Black Sun Descending (17 page)

SILAS DROVE KEN TO THE
Page airport to catch a charter flight to Moab. They stood next to Silas's Outback as the sun descended toward the horizon.

“Ken, are you alright?”

“Yes, yes, fine, amigo. You should be worried about yourself, not about me.”

“I'm alright, really. Thank you for coming.”

“Now you owe me. You'll have to come by the house when you get home and let Trish cook you a big meal.”

“I don't see how that is making it up to
you
, but I will. I promise.”

“When will that be?”

Silas looked toward the placid waters of Lake Powell.
Lake Foul
, Abbey had called it. “I don't know.”

“If you stay here, no good will come of it, Silas.”

“You don't think so? I think I'm close, Ken.”

“I think you're close to getting yourself thrown in the Coconino County jail.”

“You mean that thing with Love and his truck? I had nothing—”

“No, not that. I believe we've gotten you and your hairy friend off the hook for that. There was no evidence that the brake failure was because of any—”

“Monkey-wrenching?”

“I was going to say
tomfoolery
. You're going down a road that you've been on before. In the fall, with the Hopi girl, and the archaeologist almost got you killed, and you are no closer to finding Penelope.”

“That's not true, Ken. I found her journal. And that's helped me narrow my search. And it's led me here. I'm getting close.”

“Silas, three people are dead—”

“You don't have to tell me, Ken! I found them!”

Ken closed his eyes. “Whoever killed them does not want to be found. You
are
the connection between all three. Why, we don't know. Whoever killed these people—one person or two or three—will not want you poking around.”

“If poking around leads me to Penelope, then that's what I have to do.”

“IT'S NOT TOO
late to call, is it?”

“No, Dad, it's just nine o'clock here. Is everything alright?”

“Everything is fine, Robbie. Listen, last year, when I was digging around with that business with
US
Senator C. Thorn Smith, you ran down a business for me. You remember?”

“Sure. No big deal. What do you need?”

HE WAS PREPARING
to take a shower when there was a knock at his door. He looked through the peephole and saw the shaggy head and beard of Josh Charleston filling the frame.

Silas opened the door. “Hey, you okay?” asked Hayduke.

“I'm fine. How about you?”

“Yeah, fine. Looks like your lawyer got us off the hook for that thing with Love's rig.”

“For the time being.”

“Yeah, so, you want to go get a beer or something?”

Silas looked over his shoulder at the sterile room. “Sure.”

HAYDUKE TRIED TO
find the cowboy bar where Abbey's Hayduke and Seldom Seen Smith got into a fight in
The Monkey Wrench Gang
, but after twenty minutes of driving around Page they settled on a place that looked more like a family-style restaurant than a honky-tonk bar. Hayduke grumbled his disappointment as Silas ordered them beers.

“What the fuck happened to this town?” muttered Hayduke as he scanned the crowd.

“You're basing your expectations on a novel written almost forty years ago.”

“America just isn't what it used to be.”

“America never was what it used to be. It's just mythology. But what do I know? I'm Canadian.”

“I forgot. You got a green card or something?”

“Yeah, but for how much longer I don't know. I guess they'll kick me out sooner or later now that I'm not at the university.”

“Then what will you do?”

“Go home I guess.”

“Not before we find Pen.”

“No, not before I find Penelope.”

“So, they rake you over the coals?” asked Hayduke, signaling to the harried waitress for another beer.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Me too. Wanted to know how I knew you and what we were doing together in Paria. I stonewalled those fuckers. I stuck to our story. I told them we were just out for a hike.”

Silas drank from his beer. “They know about my dreams. It's alright.”

“Really? Shit, man, what a mess.”

“You got that right. We talked about connections between Jane Vaughn, Kiel Pearce, and that woman I found last year, Darcy McFarland. Paul Love has got to be at the top of the list.”

“Shit, man, I should have braced that dude instead of fucking up his rig.”

“Watch your language, Josh.”

“I can't hardly talk if I don't curse.”

“Stop trying to sound like a fictional character. You sound foolish.” Hayduke looked as if he had been slapped. He took a long pull from his beer. Silas watched him from the corner of his eye; the young man seemed to be gritting his teeth. “We need to sort things out. Make a list of suspects,” Silas continued. This seemed to brighten his drinking companion's mood.

“Yeah! Figure out what we know and who we have to put the thumbscrews to!”

Silas nodded.

“So what do we know?” asked Hayduke.

“Well, that we got three dead people. Darcy McFarland was found last fall. She was drowned. Hit on the head first, and then drowned in the waste pits at the potash mill near the Colorado River. No witnesses, no leads. Tires tracks nearby, but nothing conclusive. The killer may have used an old jeep trail to leave the scene and drive up onto the Island in the Sky.”

“This McFarland woman, she worked out of Flag on water issues,” Hayduke said.

“You found some information on her, didn't you?”

“Yeah, but remember, I dumped it when things got hot. Something about water deals between those oil companies working along the Canyon Rims area, near Moab, and the government. It was a mess is all I remember. But you ran that down and came up empty, didn't you?”

“There wasn't any smoking gun, that's all I remember. So that's body number one.” Silas held up a finger. “Number two,” he held up a second finger, “is Jane Vaughn. This gets more complicated.

“We know that she was tangling with a whole host of players. Paul Love, this Slim Jim Zahn, Chas Hinkley, even a town councillor, Terry Aldershot. She was butting heads with all of these guys. Paul Love and Chas Hinkley over Wilderness designation on the Colorado, Slim Jim over uranium mining on the Arizona Strip, Chas Hinkley over the impact of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado, and this Terry the Terror over God knows what. And then there's Jane's husband. His motivation was different. His motivation may well have been as simple as an insurance payout.”

