Meanwhile, the text messages were flying.
Mark (to Barry, Asia, Lissa, Orion, Stella, Daisy; cc John): Penelope has Maggie.
Barry: How?
Mark: Not clear. Her raven brought SOS to John
Asia: Who is John?
Orion: Where are they?
Mark: GPS says someplace out in the desert
Lissa: My dad has a place out in Gold Canyon. He kept my mother there. Bet that's it.
Mark: We need to get out there ASAP
Asia: Who is John??
Mark: Meet at PP, 20 minutes?
(Six thumbs-up hit the screen.)
Stella: I'll grab Daisy
Barry: On my way
Asia: Who is John???
Chapter Fourteen
Penelope pulled out of the Starbucks parking lot and headed east. She had slipped a small stone into my shoe, mumbled a few words, and my legs had gone numb. I’d have admired the spell if she wasn’t using it on me. She used good old-fashioned handcuffs on my wrists. I was trussed up with magic on the carpeted floor in the back of the van, feeling my wet clothes chafe against my skin as I got thrown around in the moving vehicle.
I could feel the van rolling slowly through the traffic of downtown Scottsdale, but she never turned. A few miles later, she stopped for a light a little longer than before, then made a hard right and accelerated down a slope. I assumed it was the freeway ramp, headed south.
A couple of miles later, I felt the van ease around a curve and then speed up. Judging from the centrifugal force, we’d gone through a cloverleaf onto another freeway and we were headed east again. Where was Penelope taking me?
She picked a lane and stayed there. Traffic must have been light, because her speed was steady for half an hour or so. I couldn’t quite figure out the light through the windows; I’d assumed we were going east, but the sun seemed to be moving around to the other side of the car. This had to be Loop 202, then, making its arc around the city. I tried to raise myself on my elbows to see out the window, but my feet were still numb and I couldn’t get any leverage.
One more ramp curving to the left, and we were headed east again. I had a pretty good idea where we were now. We had passed through Apache Junction, and we were driving into the desert at the foot of the Superstition Mountains.
A few minutes later, I got my confirmation. The smooth freeway petered out, and Penelope slowed as the highway narrowed into a state route. The sound in the van had changed; we were passing stretches of open land, occasionally broken by huge 55+ mobile home parks, office or industrial complexes, or discount outlets.
Penelope came to a complete stop, then made a left turn. She drove slowly now, so I guessed that we had entered a residential area. She made rolling stops at a couple more intersections. Once I thought I heard children playing – maybe a park? After all, it was the Fourth of July, and people would be out with their families.
I thought of John, back at the condo. He must be frantic. Had he and Mark been able to figure out my GPS clue? Had Edgar even reached John – and even if Edgar got there, did he remember the message? What was I thinking to bet my life on a bird?
My pity party was interrupted when Penelope drove up a steep slope, leveled out, and slammed on the brakes. She triggered the automatic sliding door on the side of the van. When I looked up, she was standing there with the gun.
“Out.”
I struggled to move, but she reached inside, swung my legs into the opening, and grabbed the front of my shirt to pull me up. Behind me, I heard a garage door opening.
My legs were still numb, but Penelope dragged me out of the van and sat me on a marble bench next to the mansion’s elaborate front door. She was astonishingly strong, or maybe she’d added some magical turbo boost. Either way, I was pretty much going to have to do what I was told.
“Stay put,” Penelope said with a smirk. “I’ll be right back.”
The van sat on a decorative concrete pad in front of a five-car garage. When Penelope pulled the van into the garage, I got a good look at my predicament. At the edge of the pad, the hillside fell away several hundred feet to the bottom of Gold Canyon. Running wasn’t going to be an option.
If you’ve seen the opening shots of the John Landis movie Three Amigos, you’ve seen Gold Canyon. About 20 years ago, developers carpeted the floor of the remote canyon with five perfectly-manicured golf courses and surrounded them with luxury homes. The price of the mansions goes up as you climb the canyon walls. The Spanish-style showplace on the ledge where we were perched would cash out for several million dollars.
