River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  He thought there had been happy times back in Malo Duro, but those days were so inextricably wound up with the awful ones that it was hard to know for sure.

  He did know that he felt alive now, in a way that he hadn’t for many years. Both the renewed sense of freedom that came from having survived his Iraq ordeal and the contrast with Byrd’s precarious state reinforced this. He had been granted a rare second chance, the opportunity to back away from false steps, to build his own future, starting now.

  It was more than that, though. Something else, too, some unknown, unanticipated vitality, seemed to bubble just under the surface of his consciousness, where he couldn’t quite get a handle on it. It was like that hated sensation of knowing the right word but not being able to seize it; when you were live on camera, you couldn’t stop to consult a thesaurus.

  But oh, did it bubble and churn. When he got his hands on it, he would be a new (Kethili) man. That he knew with absolute certainty.

  “Sorry?” Molly asked.

  “What?”

  She speared an asparagus stalk with her fork. “I thought you said something, but I didn’t catch it.”

  Had he? In retrospect he thought that perhaps she had said something under her breath, an unfamiliar word. He was pretty sure he hadn’t, although he might have subvocalized something without realizing it. “No, I don’t think so.”

  She shrugged and returned to her meal.

  And he picked up where his train of thought had left off. Old Wade Scheiner—Wade the golden boy, the star reporter, news anchor, river rat—was becoming something else. Turning a page.

  A new man.

  TEN

  Gretchen Fuchs—and yes, she’d heard all the jokes, most of them about a thousand times each—bustled around her little house near Sunland Park, on the west side of El Paso. Her friends, Lucy, Carole, and Trish, had left about ten minutes before, after asking twice if she wanted help with the dinner dishes. Of course she did, but she had done the polite thing and refused, hoping they would just get off their asses and start washing.

  For a second, it looked like Trish would, and her ass was the skinniest, the most barely there of the lot, thanks to all the running she did. To hear her talk about it, running was not only her favorite activity, it was almost the only activity she allowed herself. The conversation had, as always, ranged far and wide, but also as always, given that they were single, heterosexual, relatively sane and balanced women in their thirties, often veered back toward men and sex and how much of it they were or were not getting. Lucy, whose standards were a little more flexible than the rest (Gretchen didn’t want to apply judgmental terms like morals to the equation), got the most of all of them, and Trish, thin and muscular as a racing greyhound, had been on an unfortunately long dry streak.

  They talked about other things, too: the state of the world, the political situation, the seemingly interminable war, traffic on Interstate 10 and in downtown El Paso, and how with the price of gas what it was, stretching a paycheck all the way to the end of the month was harder than ever.

  Gretchen kicked off her shoes and washed the dishes. She had a window above the sink, but at the moment, she couldn’t see into the dark backyard (small, mostly paved with cracked concrete, through which weeds were starting to sprout—she’d have to get out there and pull them soon), so she settled for glances of her ghostly reflection in the glass. Though not as skinny as Trish or as voluptuous as Lucy, she felt okay about her body. While she could stand to lose a few pounds, she was healthy and the fullness actually helped keep her face from being too long and gaunt. Her blonde hair had been contained before the dinner, but had since slipped loose of its moorings, strands of it floating around her face like satellite appendages.

  She had served Cornish game hens, with green beans and a nice salad and French fingerling potatoes roasted in loads of garlic and rosemary. She scraped all the bones off the plates and into the kitchen wastebasket. The bag would have to go out tonight, with bones and meat scraps in it, or her kitchen would stink to high heaven by morning. And that was assuming Briscoe, the Persian who had disappeared into the house’s nether regions as soon as the first doorbell rang that evening, would leave it alone.

  When the last of the dishes were either arranged in the dishwasher or put away in her cabinets, she pulled the plastic bag from the wastebasket, twirled it around a couple of times to close the neck, and tied it off. It felt heavy at the bottom, as if the fat and grease from the little birds had already soaked through the other trash.

