Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

The ankle hurt, but she could put her weight on it. Not broken, she told herself, and limped away from the Blazer. She had taken the keys from the ignition and snapped them in the outside pocket of her jacket. Donating her vehicle to her attacker and spending the night under a juniper would not be a happy ending.

Anna was banking on the fact that her would-be murderer didn't think she'd stop once she got clear of his sights; that he'd turned and run the minute she'd disappeared over that second hill and would be hightailing it back to the park to cover his tracks. All Anna wanted was a glimpse of him. Or her.

That's all she got.

Having circled three-quarters of the way around the hill she saw, half a mile or more away, a tiny figure. Blurred and indistinct in khaki clothes or desert camouflage, it trotted over a ridge and down out of her line of sight. The shooter could have been six feet tall or six inches, black or white, male or female. All the hard-won sighting told her was that he was probably headed back toward Carlsbad's headquarters, and she'd already guessed that much.

Adrenaline, vengeance, hope all abandoned her at once, and suddenly she was so tired it was an effort to draw breath. Her ankle throbbed, drumming its dissatisfaction at the recent abuse. Cold poked icy fingers into her ears, irritating the eardrums. Brent's blood caked and itched on the skin of her face and neck. Eschewing cowboy delicacy, she called down vile imprecations on all things living and dead, on the wind and the cold, the uneven dirt and the knife-edged plants. By the time she'd reached the truck she'd used up the vocabularies of several generations of sailors and, had there been any truth to the conceit, would have left a blue streak as wide as the Danube in her wake.

Brent didn't carry a radio in his vehicle. As he wasn't BLM or NPS, it made sense. Anna cursed him anyway, because she was in that sort of mood. Every jolt and rut pained her. Her ankle complained so bitterly that pushing in the clutch pedal was torture. She cursed Roxbury for having a manual transmission. Cursing him was easier than remembering him, than feeling his blood on her flesh and knowing somebody was going to have to break the news to his wife.

When she reached the highway she goaded the Blazer along at sixty five miles per hour in third gear rather than trash her ankle further. Finally she could stand the whine of the engine no longer and used her right foot to shove in the clutch. The Blazer careened into the oncoming lane. "Never a cop around when you need one," she growled as she righted the vehicle; then she smiled. Anything taken to absurd extremes ran the risk of becoming ludicrous. Even ambient crankiness.

The Bureau of Land Management offices were on the east side of town, off the main drag. On impulse, Anna drove into their lot. It was just before five and almost dark, but there were still cars parked in front of the building and lights in the windows. She was taking the chance that Holden had gone to work today. Holden would have all the numbers: the sheriff, the coroner, BLM law enforcement. She yearned to dump the whole thing in his lap, run back to Zeddie's, crawl in the hot tub, and drink the forbidden juice of the grape.

Cunning and baffling, her mentor in AA had quoted the accepted wisdom on alcohol to an alcoholic. So be it, Anna thought unrepentantly. She'd been cunningly baffled by events for coming on a week now, and none of them were remotely as rewarding as a glass of good wine.

The BLM offices were as lackluster as could be expected of new government buildings. Efficient and featureless in neutral tones and cubicaled spaces. The receptionist, a young Navajo man with shoulder-length black hair tied neatly in a ponytail, squeaked like a rabbit when Anna appeared in front of his desk. She'd spent all her time with the rearview mirror looking for the sniper. Had she bothered to take a look at herself, she might have cleaned up a bit before returning to civilization. The receptionist reached for the phone, and Anna laid a hand on his wrist. "Don't worry," she said. "It's not my blood."

He was not reassured. Hand halfway to the receiver he froze, staring at her blood-black fingernails on his arm. In vain, she tried to find the words that would ease his mind. Finally, she said, "Is Holden Tillman here? He'll know what to do with me."

Magic words, "Holden Tillman." Anna made a mental note to give him a bad time about their open-sesame effect someday when they both recovered their senses of humor.

The receptionist returned, Holden swinging on crutches at his heels.

"Sorry, Holden," Anna said stupidly. "Are you in the middle of anything?"

He took in her bloodstained person, the dusty clothes, her crippled stance. "A local's been complaining about traffic noise on the northwest boundary, but I expect it can wait." He smiled his slow smile, and Anna's heart lifted a little.

"I've just come from there," she said. "And the only traffic was me, but I did stir up a bit of dust."

Holden did everything right, wearing all hats at once: EMT, bureaucrat, husband, father, friend. Hot coffee was fetched. Anna's bloody jacket was peeled off. A kindly woman in the gray-brown BLM shirt with the American flag sewn on the shoulder took her to the ladies' room so she could wash the last traces of Roxbury from her face and hands. Calls were made to the right agencies. The sheriff was alerted. Her boot was cut off and her foot elevated. Ice was found for the ankle.

Holden underwent a marvelous metamorphosis. As he tended her, she watched him change from the uncertain palsied man who'd killed his patient through negligence to the confident man of understated command he'd been when she'd first met him. Roxbury's death was not good news to Holden; there was nothing of relief or relish in his new attitude. It was that he saw the shooting as Anna did, linked somehow with the death of Frieda Dierkz. This second murder proved the first. Holden was a born-again believer in the sacred butt-print. He hadn't killed Frieda. It made a new man of him.

Only after she'd been cared for and was firmly on the road to being human again, did Holden begin to dig for details. The sheriff had come. Holden had timed it so she'd only have to tell her story once.

Anna told her tale, notes were taken, questions asked. When she finished, Holden arranged everything as she would have herself: the NPS car would be picked up and delivered back to the park by a sheriff's deputy. Rhonda and Holden would give her a ride back to Zeddie's that night. Rhonda arrived in the midst of these plans and took on her new duties with good-natured grumbles. Since Holden's ankle was broken she'd been playing chauffeur. Now she had two gimps to squire around. Their son, Andrew, had come with her. It was the first time Anna had seen him conscious. He didn't look like either his mother or his father but was one of those children who appear to have been fashioned by the fairies. There was an irrepressible impishness about him that delighted Anna even as she was glad she wouldn't have to raise the boy.

That impish spark in the child's eyes was the only physical resemblance he had to his dad. Anna laughed to see the twin gleams when Holden pulled his son onto his lap. Rhonda looked both surprised and pleased. That twinkle had been gone from her husband for a while.

Rhonda drove, Anna rode shotgun, and Holden and Andrew were tucked in the cramped seats in the back of the truck's "king" cab. From the scraps of conversation and high-pitched squeals, Anna guessed they played at some game involving toy bats and tickling.

Anna found herself telling her adventure again, not because she had to but because she needed to. It was a story of such magnitude, at least to her, that she would need to tell it several more times to dissipate its power, to get some kind of hold on it. Rhonda asked all the right questions, questions the sheriff would never think of: Were you scared? Did it hurt? Did you think you were going to die? Under this gentle probing, emotions quashed by pride or necessity welled up with such force they threatened to choke Anna. No wonder men were often frightened of women. They had a way of getting to the heart of things, a dangerous place sometimes.