Douglas Preston - Still Life With Crows

Twelve

T he sun was settling into a bloody patch of cloud along the horizon as Special Agent Pendergast exited Maisie’s Diner, accompanied by a slender man in a Federal Express uniform.

“They told me I’d find you in there,” the man said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner.”

“Quite all right,” Pendergast replied. “I wasn’t especially hungry.”

“If you’ll sign for it now, I’ll leave everything by the back door.”

Pendergast signed the proffered form. “Miss Kraus will show you where to put it all. Would you mind if I take a look?”

“Help yourself. Takes up half the truck.”

The shiny FedEx truck was parked outside the diner, looking out of place on the dusty, monochromatic street. Pendergast peered into its interior. Along one wall were perhaps a dozen large boxes. Some had labels readingPERISHABLE—CONTENTS PACKED IN ICE .

“They’re all from New York,” the driver said. “Starting a restaurant or something?”

“It’s my deliverance from Maisie.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Everything seems to be in order, thank you.”

Pendergast stepped back and watched the truck glide off into the soupy evening. Then he began strolling east, away from the dying glow of the horizon. Within five minutes, he had left the town of Medicine Creek behind. The road stretched ahead like a dark faultline in the corn.

He quickened his pace. His errand was a vague one, an intuition more than a certainty. Intuition, Pendergast knew, was the end result of the most sophisticated kind of reasoning.

Twilight and crows rose from the fields, and the smell of cornstalks and earth drifted on the air. Headlights appeared, grew larger, and then a huge semi-trailer came shuddering past, leaving dust and diesel in its wake.

Two miles out of town, Pendergast stopped. A dirt track ran away from the road here, angling off to the left between walls of corn. Pendergast followed it, moving with long silent strides. The track began to rise more sharply, heading for a dark cluster of trees on the horizon, surrounding three dark low outlines framed against the dusky sky: the Mounds. Leaving the corn behind, the track turned into a trail. Ahead were the trees, giant cottonwoods with massive trunks, bark as rough as fractured stone. Broken limbs lay scattered on the ground, clawlike branches upturned.

As he entered the shadowy confines of the grove, Pendergast paused to look back. The land fell away in a long, gentle declivity toward the town. The distant streetlights formed a glowing cross in the sea of dark corn. The Gro-Bain plant lay south of town, a low cluster of lights all by itself. The creek lay between them, a meandering line of cottonwoods that snaked through the landscape of corn. As flat as the land looked at first sight, it had its gentle undulations, its rises and its bottomlands. The point on which he stood was the highest for many miles.

The summer darkness had fallen heavily on the land. If anything, the air had grown muggier. A few bright planets glowed in the dying sky.

Pendergast turned and walked deeper into the darkness of the grove, becoming virtually invisible in his black suit. He followed a trail that wandered uncertainly through rabbitbrush and oak scrub. After another quarter mile, Pendergast stopped again.

The Mounds were just ahead.

There were three of them, low and broad, arranged in a triangle, rising twenty feet above the surrounding land. The flanks of two of the mounds had worn away, exposing limestone ledges and heavy boulders underneath. The cottonwood trees were thicker here and the shadows were very deep.

Pendergast listened to the sounds of the August night. A chorus of insects trilled furiously. Blinking fireflies drifted among the silent trunks, their streaked lights mingling with the distant heat lightning that flickered to the north. A crescent moon hung just above the horizon, both horns pointed upward.

Pendergast remained motionless. The night sky was now blossoming with stars. He began to hear other sounds: the rustlings and scratchings of small animals, the flutterings of birds. A pair of close-set eyes glowed briefly in the dark. Down by the creek a coyote howled, and at the very edge of hearing, from the direction of the town, a dog barked a reply. The sliver of moon cast just enough light to see by. Night crickets began to chirrup, first one, then others, the sounds rising from the tall grass.

At last, Pendergast moved forward, toward the three dark mounds. He walked slowly and silently, his foot crackling a single leaf. The crickets fell silent. Pendergast waited until, one by one, they resumed their calls. Then he moved on until he reached the base of the first mound. Here he knelt silently, brushed aside the dead leaves, and dug his hand into the soil. He removed a fistful, rolled it between his hands, and inhaled.

Different soils had distinctive smells. This, he confirmed, was the same soil as that found on the tools in the back of Swegg’s car. The sheriff had been right: she had been digging for relics in the Mounds. He pinched some earth into a small glass test tube, stoppered it, and slid it into the pocket of his suit jacket.

Pendergast rose again. The moon had disappeared below the horizon. The fireflies had stopped blinking; the heat lightning grew less frequent, then ceased altogether. A profound darkness slowly enveloped the Mounds.

Pendergast moved past the first mound, then the second, until he stood at their center, three dark swellings growing gradually indistinguishable. Now the darkness was complete.

Still, Pendergast waited. A half hour passed. An hour.

And then, suddenly, the crickets fell silent.

Pendergast waited for them to start their chorus again. His muscles gathered, tensing. He could feel a presence in the dark to his right: a presence of great stealth. It was moving very silently—too silently even for his highly sensitive ears. But the crickets could feel vibrations in the ground that humans could not. The crickets knew.

He waited, tensed, until the presence was no more than five feet away. It had stopped. It, too, was waiting.

One by one the crickets resumed their chirruping. But Pendergast wasn’t fooled. The presence was still there. Waiting.

And now, the presence moved again. Ever so slowly, it was coming closer. One step, two steps, until it was close enough to touch.

In a single movement, Pendergast dropped to one side while pulling his flashlight and gun and aiming both toward the figure. The beam of the light illuminated a wild-looking man crouching in the dirt, a double-barreled shotgun pointing to the spot where Pendergast had been standing a moment before. The gun went off with a great roar and the man staggered back, shrieking unintelligibly, and in that instant Pendergast was on top of him. Another moment and the shotgun was on the ground and the man was doubled over, held in a hammerlock, Pendergast’s gun pressed against his temple. He struggled a moment, then went limp.

Pendergast loosened his grip and the man fell to the ground. He lay there, an extraordinary figure dressed in buckskin rags, a string of bloody squirrels slung around his shoulder. A giant handmade knife was tucked into his belt. His feet were bare, the soles broad and dirty. Two very small eyes were pushed like raisins into a face so wrinkled it seemed to belong to a man beyond time itself. And yet his physique, his glossy and extraordinarily long black hair and beard, told of a robust individual no more than fifty years of age.

“It is inadvisable to fire a gun in haste,” said Pendergast, standing over the man. “You could have hurt someone.”

“Who the hell are you?” the man shrilled from the ground.

“The very question I was going to ask you.”