Canyon Sacrifice

by Graham, Scott

  He shrank from her when she raised her arm. But, as she’d done hundreds of times over the years they’d been together, she merely cupped the back of his neck in the palm of her hand. Her touch was just as he remembered it, both firm and pliant, as if in the simple act of reaching out to him she was both asserting herself and offering herself to him.

  She drew his face to hers and kissed him.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  4:30 a.m.

  Even as Chuck told himself to pull away, he gave himself up to the kiss, and to Rachel. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him, the heat of her lips on his a miniature sun at his center.

  Rachel’s kiss was searching, questioning. Authoritative, too, as if she was laying down a marker with it, communicating something to him.

  As quickly as she’d brought her mouth to his, Rachel drew back. But she kept her hand at the back of his neck, her face inches from him. “Chuck,” she said softly. She looked down, then up at him again, the movement of her head barely discernible in the dark. She swept her fingers up his neck and caressed the side of his head. “Hmm,” she murmured, a single falling note, a goodbye—to him, to all they’d shared as a couple.

  He considered various answers, came up with nothing, and settled on the truth. “I’m scared.”

  She dropped her hand. “You should be,” she replied.

  Just like that, Chuck was back, rooted in the present, and rooted in the realization that Rachel was right, that it was okay for him to be frightened, that he should be frightened. On the heels of that realization came awareness—he loved Janelle and the girls, and if he couldn’t spend his life with them, his life wouldn’t be worth living.

  And finally, he realized, dawn was coming far too quickly.

  Unsure how much Rachel could see of his eyes in the light filtering from the accident scene, he looked away. He remembered how easily he’d found himself telling Rachel his ridiculous idea of Janelle’s possible involvement in Carmelita’s kidnapping. If he kept talking with Rachel now, it wouldn’t be long before he’d find himself telling her about his plan to make the exchange at the festival site alone, even after Donald’s killing.

  “What is it?” Rachel asked, her eyes seeking his.

  “Clock’s ticking,” he replied simply.

  He looked past her at the accident scene and was startled to find that the ranger who’d been standing at Amelia’s side was headed up the drainage in Rachel’s wake, approaching the point where Desert View Drive cut across the wash. The ranger put a hand to his eyes below the brim of his hat, shielding the bright lights behind him and looking ahead.

  Chuck pointed at the oncoming ranger. “They’re worried about you.”

  She glanced over her shoulder, then back. “So what.”

  He took Rachel’s hand, the one that had brought his lips to hers, and held it as he studied her silhouette. “I have to go.”

  Rachel leaned toward him and spoke into his ear. “Find her, Chuck,” she said.

  “I will,” he told her. “For you. And for my wife.”

  “For the two of us.” Rachel stepped back, and Chuck felt the warmth of her smile in the darkness.

  He let go of Rachel’s hand and headed back up the creek bed at a ground-eating lope, guided once again by the night-vision goggles. The cool breeze poured past him, an invisible fog that filled him with foreboding.

  He continued a few hundred yards up the wash before climbing from the drainage and running eastward through the forest, Janelle’s voice playing over and over again in his mind. “I told myself you were the one,” she’d said. “I willed myself to believe it.” Rather than appreciate his new family, Chuck had taken to running from them each and every morning. He’d made the leap all too easily to paranoia, to wondering if his wife could be involved in her own daughter’s disappearance. He flushed with shame. What kind of person was he?

  He was on a path leading straight to where his father had ended up—alone and forgotten.

  He looked through the trees to the eastern sky, brightening with the coming day. He was not his father. Janelle and the girls were not a burden, not something to be discarded the way his father had discarded him. Janelle and the girls were Chuck’s life. For their lives to continue together, he had to win Carmelita’s freedom, had to focus on the here and now—including figuring out how, in light of the accident, Miguel would manage to get past Pipe Creek to reach the music festival site, particularly with Carmelita in tow. One possibility was Hansen Conover. If Hansen was working with Miguel, the junior ranger could get Carmelita’s father past the wreck on Desert View Drive. Or perhaps Miguel was already waiting with Carmelita at the festival site. Or he’d hidden Carmelita somewhere else and would expect Chuck to hand over the necklaces in return for disclosing her whereabouts.

