Conard County Watch

by Rachel Lee

  “This has been too weird,” Mason said presently. “None of it is making sense. First, we almost get flattened by a rockslide that someone caused, and now we’re being treated to creepy sounds? Where does that get anyone?”

  Maddie spoke. “It got us to go to town last night rather than stay out here. Anyway, I’m sure Renee has been chewing all of this over and over and I’m not sure the three of us have a darn thing to add. It’s weird. That’s about it. Someone wants us to move on? Probably. But who and why? I mean, maybe some members of the tribe don’t agree with Gray Cloud and the other elders. Maybe they want the entire place left untouched.”

  It was possible, Renee thought, but it didn’t seem likely judging by what her cousin had told her over the years. For one thing, Gray Cloud and the other elders were highly respected and liked. For another, no decision would have been made without a lot of discussion and a general agreement among the people. The tribe was not in any way, shape or form a dictatorship. When there was disagreement, a compromise was sought.

  When a decision was made, everyone followed it because community was more important than the individual. Or so Mercy had said. Regardless, there could be malcontents anywhere who might not follow the usual rules.

  But damn, it didn’t feel like that was what was going on here. The Bear brothers would surely have caught wind of something like that.

  “The point is,” she said finally, “we don’t know what’s going on or how serious it might get. Larry was hurt. Maybe accidentally, but given the rockslide that fell on him, he’s lucky all he has is a broken leg. What if that happens again and it’s worse? I just don’t feel like playing Russian roulette with you guys.”

  “Well, then,” Maddie said briskly, “let’s go free that egg before something happens to it. Then we can decide if the rest of us should even be out here in the daytime.”

  Renee was given no opportunity to argue or tell them to just go to town, per her instructions. Without another word, they picked up their backpacks and started up the path.

  Renee looked at Cope. “I think I’ve just been overridden.”

  “While the sun is up, anyway. Let me bank the fire, then we’ll go keep an eye on the mutineers.”

  “Truth is,” she said, “I’m a bit touched. They’re devoted to saving that egg, and not just because of me, I’m sure. They understand how priceless it is.”

  “They wouldn’t be here if they didn’t. And I’m with them. Let’s get the egg out before anything happens to it. Then we can work our way through everything else.”

  “I wish that Denise had come. She makes the most amazing sketches.”

  He looked over at her as he finished piling ashes and sand on the fire. “I think we can do pretty well with rulers for scale and photos, don’t you?”

  Of course they could, and she knew it. She also knew that he was trying to cheer her up.

  If she thought about last night, she could brighten with remarkable rapidity. Facing today cast her down. Someone wanted to get rid of them, and she seriously doubted it was because they wanted the fossils. Maybe it was one of those metals Claudia had mentioned, although she said that one in particular was hardly worth the trouble to mine without a rich vein.

  But who knew what they might uncover as they dug? On impulse without a word to Cope, she went to the supply tent and found the Geiger counter.

  “Good thinking,” he said as he saw it. “Want me to carry something for you?”

  She shook her head. “You’re not my pack mule, Cope.”

  “Maybe I’d like to be.”

  In that instant she lost her breath. Looking into his blue eyes, she saw fires as hot as lava.

  “Later,” he murmured. “Now let’s go save an egg.”

  * * *

  Cope was fairly impressed with the three interns who had gone up to free the egg. They had plenty of reason by this point to consider this job potentially dangerous, but they wanted that egg saved as much as Renee did.

  Dedicated. He liked dedicated people. And he didn’t at all like the crap flowing around this site. It was almost as if they were dealing with a lunatic, but what difference did that make? Lunatics could be dangerous, too. No, what was bothering him was the obscurity of purpose and direction. Like someone couldn’t make up his mind what exactly he really wanted.

  That worried him as much as the opacity of these efforts. Plan be damned. As scattershot as the events they had experienced were, it remained that at any instant the inscrutable could make itself deadly. That worried him as much as anything. In an instant this could go from some kind of insanity, some kind of game, to death.

  He carried Renee’s pack over her objections, which left him no hand to seize and hold hers. He was also carrying two tool sacks and a decent digital camera. To make up for Denise, he guessed.

  They could only have been five or ten minutes behind the others, but Maddie and Mason were already working with the tips of their trowels around the egg. Bets was occupied with supervising, watching closely and telling them which way their trowels might do damage.

  Renee had wanted to pull it with more delicate tools, but that opportunity was gone. Or maybe not, but they had no way to know, and that egg had to be gotten safely out of here.

  Whatever was going on, Renee had been willing to sleep up here to protect the egg. By herself if necessary. So the heart of any solution would be to get that egg clear before anything happened to it.

  At this point, however, for all he knew, removing the egg might prove to be a catalyst for further trouble. He’d have given a whole lot for some additional information to figure this out.

  But Renee was headed upward, her students were up there, and all he could do was try to protect them.

  * * *

  Stockman finally had it out with Broadus, the dithering boss who was driving him nuts.

  “I’m not dithering,” Broadus objected angrily. “I have to get my ducks in a row.”

