The Dane Maddock Adventures Boxed Set Volume 1

by David Wood

  “Stole their car. Crazy Charlie taught me how to hot-wire a car when I was in seventh grade. Sweet ride, huh?”

  Maddock couldn’t keep himself from laughing at his friend’s shenanigans. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  Chapter 17

  Amanda closed her laptop and took a deep, calming breath. She definitely had something here. She could feel it. The next step was to convince the others that she wasn’t crazy. She fished her cell phone from her purse and punched up Bones’ number.

  “Yo, ho! What up?”

  “That is, without a doubt, the rudest greeting I have ever received,” she said, her voice not matching the smile on her face. “Try again.”

  “Sorry, let me try again. You have reached the voice mail of Uriah Bonebrake. I’m sorry I cannot…”

  “I forgot your real name is Uriah!” she said with a laugh.

  “What? You think my mom named me Bones? Ah, forget it. What’s up?”

  “I think I’ve come up with some promising leads,” she said. “Where are you guys?”

  “We just ditched a car I stole,” he said. She couldn’t believe the calm in his voice. “Now we’re cruising out of the park and headed to Durango to meet up with you.”

  “Great! Meet me outside the library. And try not to steal any more cars while you’re at it.”

  “It really wasn’t my fault. They shot at me.”

  “Sure,” she said. “What happened to your rental car, anyway?”

  “That’s another reason I had to steal their car. They were bad guys. You wouldn’t have liked them.”

  “I don’t know,” she teased. “Were any of them cute? I might want an introduction.”

  “I wasn’t attracted to them,” he said. “I shot one in the butt. He probably won’t be able to keep up with you for a while.”

  “I guess I could nurse him back to health.” She couldn’t believe she was engaged in such banter with a man who had just casually admitted to shooting someone and stealing his car. Of course, after what she’d experienced in the short time she’d known Bones, the extraordinary was becoming ordinary. “Then again, that’s too much trouble. I guess I’ll hang on to you as long as your butt is intact.”

  “More or less,” he said. “Mine’s always been a little flat. Maddock’s the one with the booty.”

  She heard a raised voice and laughter in the background.

  “I don’t think he liked that,” she said. “Forget the anatomy. Did you find it?”

  “Maddock and Jade did. It was in Square Tower House. They had a bit of trouble themselves, but we came out of it all right. You said you’ve come up with some leads. Entertain me.”

  “Some of it I can’t really explain until you've seen what I found. I can tell you that I’m almost certain one of the next places we need to go is called Hovenweep.”

  “Hovenweep? Never heard of it.”

  “It’s actually pretty close to Mesa Verde. It’s not very well known, but it’s one of the finest known examples of Anasazi architecture.”

  “Keep titillating me with examples of Anasazi architecture, you naughty girl. So you were able to match it up to that little image on the breastplate? The image was kind of generic, wasn’t it?”

  “I matched the image to ruin at Hovenweep, yes. But I have another reason for believing I’m on the right track. That’s the part I’ll have to show you.”

  “Sounds good. We’ll meet you at the library as soon as we can get there.” He paused. “Amanda?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful.”

  The Elder reached for the phone on the first ring, then froze. It would not do to appear too eager… or apprehensive. He gave it two more rings before casually picking up the receiver.

  “Yes?” he said, feigning disinterest.

  “There is a Mister Jarren on the line for you,” Margaret said, her nasal voice made even more annoying by the note of suspicion that rang clear. “He declined to give his last name.”

  “I’ll take the call,” he said, adding a sigh as if not interested in speaking to this semi-anonymous caller. The truth was, this was the call he’d been waiting for. “What do you have to report?” The Elder found his anticipation cooling as he listened until it finally froze in an icy block of frustration. “You are telling me that not only did you fail to retrieve the artifact, but Mikkel was shot and your car was stolen?”

