by Homer Hickam
I nodded to Laura and she handed him a bottle. “Just a swallow,” she warned.
Pick got his swallow and went on. “I spent the night at Cade’s ranch and then drove to the Square C the next day. After I talked to you and Jeanette, I was surprised to find Mayor Brescoe and Cade were waiting for me just inside the BLM fence. They made it clear that, despite what was said the day before, I was working for them. That’s when they killed that black cow. They said that could be me.”
“My bull!” Jeanette gasped.
“Cade had a rifle and shot it. When it didn’t die right away, the mayor went over to their truck, got a shovel and a big knife, came back and hit the cow in the head with the shovel that broke. The cow was still alive so she cut its throat. It was awful. She also cut the fence, saying no one would suspect a local would do such a thing.”
Jeanette stared at Edith who was lying where I’d dropped her. I noticed her head was a bit bloody, seeing as how it had bounced off a sandstone rock. I hadn’t meant to do that. She was occasionally groaning. Otherwise, she seemed to be out cold.
“How could she do that to a poor, dumb animal?” Jeanette demanded.
“I’d never seen anything like it,” Pick said. “I mean she acted crazy. She was laughing the whole time. Cade finally told her to settle down.”
“So you agreed to play ball,” I said.
“It was either that or run away. I really wanted to look for that little T. rex. I figured if I found it, something could be worked out. When we started finding more than I ever imagined and not on the BLM, it got a lot more complicated. I just kept putting Cade off about it.”
“Your head in deep time as usual,” Laura accused. “Look, I want everybody to know Tanya and I had nothing to do with this.”
“That’s true,” Pick said. “I called you both to come help and I didn’t tell you about the complications.”
“What you did got Tanya killed,” Laura hissed at him. “And it might get us all dead before this is over. Pick, you’re a complete idiot.”
I thought that was a bit of an understatement as bullets began to ping on our little rock castle and whistle overhead. Brian said, “Maybe we could head for the lake and get some walleye fishermen to pick us up.”
It wasn’t a bad idea except for the news Ray gave us next. He was keeping his eye on things below. “They’ve got automatic weapons. Looks like AK-47s. And one of those guys has moved around behind us on the lake side.”
“What are we going to do, Mike?” Jeanette asked.
I appreciated her asking, which effectively put me in charge. I gave it some thought. I checked Edith to see if she had her satellite phone with her. She didn’t, so I asked, “Anybody got a radio?”
“I do,” Laura said.
“Start calling. See if anyone answers. We’re safe for now, I think. I don’t see those guys charging up here, at least during the day.”
Laura moved off to the other side of the dig and started talking into her radio. A few minutes later, she said, “Nothing. I’ve tried a number of frequencies, including the emergency channel. I’ll keep trying.”
This was a disappointment but not a surprise. The radios didn’t have much range and there were hills higher than Blackie Butte all around us. That’s why Laura hadn’t been able to raise Pick the night we all came into the ranch.
“OK,” I said. “When it gets dark, I’m thinking Brian’s right. We head toward the lake. If they only have one guy guarding that route, we should be able to get past him.”
“Why not go for the ranch?” Jeanette asked.
“Lots of fences to cross. Anyway, they’ll be expecting us to go that way. It’s wide open to the lake.”
“There’s a full moon,” Ray pointed out.
“That will make it harder,” I acknowledged. “When we go, I’ll start shooting to keep their heads down. Ray, you take everybody else and head out. If that guy between us and the lake starts shooting, find him and kill him.”
“I’ll take care of him,” Ray swore.
“Mike, you can’t stay behind,” Jeanette said.
“Somebody has to. I won’t wait long before heading out, too.”
“They’re doing something,” Ray said. “They have a big net they’re spreading out.”
I crawled over to have a look. It did look like a big net but for what purpose I couldn’t imagine. Then one of the Russians went over and started rolling one of the jacketed bones toward it.”
Pick was watching. “They’re going to destroy the bones!” He stood up. “Cade, tell them to leave the bones alone! They’ll break the jackets!”
