Blind Descent

by Nevada Barr

  Fifty yards later the trail didn’t so much stop as dwindle to nothing, and still Anna couldn’t see anything suggesting a cave. What finally tipped her off that she was in the right place was a boot, an old hiking boot, protruding from the snarly fingers of a catsclaw bush. Beyond this unnatural formation she saw Big Manhole. Tucked up beside a low serrated bench of stone, the entrance was right out of The Patchwork Girl of Oz, a place designed for the incarceration of flesh-eating ogres. Flush with the ground, a hole roughly the size of a hope chest leaked black shadow through whitened limestone. Rusted iron bars cemented into the rock formed a grid over the opening. A trapdoor of the same rusted iron was welded in, a heavy hasp wanting a padlock to secure it. To see the hairy knuckles of a giant poking elephantine fingers through the grid didn’t take too great a stretch of the imagination.

  “Brent?” Anna hollered as she stepped around the grabbing thorns of catsclaw. The wind snatched the words from her lips and hurled them over the desert. As it happened, they would have fallen on deaf ears anyway. The battered boot was not an ancient artifact. It was firmly laced to the foot of Brent Roxbury.

  There are postures that the human body does not adopt in life. Roxbury had the broken-doll look of someone struck down from a standing position and dead or unconscious before he hit the ground. His feet were splayed at uncomfortable angles, legs bent when the knees buckled. He’d landed on his hip, his left arm flung back from his torso and falling behind him. His right was trapped beneath; his face pressed against the grid over the cave.

  “Brent?” Anna said again, but she was talking to herself. Crouching over his inert form she felt for a carotid pulse. Finding none, she took the liberty of rolling him onto his back. Spinal injuries were the least of his worries. Her hand came away from his navy windbreaker dripping with blood. Not marked or smeared but dripping as if she’d dipped it in a bucket. She could feel the salt sting of it in the myriad scrapes and cuts her Lechuguilla adventure had left on her knuckles.

  “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” came a line from Shakespeare’s Scottish play, one in which her husband had carried a spear. Brent’s soul had been gored from his body by a bullet from a high-powered weapon. No neat black hole between the eyes had let his life leak away. A furrow chewed up from his clavical into his neck, severing the carotid artery on the left side of the pharynx, then continued up till it blew away the point of his jaw, much of his dental work, and his left cheekbone.

  Due to the severe facial trauma there was no way Anna could have effected an airtight seal to begin rescue breathing. It was a moot point. Without blood to carry it, oxygen had no way of reaching the vital organs. The throat wound no longer spurted but merely seeped. No heart left to push the blood, no blood left to flow.

  Feeling mildly insensitive, Anna wiped the gore from her hands on the dead man’s trousers. Nothing else was available, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to wipe it on her own.

  Blood had become toxic waste. Paper trail: if she played out the paranoia, there’d be reports and doctors’ offices visited to leave a record in case she tested positive for HIV after the incident. Every class, every lecture drummed precaution into the brain. The greater danger of being mowed down by a drunk driver did not worry the public. Maybe because it did not carry with it the horror of death by inches.

  A crack of sound and the sting of needle-fine pieces of stone sown into her cheek jerked her back to more imminent danger. What with one thing and another, she’d overlooked the obvious. The shooter was not necessarily gone, nor was he necessarily finished. Not daring to look around for the rifleman, she flattened herself on top of Brent Roxbury. Blood, warm as bathwater, drenched her face and neck. He couldn’t have been dead more than a minute or two. A second shot cracked, then sang high and angry off the rock inches beyond Anna’s skull. She could feel—or imagined she could—the stirring of its wind in her hair.

  She had two choices for cover: behind Roxbury’s corpse or down through the rusted bars wiring the jaws of Big Manhole. As tempting as Brent’s company was, a wall of flesh and bone would scarcely slow a bullet down. Unpleasant images of WWII executions clicked behind her eyes.

