A terrified wail rose from the amphitheater. Chuck spun away from the Suburban at Carmelita’s cry. He retrieved his pack and Donald’s gun and sprinted back along the far side of the storage building, coming to a halt just shy of the amphitheater. He set the pack on the ground and reached inside it, shoving aside the towel-wrapped sack containing the necklaces and rooting around until he came up with Donald’s extra magazine.
He stood with his back to the wall of the building, holding his breath, the gun in his right hand and the magazine, streaked with melted yogurt, in his left. The sound of two pairs of footsteps came from the direction of the performance stage, Marvin’s steps sure and steady, Carmelita’s half-dragging. The footsteps halted. Carmelita whimpered pitifully.
“I told you to shut it!” Marvin bellowed.
Chuck squeezed the magazine release button and sprung the empty magazine from the handle of Donald’s gun, sending the magazine clattering to the concrete apron that surrounded the storage building. He wiped the fresh magazine on his shirt and slid it into the gun with a well-oiled click, then slung his pack back over his shoulder and stepped around the corner of the building to the head of a side aisle leading through the seating area to the festival stage.
Marvin stood in the center of the stage with Carmelita clutched at his side. He was broad and solid. Carmelita was tiny beside him. Marvin stood with his back to the amphitheater’s seating area, looking out over the canyon through the open rear of the stage.
Chuck took a few tentative steps down the side aisle toward the foot of the stage, Donald’s .45 outstretched before him. Marvin did not move. Afraid of what Marvin might do to Carmelita if surprised, Chuck spoke.
“Let her go, Marvin,” he demanded.
Marvin pivoted to face Chuck, turning Carmelita with him. He gripped Carmelita’s elbow at his side with one hand while pressing the barrel of his slender pistol to her head with his other. The brown skin of Marvin’s wide face was tight across his cheekbones. His eyes gleamed. “Chuck,” he said, a dark smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “You came.”
“I swear to God,” Chuck said, aiming Donald’s heavy gun at Marvin’s face, “I’ll blow your brains out.”
“Now, now, Chuck. No need, need, need for anger. Besides,” Marvin gave Carmelita a shake, drawing another muted cry from her, “you won’t do any such, such, such thing.” He kept the muzzle of his pistol pressed against her temple.
Marvin had worn pressed slacks and dress shirts to every one of his meetings with Chuck throughout the two years of the transmission-line contract. This morning, however, Marvin wore moccasins, fringed leather leggings, and a long, light-colored, smock-like shirt gathered with a thick leather belt at his waist, just as he had as a youthful protester at the Marburys’ burial-shroud press conference ten years ago. A headband of red cloth pressed his close-cropped black hair to the sides of his head. He licked his lips, making an odd smacking noise. The odor of gunpowder from his just-fired gun mixed with the pungent desert smell of the morning breeze sweeping across the amphitheater.
“Chuck?” Carmelita asked. She wore her new hiking boots and favorite blue sweats. She slumped at Marvin’s side, the top of her head rising just above the tribal official’s waist. Her nearly shuttered eyelids, slack jaw, and trembling legs indicated she was drugged. Chuck hoped she had been unconscious when the Suburban had arrived at the festival site and therefore hadn’t witnessed her father’s murder.
“Shut up,” Marvin snapped at her. He yanked her roughly by the arm.
“I’m here, Carm,” Chuck told her, seeking to convey confidence he didn’t feel, given the fact that Marvin had his gun pressed to Carmelita’s head, a gun he’d used minutes ago to kill Miguel. “Everything’s gonna be okay,” Chuck continued. He took a step forward, Donald’s .45 still leveled at Marvin in the growing morning light.
“Stay where you are,” Marvin sputtered. He backed a step toward the rear of the stage, taking Carmelita with him.
“I’ve got what you want, remember?” With his free hand, Chuck took his pack from his shoulder and held it out before him. He took another step toward the stage as he did so. He was nearly to the bottom of the half-dozen stairs leading from the side aisle to the raised stage, close enough to see Marvin’s face grow cloudy with confusion.
“I’ve already got what I want,” Marvin said, glancing down at Carmelita. “What I need.” He pulled her tight to his side.