  “What row?” Stockman demanded. “You’ve had me out here for months skulking in the woods doing crazy things because you don’t want anybody hurt, but you want them out of here. Do you have any idea how crazy that is? Do you even know what you’re doing?”

  “If you’d been any better at what you do, you’d have arranged that landslide so we didn’t have cops crawling all over it. I don’t want the cops involved, Stockman. I need the veneer of respectability for what I’m doing.”

  “What’s respectable about driving a bunch of scientists off a sliver of mountain? Are you afraid of what they’ll find?”

  “They won’t find anything but fossils,” Broadus said angrily. “That’s not the issue. The issue is that I don’t want it to become a historic site where nobody can ever do a damn thing again except gape. Are you reading me?”

  Stockman had read this all before, but it was no help. “Who cares? You can always get that reversed. You must have the power to do that. The friends.”

  “Whatever friends and power I have, I have them only because I don’t abuse them. I need you to remove the problem without drawing legal and law enforcement attention to the place. I hired you because you’re supposed to be good at covert activity. Instead, the first thing I hear is that you have the sheriff crawling all over the place. That was not a part of the plan.”

  “Do you have a plan? Because nothing is working. They’re going to uncover those fossils and it’ll be too late.”

  Broadus grew ominously silent. Then he said the words Stockman had been waiting for. “Whatever it takes. But you’d better not have the FBI and BIA all over the place.”

  The FBI. Stockman didn’t need a reminder about them. Just his rotten luck, he got one anyway.

  “It’s Native American land, you fool,” Stockman said. “They have jurisdiction on capital cases. So if you decide you have to kill someone to get this done, make sure you do it in a wa
y that’ll look accidental because the Feds will get this tied up in knots for years. Hell, they might even get you.”

  Stockman ground his teeth and wondered why he’d ever let himself get involved with this jerk. He usually had better discretion. The Feds? No. Absolutely not.

  His job had just become a hundred times harder. “You should have told me more when you hired me, Broadus. I need more information to plan well. You waited too long. Now it’s going to be a mess. You better hope I don’t drag you in.”

  “If you do,” Broadus said in a frigid voice, “I have alternatives for taking care of you.”

  Yeah, right, Stockman thought as he disconnected the satellite phone call. Nobody had ever been able to take him out, but a guy like Broadus? He’d be easy to remove.

  Never mind. He had his marching orders. Whatever it took, preferably without committing a major crime that would get the attention of the Feds.

  Swatting at the mosquito that bit his neck and waving a cloud of gnats away from his face, he started thinking. There was no real plan, only some goals. Okay then. He’d plan and Broadus would have to live with it.

  * * *

  The egg was released from the rock just as the afternoon light began to wane. Renee lifted it reverently and placed it in a metal case lined with foam. Running her fingers over it, she expressed her awe. “Not only did we get a whole egg, but the shell cracked open in such a way that we have the entire fetus in here. This is amazing!”

  Cope watched the geeks geek out over the egg while he kept pacing the cliff edge, watching, listening, for anything out of the norm. Once he thought he’d caught a flash of reflected light from way back in the woods, but only once. It could have been a bird carrying a prize for its nest. Still, the skin on his neck was crawling.

  “Let’s get that egg down from here,” he said, not caring if he was sounding like a man giving orders.

  Renee as usual didn’t heed him. She looked into the cavity left by the egg and just purred. “Look what’s back in there, guys. This find could keep us busy for the rest of our lives. I can hardly wait...”

  “Egg. Now,” Cope said even more firmly. “We can’t do any more in this light and you know it. Tomorrow is soon enough.” If they had the chance.

  As if the breeze were talking to him, or Gray Cloud’s mountain, he felt warning growing. Danger lurked, more danger than at any other time in this dig. Gone was the possibility that the intent was to scare them off.

  In Cope’s mind the certainty settled as it had on other missions in other places: danger. Life-threatening danger. “Forget the goats, forget the medical care and get the hell out of this town.”

  He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud until Renee touched his arm. “Cope? You okay?”

  “Get that egg down from here now. No ifs, ands or buts. Then a group of you are taking it to town immediately. Do I need to ask the sheriff to escort you?”

  He could barely imagine what might be showing in his face, but he saw the change in Renee’s expression. She was looking at a stranger. Well, too bad. Some things were more important than others, and right now his screaming instincts couldn’t be ignored. The very atmosphere of this mountain had changed.

  He met her stare steadily, feeling his face settle into stone.

  “Okay,” she said after the merest hesitation. “Come on, guys, let’s wrap it and get down to camp.”

  He accompanied them down, wishing all the while that he had his M4 in his hands. God, he felt naked. His knife was useful, but only at close range. He didn’t know whether he’d be dealing with one person or a group. And he didn’t know if he’d get close.

  His hands fell into the position of carrying his M4 at the ready, and he forced himself to drop them. No point wishing for what he didn’t have. He knew that from long experience.

  He’d manage.

  * * *

  They got the egg. To Stockman it had been obvious nearly from the start that that was the fossil most important to the paleontologist woman. What was her name? Renee. Yeah, Renee Dubois.