  Chuck kept his eyes on the forest floor directly ahead of him and worked to keep his speed up, concentrating on getting to the festival site as quickly as possible to size things up before daylight arrived. He maintained his pace through the forest until, as best he could determine, he was roughly even with the site. He turned north, toward the canyon. The ponderosa forest gave way to scattered piñons and junipers as he neared the canyon rim. The scrubby trees, bent and twisted by the nearly constant winds that blew up and out of the canyon, rose no more than thirty feet above the broad swath of yucca and sage that marked the canyon’s edge.

  He reached Desert View Drive and found he’d judged well; he was a hundred yards beyond the turnoff from the road to the festival site. He crossed the empty roadway and crept from tree to tree toward the edge-of-the-canyon drop-off a quarter mile away.

  The eastern sky glowed bluish gray. A handful of stars shone overhead. Chuck left the goggles behind on the ground, unwilling to risk the slight sound of unzipping his pack to stow them inside.

  He stifled his breathing and stuck to patches of sand and smooth expanses of rock until, fifty yards ahead, rising at the lip of the canyon, the roof structure over the festival performance stage emerged above the tops of the low trees. The dying night sky framed the metal roof, held aloft by thick, peeled-log posts.

  Chuck made his way to the eight-foot, chain-link fence that enclosed the site on three sides, all the way to the canyon rim. Beneath the prowed roof, the open rear of the performance stage was separated from the canyon only by a waist-high metal railing. Several hundred blue fiberglass seats, bolted to concrete risers, half-encircled the stage to create an intimate amphitheater providing views of performances and, through the unwalled back of the stage, the abyss of the canyon beyond. A pair of flat-roofed, single-story storage buildings sat close beside one another behind the seating area, separating the amphitheater from a large gravel parking lot.

  The festival site was a perfect example of federal money sloshing around until it found a home. A decade ago, a loose consortium of musical groups out of Flagstaff had convinced local politicians and park-service officials in D.C. that the national park, always struggling for funds, could earn some extra cash by hosting a local music festival each year to attract visitors to the canyon from among the park’s local populace. The feel-good idea had gained ground quickly, prompting the musicians and park officials to team up and select the rim-hugging site east of the village for the proposed festival amphitheater.

  Upon the public announcement of the site’s selection, the tribal elder serving as president of the Navajo tribe declared the site sacred. Developing the site, he said, would amount to sacrilege. Chuck recalled that Jonathan and Elise Marbury had supported the tribal president, whose contention threatened the entire music-fest proposal until someone in D.C. suggested offering the Navajo tribe’s wholly-owned construction company, Diné Constructors, a no-bid contract to build the amphitheater at the site. The tribal president’s concerns about the site’s sacredness faded away with the signing of the lucrative contract, and a hurriedly approved federal grant funded the facility’s construction by the tribe.

  The musicians who had pushed fo
r the festival’s creation played the new amphitheater for a few years, posting impressive videos of their cliff-side performances online, before losing interest in making the lengthy drive from Flagstaff to play before what turned out to be minuscule festival audiences. After the initial acts moved on, the festival’s executive director struggled to find new acts to fill the bill because the federal grant that had paid for the amphitheater’s construction stipulated that only local acts could play it. The festival continued for a couple more years as the tiny crowds dwindled further. The festival took a “one-year hiatus” that had stretched on for four, leaving the site abandoned and bleaching beneath the high-desert sun.

  Chuck peered through the fence into the amphitheater. In the murky gray of pre-dawn, he spotted no movement on the stage or in the seating area. No light came from the windows set in the concrete-block walls of the twin storage buildings at the rear of the amphitheater. The site’s gravel parking lot was empty. The only sound was that of the strengthening morning breeze coursing through the branches of the piñons and junipers outside the perimeter fence.