This was answered by a round flying past Pick’s head. Ray reached up and pulled him down. “Don’t do that again, Dr. Pickford,” Ray said.
Down below, Cade pushed himself out of his chair and limped closer to our hill. “Pick, if you don’t want these bones destroyed, come down here, and show us what to do. We’ve got a helicopter coming for them.”
That was news. It was going to have to be a damn big helicopter to lift the plastered bones of two T. rexes. “They can’t let us live,” Jeanette said. “If they take the bones and we’re alive to alert the state police, a helicopter is going to be easy to trace.”
This wasn’t news. From the moment Cade and the Russians had shown up, I knew they meant to kill us. Their mistake was not to do it right away. “Pick, where do you think they’ll take the bones?” I asked.
Pick mulled my question over, then said, “Toby mentioned Mexico when we were still talking about only the baby skeleton. He said there would be less questions that way. Mike, we can’t let them get away with those bones. We must bring this knowledge to the world.”
“Hey, Pick!” Cade called. “Dammit. The boys just dropped a bone. It’s all busted up.”
“Stop it!” Pick screamed.
“Remain calm, Pick,” I said. “Give it some thought. They want those bones to sell. They’re not going to damage them.”
Pick nodded although I could tell he was unconvinced. I thought about the helicopter. Likely, rather than trying to fly with a huge load a long distance, it would transfer the bones to trucks somewhere. Then it occurred to me there was one among us who would know exactly the plan.
I prodded her with my boot. “Edith, get up. We need to talk.”
It took a few more prods but she finally sat up. She was holding her head. “Mike, you hurt me.”
“I should have killed you.”
She began to weep. “I didn’t mean any of this to happen.”
“Yes, you did. Now, Edith, the only way you’re going to get out of this is to tell me the truth when I ask you some questions. Will you do that?”
Sniffing, she nodded and I asked, “Tell me about the helicopter. What’s the plan?”
“It belongs to the buyer,” she said. “I don’t know his name. Cade and Toby set it up. Some rich Mexican.”
“OK. Who are the bully boys below?”
“You know who they are.”
“Well, tell me, anyway.”
“Russian mob. Cade owes them a lot of money from when he made movies. Toby came to collect. He had worked with Cade on the movies and liked him. Rather than beat him up or kill him, he tried to help. Toby was very interested in everything and said he was an avid amateur paleontologist. When I showed him a copy of Ray’s paper that I got off the school Web site, he thought it would be a great idea to sell dinosaur bones to off set Cade’s debts. So they started looking around the Net and found out about Pick. He was not only a respected paleontologist, but they found evidence that he sold fossils from time to time. So Cade sent him an e-mail. It didn’t take long for him to respond.”
“What was Ted’s part in this?”
She looked away for a moment, then said, “He wasn’t part of it. I asked him to give Pick a permit and he agreed. Then he got all bent out of shape about his precious BLM. He just couldn’t leave it alone.”
“Did Ted kill Toby?”
She smir
ked. “I told you my husband doesn’t kill men.”
“Where’s Ted now?”
Her expression was distant. “Swimming with the walleyes.”
I felt a cold chill down my back. My questions seemed to be bringing out another Edith, one I had never known. “Did you kill Toby?”
Her eyes bored into me. “I found him on his knees in front of my husband. Call me a jealous wife. Anyway, I just wanted to do it. I got a hammer, used it on the back of Toby’s skull.” She smiled. “Ted took off running. I wasn’t going to kill him, the fool. I still needed him or at least I thought I did. Anyway, I got a hacksaw blade and sawed open Toby’s throat, then put that note on him just to throw you off track. Yeah, I figured you’d start investigating. You’re no cowboy, Mike, just a cop in cowboy clothes.”
“How did you get Toby into the lake?”
“I told Cade what I’d done. We waited until the dance was over and dragged him to the lake. We thought he’d sink but he didn’t.”
“Did you kill Ted, too?”
