Slickrock Paradox

by Stephen Legault

  He landed on a stack of papers, which cascaded to the floor. He listened a moment. Hearing nothing, he turned and tried to shut the window behind him. It wouldn’t budge. In wrenching it open, he had jammed the wooden runner too tightly to close easily. He bent down and restacked the newspapers. He drew the curtains that covered the now open window, switched his headlamp on, and went immediately to the boxes stacked behind Nephi’s desk. He opened the first box. It contained dozens of fat file folders, all stuffed with project reports, assessments, records, and other papers on oil and gas projects around the Southwest. He closed that box and looked in the second one. Again, files on oil and gas projects, but this time their location was in Canada: Alberta, northern British Columbia, Saskatchewan.

  He opened the third box, his headlamp playing around the room as he paused, listening for signs of trouble. More folders were crammed in the box, but this time each bore a person’s name. He scanned through them, and felt his heart race as he saw three familiar names: Timothy T. Martin, C. Thorn Smith, and Peter Anton. He pulled those files out and sat down on the floor to read.

  He started with Anton’s file. It contained a long record of correspondence, mostly printed emails, all pertaining to the exploration of Hatch Wash. Most of the correspondence was unidirectional: Nephi probing Anton as to the state of the archaeological assessment of the wash, eagerly inquiring as to what had been found, if anything. Silas scanned through the documents, noting the dates as they advanced from a period starting four years ago up to the present. There was no mention of his wife’s name in any of the correspondence, but about two years back, Silas’s eye caught the word “Wisechild.” He read more carefully:

  “This business between you and the Wisechild girl is compromising your ability to operate objectively,” said Nephi in an email to Anton. “Her unwillingness to undertake the planned activities is going to be a problem unless you sever the relationship and ensure she is excluded from the operations.”

  Silas read on down the page for Anton’s reply: “Mind your own damned business. Kayah will not be a problem” was all he had to say. Obviously she was. The video footage she shot from the cliff above the ruins in Hatch attested to that.

  He flipped through more pages containing detailed descriptions of the contents of the ruins. Anton had reduced the wealth of artifacts into statistical lines of text: “24 pots, intact with various designs; 22 pots, with some structural decay; 6 woven baskets, intact; 4 woven baskets, with some structural decay; 3 pairs of sandals; 67 arrowheads; 4 bows with decorative arrows; 2 ceremonial mounds . . .” It went on, reading more like a stock-room inventory than the contents of an undisturbed archaeological find.

  Silas kept scanning through the pages. He was sweating in the darkness. His eye caught the words “numbered company”: “We’re setting up a subsidiary that will manage drilling contracts in the Canyon Rims project. Mr. Martin has agreed to give you a 10 per cent stake in return for your services.” The email was sent from a Gmail account to Anton. No wonder Anton was so eager to clear the ruins. With them out of the way, he had removed a major obstacle to the development of the Hatch Wash project. He now stood to profit not only from the sale of the artifacts, but also from the drilling contracts.

  Why, if he stood to lose so much by their discovery, would Anton send Silas there in the first place? Why lead him to the place they had worked so hard to keep secret? Did he believe that the ruins, cleared of their artifacts, would no longer pose a threat to a dam on Hatch Wash? Or was there something more sinister at work? Did Anton send Silas into that canyon only to follow and leave him for dead in the ceremonial kiva? If murder was Anton’s intent, why not just club him on the back of the head like Kelly Williams?

  Only briefly did Silas consider that maybe Anton had gotten cold feet himself.

  He returned to his review of the files. The correspondence with Anton returned to its businesslike tone. If Nephi had been employed as a project engineer for Canusa Petroleum Resources, it could have all been very routine, but of course, two years ago he had already been long installed in Senator Thorn Smith’s office.

  Next Silas turned his attention to Smith himself. His file was thicker, and Silas patiently read, starting five years back. Nephi and the senator discussed his employment, his absences working on again and off again with Canusa, and the handling of the Utah Land Stewardship Fund development.