  Three outward-leaning strands of barbed wire atop the fence made clambering up and over the chain-link barrier impossible. The site’s entrance gate, also eight feet high and topped by barbed wire, was closed by a length of looped and locked chain where the entry drive reached the gravel lot.

  Chuck’s goal was to be hidden and waiting somewhere inside the festival site before the kidnapper or kidnappers showed up. He followed the perimeter fence to the edge of the cliff at the east end of the festival site, hoping to swing around the far side of the fence and into the site where the fence met the lip of the canyon. Rather than come to an end at the top of the cliff, however, the perimeter fence made a 180-degree turn out and over the precipice, topped by three tilted strands of barbed wire, to end bolted into the rock face eight feet below the top of the cliff.

  The cliff itself extended without a break from the east perimeter fence past the rear of the open performance stage to the west perimeter fence, which also was bolted out and over the edge of the cliff fifty yards away. The waist-high railing at the back of the stage followed the top of the cliff both directions until it connected up with the two ends of the perimeter fence. A sandy shelf, dotted with boulders and brush, extended from the base of the uppermost, hundred-foot cliff horizontally for thirty feet before a second cliff plunged deeper into the shadow-filled canyon.

  Chuck could attempt to enter the site by climbing down one side of the inverted fence and up the other, using the cliff face for traction to overcome the tilted strands of barbed wire, but doing so would require him to negotiate the strands of wire while hanging a hundred feet off the ground. Before he could decide if he was capable of such a maneuver, he heard a car approaching along Desert View Drive from the direction of the village. The vehicle slowed, turned onto the gravel road leading to the festival site, and headed his way.

  His decision made for him, he clambered down the links of the overhanging fence as fast as he dared. He dropped his feet below the base of the inverted fence and lowered himself until he dangled from its bottom, his hands positioned between barbs on the lowest strand of wire. He pivoted his body and reached blindly upward with his left hand to begin his climb up the inside of the fence, scrabbling with his feet on the cliff wall. His hand closed over a barb on one of the strands of wire, reopening the wound on his palm. Stifling a cry of pain, he repositioned his left hand and hauled himself upward, grabbing the chain-link fence above the strands of barbed wire with his right hand. He pulled himself hand over hand up the inside of the fence, his injured palm throbbing, until his feet regained their purchase on the bottom of the inverted section of fence.

  He clung to the fence, struggling for breath, and edged his head above the top of the cliff in time to catch sight of the oncoming car as it raced up the entrance road toward the festival site. The vehicle, visible in the growing daylight behind the beams of its headlights, was Robert Begay’s hulking white Suburban.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  5:30 a.m.

  The headlights of Robert’s car swept across the parking lot. Chuck ducked his head below the top of the cliff, holding on to the inverted fence, his heart pounding. He waited for the Suburban to come to a stop at the entrance to the site and for Robert to climb out and unlock the gate. Instead, however, the already speeding vehicle accelerated further. Gravel spewed and a solid crunch echoed across the festival site as the Suburban smashed through the chained entrance.

  Chuck poked his head up in time to see the Suburban tear across the gravel lot with the gate, ripped free of its moorings, draped across the car’s hood. The instant Robert’s car disappeared behind the storage buildings at the rear of the amphitheater, Chuck scrambled up and over the top of the cliff. He ducked between the bars of the waist-high railing at the edge of the precipice and sprinted around the amphitheater, his daypack slapping his back. The Suburban skidded to a stop out of sight on the far side of the buildings, sending the gate clanging to the ground. Chuck flattened himself face-first against the wall of the nearest of the two concrete-block buildings and listened, trembling, as a pair of car doors opened, then slammed shut.

  He tilted his head to peek through a window in the side of the building as snippets of conversation reached him over the sound of the car’s still-idling engine. He leaned his head farther, aligning his view through the window with another window set in the rear wall of the storage building to allow a distorted view of the parking lot. Peering through the two windows, he saw a man standing in front of the Suburban, his back to Chuck.

  Chuck caught most of the words as the man said with a Latino accent, “I won’t do nothing of the sort, cabron . . . do as you’re told . . . give her back . . . you and me both know . . .”