  Quick as a wounded snake, she writhed over to the iron-barred trap and dropped through. The black enclosed well of the cave held no terrors for her. She figured the fall would kill her before claustrophobia could set in. Knuckles wrapped around the grid, she looked down expecting to see nothing but darkness. Today the gods were kind—or in a playful mood. The neck of the immense limestone bottle was not neat and sheer but a ragged crevice with plenty of ledges upon which a small and determined woman could find footholds.

  Where Anna dangled, the aperture was no more than three feet across. Jamming both boots on a ledge eight inches wide, she planted her back against the opposite wall. Wedged in, she could wait a good long time. Confident she was secure, she peeled her hands from the metal of the bars. Her fingers weren’t slippery with Roxbury’s blood. The man was a good coagulator. His plasma glued her skin to the iron.

  Two more shots rang out, lending the scream of lead and limestone to the shriek of the wind. Both times Anna winced, though she knew her cover was complete. In the security of the newfound shelter, her mind changed gears from instinct to intellect. Who would shoot Brent Roxbury? In the Southwest, particularly New Mexico, local militia groups had threatened to shoot BLM rangers on sight. Militia. Bubbas with IQs lower than the caliber of their hand-guns. Guys who felt cheated because “varmint hunts,” the senseless competitive slaughter of coyotes that lived so far out on the desert they’d never so much as tasted chicken or lamb, had been interfered with. Men dispossessed because bicycle trails were infringing on traditional shooting ranges, and the government, afraid a few of the Spandex-and-ponytail set would catch a stray bullet, had closed more than one.

  As near as Anna could remember, most of the ill will was centered in northern New Mexico, near Farmington. Southern New Mexico had been spared that particular ugliness. At least it had in the past.

  That train of thought derailed. She loved the novels of Thomas Hardy and was a great believer in coincidence. But never when one needed it. Two members of the survey team meeting untimely ends from unrelated sources was highly unlikely.

  Brent had been with them when Frieda died. He had been much distraught by her death. He’d wanted to speak with Anna and had foolishly left a message to that effect on the answering machine at Zeddie Dillard’s. Everyone there—all the members of the core group, with the exception of Sondra—had heard it, right down to where and when he and Anna could meet. Zeddie had conveniently pointed out that it was an easy walk from park housing to Big Manhole. Before Brent had an opportunity to talk, he’d been killed. It didn’t take a great thinker to trace the thread. Brent knew something about Frieda’s “accident.” Possibly he’d seen or suspected who had made Anna’s cherished butt-print. That person had decided Brent was to carry his secret to the grave. A one-way ticket had been provided.

  Lost in thought, Anna let a minute’s silence tick by, then two. The shooter had given up. She would wait till he’d gone, then come out of hiding. Minute three passed and with it Anna’s illusion of safety. She had no reason to believe the rifleman would slink away in defeat. Why should he? A glance disabused her of any hope she might have harbored regarding cover or alternative egress. The slot where she hid was eight feet long, two to four feet wide, and bottomless. Anna had incarcerated herself in the ideal trap. No place to hide, no place to go but down, and no way to get there but fall. Big Manhole, having no cause for regular visitation, didn’t boast a standing line, and Brent had been gunned down before he’d rigged a descent.

  Options skittered through her mind. They were few in number and low on appeal. She could remain in her chimney and wait to be shot. Slim possibilities occurred to her: the would-be attacker might make a mistake, create an opening she could parlay into an escape. A mistake of that magnitude would require a gunman bot
h unbelievably stupid and a tad psychotic. Judging by the deadly efficiency with which Brent had been dispatched, this fellow was probably neither. There would be no long cinematic tortures or lengthy rationalizations. Chances were he’d not poke the rifle barrel through the bars to prod his caged quarry so she could wrest the weapon from him in a moment of glorious heroics. He’d point, shoot; she’d fall, die; a crumpled, dead, middle-aged lady on a heap of antique bat shit. No glamour there.

  “Shit,” Anna whispered, then, with a nod to the Hodags, “Shucks.” She needed all the help she could get. The saw of the wind precluded any possibility of listening for approaching footsteps. Not that early warning would do her any good. Diving into a hole had been a serious error in judgment. Odds were, running, she’d have made it, if not unscathed, then at least alive. Moving targets were devilishly hard to hit with any kind of accuracy.

