by Nevada Barr
That was how he had Martinez pegged at first. The guy had been born in Texas but only because his mama had the guts to make it happen. She and his dad were Mexican nationals who hadn’t a pot to piss in back in old Mexico. After discreetly investigating the guy, Darden had to admit he was more than that. He was a fanatic. According to Martinez, the greatest crime ever committed in Big Bend National Park wasn’t murder or rape or drug running or stealing lizards, snakes or cacti, it was closing the border. He’d been fighting to get it reopened for over eight years. He’d made a racket but accomplished nothing. Border closings were done in rooms the likes of Martinez would never see. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of citizens would never see. When edicts came down from on high, the veil of “national security” cloaking them, they were harder to protest if the hoi polloi didn’t know who to protest to, which office to march in front of with their adorable little signs and bulk-mail logo-ed T-shirts.
Darden didn’t doubt that Ranger Martinez was positively panting to use Judith’s party as a soapbox for his cause. If he’d found out Judith was running on a build-the-wall-and-man-the-watch-towers border control platform he might do more than that. If he could get past Darden first.
“Speak of the devil,” Gordon said, and gestured out the picture windows with a twitch of his square chin.
“You keep an eye out for Ranger River Rat,” Darden said. “I’ll see if I can’t keep the press happy.” Again they had gathered on the patio. Smoking in public didn’t damage a journalist’s image.
As Darden shook hands, slapped backs and made jokes—what Judith referred to as his warm-up act—he saw Charles walking alone down the slope from the cabins. Head down, cell phone pressed hard to his ear, Charles was walking fast. His shirt had come un-tucked in the back and his hair had graduated from mussed to standing on end over his ears where he’d been raking at it. The plan was for him to arrive hand in hand with his wife just after the party started so the conventioneers would see a charming picture of good grooming and marital bliss set against the magnificent backdrop of the Chisos Mountains.
Christ on a crutch, Darden thought uneasily. The man was unraveling and Judith was about to pull out the last thread unless Darden intervened.
Darden moved around to the side of the patio away from Charles, dragging the eyes of avid newshounds with him. A political spouse looking like something the cat dragged in would draw journalists like dog droppings drew flies. He scanned the faces of the reporters to see if any one of them had caught sight of Charles in his dishabille. Nobody had, but when he got to Gerry Schneider she was studying him as intensely as he was studying the fourth estate. She smiled and tipped the brim of an imaginary hat at him. Maybe Gerry hadn’t seen Pierson, but she’d read in Darden’s face that something was afoot. What Darden the man liked in Gerry—hard work, hard knocks, hard edges and lots of laughs—Darden the security guy didn’t.
She’d be sniffing like a pig after truffles till she rooted it out.
Careful not to glance in Charles’s direction again, he continued briefing the newspaper reporters. The drill was so familiar he didn’t need to put a lot of thought into what he was saying, and his mind churned on possible solutions to the whole Charles thing. He didn’t like working behind Judith’s back, but it was beginning to look like that would be better than the alternative.
TWELVE
A second shot followed close on the first and Paul began shouting: “Get down! Get down!”
“Where is he?” Anna asked no one in particular. At a guess the shooter was on the canyon rim and either shot Carmen in the back, pitching her forward, or he was on the opposite side and the bullet had caught her low enough that her center of gravity and the pull of the earth had pitched her forward. From the rim, the six of them—seven if one counted Helena—were fish in the proverbial barrel.
“Get down!” Paul was shouting at her this time. Steve still held Helena. Anna grabbed his wrist and began running toward where the boulders nested at the bottom of the slide, the only place there was cover from a sniper above. The alcove would work if the shooter was on the American cliff. If the shots came from Mexico, running to the alcove would only serve to make the barrel a little smaller and the fishes easier targets.