She shrugged. “Well, after he started threatening to tell the police I’d killed Toby, Cade shot him. Then I cut his throat.”
I still couldn’t believe this was the same Edith I’d cared about. “How did you get mixed up in all this?”
I guess she figured she didn’t have anything to lose by telling me more. She said, “Cade said if we got enough money, we’d leave here and go to Mexico. There is a very big man there, the one buying the bones, who would take care of us, set us up.” She looked at Jeanette. “I would do anything to get out of this county and away from these ranchers. You’re a bitch, Jeanette. You always have been. But you ended up marrying Bill Coulter and climbed on top of the pyramid. Me? I was just mayor of a shithole married to a prick.”
“You killed my bull,” Jeanette said. “And cut my fence.”
At this, Edith started to laugh. It was a harsh, mean laugh and I knew now that she was insane. Completely and utterly. “You see, Mike?” she said. “She cares more about that damn bull and her fences than people. Cade, Toby, and I decided to throw everybody off track by killing more cows and cutting more fences, leaving behind that stupid Green Monkey note. Ranchers are all paranoids. I knew exactly how to sucker them.”
“It’s time to be quiet now, Edith,” I said.
Edith made a sudden grab for Amelia’s pistol. Amelia pulled back in time, but Edith vaulted over the sandstone and ran down the hill, screaming for Cade. I don’t know how many bullets struck her. She fell, then rolled until she hit the sand at the bottom.
32
“They’re leaving Mayor Brescoe where she fell,” Ray said, peeking around a sandstone boulder.
“How about Cade?”
“He’s just sitting over by the tents. He’s got a bandana wrapped around his leg. The men have moved about a dozen of the bones into the net, but now they’ve stopped.”
When I heard the whop-whop of blades, I knew why. The noise grew louder and then a helicopter appeared. It flew over us once, then turned around and came in to land behind the camp, its rotor wash tossing tents around. It was a Bell UH-1, the famous utility helicopter of Vietnam, painted a dark blue with no other insignia. Its turbines whined down and two men, the pilot and co-pilot I presumed, emerged and walked over to inspect the bones on the cargo net. They also conferred with one of the Russians and then Cade limped over. There was a lot of waving of arms and pointing at the bodies of Tanya and Edith. Then one of the pilots started walking back to the helicopter. He apparently meant to leave as this earned him a bullet in his back. The other pilot suddenly got a lot more cooperative. All the talking and gesticulating stopped and he started lifting the edge of the cargo net. Two of the mobsters helped him and they pulled it together over the bones and cinched it at its center.
There was some pointing in our direction and then the pilot and one of the Russians carrying an AK walked over to the helicopter and got in. As the rotors started to turn, I realized what that was all about. “We’re going to get strafed,” I said, thinking fast. “The cave by the mama T. We’ve got to get there.”
“No!” Pick yelped. “If they attack us there, they’ll hit her!”
“Shut up, Dr. Pickford,” Ray said. Then, to me, “Guess we’d better get going. I’ll lead.”
“OK. Ray then Amelia, Jeanette, Laura, Brian, and Philip. Pick, you and I will go last.”
The helicopter rose and dipped its nose to gather speed and gain altitude before turning back toward us. “Go!” I barked and Ray took off, Amelia on his heels. Jeanette was right behind her. Laura and the brothers tore after them, too. I pushed Pick ahead of me and we scrambled—falling, rolling, getting up, and running again. The helicopter came roaring overhead but if there were shots, I couldn’t hear them because of its rotor and engine noise.
We reached the cave and fell inside. Pick collapsed and started whining. “They’ll destroy the nest.”
I didn’t care about Pick and at that moment, not much about the dinosaurs. “Ray, get over here, help me set up a defense.” We stacked up some rocks and I motioned everybody to lie down.
When Pick kept complaining, Amelia said, “Dr. Pickford, didn’t you say that the mother T would watch over her nest forever? You said you could feel her. Won’t she still do that?”
