I tilted the straw O’Farrell’s hat up on my forehead and turned away from the murder scene below to scan the area. Black clouds stacked behind the craggy ridge promised another afternoon of pop-up traveling thunderstorms that arced torrents of rain onto the hard ground until they cried themselves out.
The sudden out-of-place echo of automatic weapons bouncing off the mountains sparked a jolt of dread. The hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I shivered as if it were cold. I angled my head, using my good ear to find the source of the sound. Like many hunters and gun enthusiasts, I suffered from “Hunter’s Notch,” a slight hearing loss on the side opposite the shooter’s gun hand.
The firefight I’d been involved in a few months earlier hadn’t done my hearing any favors, either, and now I had tinnitus to deal with. The steady ringing didn’t block sound, but it remained a constant annoyance.
The best I could tell, the shots came from far away, back toward where I left the truck and trailer. I checked the phone in my back pocket, and as usual, I didn’t have a signal. I wondered why I ever toted the damned thing around.
Red pointed his ears toward the west. I trusted his hearing more than mine. “That’s what I thought, too.”
He snorted what sounded like an agreement. I stuck a boot in the stirrup and swung into the saddle. Red knew where we needed to go and took off toward the pops like I’d reined him that way. I kicked him into a lope and settled back in the saddle as his rhythmic clatter of shod hooves ate up the ground.
We were halfway back to the trailer when I heard the shots again, hard and fast. The echoes bounced off the broken land, and Red prickled his ears each time. I resisted the urge to kick him into a run.
After a while, I realized it wasn’t a firefight, unless the guys were in a running gun battle.
The truck was just as I left it, and I had Red loaded up before the shots came again. They weren’t any closer than when I first heard them, despite the distance I’d traveled. A single report sounded heavier, sharper. Lighter rounds followed, almost drowned out by thunder from the clouds dumping a curved curtain of gray rain in the distance. I slid behind the wheel and snatched the microphone off the dash.
“Ethan, you there?”
We were supposed to use the codes I learned as a highway patrol officer, but Ethan and I had slipped out of that habit long ago. He came back, but the storms were causing so much havoc I couldn’t make out what he said.
“Ethan, I’m at the Lost Mine trailhead. I’m hearing automatic gunfire.”
His response was even worse. I pitched the mike on the seat in disgust and rolled the window down. There still weren’t any bars on my cell phone and I tucked it back into my shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.
I pulled onto the gravel road, driving over the rough ground toward the general direction of the gunfire. Two single pops came again, and the sound was stronger.
I got to thinking I was hearing a gun battle between drug dealers. I had no doubt that smugglers called mules hoofed their crap through the desert in primitive packs. Maybe two groups from different cartels found themselves on the same trail.
I really didn’t care if they shot one another across the river, but this was my country, and I didn’t want their troubles to deal with. I shouldn’t have run toward the fight. Most the time, those guys were armed to the teeth, but there was one thing a Ranger didn’t do, and that was run away from a fight.
I came upon a two-lane dirt track splitting off the road and stopped to stick my ear out the window. Thunder rumbled again, and I sat there long enough to think the shooting was over until they another flurry came again from closer to the Rio Grande and rose to a crescendo before trailing off. It sounded like two automatic weapons this time, followed by reports from the heavier rifle.
My imagination said some poor sucker was holed up and shooting it out with several someones. The recent murders and distinctive sounds of two rifle calibers made me think it might be a second ambush of innocent hikers. Maybe another armed civilian like Blue was fighting back.
Clear tread marks in the rocky soil revealed that someone had recently driven an ATV down the trail. I steered off the gravel road and followed the bumpy two-lane track with the trailer rattling along behind me. “Sorry Red! Hang on back there.”
The gunfire came again, but I still wasn’t gaining.
It must be a running gun battle.
The phone still said No Service, so I checked the radio again. “Ethan!”
Static.
It seemed like I’d been driving for miles before the trail petered out for my Dodge dually at the foot of a steep, rocky ridge. I killed the engine and studied the tire tracks of at least two ATVs heading toward the west.
Dammit. I need to get help and come back.
Not happy about having to back the trailer to some kind of turnaround, I glanced out the window and saw enough open space to make a circle.
One shot.
Then another.
Two more.
Once again my impulses won. Knowing better, I killed the engine and backed Red out of the trailer. Thunder rolled across the Chihuahuan Desert as I stuffed my Winchester into the saddle scabbard and swung aboard. I rationalized that at least he would get me across the rough landscape until I could get a peek at what was ahead. It might be something I could handle alone, or at the very least, I might get high enough for that damned cell phone to work.
If somebody got after me, Red was the perfect way to cut through the country and get away. We took off at a lope as a cool breeze washed over me from the collapsing thunderstorm ahead. Red pricked his ears forward. I let him have his head, and we went to see what was going on.