  By the end of the file Silas’s eyes were bleary from reading in the poor light, and he felt he was no closer to a link between Nephi, his wife, and the three bodies he had found. His stomach felt queasy from the depth of the collusion between the senator’s office and the petroleum business, but nowhere in any of it had he found the hoped for smoking gun that tied any of this to Penelope. Yes, there was circumstantial evidence tying Anton and Nephi to Wisechild, and by tenuous extension, Williams, but nothing explicit.

  He finally opened the file on Martin. Like the file on Smith, it began five years ago, but unlike the other two files, this one merely contained a series of newspaper reports and stories from trade magazines associated with the petroleum industry. Silas flipped through them, looking for anything relating to Hatch Creek, but all he found was a piece written in Moab’s Canyon Country Zephyr from the previous week covering the announcement of the Land Stewardship Fund. He closed the file, disappointed.

  He felt as if he’d taken a terrible chance for next to nothing. It was time to get out. Silas stood and listened again. The alley behind the office and the building itself seemed quiet as a tomb. He decided to search the rest of the office and then leave. He began to open the desk drawers: pens, markers, paper clips, a stapler. In one drawer were three cell phones, but none had any battery power left, and their SIM cards were missing. The bottom drawers were empty. He closed them and turned his headlamp off and was about to make his way to the window when he heard a noise in the lobby of the building. It was the sound of a heavy door, opening and then closing.

  Silas’s heart began to pound and he immediately felt flushed. He turned to look through the broad window into the common area. He could feel blood coursing in his ears. He heard something else through the trembling stillness: keys. Someone was jingling keys outside the senator’s office. Silas’s first thought was to bolt for the window, but as he was about to move toward it, the door to the outermost office opened and he saw a flashlight through the window. He ducked, the beam playing across Nephi’s desk.

  On hands and knees, conscious of his pack’s bulk, he crawled to the wall beneath the window that faced the common room. Suddenly all the lights in the space came on. His heart beating in this throat, Silas pressed his body against the wall, willing himself not to breathe. A year would be a long time in a US prison, he kept thinking to himself. And if it was Nephi himself . . .

  He waited, feeling naked and exposed in the bright fluorescent lights. A movement across the room caught his eye—the curtains in the office were moving ever so slightly. Where the window had been jammed open, a delicate breeze entered the room. He watched the curtains as they shifted; if the night watchman—or whoever was in the office—noticed the movement, he was sunk. He crouched there, unable to breath, and then, without warning, the lights went out and he heard the door close. He bent over and drew a deep breath and shook his head. He laughed to himself, the wave of relief washing over him like a hot flood.

  Get out, was his only thought. He cased the room and returned its contents to their places. There was nothing that clearly pointed to Nephi as a killer, though he believed now that somehow he and Anton had been in collusion with Martin to destroy the ruins in Hatch Wash to make way for Martin’s development scheme. He felt he had no choice but to tell Rain and Taylor what he suspected and let the FBI do what they could to draw the link. Ken Hollyoak was a good lawyer, even if retired, and might get him off on house arrest.

  He sighed as he approached the window, looking over his shoulder to ensure that the office was in fact clear. To make sure he could close the window aft
er he slipped through it, he grabbed the top of the frame, pushing down to force it through the runners. When it budged he felt some hope. With his crowbar, he pried between the sides of the window and the frame, then pushed on the window again. Reassured, and with the crowbar back in his pack, he slipped out and dropped to the ground. He reached up and closed the window easily.

  He might actually get away with this, he mused, as he scanned the alley. Relieved, Silas took a circuitous route to his Outback, parked four blocks away. The streets were empty.

  He’d call Katie Rain and make arrangements to meet in Monticello on his way back to Moab and then wash his hands of this whole mess. He reached his car and unlocked the door and sat down in the driver’s seat and fished his cell phone from his pocket and then his keys. He had inserted the keys in the ignition and hit speed dial on the phone, when he glanced in the rear-view mirror. Someone was sitting in the back seat.

