of red stone and spears of blue sky.

  “It’d be easy to get in through one of those.”

  “This place is practically an antique,” Tean said. “We’re not going to cause permanent damage.” He hesitated. “Unless we have to.”

  Behind the cabin, a patch of dirt had been cleared of brush and scrub. Toward the trail, a scraggly pair of pines, their leaves tinged yellow, offered the illusion of privacy. Something that looked like a wooden trellis, but without anything growing on it, provided a patch of shade over a picnic table and two benches. Beyond that, dirt gave way to slickrock, and rock gave way to the sheer drop of a cliff.

  “I’d love to have a ramada,” Tean said, looking at the trellis thing. “I guess you have to have a yard first.”

  “Really?” Jem asked as he circled around, passing under the aluminum wing of the awning.

  “Well, I can’t put it in my living room.”

  “No.” Jem peered into the jeep: polarized sunglasses on the dash, a fly-rod case and tackle box on the back seat, socks stuffed into boots in the passenger foot well, a half-unwrapped roll of Tums in the cup holder. “You’d like one of those things?”

  “I think so.” Tean moved around to the passenger side of the jeep, and he disappeared when he bent down to inspect something. His voice carried under the vehicle. “I like being outside, and you can be outside in Utah most of the year as long as you have decent shade. I could have a grill. I could read my books. I could throw a ball for Scipio. I could imagine heat death and the end of the universe.”

  “I can build you one. A ramada, I mean. Not a universe.” Jem jiggled the jeep’s handle. “I could probably build one of those too, I guess, but it’d be a lot of trouble.”

  Tean made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a laugh.

  “Excuse me?”

  “No, I was just remembering that I hadn’t refilled the birdfeeder you made me.”

  “It’s a good birdfeeder. It’s supposed to have a lot of holes in the bottom. That’s where the birds get their seeds.”

  “Jem.”

  “And the walls aren’t supposed to meet exactly square because it’s, um, abstract.”

  “Jem, come here.”

  When Jem rounded the jeep, Tean was on his knees, glasses balanced precariously on the tip of his nose as he inspected the passenger front tire. “Can you pull up those pictures of the tire impressions we saw by Blake’s body?”

  Jem pulled up the images and passed Tean the phone. After a moment’s consideration, Tean passed it back. Rocking onto his heels, he pointed at a tread halfway down the tire, near the outer rim, and said, “What do you think?”

  “It’s definitely distinctive; cheap-ass tires, obviously, because a chunk of the rubber is just gone.” Jem glanced at the pictures. “The tracks have the same defect. It’s a match.”

  “Maybe,” Tean said.

  “It has to be. He had Blake’s necklace. Now we have tire tracks that put him in the valley, within twenty yards of where we found Blake’s body. It has to be him.”

  “I think so too,” Tean said, snapping pictures of the tire with his phone. “But they’ll need to do a full comparison. The good news is that tire impressions can be used fairly reliably to identify a specific vehicle. Can you send me the pictures from the creek?”

  Jem did. As Tean tapped
a few more times on his screen, Jem said, “Are you sending those to Ammon?”

  “I will. Once we’re finished here.”

  Nodding, Jem rose and gave Tean a hand up. They finished their circuit of the cabin, and Jem went up to the porch again. He knelt, fished out his picks, and eyed the ancient lock. “This should be easy unless he’s got a bar or a deadbolt on the inside; if he does, we’ll have to try the back door.” But when Jem braced an arm against the wood, the door swung open before he even had a chance to set the picks in the lock.

  Jem first, then Tean. Inside, the cabin consisted of two rooms: a large open space that combined kitchen, bedroom, and living area; and a bathroom barely big enough for a toilet, sink and shower stall. The sink hung over the toilet, and Jem figured Jager had cracked his elbow on it plenty of times. Jem didn’t have a lot of firsthand experiences with cabins, but this place more or less fit what he’d imagined: a spindle-back bench draped with wool blankets that had been woven in brightly colored geometric designs; a bed with a sagging mattress, the sheets done with hospital corners; a porcelain sink webbed with orange cracks, two Corelle plates banded with an olive-green pattern resting against the side. The only item that looked relatively new was the wood stove in the corner. The heat was worse inside, and the trapped air smelled like mouse droppings and old leather.

  Tean was still standing by the door. He shut it and pulled it open again, pointing. “Latch doesn’t catch.”

  “Seems strange to leave his home unlocked.”

  “Not necessarily. This is a pretty remote part of the world, and the people who choose these places also tend to be lax about social conventions. As you pointed out, locking the door wouldn’t have stopped anyone who really wanted to get in here; maybe Jager decided not to bother.”

  “Or you get the kind of people who go the other way and have tripwires and landmines and those holes with sharpened sticks at the bottom.”

  “Trapping pits.” When Jem’s head whipped around, Tean held up his hands. “I was helping.”

  “A little less help, please. Let’s see what weird shit this guy has stashed.”

  But the answer, after a solid search, seemed to be nothing. Jem tried all of his tricks: light fixtures, pipes, toe kicks, false-bottomed drawers. He removed the wall plate from the lone switch and found nothing but a dead spider and knob-and-tube wiring. They tossed the bed. They pulled the two-burner range out from the wall. While Tean checked the propane tank and its hose, Jem went over every inch of the wood stove. By the time he’d finished, he’d turned up a few scraps of photographic paper, and he’d completely ruined his Goosebumps shirt. He knelt next to the stove, trying to decipher something in the crumbling fragments.