by Brad Taylor
I said, “That’s just him talking. I’ll get him to agree, and when he does, you need to be ready. He’s not going to wait. We don’t have the time to waste going to New Mexico.”
“Pike, it won’t take long. All we need to do is confirm or deny the presence of an indigenous civilization, then write a report. He’ll do the rest. Just let me give him a call and figure out the left and right limits.”
Knowing I was going to lose, I said, “We go, and you still have to train in the evenings. Okay?”
She gazed at the ceiling as if praying for patience. She said, “Let me call first. It might all be a moot point.”
* * *
A. J. Sweetwater hung up the phone and said, “They’ve agreed to come.”
The man he knew as Chris said, “And will they be able to stop the dam?”
A.J. hoisted his jeans up over his hips and said, “They can slow it down. Long enough for you to do what you want.”
“That’s sounds suspiciously like what you said originally. When I paid you the first time. Your word alone, as the president of the Historical and Preservation Society, would cause a pause in the work. That didn’t happen. Now you want me to pay more money.”
Sweetwater heard a veiled threat and wondered if Chris was lying to him about why he wanted the dam stopped. Claiming to be a member of one of the many nutty UFO groups that clung to Roswell like a bad rash, he’d stated there was evidence of an alien crash on the rancher’s land and his group wanted to find it. But he acted like none of the alien groupies that Sweetwater had met in the past. Slightly off-kilter folks, wearing clothes out of date and always talking about the latest theory on the Roswell incident so long ago, they could be spotted from across the street. Not so with Chris. No, wearing what looked like expensive clothing for a safari, Chris rarely said a word and had a cloud of menace about him.
Sweetwater said, “I’ve never had a rancher say no to me in the past. Most everyone lets us at least explore for Native American artifacts. We bring in these experts and we’ll have official paperwork backing up our claim.”
“Why them? Why not someone from here? Aren’t there government agencies that do this?”
“Well, yeah, but I didn’t think you wanted any government types involved. On top of that, we need someone from out of town. The stuff I planted will fool an outsider, but someone who makes a living looking at New Mexico archeology will know it’s not kosher. I can call them off if you want.”
“No. No government. When will they get here?”
“They said they’d fly in today, so I can see them tomorrow morning.”
“Okay. I’ll pay for their services, but they’d better slow down the process. My people need some time to search. If this doesn’t work, you’d better learn to scuba dive.”
Sweetwater smiled at the joke, the grin sliding off his face at the absolute lack of humor on Chris’s face.
Chapter 3
Jennifer tried one more time to break Pike out of his foul mood, but he was having none of it. He’d climbed behind the wheel of their rented pickup full of gear, and let her ride shotgun as the sole conversationalist with Mr. A. J. Sweetwater in his own Ford F-150.
An affable farmer-looking guy with a wispy mustache and a pronounced Adam’s apple, Sweetwater was dressed like everyone else she’d seen in Roswell—blue jeans, leather belt, plaid shirt, and straw cowboy hat. He didn’t seem like he had a doctorate in American history, but that’s what he claimed.
Pike had been grouchy since they’d woken up this morning. She’d walked down the hall and knocked on his door, the cheap hotel varnish doing nothing to add weight to the seriousness she felt about their mission. He’d answered buttoning his shirt, noticeably having not shaved. She knew he’d done it because it aggravated her. He’d been trying to push her buttons since they’d flown out from Charleston the day before.
They’d gone down to the free breakfast and Pike’s attitude had grown worse.
“This is the breakfast? Some bananas with black spots and a box of doughnuts? I should have found the hotel.”
Now getting a little piqued, she said, “This is what Mr. Sweetwater recommended. I didn’t think you tough guys cared where you stayed.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t like paying for bed bugs. I should have moved us last night when we saw the place.”
“You couldn’t. This is where they’re shipping the ground-penetrating radar.”
He’d said, “Ground-penetrating what?”
“Pike, it’s an archaeological dig. I can’t just look at the dirt. We need to see if there’s anything under the ground. Walls, wells, graves, that sort of thing.”
“Who’s paying for this shit?”
She told him. And that’s when he’d really become grumpy.
Jennifer, riding with Sweetwater, made sure their pickup with Pike at the wheel was still behind them, then turned back around to the front just as Sweetwater took a left turn off Highway 2, heading east on a dirt road, bouncing along and leaving a dust cloud like a mini-tornado in their wake. She said, “How much farther?”
Sweetwater said, “’Bout ten minutes, give or take. How long will it take to get this done?”
“Depends on the size of the plot. From what you said, we should be able to finish in a day. I did my research on the flight over, reading through the archives from the Office of Archaeological Studies at the Museum of New Mexico, so I’m up to speed on what to expect.”
Sweetwater looked a little queasy at the statement, something Jennifer tucked away for no good reason. Just a tidbit that was worth filing in her subconscious. She continued, “As a matter of fact, they’ve done quite a few surveys around here, locating sites from both the Ceramic and Archaic periods. Why didn’t you just have them do the investigation? It was no trouble getting them on the phone, and they seemed a little surprised that you’d brought us in.”