  She carried it to the back door, half expecting to see Briscoe emerge from some closet or hallway now that the strange voices had been gone for a while. At the door, she paused and flicked the switch to turn on the backyard light. She kept her garbage cans back there, tucked behind a little half fence beside her air-conditioning unit.

  The light didn’t come on.

  Something else to add to her chores list. Without a ladder she couldn’t reach the bulb, which was mounted high up on the back wall, so she wasn’t about to mess with it tonight. She knew her way to the garbage cans, after all. She closed the door—Briscoe was strictly an indoors kitty—and descended the four concrete steps, holding the bag at arm’s length. Somebody on the block had a fire going, and the smoke lent a comfortable fragrance to the night air.

  Her yard was about twenty feet square and partially enclosed by high concrete block walls. In addition to the a/c unit and the garbage cans, it contained a seldom-used propane grill, an eight-foot-long wooden planter box in which she grew herbs and strawberries, and a bicycle she rode even less often than she barbecued. The last couple feet of the yard weren’t paved, and the developer had planted trees there that still hadn’t matured into anything impressive. Of course, she also hadn’t watered them much, since in west Texas desert landscaping was more appropriate than whatever kind of trees they were. It was obvious that a fence had, at one time, connected the two straight walls, and the trees would have stood up against that fence, but at some point before Gretchen bought the place the fence had been torn down, leaving just those spurs of concrete block and those spindly trees to mark off her domain.

  Beyond the trees, the yard opened onto the gravel-covered alleyway where she would drag the garbage cans, come Tuesday night. She didn’t like having the alley back there. It came in handy at times, but people who hung out in alleys weren’t the kind of people she wanted skulking around the back of her house. And Briscoe wasn’t much of a watchcat.

  In the dark—really dark tonight, the moon having ducked behind a cloud, and the neighbors’ lights, which usually flooded directly at her rear wall, turned off for a change—Gretchen felt her way to the garbage cans. She peeled off the plastic lid of the nearest one and dropped her bag in. It hit the bottom with a wet thump that made her think of a dead thing, as if it were Briscoe and not just dinner scraps being thrown away.

  When she put the lid back on, snapping it into place, she started back toward the house.

  Then a sound from the alleyway froze her in place.

  She couldn’t identify it. Maybe a raccoon or a javelina or something walking around out there. It had definitely sounded like something moving deliberately, not just a bit of debris skittering along on the wind. There was no wind; the night was as still as any she could remember.

  Still, and dark.

  For God’s sake, she thought, smiling in the darkness, you’ll give yourself a heart attack. Whatever had made the noise had stopped. Probably a stray cat, ordinarily silent, who had stepped in something sticky.

  It wasn’t someone sneaking around the alley looking for a victim, which had been her first thought. That’s just stupid, Gretch. Paranoid.

  Still, stupid or not, she picked up her pace a little, hurrying back to the stairs so fast that she stubbed her big toe on the bottom one. “Ow!” she said. “Shit!” She bent over to inspect the toe in the light that came through the kitchen window, afraid she had torn off the nail.

  And it was while s
he stood there, bent almost double, right hand clutching her foot, that Gretchen heard another noise, louder this time, and closer. She released her foot and scrambled up the stairs and closed her fist around the doorknob, but it had locked itself. Sometimes the thumb latch did that if she wasn’t careful when she closed it, and this must have been one of those times.

  By the time it occurred to her to scream, it was too late. A shadowed form closed on her, a hand clapped over her mouth, and as her attacker wrenched at her neck she could smell rank sweat and something else, maybe steak sauce on his hands.

  You weren’t paranoid after all, Gretch, she thought at the end. There really was someone in the alley.