Gold Canyon feels like an isolated Shangri-La, but it’s only 40 minutes from Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix. I could see why Penelope had chosen it for my prison.
Or maybe, she hadn’t.
According to her husband Alex, Penelope had been tucked away somewhere safe for the past few years. Is this where he’d kept her? Was this Alex’s home, not Penelope’s?
I craned my head around to get a better look at the garage. Penelope had parked the van, and she was pulling a vintage Jeep out of the far bay. In the parking slot nearest to me was a fancy sports car under a tarp. A few inches of canary yellow paint were visible under the tarp, and I could see four matched exhaust pipes peeking out at the center. It was Alex’s Lamborghini.
No way had Alex lent Penelope that car. For that matter, why did she have the run of his house? And if the car was here, where was Alex? This wasn’t good.
Penelope braked the Jeep on the pad and used her remote to close the garage doors.
I had an awful thought. If Penelope was driving up into the Superstitions, there’d be no cell phone reception. How would Mark find me if I was off the grid?
The pocket in my shorts was still unzipped, and it took me only seconds to work my phone out past my waistband, even with my hands still cuffed in front of me. The phone fell on the bench with a loud clack, but Penelope was bent inside the Jeep and didn’t hear. I brushed the phone off the bench, and it fell into the neatly trimmed shrubs behind it.
A few moments later, Penelope snapped the seatbelt to lock me into the passenger seat of the Jeep. We rocketed down the slope of the driveway. Penelope didn’t stop at the stop sign; she screeched around the corner and slammed through the gears as she accelerated upslope. A mile later, we left the pavement and headed up a graded dirt road that climbed into the desert crags.
The Superstitions are honeycombed with dirt roads and hiking trails. The state or the forest service maintain some of them; others are on private land. They ranged from ragged ruts to carefully graded gravel boulevards.
The rough dirt road that Penelope chose took us straight at a jagged mountain that rose straight up from the canyon floor. The crags on the other side of the canyon reflected the setting sun, but we were headed into deep shadow. For us, the day was over.
The road forked at a small oasis of cottonwood trees, and Penelope turned uphill. We were headed deeper into the canyon, away from any help from rangers or police. I was on my own.
The Jeep was bouncing all over the place, and Penelope was keeping her eyes on the road. I saw my opportunity. My legs were still numb and rubbery, but maybe I could fix that.
I let my legs go limp and allowed the balance of the vehicle to jerk my feet around. After a little trial and error, my left shoe was in front of my right.
I glanced at Penelope. She had a death grip on the steering wheel, and she was staring straight ahead at the little bit of light the headlights were casting. It was now or never.
I slammed my right shoe up against the heel of the left, and let the next bump carry me up off my seat.
My heel lifted out of my left shoe a little. A second bump pulled the shoe off a bit more, and a third jolt sent my sneaker flying forward. My left foot was bare except for my sock. The sneaker tipped over, and a small, white pebble spilled out.
Sensation returned to my legs in a rush. Penelope’s spell was broken.
I bit my lip to keep fro
m crying out with the pain of the blood rushing back into my sleeping legs. I couldn’t let Penelope know that I could walk again. We jostled into the gathering dark.
♦
Penelope was driving northwest around the base of the mountain. I figured we weren’t far from the Massacre Grounds, the place where, a decade or so before the Civil War, a band of angry Apaches are said to have caught up with Mexican miners who were working a rich gold mine claimed by the Peralta family.
This story gets tangled up with the legend of the Lost Dutchman goldmine. By the way, it wasn’t the Dutchman who was lost; it was his mine. Jacob Waltz was a German (“Deutsch”) immigrant who claimed to have found the Peralta mine with the help of descendants of a survivor of the Apache attack.
Maybe, but there’s a lot wrong with this story. First of all, geologists aren’t buying it: the rock structure is all wrong for large deposits of gold. Paper prospectors find the trail goes cold when they go searching for the Peralta claim, but if the mine did exist, they were most likely digging for copper or silver. Even more curious, the directions Waltz left for his heirs to find his stash never seemed to work out.
