Ill Wind

by Nevada Barr

  “What grounds, man? She’s got my kids, for Christ’s sake.” Tom quit playing with the cigarette and lit it, striking a wooden match with an expert—and probably much rehearsed—flick of his thumbnail. “There ain’t no way she can keep me from going over there. I’ve never done a damn thing, not one damn thing she can hold up in a court of law to say I can’t. Hell, I never even hit her.”

  “I believe you, Tom,” Anna said soothingly. “But there’s a thing called harassment. Patsy has pretty strong feelings about some of your gifts.”

  Tom shook his head. Smoke poured from his nostrils. His eyes were fixed on a point beyond Anna’s left shoulder. Behind her she could hear Stacy shifting his weight.

  “She’s got a scrap of skin in an envelope, Tom. She said it was foreskin. That’s a pretty loaded thing to send somebody.” Anna was uncomfortably aware of the unintentional humor. She heard Stacy clearing his throat, a small cough that could have been thwarted laughter.

  Fortunately Tom seemed not to pick up on it. For a moment he sat smoking and Anna waited, letting the silence soak in, work for her.

  “Christ! It was a joke,” he finally burst out.

  Stacy spoke for the first time. “A joke? It must’ve hurt like crazy. Where’s the funny part?”

  Tom looked up at him, his mouth twisted with irritation. “I didn’t take a fucking knife to myself, if that’s what you mean. The doc did it. Pats had been after me for years. I thought she’d like it.”

  “You got circumcised in your thirties?” Stacy asked. Anna bit back a laugh at the “oh ouch!” she could hear under the words.

  “That’s right.” Tom smiled; his teeth were square and white. “Barnum and Bailey got a new tent.”

  Inwardly, Anna sighed. “Here’s where we stand, Tom. You, Patsy, me—we’ve all got to live together on this mesa top. At least for a while. I’d suggest that you steer clear of Patsy. If you’ve got visiting rights to your kids, you two work that out. I’ll ask Patsy to file whatever agreement you reach at the chief ranger’s office. You stick to that and you won’t have to deal with us, okay?”

  “Fuck!” Tom flicked his cigarette butt into the brush. Anna didn’t even follow it with her eyes. “Why don’t you rangers do your job instead of hassling people that work for a living? You get a fucking free ride from the government and can’t even keep the fucking roads safe. Monday night a big goddamn truck nearly ran me off the road. Where the hell were you then? Christ!”

  “We’ll look into that.” Pushing herself to her feet, Anna heard both ankles crack in protest.

  “Will that be all, ranger?”

  “Almost,” Anna returned. “Just find that cigarette you tossed and put it out and we’ll be out of your hair. Fire danger’s bad this year. Manning Class four yesterday.”

  “Find it yourself,” Silva muttered.

  “I got it.” Stacy had crushed the life from the butt and now tucked the filter into his pocket.

  “Good enough for me,” Anna said. “Take it easy, Tom.”

  “Yeah.”

  WHEN they’d passed the surveyor and were climbing out of the ravine, Stacy said: “Foreskin is a loaded gift,” and the laughter Anna had swallowed came bubbling out.

  “The way he was playing with the cigarette . . .” Anna’s laughter took over and she had to stop climbing just to breathe. “You’d think he was auditioning for the role of Johnny Wad in Debbie Does Dallas.”

  “You mean that didn’t toss your confetti? I kind of thought I might give it a shot. Run it up the flagpole, see if the cat licks it up.”

  Stacy stopped beside her. Pressed close by the brambles, Anna was aware of the smell of him: freshly laundered cotton and soap. Heat radiated from her, and it wasn’t only from the sun and the climb. Anna stifled her basic instincts and shook herself like a dog ridding its fur of water drops.

  Abruptly, she turned and pushed up the side of the ravine. In places it was so steep she pulled herself along using the low branches. Her laughter had evaporated.

  “You drive,” she said as they reached the patrol car. “These seats break my back.”

  “You’re too short. This is a man’s machine. A car for Johnny Wad.” Stacy slipped behind the wheel and slid the seat back as far as it would go.

  “Thanks for picking up that cigarette butt. What was I going to do? Shoot the guy? Never try to out-macho a construction worker.”