  “That is correct. The Indian used a secret passage. They got out of the ruin before we could get to them. We chased them into the woods and he somehow got behind us. That’s when he shot Mikkel. As for the artifact, it did not seem to be at the site. That woman Jade must have lied to us.”

  “If they have it, we will find out soon enough,” the Elder said.

  “Can you get us out of here? The park rangers were easy enough to evade, even with Mikkel’s injury, but he can’t go much farther.”

  “It would be easier to deal with were you still in Utah. I can send the helicopter to follow your GPS signal.” Another failure. Another headache.

  “Perhaps I made a mistake coming after them,” Jarren said. “I could go back to letting them do our work for us. It has worked well for us so far.”

  “Maddock has been useful,” the Elder replied with restrained patience. “He is clever and resourceful, and would also be the one to go to jail if he were caught. But we are getting close to solving the puzzle, and with this friend of his involved now… well, I don’t need to tell you what might happen. Maddock needs to be eliminated before the final clues fall into place, and his friend might as well be dealt with while we are at it.”

  “Could we not simply let him find it, and then take it away from him?”

  The Elder had to tread carefully here. Only he and a very few others knew what they were truly searching for, and if Maddock found it first… well, he simply could not think about that possibility.

  “Maddock has become a threat. What were the odds that he and this Bonebrake would turn out to know one another and, in fact, join forces? If they manage to put their knowledge together…” He shook his head. “We must take great care in eliminating both of them. And then we will complete the search on our own.” It was important to avoid drawing attention just yet, but once they had it in their hands, no one would be able to stop them.

  “I understand,” Jarren said. “I will, of course, make it look like an accident.” He paused. “Elder, with all due respect, do you still believe our source is reliable?”

  The Elder’s cell phone vibrated and he glanced down to see that he had received a text message. What he read made his frustration melt away. “Yes,” he said. “In fact, I have just received further proof of the reliability of our source.”

  “How so?” Jarren asked, his increased interest clearly evident the tone of his voice.

  “When you and Mikkel are picked up, I am going to have them take you directly to a place called Hovenweep.”

  Chapter 18

  Their surroundings grew more and more barren the closer they came to Hovenweep. The land was beautiful in its own way, with occasional sprinklings of rich greenery or bright desert flowers, but it was a parched, unforgiving landscape with little in the way of trees and even less water.

  “Man!” Bones said from the front passenger seat. “I thought Kansas was empty, but this… Hey! Check it out!” He held the travel brochure up in front of his face and scrutinized it with an intensity and seriousness that said to Maddock that his friend was being anything but genuine. “It says here that the devil’s outhouse is just a mile or two away. We should check it out.”

  “What’s the Devil’s Outhouse?” Saul asked. “Some sort of rock formation?”

  “No, dude. I mean this hot, dry, empty bunch of nothing must be where the devil comes to take a dump. We might even bump into him if we’re lucky. I wonder how regular he is…”

  Everyone chuckled but Saul, who pursed his lips and folded his arms across his chest. His severe, dour expression now filled Maddock
’s rear-view mirror in a most unpleasant way.

  “I kind of like it out here,” Maddock said. “The sea is pretty desolate sometimes, and there’s a heck of a lot more sameness on the water.”

  “Not at spring break,” Bones said, still reading the brochure.

  A sign directed them to Hovenweep National Monument. The small visitor’s center was visible from far across the desert terrain. Several police cars, lights flashing, took up a large portion of the parking lot.

  “I wonder what’s up,” Amanda said, leaning forward to peek between Maddock and Bones. “Whatever it is must have just happened.”

  “Maybe it’ll be newsworthy,” Bones said. “Give your editor a scoop?”

  “I can’t imagine something down here would newsworthy at home, but you never know,” she said. She had told her editor just enough about what Bones had found at Orley’s ranch, plus a few hints about the Dominion, to convince him to let her accompany Bones to follow up on the mystery.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” Maddock said, pulling into an empty space and shutting off the engine.