Rumors have always floated around Phoenix that Waltz never did find the mine – if there ever was one – but that he only stumbled across the remains of pack animals that were killed or stampeded by the Apaches, and that he simply raided the gold ore from their rotting canvas packs. It would explain why nobody else has ever found his mine. Whatever the truth is, the legend has kept generations of prospectors and dreamers combing the Superstitions for the lost fortune.
There’s a punchline, of course: most of the Superstitions are protected wilderness, even though they are within sight of urban Phoenix. You’re not allowed to dig or disturb the landscape in any way. That’s the problem, because any signs of the mine are probably buried by nearly two centuries of wind and water. Even if you find the treasure, you don’t get to remove it from protected lands. Or, at least, that’s the official version. It doesn’t keep people from trying.
Civilization is just over the next line of rocky peaks, but you may as well be a hundred miles from town. It isn’t safe up here. Being in the Superstitions after sundown is a sure way to ensure that somebody’s going to take a shot at you for getting too close to what they’re positive is the glory hole.
♦
The moon was still below the horizon when Penelope crested a ridge and skidded the Jeep to a stop on the silt bank of a dry river bed. There were no signs of civilization in any direction.
“Get out,” Penelope said, waving the gun in my direction.
The numbness had finally worked its way out of my legs, but I didn’t want Penelope to know that. I made a show of trying to get my supposedly limp feet to work. The white pebble was sitting near my left heel, and I scuffed my foot back to drive it under the seat before Penelope noticed it was no longer inside my shoe.
I let my legs dangle inside the footwell and used my arms to lift them, one by one, through the door. Penelope got out and came around to my side, watching the slow process. She seemed to be buying the act.
“Get on with it,” snarled, frustration rising in her voice. “ We don’t have all night.” She flashed a nasty grin. “Well, anyway, you don’t.”
I looked around at the miles and miles of nothing. “So that’s it? This is where you shoot me?”
“Oh, I don’t have to shoot you,” Penelope said. “Everybody knows the desert is a dangerous place. If you go wandering off alone, well...”
I started to argue. “I don’t intend...”
But she put the Jeep in gear, spun her tires in the soft sand of the river bottom, and headed back the way she had come.
She took off, leaving me standing alone in the middle of the dry wash, trying to get the dust out of my eyes and mouth. It was going to be a long walk back to town, and the sun was going down. I figured I had maybe an hour before I was walking in total darkness. I couldn’t remember if there was a moon tonight.
Walking in the desert at night is always a bad idea. Desert predators are nocturnal, and not just the four-legged kind. When I first moved to Arizona, I went for a drive out in the desert after work and got my little car stuck way up in the back of a canyon. I had to walk out. I thought I was pretty smart: I had a canteen and a pair of sensible shoes in my trunk, so I put on my jacket and started to hike. About a half mile later, I came over a rise and found two guys digging cacti up, wrapping them in tarps and throwing them in the back of their beat-up pickup truck. This is not as crazy as it sounds: a barrel cactus the size of a beer keg is worth more than a thousand dollars. There is an actual black market for them, and cactus thieves do serious time if they get caught. This means that they are armed and unpredictable. I mean, if you’re stealing cactus for a living, you’re probably not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, right?
So, like I said, I was young, stupid and on foot when I ran across these two desperados. Now I had a choice. Did I want to try to walk thirty miles back to town on my own and take a chance on running into dope smugglers, coyotes of both the two and four-legged kind, or worse? Or did I want to play the dumb damsel in distress and hitch a ride back to civilization?
I’m not proud to say that I batted my eyes, feigned a limp, and got back to town by supper time.
I watched Penelope’s Jeep throw up a rooster tail of dust as she slammed gears back up the hill. The odds were not in my favor of finding a ride out tonight. This time, I had no canteen, no jacket, not even long pants. My running shoes were still damp from my swim in the canal, and my socks were soaked. Why didn’t I think to put them in the waterproof pouch with my phone? Too late now.
