Jurassic Heart (14 page)

I was closer to the door and leapt out of my seat before River could answer it. He certainly looked pleased with himself as he held out a large bakery box filled with at least two dozen donuts.

“I come in peace,” he said, holding the box out and bowing his head.

I suppressed a grin and accepted the box. “You do know my team will decimate these in about two minutes?”

“Like I said, it’s a peace offering,” he said, stepping up into the trailer. He looked around, and River glanced over in interest. I decided to get it over and done with fast, like ripping off a Band-Aid.

“River, this is Hunter Joseph,” I said, knowing the reaction this would likely elicit. As I’d expected, her eyebrows rose almost to her hairline.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said with a nod.

“Likewise,” she drawled. “I’ve heard of you, Mr. Joseph.”

“Hunter, this is River Jones, my paleobiologist.”

“Do you want a pastry?” he offered.

“Sure.”

Apparently any preconceptions she held of Hunter didn’t prevent her from eating his baked goods. I took a donut too, found a marker, and clearly labeled the box:

POSSIBLY POISONED BY ECO-CONSERVATIONIST

CONSUME AT OWN RISK

Hunter rolled his eyes at me, pointedly took one for himself, and allowed me to lead him outside.

It was the perfect opportunity to have a conversation that went along the lines of
last night was great, but I just don’t think
, and those words swirled in my head as the two of us sat on a picnic bench and pulled apart our donuts. I wondered if Hunter was more into me than I was into him, then dismissed that thought as ridiculous. He was much more attractive than me.

“I’d like to go out with you again, if you want to,” he said before I could launch into my speech.

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. Last night was….”

“Last night was what? I thought it was pretty great.”

“Yes, but—”

“No buts, Nick. I had a good time, so did you. Why shouldn’t we do it again?”

I popped the last piece of pastry into my mouth and rested my head on the picnic table.

“It’s not going to work,” I said to the ground. “We’re like the Montagues and Capulets. The Bloods and the Crips. The Sharks and the Jets….”

“They’re the same as the Montagues and Capulets.”

“Don’t try to lecture me on musical theater, Joseph. What I’m trying to say is we’re on opposite sides of this debate. Actively so. I’m not going to let you try and use sex to distract me from digging.”

“That’s inaccurate and insulting.”

“I don’t fucking care,” I said. “I’ve spent my whole career—my whole
life
—working for what I have right here. I can’t jeopardize that. Not with anything.”

“I understand,” he said. “I can promise you I had no intention of trying to close you down. Or using sex as a weapon to achieve that.”

I sighed heavily, feeling the weight of responsibility on my shoulders. “There are a lot of people working here who rely on me right now,” I said. “They’re people with families in some cases, careers in all cases. They need to be paid. Being shut down—for whatever reason—scares me more than anything else.” I wasn’t sure why I admitted that.

“Would it be better if I left?”

“It’s not as easy as that anymore.”

“A week ago, it was your greatest desire.”

I grimaced. “Yeah, I know. Then you had to go and turn into an actual human being and ruined that for me.”

“Go out with me,” he said, and I knew I was a goner.

“Yeah, okay,” I sighed, swinging my legs over the bench and standing. “Now go away and let me do some work.”

The bastard had the audacity to smile at me. “See you later, Nick.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Fuck off.”

I
NEVER
intended for there to be a divide between the work I was doing in the “Beyond Zero” grid references, as they had been dubbed, and the rest of the team, but it appeared nonetheless. As we got deeper and deeper into the dig, we were pulling things up, interesting things, good things that brought a steady stream of funding into the project. I was proud of them.

There could be little doubt that there were two digs going on at the same time, though. Raven had slipped into the role of coordinator at the top of the hill as easily as River had taken charge of the lab, and she was doing a great job. Better than I had been doing, I was ashamed to say.

Boner and I had become obsessed with the patch of land we had been working from scratch. It was slow going at first, doing all the grunt work, moving the topsoil until we got down to a level similar to that of the other finds.

This time, my gut instinct had been spot-on.

Within a few days of working the layer, I found an infant Ornithopod, almost perfectly preserved. I estimated it had only been a few months old at the time of death, and because it was so tiny, identifying the species was difficult.

“Jesus,” Boner breathed when I called him over, after most of the dirt had been brushed away from the bones with a soft artist’s brush.

“Yeah,” I said, sitting back on my heels.

“I’ve never seen one that small before.”

“Just what every man wants to hear,” I said drily, and he snorted and punched my arm.

“Shut up. That’s incredible, Nick.”

I picked up my camera and took a few more shots. I’d been steadily photographing the excavation process for my own records, and I wanted to make sure I had everything before lifting the bones out of the ground. Once I was confident I had all the pictures I needed on, I took a few backup shots on my phone and attached one of the photos, the clearest one, to a text message and sent it to Sam.

He replied a few minutes later with a two-word message:
Holy shit.

Then, a few moments later:
Get me a goddamn report ASAP, Eisenberg.