“But I have the A. Dinaveri.” Chuck gave the open pack a shake, trying to draw Marvin’s attention to it. Instead of focusing on the pack, however, Marvin’s eyes wandered away to fix on the brightening sky to the east.
“Dawn,” he said. “Sunup. Have to, have to, have to.”
“What are you talking about, Marvin? What is it you have to do?”
At the sound of his name, Marvin returned his attention to the front of the stage. He stared at Chuck as if seeing him for the first time. “What are you doing here?” he asked, eyes wide with surprise.
Marvin’s grip on Carmelita loosened and she leaned away from him. Half a foot of space opened between the two of them, enough for Chuck to consider risking a shot. Even as the idea occurred to him, however, he rejected it. Despite his expertise with a hunting rifle, he’d proven himself a lousy marksman with Donald’s heavy-triggered, hard-bucking .45 when he’d shot the pistol at the park firing range several years ago. At this distance, even with the benefit of the morning’s increasing light, he was as likely to shoot Carmelita as he was Marvin.
Chuck lifted his pack higher, attempting to hold Marvin’s attention. “The exchange, remember?” He took two more steps to the foot of the stairs leading to the stage, causing Marvin to jerk Carmelita back to his side.
Marvin’s eyes wandered to the daypack, then away. His head lolled sideways, as if he couldn’t quite control its movements. He turned to face the eastern sky, twisting Carmelita with him, his feet shuffling on the polished-concrete floor of the stage.
“Dinaveri,” he muttered, straightening his head and looking off into the distance. “Din, din, din.” Then, addressing the eastern sky, “Today. Sunup. Dawn, dawn, dawn.”
Arturo Dinaveri’s calendar, Chuck realized with a start. That was what Marvin was going on about.
According to Dinaveri, the shadow calendar discovered by the Italian archaeologist’s team at Chaco Canyon called for the Anasazi to reemerge from beneath the Colorado River here at the Grand Canyon sometime this decade. Marvin’s addled brain must somehow have settled on today for the reemergence, with dawn the most likely time for the Anasazi to come forth.
Dinaveri contended in his thesis that the reemergence would take place only if the A. Dinaveri necklace from the hidden Grand Canyon shrine was thrown into the canyon the instant the sun rose into the sky. Dinaveri claimed the necklace would serve as a suitable sacrifice to Chirsáuha, the Anasazi god of fertility, as long as it was accompanied, Chuck recalled in sudden terror, by one additional sacrifice.
When Dinaveri released his thesis in the late 1950s, archaeological teams from around the world had been busy announcing revolutionary discoveries at the sites of abandoned cities built by the Mayan Indians a thousand years ago in the jungles of southern Mexico. Capitalizing on those headlines, Dinaveri juiced the conclusion of his Anasazi thesis with the contention that, like the many human sacrifices documented in Mayan society, a human sacrifice would be required to bring forth the Anasazi from the underworld at the Grand Canyon—and not just any sacrifice, but that of a young female.
TWENTY-NINE
Dawn
Shaking with dread, Chuck took the first step up the stairs to the stage. Carmelita was thirty feet away from him, teetering against Marvin, her elbow still trapped in Marvin’s grip, her eyes closed. Chuck risked a second step up the stairs. How devoted was Marvin to Dinaveri’s sacrifice theory? Would he kill Carmelita even if he got his hands on the A. Dinaveri necklace?
Marvin dragged Carmelita backward until the pair came t
o a stop facing the amphitheater, their backs against the cliff-top railing at the rear of the open stage. Like a light turning off, the tribal official’s eyes went flat, just as they’d been when he’d shot Miguel. “Today, today, today,” Marvin said, his words disjointed, his face slackening. “Sunup, sunup, today, today, today.”
The first rays of the rising sun struck the cliffs at the top of the North Rim. Soon sunlight would flood the festival stage here at the South Rim as well, the instant Marvin’s bewildered mind must be telling him he had to sacrifice Carmelita in order to summon the long-disappeared Anasazi back to the Earth’s surface.
Chuck stared at the young Navajo official in horror. Marvin had come across as sane when they’d met in Tuba City three days ago. He had spoken coherently about the conference of tribal elders he was to have been attending in Page this very moment, and he’d discussed the upcoming deadline for the transmission-line report lucidly. But Francesca had described Marvin as crazy and getting crazier when he’d taken Carmelita from the room in Maswik Lodge a few hours ago.