  “Jesus Christ!” He tried to turn, but the nose of an automatic pistol clipped his right cheek and he reached up to feel the hot stream of blood there. He looked at the face in the mirror again.

  “Find anything interesting, Dr. Pearson?” asked Charles Nephi.

  “PUT THE CAR IN GEAR and drive.” Nephi had the barrel of the pistol pushed into the side of Silas’s neck.

  “Where?”

  “Just drive. I’ll tell you when to turn.”

  Silas looked in the mirror. Nephi was sitting in the middle of the back seat, a 9mm Browning pistol held tightly in his right hand.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Out of town.”

  “Where out of town?”

  “We’re going for a drive, Dr. Pearson. That’s all you need to know.”

  “I didn’t find anything in your office. Why are you doing this?”

  “There was nothing there to find. There’s nothing to find anywhere, Pearson. Shut up and drive.”

  Silas shifted up into fourth. They were approaching the municipal airport.

  “Don’t speed. You attract any attention I’ll kill you.”

  “You’ll get caught.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why are you—”

  Nephi pressed the pistol into Silas’s face.

  “If you keep this up, Pearson, there’s going to be nothing left of you. Now slow down and turn right up here.”

  “Highway 95?”

  “Turn.” Silas slowed and made the turn onto Route 95 and started across the darkened desert landscape. His headlights cut a narrow hole in the blackness, and from time to time the eyes of some nocturnal desert creature appeared by the side of the road.

  “What are you going to do?” Silas risked asking.

  Nephi sat back, relaxing, and sighed. “You’re going to have an accident, Dr. Pearson. An accident.”

  “Did you kill Kayah Wisechild? Williams and McFarland too?”

  Nephi laughed. “If this was a Hollywood movie or some second-rate paperback, this would be the part where the bad guy spills his guts, right? You run a bookstore, you’ve read that trash. You think I’ll confess all my sins because you’re not going to be around to do anything about it, but then somehow you escape my evil grasp and heroically return to use my confession against me—”

  “I haven’t read any of those books. Not my thing.”

  “Maybe not, Pearson, but you’re not going to get any confessions from me.”

  “What about my wife? Did you kill her?”

  Nephi laughed again. “I never even met your wife, Pearson. Too bad—from what I’ve seen she was a good-looking woman. Now, just drive and keep it under the speed limit. I’d hate to have to shoot you a few times before you actually have your tragic mishap.”

  They drove on in silence for a few minutes and then began the long, steep incline of Comb Ridge. Silas could feel his hands growing sweaty. “You’re going to do this on Comb Ridge, aren’t you?”

  “Just drive, Pearson.”

  “That’s fitting. Penny was such an Abbey freak, and Comb Ridge was where the Monkey Wrench Gang did their first job.”

  “I hate Edward Abbey.”

  “Me too.”

  They drove up the long back of Comb Ridge, the blacktop hissing under the Outback’s tires. Silas’s mind raced. He had seen in movies where, in a situation like this, the driver had crashed the car deliberately, so that the unbelted assailant in the back seat would be injured or killed, and he could walk away from the accident, saved by his air bag. He looked for a likely place to do it, but the road was hemmed in between walls of sandstone on one side and guard rails on the other. He feared that at worst, he would enrage Nephi and get himself shot in the process.

  “Was this really all about oil?”

  “I’ll tell you this much, Pearson, only to shut you up. It’s about power. Oil is just the tool you use in this country to get it. It’s about power.”

  “Power for who? For your boss? Martin?”

  “Tim Martin is not my boss. Never has been.”

  “Smith? Senator Smith?”

  “You almost got me to confess there, Dr. Pearson,” said Nephi.

  “But I didn’t find anything.”

  “You really think I would leave something sitting around in my office? I’m not that stupid. But you have demonstrated a surprising level of determination that frankly has to be interrupted before you stumble on something truly important.”

  “I was just about to give up—”

  “Too late now. Stop the car there, in the weeds by the side of the road.”