  A second man, facing Chuck, spoke: “You, you, you . . . you’re the one who . . .”

  Chuck gasped. The man was Marvin, not Robert, Begay.

  Stunned, Chuck gripped the lower frame of the window for support. He watched as the young tribal official raised a pistol and aimed it at the Latino man. Even in the half-light of dawn, Chuck saw that Marvin’s eyes displayed callous indifference.

  The Latino man spoke with more force: “You’re out of your mind . . . never let you . . . can’t even . . .”

  “You don’t get it,” Marvin replied. His voice was flat, in-flectionless. “There’s no way you can understand, understand, understand.”

  The Latino man held out his hand and stepped toward Marvin. “You have no idea what you’re doing.” His voice was stern and controlled, yet vibrating with rage. “Give it to me, to me, right now. Do I have to—”

  Marvin’s hand twitched and a gunshot sounded, the same sharp, small-caliber crack as at the railroad wye. A puff of smoke rose from the barrel of Marvin’s pistol. He fired a second shot, then a third.

  The Latino man grunted. He stumbled backward and fell, out of Chuck’s sight, to the gravel surface of the parking lot.

  Chuck ducked away from the aligned windows before Marvin looked up from the downed man. Swinging his pack to the ground, Chuck clawed inside it until he came up with Donald’s .45. A door to the Suburban creaked open, the car’s engine died, and the door closed. A second door opened. Quaking with fear, Chuck looked back through the two windows in time to see Marvin wrench Carmelita from the back seat of the Suburban.

  “Come on, you,” Marvin commanded. Carmelita leaned against him, her eyes closed. Marvin shook her by the arm, causing her to open her eyes.

  “You’re hurting me!” she cried.

  “Shut it,” Marvin said. He hauled Carmelita by the elbow toward the amphitheater, his pistol in his free hand. The two disappeared from Chuck’s view. Their footsteps crunched on gravel as they crossed the parking lot to the walkway that led between the storage buildings and into the amphitheater.

  Chuck scrambled along the opposite side of the building and emerged at the back of the amphitheater seating area, Donald’s gun
in hand. He readied himself for the instant Marvin and Carmelita would come into view at the rear of the amphitheater. Then he remembered: he’d never reloaded Donald’s gun after emptying it at the railroad wye.

  Before Marvin and Carmelita exited the passageway, Chuck fled back around the building, his pack in one hand and the .45 in the other. Behind the building, he came upon the Latino man sprawled on his back in the gravel parking lot. Chuck did not recognize the man, whose arms and legs were askew, his head cocked to one side. The man was in his early thirties. He wore bright white sneakers, low-slung jeans, and a loose dress shirt opened to expose a pair of gold chains around his neck. Three crimson spots blossomed through the silky fabric of his shirt, forming a bloody triangle in the center of his chest.

  Chuck hurried to the man’s side. A glance at the passageway between the buildings told him the angle was such that he could not see all the way down the passage to the amphitheater, and was likewise shielded from Marvin’s view. Chuck dropped his pack and Donald’s gun, knelt over the downed man, and put his fingers to the man’s neck, searching for a pulse but finding none.

  The man’s eyes were open and unblinking, adding to the look of surprise on his brown, clean-shaven face. Blood, dark red in the early-morning light, spread slowly through the gravel from beneath his body. Chuck dug his fingers deeper into the man’s neck but still failed to pick up a pulse. The only sounds were the low moan of the morning wind and the ticking of the Suburban’s engine as it cooled.

  Chuck tugged the neck of the man’s dress shirt to one side. There, running along the man’s collarbone, was a string of Chinese letters in the fashion of bold brush strokes. Chuck pulled the neck of the shirt the other direction, uncovering a second string of matching Chinese letters tattooed on the man’s collarbone. Chuck returned his fingers to Miguel’s neck. Nothing. The girls’ father was dead.

  Chuck rose. Should he attempt to ease open one of the Suburban’s doors and call for help on the radio? Would the arrival of the park’s ranger corps at the festival site convince Marvin to give up? Or would the rangers’ arrival make matters worse?