Her sense of self-preservation as keen as everything else relating to her self, Chrissie sprinted for the rocks. Lori was huddled on the beach trying to squeeze herself beneath a rock not quite big enough to shelter a Labrador retriever. Anna couldn’t see Cyril; she’d retired to the other side of the line of boulders to commune with her cow. A third shot rang out. The stinging sound of a ricochet cut past Anna’s ear and she felt herself lifted off her feet and flung forward. For a sick moment she thought she’d been hit but it was Paul catapulting her, Steve and the baby into a narrow space between two square slabs of shale, new enough to the canyon that the cliff they’d fallen from still had matching holes where they’d once been.
Between the stones, Anna took the baby from Steve and he folded like a jackknife, pulling his long legs up under his chin trying to get as much of his long form into as little a space as possible. Anna crouched as low as she could and still keep her upper body over the newborn. Warmth and weight squashed her down farther and she realized Paul was curled over her much as she curled over Helena.
Anna appreciated the sentiment but she didn’t like being held captive and, awkward with the baby in her arms, wriggled out of her husband’s protective embrace. Like as not both her gesture to shield the infant and Paul’s to shield her were pointless in the face of modern weaponry. Mattel was probably making BB guns whose pellets could pass through a target as soft and squishy as a human body. The knowledge allowed her to move away from Paul. Oddly, it didn’t allow her to stop shielding the baby. She was surprised the instinct to protect the young survived so strongly in her.
Paul must have realized his bone and muscle, impressive though his wife found it, was not sufficient to stop speeding bullets. He joined her and Steve where they sat, backs to the shale, feet pulled in close to their buttocks.
“I’m guessing the canyon rim above the slide on the American side,” Paul said. “The way she fell forward when she was hit.”
“Could be,” Anna said noncommittally.
“Carmen told us this happened a few years back,” Steve said. His voice was as rich and fat as ever. If he was scared it did not reach unto his vocal cords. “A couple rafters died. Mexican boys were shooting at the raft just to scare them. Just for the fun of it. One guy limped out of the river and they figured they’d hit him so they shot him and the other guy—killed them—because they got scared they’d get in trouble for the leg shot. Turned out the guy had a limp from something else altogether.”
“Sheesh,” Paul said in a whoosh of sadness for all mankind.
“If it’s Mexican boys they’ve gotten awfully good,” Anna said. “Carmen went down with the first shot.”
“Practice makes perfect,” Steve said. Then: “I’ve got to go.” He started to unfold.
Anna was too shocked by the sudden announcement of departure to do much more than gape. Paul grabbed what he could reach of the younger man and dragged him back down on the sand.
“Don’t be stupid,” Anna said.
“Go where?” Paul asked.
“Sis and her cow are somewhere. Maybe our shooter is a cattle rustler. Cyril would probably go mano a mano with el Diablo for one of her critters.”
Steve seemed concerned, but not overly so. Anna wondered if he felt his sister the way twins are said to sense each other, and knew she was okay.
“I’ll go,” Anna said. Paul started to protest. Smaller than Paul and shorter than Steve, she could hide better. She shoved the baby into her husband’s arms, a ruse used to make women ineffective for thousands of years. It worked just as well on men.
As she crawled down the tiny canyon they’d taken refuge in she could hear him murmuring orders to Steve, hoping they could get Lori to a safer place without endangering her or t
hemselves.
In Anna’s mind was a sketchy map of the scattered rocks between the alcove and the cow. If she stayed low and headed toward the cliffs she should be able to get over with a minimum of exposure. The last shot had been close, the shooter aiming to kill or frighten her or Paul or Steve. To what end she couldn’t imagine but there was sufficient universal malice floating around killers no longer needed motive, just opportunity. Like the Mexican boys Steve told them about, some didn’t even have their own reasons, just blind boredom. The sense of consequences, or of good and evil, or even of tomorrows missing from their psyches; a quirk of evolution, people becoming like the overcrowded rats in an experiment and turning to murder to keep the species at a sustainable number.
Or the fundamentalists had it right; God and Satan warred for the earth using hapless human saps to man the front lines.