  ELEVEN

  Ginny Tupper watched a hawk wheel through the blue Texas sky until she lost it in the bright burn of the morning sun. She thought it was a Harris’s hawk, but birds weren’t her specialty by any means, just a pleasant, occasional fringe benefit of her specialty. Anthropology kept her outdoors more often than not, which she appreciated. Her trade also, by necessity, sent her to places where she could be alone, or with a few chosen companions, away from the crowded cities she had lived in until these past couple of years, with college behind her at last and her life’s real task ahead.

  She had awakened around dawn in the Palo Duro Motel, an establishment with absolutely nothing to recommend it except its proximity to the little-explored rock art at Smuggler’s Canyon on the Rio Grande. The motel’s walls were brick and did little to keep out November’s chill, and the heater under the window roared like a wounded water buffalo when it was turned on. After a tepid shower, she had tromped across the gravel parking lot to the adjacent Café (that was its whole name, as far as she could tell), set up in a similar brick building except that it was painted yellow instead of adobe buff. She caught a few of the diners eyeing her out the window, looking away quickly when she met their stares, and she could guess what they were seeing and saying. “Wonder if she plays basketball?” was the top choice. A modern classic was “Did you know Janet Reno had a daughter?”

  Ginny was accustomed to the stares and the comments. You didn’t grow up as the most noticeable person on your block without either developing a thick skin and a sense of humor or throwing yourself under a bus. The people in the café saw a tall, sturdy woman, a hair’s breadth shy of six two, with a shock of frizzy red curls and fair skin on which her frequent exposure to the sun had raised vast fields of freckles. She was dressed in jeans and a hooded blue sweatshirt, with a red windbreaker pulled over it, and hiking boots with fluorescent pink laces.

  She had, in fact, played basketball in school, but she was no relation to the former attorney general, and she wondered how long the woman would have to be out of office before people stopped making the comparison. The topic of her parentage was what had brought her to Palo Duro, though, and it was at Smuggler’s Canyon (an hour later, the hawk having disappeared in the sun, Ginny beginning her anxious scramble up into the rocks) that she hoped to finally find out what had happened to her father more than twenty years earlier.

  She had already spent two full days at Smuggler’s Canyon, climbing and crawling, bellying beneath overhangs and inching into narrow slots, looking at the ancient rock art her father had sketched and studied. Somewhere around thirty million years ago, give or take a millennium or two, molten magma had bubbled up from beneath the earth’s crust, forcing limestone formations through the surface, where it cooled and weathered into a massive jumble of granitelike boulders that soared a couple hundred feet into the air. The Rio Grande had sliced a channel right through the formation, leaving most of it on the U.S. side but a separate, smaller chunk in Mexico. According to the stories, its network of caves and canyons had made it ideal for smuggling going both ways across the border, for at least the last hundred years.

  Before that, however, Smuggler’s Canyon had been sacred to dozens of different First Americans, from the Paleo Indians of twelve thousand years ago, through the Archaic, Mogollon, Comanche, Apache, and no doubt others who had lived in the area or simply passed through. Hollis Tupper had taken minute samples of some of the pictographs he had recorded and had them dated in labs, and the pigments (made from local berries, insects, mud, minerals, animal fats, even urine, in an astonishing variety of colors) had been almost ten thousand years old. Petroglyphs, art etched or pecked into the surface of the rocks, were likely older but couldn’t always be dated as precisely.

  Even more diverse and surprising than the materials and workmanship was the sheer number of individual rock drawings. Ginny’s father had recorded two hundred and forty-three of them, and had hinted that he believed there were more that he had not yet been able to get a good look at. There were dozens of face masks, many animal portraits, hunting and war scenes, pictures representing the seasons, the sun and the moon, and abstract images that had yet to be interpreted.

  Studying the records he had sent home, Ginny was surprised by how fascinating she found it all, and an adolescent obsession turned into a degree and a career. Always, though, she had kept her main goal in mind: getting to Smuggler’s Canyon, which was the last place she was certain her father had been, and figuring out what had happened to him when she was eight years old, a little girl who couldn’t understand why Daddy went on one of his trips and never came home again.

