Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

Dante passed a little turnout to the right after Sand Dune Junction, blacktopped and with a single chemical toilet standing in lonely splendor. At Chuck’s direction, a hundred yards further he turned left on a narrow dirt track toward the yellow-white amazement of the sand sea.

“Takes us to the original stovepipe well,” Chuck said as they bounced along the sandy track pursued by their own dust cloud. “It was an important water hole on the old cross-valley trail in the days of the mining towns of Rhyolite and Skidoo, so they set up a way station. Long gone now. Park here.”

Dante pulled up and stopped. Their dust overtook them, gritting between their teeth and in the corners of their eyes. Theirs was the only car in the little parking area. They got out, stretched, started across the level sandy desert floor toward the great sloping dunes that rose up suddenly ahead of them. Chuck stopped at a rusted capped-off pipe.

“Here’s the well-they don’t use it any more.”

“Why stovepipe?”

“Used to be a literal stovepipe stuck down through the sand to the natural spring so they could get at the water. That rusted away many long years ago, of course.” They started out across the billowing desert dunes. “Lucas shot a lot of Star Wars here in Death Valley. Used these dunes a lot.”

Dante could see why. Fifty feet from the edge of the dunes, there seemed to be only sand for miles in any direction. Chuck said most of it was tiny fragments of quartz, buried, uncovered, reburied thousands of times as the sand shifted and flowed under the pressure of the wind.

The dunes themselves had an eerie beauty in the late slanting light. Long smooth sweeps of sand with crests like blunt sword edges, breaking suddenly to fall away in delicate blue-gold shadow toward the ground far below.

As they labored along one of these sword blades, Chuck panted, “They call this the cornice of the drift-it keeps collapsing under the pressure of more sand brought by the wind. That steep slope they call the slip face, with an angle of repose usually somewhere around thirty-five degrees. Come on!”

He started to run down it. Dante followed, sinking in almost to his knees at each stumbling, giant step. Sand whipped and stung his face. Each step splashed out a miniature avalanche of snowlike sand.

They collapsed in the cut between two massive dunes, to share Dante’s canteen and the scraggly shadow of a creosote bush half-buried in drifting sand. Their faces were covered with sand stuck to their drying sweat.

The ground was a flat layer of dried mud, cracked by a summer of sun into patterns and shapes often unlike the usual triangular segments Dante expected. Here were circles and swirls, the edges eroded by wind so each segment looked like a miniature mesa. Other circle patterns looked like the dinosaur hide on the models at Marine World in Vallejo.

Around scraggly clumps of tough dry bunch grasses, poised for a winter rainstorm so they could shoot up, seed, and replenish themselves with dazzling speed, were circular drag marks where the wind had swept them against the sand.

“Tracks and sign,” said Chuck. “Let me show you.”

Both dried mud and sand carried wildlife tracks with great clarity, though Dante didn’t know what he was seeing until Chuck pointed them out.

“Those sort of delicate ones with a pad and four toe marks are bobcat. Don’t get too many in here.”

“How can you tell it’s not a coyote or a dog?”

“Retractable claws.” He pointed. “ These are coyote.”

The tracks were larger but quite similar to Dante’s untrained eye, except they indeed had made distinct claw marks in the sand. Running across them were delicate X-shaped tracks that went up over the lip of a shallow sand drift.

“Roadrunner.”

“Beep-Beep?”

“You got it. And these-‘Quoth the raven.’”

They looked somewhat like the silhouette of a swept-wing jet fighter, except the toes making the winglike marks pointed forward rather than back. Rather confusing spraylike tracks with a line drawn in the sand between them had been made by a lizard dragging his tail.

“Here’s one nobody gets.”

The tiny double row of endless pinpricks in the sand went from nowhere to endless nowhere. Running between the pinpricks was the lightest of pencil lines drawn in the sand.

“Stink beetle,” said Chuck. “The line is drawn by its dragging abdomen.”

Daylight was failing. They started back. Dante was hopelessly lost, turned around, disoriented.

“If the wind doesn’t blow ’em away, you can always follow your own tracks back out in daylight. Or get to the top of a dune to see the mountains and most likely a road.”

“I wouldn’t know which mountains or which road.”

“Don’t matter so long as they get you out of here.”

They crossed a vast stretch of low-lying dune that was rippled by the wind like the bottom of a stream rippled by flowing water. There were other wonders: the energy-filled bounds of leaping kangaroo rats; the delicate mincing trot of a big-eared kit fox; the talon marks of an owl dug into the sand where an unwary rabbit had died, surrounded by the giant brush marks of its wings beating predator and prey aloft again.

Most evocative of all was a series of long parallel scroll marks, each somewhat offset from the mark before it so the scrolls moved across the sand at an angle.

“Sidewinder,” said Chuck. “Desert rattlesnake, you don’t see them very often.”

Not very often was fine with Dante.

They sat for a time in the car with the motor off, watching the sunset over the western mountains. The clouds turned first gray with gold foil edges, then golden, then an incredi ble bloodred herringbone pattern, finally fading off to delicate silver.

“Show’s over,” sighed Chuck at last. Dante started the engine. “Full-moon nights, sometimes I come out here and just sit on the lip of a dune and listen. You can hear everything that goes on, can hear yourself think.” He paused. “Can hear yourself blink ”

Dante’s lights caught a tiny kit fox, great ears standing out in alarm, as he trotted into the sand dunes for the night’s hunt. He looked gray in the headlights. On the way back to Furnace Creek, they saw a coyote loping away from the road into the rock-strewn desert.

A memorable day.

But still Dante couldn’t sleep.

He had a hamburger and fries and berry pie at the Furnace Creek Ranch cafe, on his own time here, feeling a little guilty. He went to the front office and used the pay phone to call Rosa and tell her he was okay and that he loved her.

It should have sent him to bed relaxed and satisfied. But when he walked the dim roadway back to his room, the palm trees tossing and shivering against the full moon in the evening wind woke the familiar restlessness the full moon used to raise in him as a kid in San Francisco. Out his bedroom window he would go, to climb Telegraph Hill in moonlight, or run along the silent wharves of the Embarcadero, or race the night’s final cable car up the California Street hill.

He returned to the little bungalow cabin and went to bed. The cabin was wood frame, built during the depression by the WPA after Death Valley had been made a national monument in 1933. Dante liked this old room with its feel of days gone by, when a motel really had still been a motor hotel. Linoleum floors, no phone or TV, just a clock radio, a desk and chair and twin beds set a prim distance apart. A joint front porch with the sister unit.

Dante tossed and turned like the ferny tamarind leaf patterns the moon laid across the windows. Tried to read a guidebook, put it aside, thought about his case.

Hymie the Handler had told him that Otto Kreiger’s death had been managed. A section of gas line had shown a recent, deliberate rupture. A fragment of door frame had a strip of sandpaper adhesived to it. And a persistent but invisible Ed Farrow the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency had never heard of had phoned to demand a meeting with Kreiger in the condemned building just an hour before the explosion.