Was it possible for someone to go from sane to insane in less than three days? Or did Marvin somehow see his bizarre, return-of-the-Anasazi plan as entirely logical?
“Why’d you kill Miguel and Donald?” Chuck asked, hoping the bluntness of his question would pull Marvin back from wherever he’d gone.
Light returned to Marvin’s eyes. “Your friend Donald blew it,” Marvin said, sounding for all the world like the intelligible tribal official Chuck had come to know over the past two years. “All he had to do was keep you moving in the right direction.”
“Donald was in on this?” Chuck asked in disbelief.
“He thought he was going to have all the money he needed.”
“You told him you were meeting me at the wye?”
“I let him know what you were in for, yes. He got sentimental on me. Thought he was going to put a stop to this.” Marvin waved his gun vaguely in the direction of the canyon before putting it back to Carmelita’s head.
“You murdered him, Marvin. You tried to kill me, but you killed him instead.”
Marvin’s nostrils flared. “That’s what Miguel said.”
“You murdered him, too.”
“He kept telling me I’d ruined everything. Thought he was going to jail. Wouldn’t let it go. He wanted to take the girl from me.”
“You killed Miguel and you killed Donald.”
“I did what I had to do. For my people.”
“You’re wrong, Marvin,” Chuck said. “The Diné way is the path of peace. The Diné way has nothing to do with murder.”
Marvin recoiled. “This is not about murder,” he hissed. “It’s about rebirth.” His eyes slipped from Chuck’s face and began to dim.
“No,” Chuck said quickly, fighting to keep Marvin tethered to reality—or whatever version of reality he now inhabited. “It’s about kidnapping. You stole this little girl from her mother. You kidnapped her. You and whoever else.”
Marvin’s eyes brightened in recollection. “Clarence told me about the shrine one night in Gallup, the one you found in the canyon. He was drunk, hardly knew what he was talking about. He said he didn’t know what was in it. But I knew. I’ve always known.” Marvin’s face lit up. “He kept talking. Talk, talk, talk, like always. He mentioned these people he knew in Albuquerque, Ronnie and Francesca. Lowlifes, he said. So I contacted them. Sure enough, they were willing to do what I needed done, and for a reasonable price.” Marvin’s eyes actually sparkled. “They were tracking you in Durango for me. Then you came here. It was perfect. Perfectly perfect.”
“But you said Miguel took her.”
“Sure. It was Ronnie’s idea to bring Miguel in on the deal. The girl was happy to go along with her dad, do whatever he said.” Marvin glanced down at Carmelita. He gave her a shake. Her eyes fluttered open. “Weren’t you?”
“Miguel took her from the camper?” Chuck asked.
“She went to the bathroom,” Marvin said, looking back at Chuck. “Miguel followed her. I snuck into the camper, left the note. You were snoring away.” He nearly smiled.
“You’re a murderer,” Chuck said, wanting to wipe the smug look from Marvin’s face. “A killer two times over.”
Shame appeared in Marvin’s eyes for an instant before he buried any hint of remorse away inside himself. His entire body shuddered and his eyes burned with zealous intensity. “This is about life, rebirth, reemergence,” he said, choking on the last word.
His arms twitched and he took a stumbling step forward, nearly toppling to the stage floor. He regained his balance and pressed his pistol so hard against Carmelita’s temple her head bent all the way to her shoulder. Carmelita’s eyes were wide open, her body rigid. Marvin curled his finger around the trigger and stepped back with her to the railing, the canyon behind them.
Chuck thought of how simple it had been for Francesca to push Ronnie off Maricopa Point. It would be just as easy for Marvin to send Carmelita to her death over the railing at the open rear of the stage when the first rays of morning sun struck the amphitheater.
The pink glow of dawn was disappearing from the cliffs along the North Rim, giving way to the bright light of day. Chuck glanced to the east. The tops of the piñons and junipers at the edge of the festival site were outlined by the first rays of the rising sun on this side of the canyon. Direct sunlight would reach the stage in no more than a few minutes.
Chuck climbed the last of the steps to the stage. “The shrine,” he told Marvin, holding his pack out before him from the top of the stairs. “The offering. You must have this in your hand before the sun gets here. Chirsáuha demands it.”
