Borderline (17 page)

Steve shook the water bottle. “Maybe a cup or so,” he said. “Want to see if the baby will drink some?”

This ordinary statement was anything but ordinary. Anna was so thirsty she had to wiggle her tongue around to keep it from sticking to various places in her mouth. Steve had to be as thirsty or more. To offer the gift of water in the desert as if merely passing the salt at the dinner table was a form of grace that Anna couldn’t help but admire. She’d never wanted children but, if she could have ordered a pair like the Kessler twins to be delivered fully baked, she might have given it another thought.

“You try and see if she will drink,” she said, untangling Helena from the mess of down and ripped linen that had been her home for the past few hours. “We need to find Carmen while there’s still a little light.”

Steve took the baby with such confidence Anna guessed there were smaller Kesslers in the world.

Anna didn’t bother to get to her feet but rolled onto hands and knees and crept to the edge of their platform to peer into the darkening cracks between the boulders under the bloodstain. “Carmen!” she called.

There was no answer and she’d expected none. Fortunately, there were not many places the body could have landed. A couple of yards beneath the ledge they inhabited and beneath the stain on the shale were three enormous blocks of shale, each the size of a mobile home standing on end. They’d sheared from the cliff along fault lines, straight as a die, leaving them as square and neat as if a mason had cut them. They leaned against one another, forming V-shaped crevices twenty or thirty feet deep. Carmen could only be in one or the other of them.

Anna stretched out flat on her belly and stared into the inky bottoms of the two natural shafts. A change of what little light remained in the day made her look back. Paul was standing astraddle her, between her and where the shooter was presumed to be.

“Hey,” he said when she looked at him. “This way we go together. For better or worse,” he said, and smiled.

Anna had nothing to say to that and turned her eyes back to the dark below.

Carmen had dark hair and wore a dark long-sleeved shirt and black silk long johns; not a great ensemble for being discovered at the bottom of wells or rock falls. Anna crabbed across the ledge to where she could see into the second of the crevices.

“Could that be an arm?” she asked Paul. He knelt beside her. Like a lot of men, Paul was strong but not supple; he couldn’t coil up and snake around the way Anna and Cyril could.

He stared into the crack. Then he went and looked down into the crack Anna had first studied. “I think it’s our best bet. Too bad we didn’t save any rope. That’s a ways down and those rocks don’t promise anything in the way of foot- or handholds.”

“I can do it,” Anna said.

“Somehow I knew you’d say that,” Paul said. In the thickening dusk Anna couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not.

No matter, she had a plan.

“Let’s jury-rig whatever we’ve got for line. Even a few feet might help.”

Steve gave up a belt. After some modest twisting and contortion, Cyril offered up a spandex sports bra, and together with Paul’s belt and the linen Anna had torn for Helena’s hammock, they cobbled together a line close to seven feet long and fairly sturdy.

There wasn’t enough that it could be tied off or wrapped around something to create a decent belay, and Paul was the only one with the strength to hold it or use it to pull anyone up. He made no argument as Anna made preparations for the climb down.

Anna was relieved. The arguments had already been made in her head and, evidently, that of her husband. On the slim chance Carmen was alive, a wait till morning could well kill her. Should the shooter be waiting to make another kill, waiting till morning would give him light to aim by. Without water Chrissie and possibly the twins would be too weak to finish the ascent in the morning. Weighed against those, the dangers of Anna making a low light climb seemed paltry.

Paul held the makeshift line and Anna scraped, belly down, feetfirst over the edge of the ledge. With the line to hold on to, the seven feet was an easy descent. Steve handed the baby to Chrissie and he and Cyril took the line to hold it so Paul could follow but Chrissie huffed to life.

“Take this baby,” she said as she thrust Helena into Cyril’s arms. “I’m going to do it with Steve. I weigh more than you.”

Cyril was either too tired or too shocked to protest. Anna watched as the girls changed places and Chrissie and Steve knelt and braced themselves to take Paul’s weight. In the end, he didn’t use the line. Afraid, probably, that the two college students couldn’t hold it. He got most of himself off the ledge, hung on for a moment then dropped with a thud and an
oof!
to the platform where Anna waited.