  “Believe it or not, picking up litter is why I went into this business. I don’t work for the Park Service. I work for the parks.”

  Anna settled back into the seat. “The NPS could use a few more fern feelers. I, for one, hope you get on permanent.”

  “So do I,” Stacy said. “So do I.”

  His tone was so grim, so determined, Anna dropped the subject. Everybody had to contend with their own demons. Some of hers were such old familiars she considered naming them and renting them closet space.

  Leaning her head back against the vinyl headrest, she closed her eyes. Zachary was dead eight years come August. She could no longer consistently call his face to mind. Without his memory clear and present, her fortieth might turn out to be a damn lonely year.

  FOUR

  HOUSEMATES OUT, TELEVISION OFF, ANNA HAD BEEN sleeping with glorious abandon. Deep sleep, REM sleep, sleep without nightmares. Of late a good night’s sleep had become such a rarity her fantasies about it bordered on the erotic.

  Hence the cursing reluctance with which she relinquished it to answer the phone.

  “Anna, Frieda. Sorry about this.”

  Anna turned on her bedside light and snatched up the alarm clock: 2:02 A.M.

  “Nobody else to home,” Frieda said. All law enforcement on MEVE shared an emergency party line called the ’69 line because of the last two digits of the number. Every call rang in quarters on Chapin and at Far View. Anna’d been the unlucky ranger who picked up first.

  “What’s up—other than me?” Anna was already threading her legs into yesterday’s underpants.

  “Got a report of lights in the maintenance yard. Somebody needs to check it out.”

  “I’m headed in that direction.” Maintenance was scarcely a hundred yards from the housing loop on Chapin. Stacy would have been the logical one to respond but he never answered the ’69. Scuttlebutt was he unplugged it nights. Some said for Bella, others said Rose did the unplugging.

  Loss of sleep was a trade-off for money. Every call, short or long, earned two hours’ overtime. As she buckled on her duty belt, Anna totaled it up. Two hours at time and a half was close to thirty bucks. She’d’ve paid nearly that for an uninterrupted night’s sleep.

  From the patrol car, she called in service. Frieda responded—not because she had to, she wasn’t officially on duty. There would be no overtime or base pay for her. Frieda monitored because she took her job more seriously than her employers did. She didn’t like rangers out without at least rudimentary backup.

  The air was cool and fresh. Anna rolled down the Ford’s windows and let the darkness blow in around her. On her first late shifts she’d had a new experience—or if not new, one she hadn’t felt for a long time, not since leaving New York City. Anna’d found herself afraid of the dark.

  Walking trail in Texas, skirting islands around Isle Royale, she’d worn the night like a star-studded cloak. But Mesa Verde was all about dead people. In the mind—or the collective unconscious—there was a feeling they’d not all left in the twelve hundreds. Or if they had, perhaps whatever it was that drove them out had taken up residence in the abandoned cities. Everywhere there were reminders of another time, another world.

  Given the propensity of Jamie and some of the other interpreters to capitalize on New Age voodoo, Anna never admitted her fear but she patrolled with an ear open for voices long gone, footsteps not clothed in mortal flesh.

  A half-moon threw bars of silver across the road, enough to see by, and as she turned onto the spur leading to Maintenance, she clicked off her headlights. The Maintenance yard
, a paved area with a gas pump in the center, was surrounded by two-story buildings: offices, garages, a carpenter’s shop, storage barns. Built in the 1940s, the buildings were of dark wood with small many-paned windows. One remnant remained from the thirties: the fire cache, where helitack stored the gear needed to fight wildland fire. It was of stone with juniper beams supporting a flat roof. Behind the cache a twelve-foot cyclone fence topped with barbed wire enclosed the construction company’s equipment behind padlocked gates.

  In the inky shadow of a storage barn, the car rolled to a stop. Anna called on scene and received Frieda’s reassuring reply. Setting the brake, she listened. Pre-dawn silence, fragile and absolute, settled around her. The pop of her tires as they cooled, the clicking of insects flying against the intruder lights, pattered like dry rain.