  Now whoever it was would be closer, know precisely where she was, where she could and could not go.

  Anna eyed the rectangular chunk of uncut blue in the iron grid. She was in fairly good physical shape, but climbing out was going to be considerably slower than dropping in. At best guess, there would be thirty to sixty seconds during which she’d be a tempting target.

  Still, there was nothing but to do it, and she tensed up, gauging the distance with the concentration of an Olympic gymnast: eighteen inches, a jerk, a push, a scramble. Readying her muscles, she shifted her weight and flexed her fingers, mimicking the tiny nervous movements of a cat preparing to pounce. On three, she told herself.

  Before she’d begun her countdown, a glittering ruby detached from the sky and fell to a narrow shelf of white limestone. The red was unreal, luminous. Blood, Brent’s blood, dripping through the bars with mesmerizing slowness.

  A second drop, perfect and beautiful in the harsh light of the winter sun, formed on the underside of the iron, quivered, sending thousands of microscopic reflections across its scarlet surface. Caught up in this minuscule drama, she watched as it grew too great to support its own weight, then fell three feet to explode in sudden and sparkling splendor. In this brief life and death of a droplet Anna’s mind had time to paint a grisly future: her grabbing for the bars on either side of the trap, ramming her boots into the sides of her rock prison, and shoving her head and shoulders up through the grate. A bullet ripping through her spine, bits of bone, white and sharp as shrapnel splattering the rock beside her. Her bowels letting loose and her legs going numb as the nerves were severed. Fingers uncurling and the weight of her dead legs dragging her down. Light receding to a pinpoint as she fell to the bottom of Big Manhole.

  The vision sucked the breath from her. She shook free of it and began to scream like a berserker warrior reminding himself of his own bravery. Intellect was over. Time for instinct.

  She lunged upward toward the light.

  13

  TACKY WITH BRENT’S fast-drying blood, Anna’s hands caught the metal and held as if mated with Velcro. No small blessing under the circumstances. Without a glance at Roxbury’s corpse, she kicked up from the limestone, pulling with all her strength. Adrenaline made her virtually shoot upward; half her body cleared the grid in a heartbeat. In another she had one knee on the iron bars and was scrambling on all fours over the ledge of stone that backed the entrance to Big Manhole.

  Moving too fast for balance, she was unable to straighten up, and loped along on hands and feet. Wind tried to push her back, but fear made her unstoppable. She was a stampede of one. Rock and lechuguilla raced past a mere foot or two from her eyes as if she swooped over the desert in a low-flying plane. “Serpentine! Serpentine!” A line from an old Peter Falk movie blossomed in her mind. Had she had breath, she would have laughed. Had she time, she would have complied and zigzagged to avoid the sniper’s bullets.

  A moment more and she found her balance, pulled herself up, claiming her ancestry as a Homo sapiens, and began to sprint up the hill. This tiny evolution had transpired in seconds. That was as long as the honeymoon was to last. The time had been purchased by the element of surprise. Evidently her attacker didn’t think she’d have the courage—or the cowardice, depending on how one looked at it—to make a run for it across the open country.

  A shot cracked behind her. Energy in the form of liquid panic spurted into her gut, but her body was already performing at its peak. There was no more speed to be gotten from her legs. The next noise brought her down. Whether the crack was from bullet or bone, she couldn’t tell. Both feet flew to one side, and she smashed down on hip and shoulder. With the breath knocked half out of her and her brain skidding in her skull, she considered for a moment lying where she fell. An instant’s betrayal of life and those who loved her, and it would all be over.

  Oblivion’s temptation flickered out in a gust of anger. She clawed at the rock, determined to drag herself as far as she could. The gunman could damn well work for this kill. Though hurting—a fact she vaguely sensed through the insulating layers of nature’s own anesthetic—everything seemed in decent working order. Again she scrambled animal fashion over the ground, wondering with an odd detachment where she’d been hit and waiting with the same carelessness for the bullet that would end her life. The spill she had taken had been of long enough duration the shooter could take careful aim for the follow-up shot.