“You sure you can do this?” he asked, hands on hips, staring down the crack Anna had chosen to descend.

Close up, it looked wider and deeper.

“It is Carmen,” Anna said. Crouching, she could see the pale outline of an arm and part of the guide’s face, mere smudges of paleness in the gloom but definitely human in shape. “Carmen!” she called, hoping for a twitch or a moan signifying life.

“I’m pretty sure I can,” she answered Paul’s question.

“The drop doesn’t look as far from here,” he said.

Easy to say when he wasn’t the one about to go down it.

“No time like the present,” Anna said.

She took one end of the line and put it between her teeth. It wasn’t long enough to do any good but it served the purpose of Dumbo’s white feather: it gave her courage to begin. The top of one of the boulders had been sheared off, forming a steep ramp that funneled down into the space between the two leaning rectangles of rock. More blood was smeared where Carmen had hit, then slid down and fallen after being shot. Anna sat at the top of the slide. Paul lay on his stomach on the flat. She took one of his hands then turned over on her stomach as well, facing him.

Panic gripped her as she felt the pull of the black hole she was being funneled into, a pit like the pit in her soul.

“You don’t have to do this,” Paul said softly.

“Yes I do,” Anna mumbled around the spandex bra strap clamped between her teeth. The phrase
blind panic
was not a metaphor, it was a description. She could see almost nothing. Black tunneled her vision till only Paul’s hands remained. Gripping them so tightly she would have broken finger bones had he been one of the twins, Anna loosed the grip her feet had on the funnel’s side and let herself slip down the length of her and Paul’s extended arms. When she could slide no farther, she forced herself to let go of Paul’s left hand, took the line from her teeth and held on to it. Paul closed his fingers around the line.

“Got you,” he said.

With a feeling she was letting go of life and sanity, Anna let go of his right hand and gripped the line tightly in her fists. The added couple of yards brought her easily to where the funnel ended and the rocks met. The space between them was no more than a yard wide for the most part, no wider than the average doorway.

Holding tightly to the bra and belts, Anna knelt on the slope and looked down. It was not as far as gloom and fear had suggested. No more than fifteen feet. Carmen, now the merest outline in the growing dark, lay at the bottom.

“It’s doable,” she said to Paul.

“Be careful.”

There wasn’t any more line but Anna didn’t think she would need it. Lowering her legs into the crack, she pushed hands and feet out to the sides and, braced between the rocks, began to spider-walk down. She made it nearly halfway before she lost purchase on the smooth shale and fell. The chute she was shinnying down flared out near the bottom, and she struck the slanting base of the rock and rolled down.

Her squawk and the forthcoming thump brought Paul’s voice down, high and frightened, the warmth gone. “Are you okay?” he shouted.

“Okay,” Anna managed, her voice sounding hollow and strange in this dry well. She hadn’t fallen and rolled more than a few yards and she had landed on something soft. Carmen. A woman Anna had killed in a similar fashion years before and beneath the surface of the earth in Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico rushed out of the past and the pit and Anna felt again her knee crushing the throat, felt the weight of a mile of limestone on her neck and chest and she could not breathe.

Rolling off Carmen as gently as she could, Anna found herself crying, great fat tears creeping down her dusty cheeks.

“Wasting water,” she whispered. Carmen’s eyes were open, catching the last dull gleam of evening from the opening above them. Anna didn’t bother with a field exam. The exit wound in the middle of the guide’s chest was as big as her fist and the blood around it dry. “Sorry I landed on you, Carmen,” Anna said, still crying. “I am glad it wasn’t me who killed you, though.

“We need your sat phone. Tell me you didn’t fling it from you when the bastard shot you.” Anna’s tears were stopping. Carmen was a southpaw. Anna felt her way down Carmen’s left arm to her hand. The phone wasn’t clamped in her fist. “Butterfingers,” Anna said, and began sweeping her hand over the ground around the corpse.

“Anna?” Paul called.

“Carmen’s dead,” Anna answered, and was relieved there was no sign of her recent weeping in her voice. “I’m trying to find her sat phone.”