Sweetwater looked downright nauseous at her words. He fumbled a little with the radio dial, trying to get something to come in, then said, “Well, that’s mighty big of them to say that now. All I care about is preventing the loss of indigenous artifacts, like an Apache migratory campsite or some other settlement. When I talked to them, they said they’d put it in the queue for survey, but that wasn’t going to work with the dam being built.”
Jennifer took Sweetwater’s words at face value, catching Pike’s visage behind the wheel in the side mirror, all venom and disgust at the entire effort, bouncing along behind them and eating all their dust. She focused back to the front, smothering a smile.
She’d spent a great amount of time trying to figure out what made him tick, and had given up. Whenever she thought he was intolerant or chauvinistic, he would end up surprising her, showing a softness that was completely out of character.
He could be more trying than any man she’d ever met, but she held the edge and she knew it. Pike could threaten all day long, but there was a connection with him that was real. She knew, beyond the grumpiness, no matter what she did, he liked her. Which was a high school way of saying he had a crush on her, and also pretty much summed up their relationship. A sort of twisted juvenile bond between grown adults. A stagnant level she tolerated because his ability to connect had been short-circuited by the loss of his family. Pike might be capable of killing men with a soda straw, but he had no skills operating in her world, and it was so easy to twist him about, something she enjoyed. Up to a point.
Pike had once saved her life at great risk to his own, with nothing for a reward other than the fact that she’d lived, and she would never forget that. He could stomp and scream all he wanted, with her tweaking him at will, but at the end of the day she would do what he asked. And he would do the same in return.
But it was fun tweaking him.
They bounced over a set of cattle guards and Jennifer saw the line of foliage marking the Pecos River off on the horizon, a
small tributary from it snaking out in the desert scrub-oak toward them. Sweetwater pulled the truck up short and she saw construction in the distance, a bucket-loader with piles of sand next to it.
The dam.
Sweetwater said, “Well, this is it. You see the tractor up there? That’s the head of the dam. From there to here I’ve found some artifacts, but I’m not sure if they’ve just been washed out by the river, or if this is really a settlement worthy of excavation. As you know, the river has probably moved two hundred feet in the last hundred years, so what I need is your official call on whether we can get an injunction on that dam. He gets it built, and whatever is here disappears.”
Having stopped behind them, Pike came up in time to hear the end of the conversation. He said, “Who owns the land? They know we’re here?”
“Yeah, they do. They’re continuing to build, but told us we can search as long as we want. Well, as long as we can, I guess.”
Jennifer exited the vehicle and saw Pike scowl about something. She glanced back and caught Mr. Proper Farmer Sweetwater gazing at her bottom as she stepped down. Which would be enough for Pike to start cracking heads just to let off some steam. He had no tolerance for anyone treating her as anything less than a scientist. Sweetwater caught the glare and quickly wandered down the stream bank, staring at the ground.
She quickly opened the tailgate and said, “Give me a hand with the GPR.”
Pike said, “Yeah, great. Three thousand dollars against a profit of two thousand. Sure. Let me help you with that.”
He leaned in and grabbed the outside edge of the cradle for the ground-penetrating radar, an all-terrain chassis that looked like a shell for a lawn-mower engine, only with larger wheels.
She saw his aggravation building and decided she’d had about enough. It was time to curb his little tantrum, and she knew she could. She brushed up against him and said, “Hey, I found a gym near our hotel. I told you I’d work while we’re here. We can’t shoot, but we can do the grappling stuff. Right?”
He jerked the chassis to the ground and stood up, wiping his brow. Glaring at her. She said, “Okay, stop the crybaby crap.” Well, she said that on the inside, anyway. Outside she leaned into the bed of the truck and pulled the GPR unit toward him, waiting.
She felt him slide in next to her, grasping the outside edge of the GPR, their bodies touching, and knew she’d won. But she didn’t dare show anything.
He said, “All right. You want to find a bunch of old pottery shards, I guess I can waste a few hours. But you’ll pay it back on the mat.”
She looked at him and saw the same unshaven, gruff growl. She elbowed his short ribs and he jerked away, grinning. And just like that, they were back on an even keel.
Jennifer heard Dr. Sweetwater shout something and left the GPR setup to Pike, running over to see what he’d found.
He said, “See! Right here! There are artifacts on the edge of the stream. Out in the open. This was a settlement.”
He held up what looked like an arrowhead, and she bent down, picking up some pieces that may or may not be ceramic shards. She gently set them aside and said, “Well, maybe, maybe not. This is a floodplain, after all.”
Sweetwater scowled and said, “This should be enough for further exploration. Write it up.”
She said, “I will. After I sector the land with the GPR.”
Pike came over dragging the lawnmower device, the GPR now settled inside. Sweetwater said, “Okay, okay. We’ll talk to you at, say, nine A.M. tomorrow?”
Jennifer said, “Sounds good.”
By the time he’d driven away, Pike was grumbling about the terrain, pushing the ground-penetrating radar over the rocks, manhandling it every fifty seconds.