Pick shook his head. I guess he didn’t have confidence in his own mystic philosophy when things got rough. Funny how that works.
The helicopter made a pass but the AK fire out of it was in effective. Then, two Russians on foot appeared below us and sprayed bullets into our cave. Fortunately, the bullets didn’t ricochet but were absorbed into the ancient mud of the Hell Creek Formation. I traded pistols with Amelia—the .22 just didn’t cut it for distance or impact—and Ray and I fired back, carefully squeezing off only a single round apiece, trying to make them count. Happily, I hit one of the Russians in his arm. He twirled around, then fell, before getting up and running away. The other Russian went with him. That was good but we were in a cave, not able to see much of anything, and that was bad. I said, “Ray, you and I need to get to the top of this hill.”
“No,” Jeanette said. “I’ll go with you. Ray, you hold the line down here. You’re the better shot.”
Ray hesitated and I said, “She’s right, Ray. We need you here.” I looked up, trying to recall the terrain above. We would need to go all the way to the top where there was a layer of sandstone slabs for protection. I told Jeanette what we were going to do.
“Now or never, Mike,” Jeanette said, catching a water bottle Laura tossed to her.
“Let’s go,” I said and we bounded out of that cave like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I guess I was Butch. We scrambled up, sending little landslides behind us, and were up that hill in a few seconds, falling down on top of it. No one shot at us. We crawled over to some boulders. I looked toward the camp and could see the helicopter had landed but just about everything else was blocked by the truncated top of Blackie Butte. To the north was a series of hills that we’d need to cross if we tried to break out toward the lake. There was no sign of the Russian sent to guard in that direction. No matter. We were stuck until nightfall.
Then I saw something interesting on the western horizon. “Look,” I said, nudging Jeanette. “Something coming our way.”
“Whoa,” she said, “a big’un.”
It was a “big’un” all right. The layer of slate-black clouds blanked out the entire westward sky. Well, like old Bill Coulter said. A quiet day in Fillmore County is a temptation to God. We were going to be hit by a terrible blow.
The UH-1’s rotors started up, then it lifted off and moved to hover where the bones had been stacked in the net. When it rose, the net with its load was dangling beneath. The chopper flew over us to the east, the whop-whop of the blades diminishing to nothing in a few minutes. “There go our dinosaurs,” Jeanette said, sorrowfully, “at least part of them. How do you think they’ll move them, Mike?”
“The way I’d do it
,” I said, “would be to have some big trucks waiting out there somewhere, maybe over by the Ogallala Indian Reservation where there’s hardly any traffic. I’d load up the trucks and drive south on the Interstate. Crossing the border into Mexico shouldn’t be much trouble with the right payoffs.”
“I’ve been such a fool,” Jeanette said. “You tried to warn me.”
“Well, maybe I should have listened to myself,” I said. “I’ve had a hunch for days we should get the hell away from here.”
She leaned back and allowed a sigh. “I’m sorry about Tanya.”
I hadn’t been able to think much about Tanya, not while dodging bullets and such. I didn’t want to think about her now, either. Time for that later if I was still alive, a doubtful proposition. “She was a fine woman,” was all I had to say.
The hours ticked by. I saw Cade once or twice limping around and then a couple of the Russians. They were moving more jacketed bones into another cargo net. Then I heard a small rock slide below. It was Pick climbing up to us. He fell over the top and crawled over. “What do you want?” Jeanette asked him in something less than a happy tone.
“I want one of your pistols,” he said. “I don’t intend to let them destroy the mother T and the nest. If necessary, I’ll go down fighting.”
“I told you,” I said, “that they’re not going to destroy anything. They plan on selling it.”
“They can’t remove the bones at this site. None of them are jacketed. All they can do is tear them up trying to get at us. Let me have some dignity, Mike. If the greatest discovery in paleontological history has to be destroyed, I’d just soon die with it.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not happening. We’re going to break out tonight.”
“Until then, can I stay up here?”
“The helicopter might try to strafe us again when it comes back.”