Hayduke was motioning to their waitress for another round of beers. “But if it was the husband, it seems unlikely that these murders are all connected. I mean, this dude didn't pop Kiel Pearce just because he was pissed about his wife's environmental activism, did he?”

Silas shrugged. “How would I know? Maybe Jane and Kiel were having an affair.”

Hayduke gratefully accepted his beer and said, “So maybe the old man found out that Kiel was boning the wife and followed him on a hike up the Paria and punched his ticket.”

Silas winced. “Seems unlikely that a guy like Dallas would have the
wherewithal
to track down Kiel and then traipse two hours up the Paria just to kill him. And to use chloroform to knock him out first? I don't see it. This guy was more of a beat-him-to-death-with-his-bare-hands sort.” Silas thought about Vaughn's physical strength when the man threw him off his property. “Plus, there's no evidence that Jane and Kiel were anything other than acquaintances.”

“Maybe Dallas just did the wife.”

“But why dump her in Moab?”

“Why not? You kill your wife, you got to hide the body somewhere.”

“If your motivation was insurance, then you'd want the body to be found. You'd make it look like an accident too.” Hayduke made a sound in his throat that indicated agreement and drank from his beer. Silas continued, “What connected all three of these people, as well as Penelope?”

Hayduke folded his heavy brow in thought. “They were all environmentalists?”

“They were all Colorado River crusaders.”

“Fuck, of course!” Hayduke shouted and several other patrons looked his way.

“Watch your language. This isn't a cowboy bar. It's a respectable joint,” Silas admonished.

“Whatever. I think you're right. The Colorado is the central theme here. Darcy was a water rights activist. Jane was advocating for wilderness preservation. Kiel was a guide for a non-motorized outfit, and Pen, well, she did it all!”

“And who do we know had it out for Jane, and in all likelihood for Kiel, Darcy, and maybe even my wife?”

“That son of a bitch Love, and his lackey Chas Hinkley.” Hayduke started to stand. “Let's go find Love and nail his ass—”

Silas put a hand on Hayduke's arm. “Sit down. It's late. We're not going to nail anybody to anything tonight.”

“Come on! I bet he's still at his Page office. We can have a little tête-à-tête with him right now.”

“Don't you remember? He's on the Colorado River.”

“Right. Of course. Well, we can still go and talk with him.”

“How?”

“Find out what his itinerary is. When we know he's going to be at Phantom Ranch we walk down the Bright Angel Trail and confront him.”

“You've got to be kidding me.”

“It'll be fun. We'll catch him off guard. He won't have the Coconino County Sheriff's Department to hide behind.”

Silas thought about this for a while. “He's likely still a few days from the halfway point on the trip, even with his motorized rafts. What do we do in the meantime?”

A gleam came into Hayduke's narrow eyes. “Didn't Terry Aldershot and Slim Jim have a hate on for Jane Vaughn?”

“They sure did.”

“I think we should go and see if they also had a hate on for Penelope.”

“You know, Jo—Hayduke, I think you and I are actually starting to think alike.”

“I know! Isn't it awesome?”

“No.” Silas finished his beer. “No, it isn't.”

HAYDUKE AND SILAS RETREATED TO
the desert to sleep that night. Neither wanted to spend the night between the cardboard walls of a Page motel so they left the bar—Hayduke complaining about the lack of pluck among the Page men in general—and, each taking their vehicles, followed Highway 89 west. Silas could see Hayduke's Jeep start across the span of the bridge over Glen Canyon, just half a mile from the dam. When Hayduke's brake lights came on, Silas found himself unsurprised.

He stopped his Outback behind the Jeep and got out in time to watch Hayduke kneel down at the edge of the bridge. There was little other traffic. The dam loomed large before them; its perfect arch of cement plugged the Colorado River and created the second-largest manmade lake in the
US
, where more than a hundred thousand square miles of canyons, arches, domes, passageways, and natural temples lay submerged beneath as much as five hundred feet of stagnant water.

Hayduke closed his eyes, pressing his hands together in prayer, and started to mumble. Silas walked up beside him, sighing in exasperation. He was about to intervene, but the sight of the seven-hundred-foot-high dam stopped him. It was a marvel of human engineering, holding back twenty million acre-feet of water. He stepped up to the railing on the Glen Canyon Bridge and looked down seven hundred feet to the river below. In the stillness Silas could hear the turbines of the dam humming and thought he could detect the faint sound of the Colorado River slipping out of the spillways and continuing on through the last few miles of the vanquished Canyon.

Is this what it's really all about?
thought Silas. Five million cubic yards of concrete, the end of Glen Canyon, and the focal point for nearly fifty years of conflict in the American Southwest. Edward Abbey hated the dam. He wrote
The Monkey Wrench Gang
and created the foursome's exploits as a way of railing against what the dam had done to one of his favorite places. Silas looked over at Hayduke, quietly asking God for an earthquake, an asteroid, and an intercontinental ballistic missile to hit the hated edifice all at once.

“You know, it was Seldom Seen Smith who prayed for an earthquake in
The Monkey Wrench Gang
.”

“Don't give a shit,” said Hayduke, concluding his incantations. He stood up, his knees popping.

“Done?”

“For now. Never did believe in that religious shit anyway.”

They drove out into the desert beyond the dam and slept rough under a veil of stars packed together so tightly that they appeared to bleed into a single celestial body that stretched across the cupola of heaven.

THE NEXT MORNING,
they stashed Hayduke's Jeep in the desert outside of town and drove in Silas's vehicle to the offices of Aldershot Transportation. Silas reasoned that while Terry Aldershot would be hard to find, her husband, Balin, would likely be at work.