  Well, they got it out of there. He suspected that one item would draw a lot of attention, and quickly. His time had run out. He had to shut down that mess before Broadus’s worst fear came to pass: that it became a historic site and attraction.

  Stockman didn’t pretend to understand since it was already on Native American land and couldn’t be touched, but he’d been around the world enough times to know that it didn’t matter who owned it: money could take it. Money and power.

  Taking care, he began a sweep of the area while he tried to figure out the best way to shut the whole thing down. Those Bear dudes weren’t anywhere in sight. Maybe they’d stopped patrolling. Possible, since nothing physical had happened since the landslide. Sounds were nothing, however creepy. Not threatening. Not the kind of thing you needed security to protect you from. Maybe in that regard, Broadus hadn’t been so stupid.

  But here he was, and with the egg removed time had to be getting short. That whole rock face was filled with fossils and he had no idea which ones were truly important. But he had some ideas about how to make them all useless.

  * * *

  “You should go with them,” Cope said as the team piled into their car with the well-protected egg. “Keep an eye on your prize.”

  She looked at him. “And leave you here all alone to face whatever it is you’re expecting tonight.”

  He kept his face straight. “What are you talking about?”

  “You can be revealing sometimes. Or maybe I’m just getting better about reading you. Anyway, you’re expecting trouble. You can blame that suspicion on how eager you were to get the egg out of here.”

  Maddie, at the wheel, gave a couple of cheerful toots on her horn, then hit the rough road at daredevil speed. Renee winced. “I hope there’s enough foam in that case.”

  “That fossil isn’t exactly indestructible,” he reminded her.

  No, it wasn’t, but she was troubled that they’d had to pull it quickly from the matrix, leaving questions to piece together later. Angry that they’d exposed other pieces that might be just as valuable to the elements that could damage them. Maybe it was time to shoot some plaster into those holes.

  He took her hand, pulled her toward him, then cupped her face, looking deeply into her eyes. “I’d love to sweep you off your feet and take both of us far from here for the night but...”

  “But?” she asked, battling the hazy fog of desire he’d unleashed in her.

  “But I want to do some scouting first.”

  “The Bears are doing that.”

  He shook his head slowly. “Not the way I can. You should have gone to town, Renee. But since you didn’t I’m going to ask you to stay right here by the fire and nurse that shotgun that Mason brought along to scare away menacing wildlife. You do know how to use it?”

  “Of course.” She bit her lip. “But we’re not talking about menacing wildlife.”

  “And maybe I’m just paranoid. Will you do that for me?”

  She nodded, hating it. But he was right. She wasn’t trained to move through the woods hunting someone, and he was. He didn’t need to be worrying about her, so she’d sit here and guard the home fire, such as it was. Anyway, she had a whole table of fossils to pore over. Not very exciting, but important nonetheless. So until the light failed her...

  “Okay,” she said, emphasizing her nod. “But don’t do something stupidly brave, Cope.”

  * * *

  Stupidly brave? he wondered as he melted into the woods. Didn’t the two words go together?

  He’d noticed a distinct lack of the Bears and wondered if they’d taken up a post somewhere, or if they were only coming by occasionally. Or maybe Gray Cloud had taken them off guard duty. The two men must certainly have something to do with their time. Like jobs.

  He started with a wide c
ircle around the ravine. If someone were trying to maintain concealment while watching them, he would spend most of his time well out of any possible line of sight. He could move in for a look-see without leaving any hard-to-remove signs that he’d been there, such as boot prints twisted into the ground, cigarette butts, whatever. Even a candy wrapper.

  Steadily he wound the circle inward, moving quite silently on the pine-needle floor of most of the forest, avoiding branches that would crack under his feet. The waxing moon provided just enough light, even under the trees.

  Suddenly he smelled something not of the forest. Lifting his head, he closed his eyes and drew the air in through his nose. Body odor. Fresh. It had the stale smell of someone who hadn’t bathed recently.

  Smiling to himself, Cope pulled the knife out of his belt holster and followed the guy’s stench. He couldn’t be far away now or the piney woods would have swallowed his odor, expunged it and freshened it.

  Allowing for the way the air stirred, he followed the guy’s smell as best he could. Sometimes it just disappeared. Then it would come back strongly. It seemed he was heading for the rock wall.

  Was he planning another slide? Well, that wasn’t going to happen on Cope’s watch. A bigger slide could do considerably more damage. It wasn’t even difficult to imagine that it could shut down Renee’s work indefinitely.

  At this point it didn’t matter what this guy was up to. Cope needed to stop his mischief. Later would be time enough to find out his reasons.

  He knew he was closing in. He could feel it. Right now he’d have been glad if one of the Bear brothers had materialized out of the shadows to help. Extra bodies were always welcome.

  But no one materialized. Halting often to listen, Cope soon heard the sounds of some rustling of some kind, and then the all-too-familiar and sickening sound of a large-caliber bullet being racked into an AR15. The guy was getting ready to shoot. But what?

  Hurrying as fast as he could without giving himself away, he tried to get close without finding the guy turned around and facing him with that loaded weapon.