  The heat blasted him like a furnace as soon as he stepped out of the vehicle. It was even hotter than Chaco Canyon had been, and not a breeze stirred the air. “Now I know how pottery feels,” he said.

  “You get used to it,” Jade replied. “It’s humidity that I hate. Makes you feel like you’re drowning in the air. Around here it’s the proverbial ‘dry heat’.”

  No one was on duty in the visitor’s center. They looked around for a while before finally concluding that everyone must be at the scene of whatever incident had brought out the police. Maddock left a twenty under a paperweight on the counter and they made their way into the park.

  The brick path gave way to a primitive trail that wound down into a narrow, twisting canyon, thick with sun-baked rock and desert flora. Amanda clambered up onto a nearby boulder and scanned the canyon.

  “Where to, hot chick?” Bones asked.

  “I’m not seeing…” Amanda’s voice trailed off as she spoke.

  “I thought you said you knew this was the place,” Jade snapped. “You said you were certain of it. But you won’t show us whatever ‘proof’ you claim to have.” The two had argued in the car on the way to Hovenweep. Jade had already researched and subsequently eliminated this site from consideration, the architecture of the ruin with the only known solstice room in the park did not match any of the images on the breastplate.

  Amanda slowly turned and stared down at Jade, waiting for a moment to make sure the other woman had finished. “It is very rude to interrupt people, Jade. Didn’t your mother teach you that?”

  A slender young woman in an NPS uniform appeared on the trail behind them, cutting off Jade’s retort.

  “May I help you?” she asked, shading her eyes against the sun as she looked up at Amanda, who remained atop the boulder, hands folded across her chest. “Are you looking for a specific ruin?”

  “Yes, actually,” Amanda said, hopping down. “I’m Amanda Shores from the Deseret Bugle. I’m sort of combining business with pleasure on our trip. The article I’m writing is on Anasazi solstice markers. Do you have any structures in the park of that sort?”

  “Well,” the woman said, taking off her brown, mesh ball cap and running her fingers through her coppery hair which she wore in a loose ponytail. “Tracking the solstice and equinox was fairly common among the Anasazi. A room would often have a small window, and the family would follow the course of the sun by marking where it struck the wall on the opposite side. Some buildings were constructed in such a way that the sun would strike a specific place on the solstice, like a corner.

  “In this park, Hovenweep Castle is about the only one that fits the bill. But you can’t go there.” The woman’s hazel eyes flitted from person-to-person in Maddock’s party. Her mouth was drawn in a tight, nervous frown.

  “I didn’t realize it was closed to the public,” Amanda said.

  “It isn’t. I mean… it is today. I…” The woman closed her eyes and shook her head. “I apologize. I’m a little out of sorts.” She took a deep breath, looked up at them and started again. “Someone vandalized it just a short while ago. In fact, they broke open the wall in what is called the Sun Room. It’s where the solstice is marked. I guess your question just threw me off.”

  Bones muttered something inaudible and Jade made a sound that could have been sympathy but sounded more like annoyance. Maddock took a deep breath and released it slowly, taking control of his rising anger. Had there been any doubt before, it was now certain that someone else was on the same trail. And whoever they were, they had somehow gotten here first.

  “Did they take anything?” Saul asked.

  “There isn’t really anything to take,” the ranger replied, frowning. “The ruins have been empty for a long time. Strange, though. They booby-trapped it.” She didn’t wait for them to ask what she meant. Their quizzical expressions must have been enough. “Whoever it was placed some very large rocks above the doorway, held up with some posts, then tied a trip wire between the posts. The ranger who first investigated the damage didn’t see the trip wire in the dim light.”

  “Is he all right?” Amanda asked.

  “We think so. He’ll need a few stitches in the back of his head, and he might have a concussion. Anyway, back to your question. You might be interested in the solstice marker at what we call the Holly Group. There is a sandstone wall with a number of carvings: a snake figure, two spiral circles, and some others. Nearby rock formations cause daggers of light to appear on the wall. It actually marks the summer solstice and the spring and fall equinoxes.”