  Her favorite childhood memory, one that had sustained her through hard times during the years of his absence, was from a family trip to the Grand Canyon when she was six. They had spent a few days on the South Rim, admiring the expansive views, which changed minute by minute and hour by hour as the sun slipped through cloudless blue skies. Then they had driven to Lees Ferry and taken a raft into the canyon, stopping at different points along the Colorado so her father could show his family traces of the prehistoric occupation of the area. His enthusiasm for the Anasazi people had been evident, and when they had climbed up to ancient storage bins in Nankoweap Canyon, it had been infectious. To this day, she remembered her childish amazement at the way stones had been fitted together so carefully that they remained in place thousands of years later. Hollis Tupper had taken a few sticks and twisted them into the shape of a deer, demonstrating how the Anasazi people had made toys for their own children centuries ago. She still had one of those twig animals in her room at her mother’s house. Holding it in her hands invariably summoned memories of her father’s warm hands and scratchy cheeks and the dry springtime air that had surrounded them that day.

  This morning, for the first time, she had company at Smuggler’s Canyon. When she arrived, a blue van was parked in the little circle of dirt where she had been leaving her Kia Sportage. She parked some distance from the van and climbed out, looking at the other vehicle like it was an unwanted intruder, a burlesque dancer in church. What was someone else doing here, among her rocks? The license plate was from Nebraska (although her own SUV had California plates, so she couldn’t buck much about that) and the van screamed “tourist.” It even had one of those plastic shells on the luggage rack for carrying yet more luggage.

  She scouted around for discarded water bottles or candy wrappers, certain that these interlopers couldn’t care as much for the canyon as she did. Seeing no immediate despoiling of the landscape, she opened her passenger door, pulled out a worn leather backpack containing some of her father’s notebooks, as well as her own, a camera, binoculars, water and a first-aid kit, and slung it over one shoulder.

  The lack of visible trash encouraged her a little, but she still worried about tourists up in the rocks. Nothing protected the rock art except the site’s remoteness and some state laws posted on a sign near the parking area, which most people probably didn’t bother to read. She had seen names spray-painted over some of the ancient markings. Going back to the 1840s, people had added their own contributions to these walls, with chisels or paint or fire, each one obscuring the original artwork found here.

  They wouldn’t do it while she was around to stop them.

  She stalked into the roc
ks, her sunny mood fouled by the appearance of the van. If she came across some idiot smearing graffiti on this sacred place, she would—well, she didn’t know, but the object of her wrath would wish she hadn’t come along.

  The most obvious trail led from the parking area into a natural gully between two huge jumbles of rock. About a quarter of a mile in, the rocks sloped away from the trail at a gentle enough angle that people could easily climb up and find the first batch of masks. Most tourists never went any farther into the rocks than that, judging by the sudden drop-off in the amount of litter Ginny had seen strewn about.

  Ginny followed this trail first, guessing the tourists had come this way. Hiking boot prints marked the dirt path, scuffing over the tracks of lizards, snakes, and birds. Mesquite and creosote and amaranth grown tall from late summer rains scented the still morning air with a faint dry, peppery aroma. From somewhere up ahead, Ginny caught the sound of laughter on the breeze. She set her jaw and clenched her fists, anticipating a confrontation with a rowdy bunch of defilers. They had to be at the first section of masks, just around a sharp bend. Her view of them blocked by a pile of massive boulders stacked thirty feet high.

  Before she reached the bend she heard what sounded like a cry of alarm, with lesser shouts following in its wake. She rounded the curve at a sprint. On the slope up toward the flat wall where the masks were painted, she saw them. Four people stood near the wall, looking down the rock slope with varying expressions of shock. A fifth person scrambled down at a half crouch, hurrying toward the last, who was about twenty yards away from the others, trying to sit up. The one on the ground was a woman, and she looked unsteady. Her nylon jacket was torn, her dark hair tugged from its ponytail. Blood smeared both her palms.