Anna had made her share of enemies over the years but she doubted any of them were dedicated enough to her demise to travel all the way to Texas, find her on the river and take her out. There were many more practical places and easier ways to commit murder. It was hard to imagine anyone not loving Paul Davidson, but those whom he had sent to Parchman Farm for an extended stay probably didn’t feel as warm and fuzzy about him as she did. Most of them were poor; most had never been out of the state of Mississippi; most never expected life to deal them a better hand. Traveling across the great state of Texas to shoot the local sheriff didn’t make any more sense than her old nemeses doing her the same courtesy. As a rule, criminals were a lazy bunch, not given to seeing tasks through. Otherwise they’d have gone into a field that paid better and had health benefits. Had there not been a woman caught dying in a strainer, Anna would have opted for the chance shooter. The two things taken together were a bit thick for the universal-malice theory.
She had crept closer to the cliffs and was going belly-down to squeeze through the opening left beneath two boulders that had crashed together. Water seeped through her clothing. If she remembered right this area had been dry an hour earlier. The river was still rising. Rain in the Coahuilas. The beach they’d washed up on was narrow and level. If the water continued to rise it would be inundated in fairly short order, forcing the seven of them up out of the sanctuary of the stones.
She chose not to think about that. Suffering pangs of claustrophobia, she squirmed beneath the shale, propelling herself with elbows and toes.
Given the odds the shooter and the dead woman were somehow connected, it was possible a Mexican national—maybe Helena’s father—had reason to hate. It could be he was on the canyon’s rim searching the river looking for his wife. It could be he thought they had killed her. If he’d seen Anna opening her up with Paul’s pocketknife, that would be a logical conclusion.
Another possibility was that Carmen had been the target. Anna doubted she had money or power or secrets worthy of such notice but she did live in a limited society, a desert Peyton Place, where gossip was rife and sexual tension ran high. A scorned lover could do a lot of damage. She worked with people who knew the river, knew the rockslide and knew, even without the loss of the raft, that the bottom of the slide would be a good place to take a shot. They would probably have the equipment to get to the rim—four-wheel drives or ATVs. The additional shots might have been for fun or an attempt to take out the witnesses. That the witnesses had witnessed nothing but their guide taking a nosedive off a cliff might not matter to the mentally disturbed.
Anna reached the main spine of the litter of shale separating the two areas of the beach. To get to Cyril and her cow Anna had to scramble up a boulder slightly higher than her head and down the far side. For those moments she would be exposed to the shooter regardless of which side of the river he shot from. During her slithering, crawling travels she had tried to be as uninteresting and unseen as possible in hopes the rifleman, if he was still there and hadn’t hightailed it after the first spatter of gunfire, would not know she’d moved, that his attention would be elsewhere and by the time he caught her movement and took aim, she’d be down the other side. If he’d followed her progress and had a bead on her, she was a dead woman the moment she was fully exposed on the rock.
Overdramatizing, Anna chided herself. Most shots missed their mark. This guy had hit Carmen but he’d missed with his other two bullets, presuming he was going for a couple more murders and not just having scary fun. One of the Park Service’s most famous shoot-outs was between a ranger and a small airplane pilot bent on taking off on a beach with a load of contraband. It was back when NPS law enforcement rangers carried six-shooters. The ranger and the smuggler were no more than fifty feet from each other. Both fired six shots, reloaded and fired six more. Nobody was hurt. Rifles were more accurate than handguns but whoever was pulling the trigger from the cliffs was at least three hundred yards from his targets.
Anna was not a dead woman the moment she showed herself. Still and all, she wished she’d not put on a raspberry-colored shirt that morning. Taking a deep breath to get up her nerve, she gathered her legs under her to make the first jump to where she could get a foothold.
The sound of yelling stopped her. No words, just raucous sounds and the noise of rocks being pounded together. Paul. He’d been counting off the minutes till he figured she was in place. He was creating a diversion.
Good man, Anna thought, and sprang up the rock. In a bump and a tumble she was down the other side on her hands and knees in river water four inches deep. Still rising. When the heavens thundered retribution and lightning struck sparks from the canyon walls, the rising of the waters seemed appropriate. With sunlight and birdsong it didn’t. It felt personal and hostile and unnatural.