I thought for a minute about which was the worst option: squishing on wet shoes and socks for a dozen miles back out to the main highway, or walking barefoot and take the chance of stepping on pebbles, cactus thorns or assorted critters. Neither option made me very happy. I decided to compromise: I draped the damp socks around the back of my neck – they could at least keep me cool as I walked – and put my shoes back on. They would probably chafe blisters by the time I walked out, but it was better than nothing.
But where was I going to walk to?
If my guess was correct – if Penelope had driven us near the Massacre Grounds – then maybe I might be able to walk out. Officially, the Massacre Grounds Trail is closed. Of course, that doesn’t keep day hikers from stepping through the gap in the barbed wire fence to enjoy the wildflowers in the spring, but this time of year the waterfall is dried up, and the trail sizzles in the blazing sun.
It only takes a couple of hours to hike from the trailhead near Tortilla Flat to the waterfall – or, in my case, going the other way back out to civilization. Penelope had brought us in by the back way, but most of the graded dirt roads in the Superstitions intersect, and I was hoping that if I stayed on this one, I’d eventually run into the trail I needed.
I immediately ruled out the idea of retracing the Jeep’s path. It would be just my luck for Penelope to have car trouble on her way out of the mountains, and I’d stumble right into her. The night was very dark now, but I could see the glow of Phoenix behind the peaks to the west. I was guessing that we were somewhere in the middle of the protected wilderness area, but quite a few developed trails and roads came from Apache Junction at the foot of the mountains on that side.
I walked quietly and carefully for at least half an hour before the moon came up. I wasn’t lost – I was heading toward the old Massacre Falls Trail, one that I had hiked twice before in daylight – but I was alone. I regretted with every step that I had left my phone back at the house in Gold Canyon. The desert comes alive after dark, and I could hear wildlife moving around me in the deep shadows. I would’ve given just about anything to be able to fire up that flashlight app.
♦
I made better time once the moon was up, and the goat trail I was following finally intersected a little wider goat trail that I knew led to the Massacre Grounds.
&nbs
p; Let me explain about walking in the desert.
The Sonoran desert does not have Lawrence of Arabia-style dunes, at least not around here. Think of it as a dry forest, with saguaros as the trees and head-high cholla, creosote, prickly pear and yuccas as the understory. The soil is sand and gravel, infused with moss, lichens, fungi and other microorganisms that form a delicate biological crust. If you step off the trail, you “bust the crust” and your footsteps disrupt that whole ecosystem, sometimes for years. There are still wheel ruts visible out in the desert that were made by horse-drawn wagons that crossed the high mesas before the Civil War.
So, anyway, I picked up the main trail just before midnight. Anybody who’s walked National Park Service trails is at this point picturing a smooth, gradually pitched walkway that’s carefully maintained. Nope. This trail is more like a river wash studded with shoe-sized rocks. In places, the trail goes over a ridge in what hikers call a chute: a narrow v-shaped cleft that goes uphill through ancient lava flows at an alarming angle. Still, it’s better than cutting across the open desert.
Above me, I could see the thousand-foot cliffs of the ridgeline silhouetted against the starlit sky. I knew right where I was: turn right, and I’d end up at the high cliff where water cascaded over after a good rain. Turn left, and after a while I’d end up out at the highway – and help.
I’d only managed ten steps before I heard the explosion.
Chapter Fifteen
Mark had been very, very busy since he sent his text. His first stop was Pentacle Pawn.
“Frank!” he called when the door let them in. “Frank! Where the heck are you?”
The orange tabby lazily unfurled himself from his cozy bed under the counter. Since when did this person summon him?
“Frank! It’s an emergency! Show yourself!” Mark shouted.
Frank slipped around the corner of the counter, his tail twitching with curiosity.
“Ah – There you are!” Mark said. “Come on; we need to go.”
Frank couldn’t speak to Mark, but he understood Maggie’s human friend just fine. He sat down and wrapped his tail across his feet, cocked his head and flashed Mark an expression that he hoped expressed the sentiments: Go where? And why?
Pentacle Pawn Boxed Set Page 41