  Trickling out of the quiet, it came to her why Mesa Verde nights pricked some nerve deep in her psyche. Like New York City, the mesa was comprised of peopled dark, dark that collected in the corners of buildings and under eaves, choked alleys, and narrow streets. A darkness permeated with the baggage of humanity. Dreams and desires haunted the mesa the way they haunted the rooms in old houses. Traces of unfinished lives caught in the ether.

  Anna felt her skin begin to creep. “Why don’t you just rent a video of Hill House and be done with it?” she mocked herself.

  Another minute whispered by. Apparently nothing was going to manifest itself in her windshield. She loosed the six-cell flashlight from its charger beneath the dash.

  Metal clanked on metal as she opened the car door and she froze. It wasn’t the familiar click of door mechanisms, it was what she’d been waiting for: something not right, a sound where silence ought to be.

  Noise gave her direction. Leaving the car door open rather than risk a racket, she moved quietly toward the fenced construction yard. Between her car and the fence were three board-and-batten shacks used to store hand tools and pesticides. In the colorless light the short road looked like a scene from Old Tucson’s back lot.

  Anna followed the line of buildings till she ran out of shadow. Two junipers framed a picnic table where the hazardous-fuel-removal crew cleaned their saws. She slipped into the protective darkness. Closer now, she could see the gates to the yard. A chain hung loose, its padlock broken or unlocked.

  Within the confines of the cyclone fence, equipment clustered like prehistoric creatures at a watering hole. Bones of metal linked with hydraulic cable in place of tendons thrust into the night: the skeletal neck of a crane, the scorpion’s claw of a backhoe, the rounded back of a water truck—one she’d never seen in use though dust from construction was a constant irritation. Easily a million dollars’ worth of machinery brought in to do the work needed for the waterline.

  Again came the clank, softer this time and followed by a faint scraping sound. Moving quickly, Anna crossed the tarmac and slipped through the gates. Moonlight caught her, then she was again in shadow, her back against a wheel half again as tall as she.

  When heart and breath quit clamoring in her ears, she listened. Concentration revealed sounds always present but seldom noted: the minute scratch of insect feet crossing sand, a whispered avian discussion high in the trees. Nothing unnatural, nothing human. Odd, Anna thought, that “man-made” and “natural” should be considered antithetical.

  Time crawled by; the slight adrenaline rush brought on by the act of sneaking faded and she began feeling a bit silly crouched in the darkness chasing what was undoubtedly a wild goose—or at worst a chipmunk who’d decided to build her nest in one of Greeley’s engines.

  Probably the last guy out had forgotten to lock the gate. Monday nights Stacy had late shift. He should have checked it but something may have distracted him.

  Realizing she’d been taking shallow nervous breaths, Anna filled her lungs. Muscles she hadn’t known she was clenching relaxed and she felt her shoulders drop. Expelling a sigh to blow away the last of the chindi-borne cobwebs, she switched on her flashlight and stepped out of the shadows.

  Weaving through the parked machines, she played the light over each piece of equipment. Nothing stirred, scuttled, or slithered. A backhoe at the end of the enclosure finished the group. Anna shone the light over the yellow paint, up an awkward angle, and into the mud-crusted bucket. Nothing.

  The goose could consider itself chased. Anna was going back to bed. Turning to leave, her beam crawled along the oversized tires and across the toe of a boot, a cowboy boot, scuffed and brown like a hundred thousand others in the southwest.

  Like a dog chasing cars, she thought. Now what? Indecision passed with a spurt of fear. She stepped into the shadows and moved the flashlight out from her body lest it become a target.

  “Come on out and talk to me,” she said. “No sense hiding at this point.”

  There was only one way out of the yard that didn’t involve scaling the fence, and Anna waited for the intruder to show himself or bolt for the gate.

  The toe twitched. “Come on out,” Anna said reasonably. “You’re not in too much trouble yet.”

  Slowly, with a feeble skritching sound, the toe pulled back into darkness. A peculiar shushing followed and Anna realized whoever it was was pulling off the boots.

  Little hairs on the back of her neck began to prickle. “Enough’s enough, come out of there.” She walked toward the backhoe’s rear tire, unsnapping the keeper on her .357 as she went.