  Silas pulled the car over. His eyes darted from the mirror to the world caught in his headlights and back to Nephi. The crest of the roadway over the ridge was cut deeply into the ancient sedimentary stone, so they were parked in a narrow pull-off. On the south side, where the highway opened up and began its long precipitous descent toward Comb Wash, the slope opened roughly and led up to the top of the ridge.

  “We’ve stopped on top of Comb Ridge,” Silas said, glancing back in the mirror. As soon as Nephi got out he was going to gun the engine and race down the steep side of Comb Ridge. He’d drive all the way to Natural Bridges National Monument if he had to.

  “Turn the car off,” ordered Nephi.

  Silas turned off the engine but left the keys in the ignition.

  “Hand me the keys,” said Nephi sardonically. Silas grabbed the keys out of the ignition.

  The pistol clipped Silas in the jaw just below the ear, and he felt more blood trickle down his neck. A bead of perspiration leaked from his hairline and settled in his brow. Next plan, drop the keys at Nephi’s feet and hope he looked down. Before he could reach back, Nephi hit him with the butt of the pistol behind the ear. Silas heard the crack before the world went black.

  HE WOKE LYING on the ground, his hands tied in front of him with twine, his head aching. He could taste blood in his mouth. He was staring heaven­ward and his first thought was how extraordinary the desert sky was. The stars were pasted across the black cosmos in layers that receded into infinity. He rolled onto his side and immediately wanted to vomit. He suppressed the urge, breathing in through his nose. He smelled something mechanical, oil or grease. He focused his eyes and saw Nephi’s legs protruding from under the front of the Outback. The legs wiggled and Nephi emerged.

  “Don’t even think about moving.” Nephi patted the pistol in his waistband.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Cutting your brake lines. These vehicles are a bitch to work on. You got any tools in the back, Pearson?” Nephi wiped his hands on his jeans.

  “Fuck you.”

  “I would have expected more from a professor of literature. Something more . . . well, literate, I suppose.” Nephi walked to the back of the vehicle and opened the hatch. He found Silas’s toolbox and rummaged through it for a large enough pair of wire cutters.

  Silas tried to sit up, but his stomach turned over and he returned to his side. He realized that his legs were also bound. He scanned the car and the rocks be
yond, seeking some salvation, but he could find none.

  Nephi found what he was looking for. “This should do.”

  Silas detected movement ahead, beyond the car, something in the rocky cliffs on the side of the road. A coyote?

  Nephi walked back to the front of the car and was preparing to duck under when a voice boomed from the rocks.

  “Drop the fucking gun!”

  Nephi dropped the wire cutters instead and pulled his Browning from his belt. He fired twice in the direction of the voice, into the rocks. A muzzle flash and the roar of a .357 Magnum responded, the bullet whizzing past Nephi and ricocheting off the rocks behind Silas’s body. Nephi fired three more times into the rocks.

  Silas thought he saw a bulky figure move amid the boulders. Realizing his precarious position, Silas struggled to stand, but instead fell face forward into the dirt. Desperate, he began to roll toward the back of the car. Nephi wheeled on him and fired twice in his direction, both shots hitting so close to Silas that he felt their impact reverberate through the blacktop.

  Silas heard another blast from the .357 and the windshield of his Outback exploded. Nephi turned toward his attacker and fired two more rounds.

  Nephi jumped into the car. It roared to life. Silas, prone behind the rear wheels, feared Nephi would back over him. Instead, Nephi spun the wheels, kicking rocks and dust into Silas’s face, and the car raced down the steep slope of Comb Ridge.

  A stout figure emerged from the rocks. Silas watched the man take aim with a revolver and fire at the speeding car. The man turned and Silas could see the hairy visage clearly. Hayduke.

  “Holy fuck,” roared Hayduke. “You okay? You hit?”

  “Fine, I’m fine.”

  “Sweet motherfucker!” he yelled again, his pistol at his side. “Let’s get that cocksucker!”