Badwater (The Forensic Geology Series)
Page 26
“How?”
“Tell him Soliano will need his guidance.”
“Tell him yourself.”
I watched Hap. He was nearly at the ridge. “There’s no time.”
“If you can go, why can’t Grandfather?”
“He’s been sick.”
“Then if he can’t go he won’t go.”
I met her coal-black stare. It was impenetrable, like her reasoning. I didn’t know what else to say so I just told her the truth. I told her what I suspected, what I knew. I armed her with the geomorphology. I told her to stay out of the valley, to stay high on the hillside. I gave her the keypad remote, and told her to show it to Walter. I strapped on Hap’s wristwatch, a clunky diver’s model. I put Hap’s flashlight in my pocket; Girl Scout law. I reset the subgun so that it rode tight against my flank.
She eyed me. “You sure you know how to shoot it?”
“Did you?”
She shook her head. “It’s got a lot of parts.”
46
I stood at the base of the alluvial fan, recapturing the vision I’d had staring into the dregs of Pria’s bath. I saw again the giant fan where Walter and I had been stranded. I felt again the heat thrown off by the fan rocks with their dark coating of desert varnish. I felt again the relief of taking shelter in the channel that was unvarnished, washed clean by floodwaters.
That bathtub vision had led me to an idea that beggared belief and I’d abandoned it because logic said Hap could not summon a flood.
I saw, now, that he could.
Studying the dark channel on this fan, I knew three things:
First, the dark channel was deeply incised and so it must have been carved by a significant flow.
Second, the flowpath led directly to the reservoir below. Perhaps the miners had built it there to collect runoff water. That runoff, now, was only a localized trickle.
Third, desert varnish darkened the channel, which meant it had been many years since floods came this way.
These things told me what had happened here. A once-major channel had been abandoned by forces unknown and now it was largely inactive. I did not know the main thing—why. Maybe a fault scarp had broached its head. Maybe an obstruction had diverted the water flow, up in the canyon above. I’d find out, somewhere up above.
Hap, wherever he was, already knew.
I started up the mysterious channel. As I climbed, the incision deepened until only my chest and head were above the rim. Somewhere around here, Hap had spotted me watching him and climbed out. I scanned the curve of the fan—nobody. I scanned the bowl of the sky—nothing. Not a man, not a cloud, in sight. The sun baked the dark rocks and heat boiled up my legs. As fast as my rain-wet clothes dried, I wetted them again with sweat. My spongy socks had never dried. My eyes stung in the bright sun. I wanted my hat. I wanted my shades. I wanted my water bottle. I picked up a pebble to suck on, and tasted bitter manganese. I flung it away.
I returned my attention to what lay up ahead, puzzled. My channel seemed to lead directly into solid rock.
Ahead, at the top of the fan, the framing ridges met to form a face of high-rising walls. I scanned that face, searching for the break in the rock that would lead to the upper canyon—the canyon that must have once fed its waters down to build this fan. I wondered if a rockfall had blocked the watercourse, if the closed rock face was the end of the line. And then my climb topped out and, suddenly, I saw what I had not seen three steps back. There was a joint in the wall, a ragged slot with its edges offset so that if you looked from any viewpoint other than dead-on, you would miss it.
This was not the end of the line. I spent a minute staring at the slot, cataloguing the things I knew:
First, the slot fed the dark channel.
Second, the slot, like the channel, was stained with desert varnish.
Third, flood waters had not come through the slot in a very long time.
Should they come now, I did not want to be here. This slot was like the nozzle on a fire hose, only the hose was obstructed somewhere up ahead. And if that obstruction was removed, this nozzle would shoot a high-pressure jet stream down the dark channel to hose out the tub of beads below. Only one way I knew to remove a geological obstruction and that was to blow it the hell up. With C4 and a remote control. And if you don’t have your remote, then you come do it in person.