  The intruder was quick. On silent sock feet, he’d retreated into the jungle of blades, tires, and engines. Anna had no intention of following. Backing slowly out of the alley between the metal monoliths, she ducked clear of the moonlight and took her King radio from her belt.

  Frieda, bless her, was still monitoring. “We’ve got an intruder in the construction yard,” Anna said clearly. “Get me some backup.”

  The radio call stirred the stockinged feet. Distinct rustling from a careless move riveted Anna’s attention on a ditcher parked one space nearer the open gate. Staying well back in the shadow, she waited. Silence grated on her nerves and she listened as much for the approach of help as she did for the movements of the person she tracked.

  Scuffling: the tiny sound made her flinch as if a cannon had gone off near her ear. Behind her now, beyond the backhoe; loath to leave the dark for the glaring moonlight, Anna knelt and turned her light between the wheels. A flick of gray; a tail disappearing through the fence. She turned the flashlight off. Time to move. The rodent had tricked her into giving away her position.

  Easing to her feet, she tried for quiet but knees and ankles popped like firecrackers in the stillness.

  A foot scrape on concrete and a singing of air: a black line with a hook windmilled out from the rear of the ditcher. Moonbeams were sliced, air whistled through the iron. Someone was swinging a heavy chain with an eight-inch tow hook attached to the end.

  Reflexively Anna dropped to her belly and rolled under the backhoe as the weighted chain cut through the air, striking the tire where she’d been standing. Iron links whipped around the hard rubber and struck the back of her neck, the links cracking against her temple. Shock registered but not pain.

  Wriggling on elbows and knees, Anna worked her way deeper under the belly of the machine.

  Footsteps, soft and running, followed the cacophony of chain falling. Whoever it was ran for the gate. Courage returned and Anna scrambled into the open. She was on her feet in time to hear the gate clang shut. Sprinting the twisted path across the pavement, she caught a glimpse of a figure flitting through the shadows of the utility buildings beyond.

  When she reached the gate she stopped. The chain had been strung back through and the lock snapped shut.

  “Damn it!” Greeley had his own locks and the rangers had not been given access keys. With a jump she reached halfway up the fence and hung there. A double line of barbed wire slanted away from the fence top. She could probably thread her way through with only a modicum of damage but not in time to catch whoever had locked her in.

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nbsp; Smothering an obscenity, she dropped back to earth and unsheathed her radio. Not even Frieda heard her call this time. Leaning against the wire, she caught her breath and let the nervous energy drain away. Fatigue welled up in its place and her legs began to shake. Where the chain had lashed ached and her head felt full of hot sand.

  She crossed the asphalt and rested her back against the tread of a D-14 Cat. Her insides shook and her breath was uneven. What scared her wasn’t so much the attack but her lack of readiness to meet it. Like a rookie—or a complacent old-timer—she’d wandered happily into the middle of a crime in progress. And nearly been killed for her stupidity. She’d gotten sloppy, let down her guard.

  Mesa Verde was old and slow and visited by the old and slow. Situated on a mesa in the remote southwestern corner of Colorado, approachable only by twenty miles of winding two-lane mountain road, it didn’t get the through traffic of a park on a major highway. No accidental tourists on their way from Soledad to Sing Sing.

  Mesa Verde’s dangers had struck Anna more akin to the pitfalls of Peyton Place. Societies, like other living organisms, sometimes fell ill. But she hadn’t expected violence. She had let herself be lulled into a false sense of security.

  Scrapes from the chain throbbed and she brought her mind back to the machinery yard. What had the intruder been after? The stuff was too obvious to fence, too big to steal. Something important enough to risk imprisonment. Assault on a federal officer was a felony offense.

  The fog in her head was clearing and only a dull ache behind her eyes remained. Anna pushed herself to her feet. Somewhere beneath the backhoe was her flashlight. Before morning’s business stomped over the whole place, she would use it to see if Mr. Brown Boots had left anything behind.

  Cigarette butts were scattered beneath the ditcher. Sherlock Holmes might have made hay with such an abundance of clues but Anna didn’t bother. Half the construction workers smoked and, near as she could tell, all of the maintenance men. Marlboro, Camel Lights, Winston, she noted the brands for the sake of feeling useful but they were too common to draw any conclusions.