She caught up to him and said, “Hey, something strange is going on here.”
He jerked the GPR forward, saying, “You mean besides me just running this thing back and forth without knowing what I’m looking at?”
She grinned at him and said, “You don’t even have it calibrated.”
He stopped and wiped his brow again, grinning back. “Okay, smart-ass. What’s so damn strange?”
“Sweetwater led me right to a couple of artifacts, but they’re completely out of time with each other. There’s no way both are sitting at ground level.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they’re both old as all get-out, but way, way out of time. It’s like someone from a thousand years in the future found a stone axe and a microwave oven. They don’t match.”
“So what are you saying?”
She fiddled with the keyboard of the GPR, going through the sequence to get it calibrated for the terrain they were on. She said, “I’m not saying anything yet. They could have been exposed by flooding here in the riverbank, and not tied to each other. Let’s get a grid search with the GPR. We don’t find anything with it, and we can write this off.”
Pike started pushing, muttering, “You mean write this off as a tax loss?”
She gave him a hip check, and he smiled. Telling her he was okay with the entire trip.
They had traversed about two-thirds of the available terrain, finding nothing, when Jennifer said, “Whoa. Stop right there.”
“What?”
“There’s something here.”
She bent down and stuck a little flag in the ground, saying, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s only about a foot down. Since it’s in the floodplain, it might be an old log. But it also might be the remains of a pueblo wall.”
When she heard nothing, she looked up, seeing Pike gazing into the distance.
“What?”
“Someone’s coming. From the other side of the creek.”
She looked up and saw a dust cloud approaching at a high rate of speed. A four-by-four slid to a stop opposite them. A man wearing one of those ubiquitous straw hats and sporting a full mustache exited. With a shotgun.
Pike immediately went into combat mode, pushing Jennifer behind him and getting ready to fight. The man stormed across the creek, heedless of the ankle-deep water. He never brought the gun to bear, but the threat was there nonetheless.
He said, “What the fuck are you two doing on my land?”
Chapter 4
Rudy Chamfer watched the truck bounce away across the scrub, headed to Highway 2. He pulled out his phone. He waited for it to connect, wondering if he should have called while they were still under his control. A man answered.
“Hey, I just chased off two people searching the riverbank.”
“Did they find anything?”
“Not that I could see. They had some contraption and was running it about, but they didn’t seem to have any focus.”
“So there’s nothing to stop the dam?”
“Not as far as I know, but I’m not a scientist. I don’t know what they have.”
The man cursed in the phone, and Rudy saw his cattle lease going up in pottery shards and government red tape. He said, “I’ll get it built. Don’t back out on me now.”
The man said, “I can find plenty of leases to graze my cattle. You’re the one that said you could provide water. I don’t have a lot of time to wait. I have to put them somewhere.”
“I hear you. Don’t worry. The dam will be built in time. I’m on schedule.”
“Who were they?”
“A company from Charleston, South Carolina. Some archaeological firm called Grolier Recovery Services. They claim that they had permission to explore.”
“Really? How would they have permission?”
“They don’t, dammit. Someone told them they did.”
“You know where they’re staying?”
“Yeah. They gave me all their information. They wanted to clear up what they thought was a misunderstanding.”
“Where is it?”
I spent the rest
of the ride back into Roswell in a fine stew, refusing to talk. This whole endeavor was ridiculous. I was sweating out in the middle of the New Mexico desert, pushing a lawn mower on steroids, only to get confronted by a guy and a shotgun. I couldn’t believe the damn junior varsity bullshit. Sweetwater hadn’t even gotten permission to check out the guy’s land.
Jennifer tried to mollify me, saying, “Hey, we found something. At the end of the day, even with the sorry coordination, we need to check that out. We can’t let it get flooded.”
I said, “I could give a shit about that. What I really want to do is punch Sweetwater in the face.”
We connected with Highway 285 and entered downtown Roswell. Once again in the land of fruits and nuts, the drab surroundings doing nothing for my mood.
We passed the vaunted, world-renowned UFO museum, looking like a snake-show on a dirt highway in Florida, and Jennifer said, “Pike, you need to come to grips with the fact that a lot of our work won’t be commando missions. It’s a slow, hard, dirty toil. The payback is the site itself.”
I said nothing. She continued. “You said if I started this business with you that fifty percent would be real scientific work. You said we needed to prove our cover in order to use the cover. This is just that fifty percent.”
I pulled into our hotel and she said, “Okay. Look. Let’s get to the gym. You can show me some commando stuff and then sleep in tomorrow. I’ll handle Sweetwater. I’d rather you didn’t come to the meeting.”
I put the truck in park and said, “All right. I’m okay with that. But you’d better put your game face on. I’m a little aggravated.”
Thirty minutes later we were rolling around on the mat at a local gym just off Main Street. It was privately owned in a crumbling, cement cinder-block building, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t pretty good, with a complete assortment of free weights, cardio, and Cro-Magnon CrossFit gear. We found a corner in a yoga room that wasn’t in use and I went to work, teaching Jennifer the finer arts of kicking someone’s ass.