I glanced back at the cable ridge, where I’d last seen Hap. He’d been moving slowly, maybe beginning to get sick. He’d been traveling as though intent on escape but I figured he’d changed directions once out of sight, and the good thing—the main thing—was that it was going to take him some serious time to traverse the rugged terrain to reach the canyon above the slot. Actually, I knew a fourth thing. There must be another route to that canyon. Otherwise, Hap would not have abandoned this one.
Either way, I had a head start. I wasted thirty seconds of it wondering if I had the nerve to continue. If I cut and run, if Hap completed his work, then that fire hose was going to sweep the beads down to the oasis at Furnace Creek and crap up all life that drinks there.
My palms grew slick on the stock of the subgun.
You’re armed, lady. He isn’t.
I moved like I’d seen the ninjas do, leading with the subgun, and passed through the slot. Nobody was waiting in the narrow canyon, although my imagination gave itself a short run for its money. I settled my nerves scanning the rock crevices for nesting snakes.
It was a sinuous canyon, sidewinding its way deeper and narrower with every yard I advanced. By the time I’d advanced a few dozen, the walls had risen so high they reduced the sky to a thin blue strip. At first, I welcomed the shade. I cooled, I dried, my mouth found its spit. But within another dozen yards I was straining to pierce the gloom. The rimrock, in places, blistered out to close my sky-strip, darkening the walls beneath the overhangs. The walls were inky dolomite, their folds so entangled I could not read the strata. They began to squeeze in. Ahead, in silhouette, the walls undulated like the bosoms and bustles of Victorian ladies. The ladies were draped in a rough brocade, pocked with erosions and studded with pebbles. As they crowded me, I had to press my arms to my sides so their curves would not slice my elbows.
And then the canyon kinked again and I squeezed around a corner and nearly whacked my head on a tree branch wedged between the walls. It looked to have hung there for ages, stripped bare and bleached white. Hung up to dry by some long-ago flood.
A saying came to me about floods in narrow canyons: more water than you want in less time than you have.
I checked Hap’s watch. Eight minutes gone.
Reflexively, I scanned the walls up to the rims, searching for escape routes. There were none to be had. The sky-strip still showed blue but what did I know of thunderstorms up ahead?
The varnished walls gave me comfort and the will to move on.
I passed beneath the deadwood bridge and continued up the hallway of Victorian ladies, who passed me along in stony silence.
Lady Canyon, as I christened it, began to climb in earnest and within a few dozen yards I met the chute of a dry waterfall. The chute-rock was polished but on either side the roughened rock provided handholds and footholds. It was not much of a dryfall—six feet, at most—but I had to sling the subgun across my back and let it ride, unreachable, as I inched up the rock. Now’s the time, I thought. Nobody ever jumps out at you when you’re ready for them. Of course, Brendan From The Fiery Hill would need wings to get here fast enough to swoop down on me while I’m pinned on this rock. Nevertheless, I was glad to achieve the top. Nobody awaited me there but my ladies. I ninja-cradled the subgun and within another dozen yards came to another little dryfall and had to do it all over again.
It was around another bend, at the foot of the third little fall, that I first heard the hiss of running water. I stood frozen in the dolomite gloom. I stared so hard at the dryfall that it seemed to flow, like dripping candle wax.
Ten more minutes gone, by my watch.
When I achieved the top and approached the next kink in the canyon, the hiss fractured. It seemed to come from here, from there, from above, from below. A trick of acoustics.
I went reluctantly around the bend, subgun at the ready—for what that was worth.
Nothing.
47
There was nobody to shoot.
There was nowhere to go.
So I just stared at the obstruction.
My path dead-ended at another dry waterfall, an end-of-the-liner. It was a good forty feet high and its slick chute was edged by vertical strata that I was not equipped to scale. And even if I’d had the ropes and guts for it, achieving the top of this fall would bring me to the bottom of the true obstruction. It rose above the dryfall at least another forty feet and jutted out like a defiant jaw. Its rough gray face filled the canyon from wall to wall, like it had been born here, but there was no crater in the walls from which it might have been torn. There was only one way it could have got here. It had to have come from above, carried downcanyon in some past monstrous flood, and here, unable to shove its jaw through the narrow slot, it had come to rest. It was a keystone, locking the canyon shut. It was the biggest mother chockstone I had ever come across.