  None came. A clue. What kind of rifle carried only that many bullets? How many? Worthless. Anna couldn’t remember if the gun had fired twice or a dozen times, and she didn’t know for a fact that Brent had been killed with a single shot. Didn’t matter. The shooter was reloading. She had time. Hope did what fear could not, and she squeezed more speed from her muscles.

  The top of the knoll had been graded flat to provide parking space. A low berm of dirt around the crown of the hill resulted. Anna hurled herself over it and rolled. When her belly came under her once again, she pushed to elbows and knees and wriggled toward the Blazer. Another shot rang out, but she didn’t hear or feel it hit. If her guess was right, and the rifleman had come to the cave’s mouth to kill her, he’d put himself on the downhill slope. As long as she stayed low she’d be out of range till he climbed to the top of the hill.

  By then she’d be gone.

  Unless Brent had taken the keys with him.

  Anal retentive, Anna thought as she dragged open the Chevy’s door and crawled lizardlike onto the seat. “I’ll bet the son of a bitch—” Keys dangled from the ignition. “All is forgiven,” she said aloud. Swinging into position, she cranked the key over while muttering a mantra of “pleasepleaseplease” left over from a childhood in which begging occasionally produced favorable results.

  The engine fired up without complaint, and she promised herself she’d write General Motors a thank-you note if she made it back to a post office alive. Haste precluded finesse. Dropping the Blazer in reverse, she floored the gas pedal and jerked the Chevy in a tight arc, its tailpipe pointed about where her stalker would be coming over the hill if he’d continued on her trail. Before the truck came to a full stop, she jammed the gear lever into first and poured on the gas. Gravel flew from beneath all four tires as they scratched down through the dirt to find purchase. Then the Blazer leapt forward, its power fishtailing the body over the ruts of the road and down the far side of the hill.

  The jolting knocked Anna from one side of the cab nearly to the other. Without seatbelt and shoulder strap it was a battle to keep her feet on the pedals and the car on the road. If there were any more gunshots the racket of the engine drowned them out. She didn’t so much drive as ride the bucking, skidding beast of metal until she’d put a lump of hillock between her and the knoll she’d left behind.

  Unable to control the raging jitters, she mashed on the brakes rather than easing to a civilized stop. The Blazer skidded, shuddered, and died. Gasping for breath, Anna clung to the steering wheel and studied the rearview mirror for any sign of pursuit. Reaching up, she wrenched the little mirror this way and that, widening the scope of her search. Vanity stopped her from si
mply turning around and looking out the Blazer’s rear window. Should she take a bullet, she’d just as soon it wasn’t in the face. That was too personal. Brent wasn’t merely dead; he had been ruined. Though it probably mattered not at all to the dead, it bothered the living, and, at least for the moment, that was the side she was on.

  No lumpish hostile appeared. Anna would have been surprised if one had. She had escaped, but so had the shooter. He still had his anonymity. He’d be a fool to risk it just to shoot someone who might or might not be a threat to him.

  Or her.

  Anna tried that out. No sense being close-minded about things. Cowboy movies had trained her to think of rifles as boys’ toys. Usually true, but women in law enforcement were out-shooting their male counterparts on the rifle and pistol range. They seemed to have a natural aptitude for it. Lining up a bead on a target was not unlike threading a needle, plucking a splinter from a toddler’s finger, dotting the “i” in icing on a birthday cake: hand to eye, steady nerves. They were born to it.

  With a last long look into the mirror to guarantee the coast was indeed clear, she finally shoved open the Blazer’s door and stepped out. Her foot buckled under her, and pain, kept at bay by necessity, crippled her. Screaming at the suddenness of it, she fell to her knees beside the truck. When the shock cleared she dragged herself around till she was sitting, back against the front tire, to assess the damage. A bullet had struck her left foot. It was that which had downed her with such vicious abruptness on the hillside. Lead had torn away the heavy lug heel of her hiking boot and pulled the leather away from the sole. Near as she could tell without taking the boot off, it hadn’t drawn blood, but the force had twisted her ankle sufficiently to break or sprain it.