No gunshots answered Paul’s racket. No bullets pinged off the rocks where Anna had recently been. She scuttled backward under the nearest—and merest—overhang anyway. The tiny beach was empty: no Cyril, no Easter. There wasn’t anyplace to hide and Anna got a sick feeling that they’d run for the water, been shot and floated downstream unnoticed while the rest of the party were distracted with saving their own skins.
Anna remembered only three shots—the first that hit Carmen, the second and a third that ricocheted off a chunk of shale near her. That would only leave one for both girl and cow. A tricky shot at best. She knew from experience witnesses are unreliable when it comes to the number of shots fired. Fear made the number seem greater or fear deafened the hearer and made the number fewer. Simply because she was an erstwhile law enforcement ranger didn’t immunize her from the phenomenon. Cyril and Easter could have been killed by bullets fired while she was focused on Helena and Paul and safety and she’d never heard them.
The far end of the divided beach was walled off by the huge stones forming the rapids. Water piled up between the rocks, its foam a dirty brown, its force enough to pull trees up by the roots and roll stones the size of trucks. Since Anna had floated through steering the cow, the river had risen at least a foot. Either it would drop soon or they would have to head for higher ground. Slow-rising water was a pain. Flash flood was deadly and, a thousand feet down in a crack, she had no idea what was coming.
Like her brother, Cyril could probably hide in a mail slot. But as far as Anna could see the boulders between the water and cliff were too close together to provide sanctuary for the cow. Quiet, unmoving, she tried to see around corners and through solid obstacles.
Movement caught her eye and she looked up nearer the cliff where the sand piled up and the Bermuda grass was rich and thick. Cyril and Easter were not hiding anywhere. Basking in sunlight and bucolic splendor, the cow was grazing unconcernedly while the young woman sat cross-legged on the grass talking to her.
Cyril hadn’t seen Carmen fall. She’d undoubtedly heard the shots and written the sound off to some nonlethal source. The tranquil scene, unsullied by the knowledge of violent death by gunshot, of fear for life and limb, was in such juxtaposition to the mad race for cover Anna had just left that it was hard to believe she hadn’t made the whole thing up, or dreamed
it. It remained real enough, however, that she wasn’t anxious to dash out from under her rock and join the lovely targets on the green. Staying as close as she could to her big friendly rocks, she worked her way toward the cliff till she was nearer Cyril.
“Cyril,” Anna whispered.
Cyril’s dark head turned and she shaded her eyes with her hand, her ball cap lost to the river. Anna didn’t want to shout. If the rifleman was still around and still feeling hateful, she wasn’t going to draw his attention down on them.
“Over here,” Anna said softly.
Cyril finally found where this tiny pest of a noise that was Anna was coming from and pivoted around to face her. They were twenty feet apart; she in the sun, Anna tucked in the shadows.
“Is that you, Anna?” Cyril squinted into the glare.
“Yeah.”
Cyril waited for Anna to explain why she was cowering in crevasses. Anna didn’t know where to begin. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Easter and me are fine.”
“Easter and I,” Anna corrected her automatically, and wondered why the shade of her first and beloved mother-in-law had chosen that moment to visit her mind.
“Why?” Cyril asked.
“Could you come over to me? Walk slowly, okay?”
“What’s going on?” Cyril asked as she stood and began to walk casually toward where Anna was hidden. Alarm had crept into her voice. Cyril and Steve were smart kids, smarter than most people, Anna guessed. It hadn’t taken her long to figure out that something was very wrong and that her best bet was to do as Anna suggested.
The next leap of logic was easy for the young woman: “Were those gunshots?” she asked as she snuggled into the small alcove where Anna was.
“They were.”
“What’s with that? Why would anybody be shooting? Hunters . . . Are you guys okay?” she asked, and Anna knew she’d grasped the seriousness of the situation.