I listened to the hiss of water. There was no longer any question where the water hissed—up above.
When I regained my nerve, I searched for a way up. There was a narrow ledge on the right side of the dryfall, maybe eight feet up. The ledge slanted steeply and led to a fracture in the steeper canyon wall. I continued to search for a better route but there was none to be had.
I waited, for Soliano’s helicopter to appear, for the good sense to send me back downcanyon. But the fastest way out was in front of my nose. Backpacking the subgun, I began to frog-crawl up the chute. Two feet up, I slipped back down, leaving some skin on the rock. Nopah Formation, I judged, upper Cambrian. I didn’t give a shit. I started up again. When I’d passed the bloody palm-streaks I figured I was committed.
The ledge was worse.
I no longer had to worry about slipping. I worried, instead, about toppling off. The ledge was so narrow I side-stepped, kissing the dryfall, heels hanging in air. I looked up, once, to the underside of the jutting chockstone chin. There was a stain of travertine, where water had once leached.
The steep wall was worse yet.
I glued myself to the rock, fingertips probing chinks in the brecciated dolomite, toes curling in my boots as I edged along the fracture. At last, the scarp widened and I exhaled in relief. My thin footpath now accommodated a heel-toe walk and as it angled up the wall, the wall flared inward and I could lean away from the edge. I chanced a look down and saw the chockstone directly below, where it bulged into the lower wall. I went queasy and snapped my eyes back to the business at hand. Ahead, where the scarp angled more steeply, the faint trace of a trail intersected. The trail followed a soft stratum of rock that had been eroded, creating a relatively flat bench. But this was no Park Service footpath. This was fit only for native creatures. I eyed the corrugated horns of the skull on the trail and, in the end, threw in my lot with the bighorn.
It was not until I found a wide enough pocket to collapse that I realized I was crying. I wiped my face and blew my nose, then reset the subgun and scanned the canyon, searching for Hap.
Nothing moving. Nothing orange, trying to blend in.
I turned my attention to what lay below.
It was long and narrow, like a lap pool. It nearly filled this section of canyon but for a shelf of rock that ran alongside the water below me—the decking of the pool.
I thought of the pool at the Inn. I thought of Hap diving into the deep end, doing lap after lap in his purple trunks. I thought no further along that line.
This pool was fed by a large waterfall at the upper end of the canyon. At the waterfall’s base, the pool was shallow. Then, as the canyon descended, the water deepened, plunging to unseen depths by the time it met the chockstone.
No doubt this waterfall would dry up within a day or so, once the hurricane-spawned rainstorms that fed who-knew-how-many-square-miles of this watershed stopped.
But for now, it fed the abyssal pool.
My attention moved to the chockstone. It domed maybe fifteen feet above the water line. It was the lumpy back-head of the jut-jawed face I’d seen from below. It plugged this canyon and backed up this water as surely as a knot obstructs a fire hose. Undo the knot and the water flows free through the hose to the nozzle, which compresses it into a jet stream. I didn’t know how much water was needed to create a large and rapid enough flow to flush the beads from the reservoir and take them all the way down to the springs, but if I’d wanted to make that kind of flood I guessed it could be calculated. And if I wanted to keep track of the water level, I guessed I could rig up a depth gauge that transmits a signal.
I scanned the canyon rim and spotted what looked like the desiccated spine of a cactus, only it was nothing so indigenous. It was an antenna and it rose from a cairn of rocks and it was well positioned to relay signals. Which meant there must be a box around here to send—and receive—them. Where? It didn’t really matter. Hap no longer had his remote.
Thunder sounded somewhere beyond my patch of blue sky. Somewhere, perhaps at the head of this watershed, the rains were beginning again.
I decided to have a closer look at the pool while I still safely could.