  “Are you familiar with a ruin that looks like either of these” Amanda showed the woman a paper with the remaining undiscovered symbols from the breastplate.

  The ranger scrutinized the paper, holding it close and staring intently. She broke into a sudden smile and tapped a picture of what looked like a cylinder floating on a rough sea.

  “Yes! This ruin is in the Cajon group. It’s a fascinating example of Anasazi architecture. They constructed a circular tower atop three very uneven boulders, yet the masonry is perfect. It’s a very impressive structure, but the Cajon Group is more than eight miles from here, and not readily accessible, so it doesn’t receive nearly the attention it deserves.”

  “Does it have a solstice room?” Maddock asked, suddenly excited.

  “Not a solstice room,” she said, “but there is a solstice connection. There is a set of three buildings. On every solstice and equinox, the shadows of two of the buildings meet at the corner of the third building as if the shadows are pointing to something. Few people know about it because it isn’t a true solstice marker or sun room. It might be something interesting for you to write about.” She turned a hopeful smile to Amanda.

  “Thank you so much,” Amanda said. “I think it will be perfect.”

  The road leading to the Cajon group took them along a winding, heavily rutted dirt road. It seemed much farther than the eight miles the ranger had told them it would be. They traveled in silence, knowing that whoever was after Fray Marcos’ secret had somehow gotten ahead of them and might even be waiting for them at their destination.

  Maddock wondered if they were even on the right track. He hoped so. It felt right, but this whole thing had been nuts. One close shave after another. How long could their luck hold?

  They came upon a simple wooden sign that read, Cajon Group. Please do not leave the trail or climb on the ruins. He chuckled. Fat chance they’d be following those guidelines. He scanned the ruins for signs of their adversaries and found them blessedly empty.

  It was a small settlement. The remains of a few lodges ringed a small reservoir. While the ruins might not have been as impressive to a tourist as, say, Mesa Verde, Maddock found them appealing because they had not been reconstructed by modern archaeologists, like Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde had been. What remained was in its original state, and clearly illustrated the f
ine craftsmanship that had been involved in its construction.

  “I see the tower,” Jade called, pointing across the ruin. “I’m going to go ahead and check it out.” Without waiting for a reply, she strode away at a fast walk. Saul hurried after her.

  Maddock started to follow, but Bones touched him on the shoulder.

  “Let’s talk for a minute while we walk,” he said in an uncharacteristically soft voice. “Try to act nonchalant, though.” He nodded toward Jade and Saul as they picked their way across the rocks toward the tower.

  Maddock slowed his pace and fell in beside Bones and Amanda, but kept his gaze ahead of him. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I’ll make it quick,” Bones said. “It’s too big a coincidence that these people found out about Hovenweep at the same time we did, and actually managed to get here before us.”

  “What are you saying?” Maddock asked.

  “If I have the story correct,” Amanda joined in, “they were at Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and Hovenweep. But they weren’t at Yucca House.”

  “True,” Maddock said, knowing where she was going with this and wishing he could disagree.

  “And Yucca House was the only place Saul didn’t know about because you figured it out while he wasn’t there,” Bones said.

  “So you think Saul is a mole,” Maddock said. “I hear what you’re saying, but Jade trusts him. Doesn’t like him all that much, but trusts him.”

  “You’ve got to admit it makes sense,” Bones said. “It would explain how they know where we’re going. What I don’t get, though, is what these guys need with us if they have all these resources at their disposal?”

  “They need Jade,” Maddock said. “She’s spent years researching the history and legends surrounding Cibola, and she’s gotten farther than anyone before toward solving the mystery. She found the breastplate, which is more than anyone else can claim. Saul is a necessary evil- he comes with the financing.”

  Amanda made a “huh” sound that said she considered this merely to be further confirmation of what she already believed.