Marvin leaned away from Chuck, his upper body canted backward out and over the top bar of the railing, his pistol still pressed to Carmelita’s head. “What, what, what?”
“The A. Dinaveri,” Chuck urged. “If you’re not holding it up to the east so the first ray of sun strikes it, the reemergence won’t happen. Of course you know that. That’s why you had me meet you here, remember? The offering from the shrine and the girl. You have to have both.”
“The offering. The girl. Have to,” Marvin repeated, breathing hard. He appeared lost and haunted, guilt-ridden, seemingly intent only on sacrificing Carmelita, and on killing no one else.
That, at least, was the instantaneous determination Chuck made as he turned Donald’s gun so its muzzle faced the sky. He intended to show Marvin he meant no harm, but the movement startled the tribal official nonetheless. Marvin’s body spasmed. He pulled Carmelita to him and leaned even farther back over the railing.
“Marvin,” Chuck said. “You have to listen to me. I’m going to put my gun down and show you what I’ve got for you.” Without waiting for acknowledgement, Chuck squatted and laid Donald’s gun on the stage floor.
Now was Marvin’s chance. All he had to do was turn his pistol on Chuck and fire. With Chuck out of the way, Marvin could rummage through the pack for one of the necklaces, and have everything his crazed mind was telling him he needed to bring forth the Anasazi from beneath the river. Instead, however, Marvin kept his gun pressed to Carmelita’s head as he leaned back over the railing and regarded Chuck with confused eyes.
Chuck set his pack on the stage floor beside Donald’s .45. He showed his opened palms, still stained with Donald’s blood, to Marvin. He reached inside the pack, loosened the neck of the sack containing the necklaces, and slipped one of them free from its plastic bag.
“You were right about my find,” Chuck said, lifting the necklace. Marvin gasped as Chuck straightened, the piece of jewelry draped over the fingers of his hand. “This is what you want.” He held out the necklace and stepped past his gun and pack. “This is what you have to have, for Chirsáuha. Now.”
Marvin turned his face to the east. He looked down, taking in the precipice behind him. From there his eyes rose to the sunlit North Rim. He wagged his head from side to side.
Chuck took two more steps, still proffer
ing the turquoise necklace. He was no more than fifteen feet from Marvin and Carmelita now. Marvin turned to Chuck and beheld the necklace before looking at Carmelita trembling in his grip.
“The girl,” Marvin said. He looked again to the east.
Chuck jiggled the necklace, counting on the thousand-year-old braided yucca cord not to break. “There’s a sun inscribed on the pendant,” Chuck said with a quick glance at the large chunk of burnished turquoise. “It’s just as Dinaveri wrote: ‘The sun must face the sun when the first ray hits.’ You know that, don’t you? Everybody knows that.”
Marvin nodded, though Arturo Dinaveri never wrote any such thing. As if for the first time, Marvin seemed to realize Chuck was unarmed. He pointed his gun at Chuck’s torso.
Chuck raised his free hand in surrender. “Marvin,” he said. “Enough.”
Chuck lifted the necklace above his head. Marvin tracked its movement with his eyes but kept his gun centered on Chuck’s chest.
“You’ve only got a few seconds,” Chuck insisted, trying to ignore Marvin’s finger tightening on the trigger of his gun. “If you—”
Marvin’s eyes grew large. His moccasined feet skittered on the bare floor of the stage as he shoved himself back against the unyielding metal railing, his gaze fixed on something beyond Chuck’s shoulder. Marvin reached around Carmelita’s waist, lifted her off the stage, and pressed the barrel of his gun against her temple as he pivoted with her toward the cliff.
Chuck ducked low and charged, dropping the necklace as he hurtled himself across the stage.
Only at the last second did Marvin see Chuck barreling toward him, too late to get off a shot before Chuck, holding his crouch, rammed Marvin hard in the side with his lowered shoulder.
Chuck enveloped Carmelita in his arms as he crushed Marvin against the metal railing, his shoulder ramming Marvin’s midsection. Marvin’s feet left the floor of the stage and his upper body leaned past the top bar of the railing at an impossible angle. He cartwheeled up and over the railing and out into space.
Canyon Sacrifice Page 21