The slope below the bighorn trail was steep and crumbly with talus. I had to scramble down, nearly losing my footing in the rocky debris. When I reached the pool decking, I realized my viewpoint had changed and so I scanned the canyon yet again.
Nobody in sight.
I turned to study the water. There was a strong current right now, fed at the inflow, puckering the surface. I peered into the depths. The water was opaque with suspended sediment, concealing the bottom. I broke out in a sweat, fighting the temptation to take a dive.
Another crack of thunder brought me to my feet. I looked upcanyon and spotted a newcomer—the fat gray lip of thundercloud above the waterfall. And then I spotted a second newcomer—curled into a red-headed knob in the deep notch to the right of the fall.
48
My first thought was, I wish I’d come in that way.
I’d come in the hard way, via the chockstone and the ledge and the sheep trail, and now I stood at the deep end of the pool and stared upcanyon at Hap.
He’d come in the easy way.
The notch was almost a stairway, cleaving all the way down the canyon wall, paralleling the tall waterfall, intersecting the bighorn sheep trail, continuing down to the shallow end of the pool.
The notch was so recessed that I couldn’t have seen it from my end of the sheep trail, on my way in. So recessed that Hap couldn’t have seen me.
But we saw each other now.
I found my voice and yelled, “Stand up.”
He rose slowly, like an unfolding petal. Bracing his arms against the notch walls.
I thought, jolted, he’s already sick. How long does it take between exposure and symptoms? Or maybe he’s just buying time. Playing me. I grew uneasy. But what could he do? I reminded myself, again, that I was armed. I reminded myself that I had a plan. Just do it, lady—you picked this movie, now start it.
I yelled, “Come down.”
He didn’t move. I raised the gun. He spidered down the notch stairs to the sheep trail.
No, not sick. “Keep coming,” I yelled, wondering precisely where I wanted him to go, but he moved at my command so I did not have to decide just yet. I watched him walk that sheep trail as impeccably as if he were, himself, a bighorn.
When he approached the skull, he paused.
Plan was, I’d make him take off his shirt and kiss the ground and then I’d use his shirt to bind his arms behind his back. First, though, I wanted him away from that skull. “Step over it. Don’t even think about kicking it at me.”
He cleared the skull with an exaggerated step and lost his balance in the process, putting out his hands to catch himself on the trail. He held there in a crouch. A tremor started up in his right leg. I waited for his back to arch, his gut to convulse. His right leg flexed, and now suddenly he looked like a runner in the blocks, waiting for the start gun. The tremor, I realized, had been muscle fatigue. I felt that myself. I knew why he was crouching there. He was ready to make his move. All the while, watching my hands on the gun.
I knew what he was wondering. Does she know how to shoot it? Did she learn, watching Walter? And if she did, will she or won’t she? And if she’s undecided, can I move fast enough to interfere? Throw a rock, like Miss Alien. Slide down and tackle her before she makes up her mind.
I yelled, “Walter taught me how to use it.” I thumbed the lever away from safety lock, to single fire. Hap saw that and let out a low whistle. I said, “Lie on your belly.”
He sank smoothly to the trail like the athlete he was.
I saw now that I should never get close enough to tie his hands. Okay then, what’s the plan? Just keep him believing. He already thinks you’ll shoot. Or at least he’s not ready to call your bluff. Just keep him away from any place that could be hiding the explosives, and hold him there until Soliano comes. You’ve got him under control. Now increase the odds in your favor. I said, “Roll onto your back.”
He turned over.
“Take off your pants.”
He rotated his head to peer down at me. “Hey Buttercup, change your mind?”
I said, cold, “I know what you were after that night at the pool.” Blow a fog of romance into my eyes so I don’t see clearly. “It won’t work now either.”
“Was after a little bit of life.”
My heart hardened. “Take off your damn pants.”
He put his legs in the air and peeled down the parachute pants. He wore the purple swim trunks underneath.
I filed that piece of information. “Wad the pants. Slide them down to me.”