Anna could see her hands moving like pale spiders over the dirt and gravel. She could feel the muck of blood and dirt commingled and nearly dry. She hoped she would not feel an angry scaly creature or wake up a scorpion or tarantula. It was dark enough she’d never see them till they were getting to know each other far better than either party desired. Finally her hand landed on what she’d been looking for, the smooth small rectangle of plastic that could send signals to objects rotating the earth.

“Got it,” she called to Paul.

“Hallelujah!” filtered back down the crevasse. “Does it work?”

Anna opened the face of the sat phone. It lit up and displayed the usual options. She chose not to shout the answer to Paul. Knowledge they had a satellite phone might inspire the killer to be more aggressive in his quest. Or it could scare him away. Undecided, Anna slipped it into her pocket.

For reasons rooted in ancient ritual but as necessary now as they’d been then, Anna knelt by Carmen. She straightened the guide’s legs, folded her arms on her chest and closed her eyes. That done, she smoothed the hair off her temples and into the braids she wore. This was unquestionably a crime scene and she was messing it up. Since she’d begun the process by dropping eight feet onto the corpse then fondling it and running her hands and scrabbling her feet over every inch of the place, Anna didn’t feel any compunction about paying last respects.

“Good-bye, Carmen. The Rio Grande is rising to take you but I doubt even he can climb this high. We’ll be back for you.

“I’m coming up,” she shouted to Paul. Checking to make sure the sat phone was secure, she crawled up the slanted cut at the bottom of the westernmost rock. The crack narrowed there and she was able to get hands and feet on opposite sides of the chimney without any trouble. Unable to fall up, the ascent was longer and harder than the descent had been. Halfway her arms and legs began the quiver of nearly exhausted muscles.

Another five feet and she knew she was not going to make it.

A
s children Anna and her sister, Molly, had often “chimneyed up” door frames, their small hands and feet leaving dirty prints all the way up. It wasn’t a skill Anna had been called upon to use all that much in her adult life: once in Texas and once in Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico. The idiosyncratic activity called on muscles seldom called upon. Or so Anna told herself. The possibility that it was age and the more sedentary life of a district ranger, that perhaps the leaping tall buildings in a single bound had been left behind in her salad days, didn’t appeal to her at the moment. Caught as she was, hands and feet crabbed out to the walls of the stones in crushed cruciform, there was little she could do if her strength gave out but fall. She’d been lucky she’d done herself no more damage than a few bruises and scrapes when she dropped the last few yards into Carmen’s sarcophagus. Now she was a good fifteen or twenty feet from the bottom of the cut. Enough to break a leg or back or neck.

Trying to ease the tension in her muscles while keeping the tension against the rock, she debated whether to try to climb again, try to wedge herself into a position where she could ease and rest for a moment, or holler for help.

“Paul!” she shouted after an exceedingly short deliberation. “I’m stuck.”

“Wedged?” he called back.

Getting wedged was funny in the comics. In caves or climbing it wasn’t. People wedged between the proverbial rock and hard place often died there.

“No,” she reassured him quickly. “I ran out of steam. I don’t think I’ve got the strength to get myself out.”

“How far up are you?”

“Too far.”

“How far down are you?”

She knew he was thinking of their paltry lifeline of bra and belts.

“Too far.”

“Hang on,” he said, then began talking rapidly in tones too low for Anna to catch the drift of the conversation.

She thought about trying to throw the sat phone out so they would be able to make a call—if they could get high enough to get a signal without getting their heads blown off—but knew if she moved a hand from the wall to her pocket she’d likely as not lose her tenuous position and join Carmen in more than just physical proximity. It didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. If she could get at it, she couldn’t throw it; if she could throw it, it would slide back down into the crack.

The palms of her hands were growing numb where they were splayed against the shale and the quadriceps muscle in her left thigh shuddered from quivering to cramping. Looking up, she noticed a narrow band of gray light, no more than six feet above her head, vaguely crescent-shaped. Rather like a sinister half smile on an evil mouth viewed from the vantage point of the glottis. Don’t swallow, Anna prayed to the Rock God.