It seemed like an hour later before I came to the edge of a steep, high-desert canyon. There hadn’t been any gunshots for a good, long while, and I wondered if everyone was dead and all I’d have to do was count the bodies.
A well-worn, bright orange ball cap surrounded by several dozen bright brass hulls lay on the ground beside a thick clump of cactus. I reined in and stayed in the saddle, checking the area. Nothing but the cooing of a white-wing dove broke the silence. I figured no one else was around, so I swung to the ground.
Ears flicking, Red sniffed at a trumpet flower shrub, unconcerned. I’d learned long ago to trust the horse’s instincts, so I relaxed.
Holding the reins in one hand, I studied the empty brass at my feet. I didn’t see any blood, but that didn’t mean anything. Footprints in a clear sandy spot pointed toward the edge of the canyon. Stepping close, I peeked over the edge, thinking the cap’s owner might be down there.
I tensed at a sudden movement far below, but relaxed when I saw a saw a whitetail deer working its way along the canyon floor. The sun disappeared behind another approaching thunderstorm, and I realized it’d be dark soon and I’d have to ride back without the aid of the stars or moon.
I turned and glanced up at still another ridge high above my position at the exact moment a white-wing dove floating past caught the bullet meant for me. The bird vaporized in an explosion of feathers about twenty yards from where I stood. The impact with the tiny body diverted the projectile enough that it wasn’t the center shot that would have blown out my chest. It still punched a hole through the big latissimus muscle under my left arm.
A number of things happened at the same time the rifle’s crack reached my ears. Red yanked the reins out of my hand. He spun and took off like a striped-ass baboon at the same time I took a step back to catch my balance.
My foot came down on nothing but air.
I screamed like a girl for the first time in my adult life. Anyone would, knowing they were plummeting over the edge of a canyon rim. The breath caught in my chest and I fell back in time past the strata of millions of years.
Images both blurred then came sharp as a tack as I fell. An upside-down glimpse of the rocky wall included my boots flashing past the heavy clouds off to the southwest. The next time I saw them, they were defined against the blue sk
y in the opposite direction.
A strobelike image of the sun peeking between clouds and a sweeping gray curtain of falling rain became rocks flashing by. A crisp crack inside my skull hurt worse than the bullet wound when I slammed against the hard surface of the canyon wall’s acute slope. Despite all that, I was lucky I wasn’t on the virtually straight drop of the nearby Santa Elena Canyon.
I cut a flip and my shoulder smashed hard on the rocks, reversing the spin so that my hip took the next hard blow. I still had the presence of mind to try and stop my accelerating fall. I spread my arms and legs to gain traction on the steep slope. The bottom of the canyon was still a long way down, and I sure didn’t want to roll like a meat cannonball, knocking chunks and pieces of myself off on every rock and boulder all the way to the bottom.
It seemed like a month of Sundays before I managed to grab a tough bush with one hand and slide to a stop. Thank God, I might just make it.
Rocks jarred loose by my fall continued to rattle within earshot. I waited until everything was quiet before taking a deep breath of relief. Gunshot wound. Check, but nothing felt broken. I wiggled all ten fingers and toes to make sure. Stuff ached, but all was still good.
One foot hung over a big rock and I dug my other heel in. Stable for the time being, with a heart pounding like a jackhammer, I turned loose of the brush.
The scree stretching in all directions broke free and I slid again with the terrible realization my foot wasn’t hanging over a rock, but another drop. I grabbed at the bush again, but missed. The dry ground melted away as the dusty flow took me over the sheer edge like a leaf slipping over a waterfall.
“Well, hell.”
I dropped again. Nothing but luck kept me upright, and I fell feetfirst.
Kids love the feeling of stepping off a high diving board, but there wasn’t anything fun about looking down past the slope and seeing the long dark shadows stretching across most of the canyonland still far below.
I landed in the soft river of fine dirt and rocks that poured into the tops of my boots. I went down again on the steep angle, this time on my rear for another wild ride through the gathering dusk.
Control was impossible, and I dug my heels into the loose ground, grabbing at everything grabbable. Material tore and my funny bone banged on a boulder and my arm went hot and numb.
I was upside down again before thumping off what felt like a rock big as a hall closet, then it was freefall city. The thought that a storm was coming, but not the one in the distance, was the last thing I remembered.
Photo by Shana Wortham
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
REAVIS Z. WORTHAM is the award-winning author of the Red River Mystery series, including Unraveled, The Right Side of Wrong, Vengeance Is Mine, Dark Places, Burrows, and The Rock Hole (winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award). He is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, the Writers’ League of Texas, the International Association of Crime Writers, and International Thriller Writers. Reavis also pens a weekly self-syndicated weekly outdoor column for numerous Texas newspapers, writing on everything from fishing to deer hunting. He lives in North Texas with his wife. Please visit him on Facebook or at his website, reaviszwortham.com.
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