I replied to tell him I would and stood, stretching out muscles that ached from being hunched over the find for so long. A quick glance at my watch told me it was probably a good time to break for lunch and update the rest of the team. I expected they’d all want to come down and look at it.

“Here, help me cover it up,” I said to Boner. He brought a good-sized tarp and helped me nail it into the dirt around the find, protecting it from the elements while we ate lunch. It was a quick job, and we were soon walking back up the hill, collecting the team as we went. I let them chatter away about what they were working on, the different excavations currently in progress.

While we ate lunch, a message from Hunter came through to my phone, asking if I wanted to go to a music festival that was scheduled one evening later in the week. Boner managed to read it over my shoulder before I realized he was there, and I ended up blushing like a teenage girl with a crush.

“You like him,” Boner said, elbowing me in the ribs. I was grateful he didn’t announce it to the rest of the group.

“I like his dick,” I corrected.

“I don’t think so. I think you like what’s attached to his dick as well. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Nick. He’s a good-looking guy, and he’s clearly interested in you. Why don’t you go for it?”

Before I lost my nerve, I shot a quick message back to Hunter saying I could go, and then worried while finishing my bag of chips. It didn’t take long for him to reply, telling me not to bother getting dinner before we went out and he was looking forward to it. I worked on trying to make myself feel the same way.

After lunch, Boner and I continued to work through our area, finally excavating the infant and wrapping the bones up to be ready for transportation. Due to how small she was, it was a fiddly job. Some of the students watched for a while before disappearing up the hill to their own areas, leaving me and Boner alone to get on with things.

For that reason, I was pissed off when River interrupted us.

“Cops,” she said and took a step back from the trench I was working.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I muttered and started to hoist myself up.

“No,” she said, interrupting. “Not for you. They want to speak to Boner.”

I frowned, but he looked resigned and clambered out of his space, brushing the dust from his hands onto his knees.

“I’ll come too,” I said.

“Don’t bother, Nick. I’ll let you know what they said after, okay?”

The look on his face convinced me to let it go. Working without him next to me was weird. I’d become used to the sound of his music and tuneless humming. It took about an hour before he trudged back down the hill and sat on the edge of my trench, playing with the end of one of his long dreads.

“What’s going on?” I asked, pulling myself up to sit at the edge of the trench, facing him.

He sighed heavily and refused to look me in the eye. “A couple years back, I got busted for pot,” he said. “They wanted to question me about the stuff that’s been happening around here because I’ve got a knock on my criminal record.”

It took a lot of effort for me to remain calm. He was my best friend, though, and needed it from me. Shouting and cursing was not going to make him feel better.

“That’s bullshit,” I said simply.

He nodded mutely.

“I’m not being charged with anything,” he said after a long pause, during which he refused to meet my eye. “I’ve got good alibis for when shit went down. They weren’t even really looking at me for any of it. I think they just had to follow up after they checked my record.”

“It’s still bullshit. I’m sorry you had to deal with that.”

“It’s just insulting, you know? That they think because I was caught with pot on me, I’d do something to the dig.”

“Did you tell them that?”

“Yeah,” he said with a weary sigh. I stood and opened my arms, welcoming him into a hug. It felt good, being able to comfort him like this.

“Come on, we’ve got a job to do,” I mumbled into his dreads, knowing work—immersing himself in something positive—was probably the best thing for him right now.

The infant find was definitely something positive, something we were both excited about, and I hoped it was enough to be a distraction for him. Boner was a good guy. For the first two or three years of our friendship, he hadn’t been particularly forthcoming about details of his childhood. He’d tell me little things like where he grew up, how he got interested in dinosaurs, stuff like that, but nothing too personal.

As we became closer, he told me other things, like how he never knew who his real father was, how he wasn’t sure his mother did either. His mom was happy to let other people in the hippie community where they lived take responsibility for raising him, teaching him stuff, being responsible for his education. She loved him very much but would leave him for weeks at a time to go on “spiritual journeys.”

I had a feeling his upbringing had a lot to do with the reason why Boner adapted so quickly to the way we worked as paleontologists. When we were out in the middle of nowhere for months at a time, colleagues became family, a little network of people who had come together for reasons of mutual interest. Although he’d never said as much, I got the impression that spoke to him, to a part of his past.

I also knew, from conversations we’d had, that there had been a very open view of drugs in his mom’s community. I guessed he’d seen smoking pot as not such a big deal, and the authorities had disagreed.

We worked together steadily for another couple of hours, then closed down for the night. I returned to the trailer to start writing up a report, and Boner went back to his own trench. He was still down, and I guessed it would take time for him to get over his encounter with the police.

S
INCE
A
UGUST
was making its presence known with a heat that lasted well into the evening, I dressed for my official second date with Hunter in a pair of cargo shorts and a T-shirt, taking one of my sweaters in case it got colder later.

I couldn’t remember summers here being this warm. The weather channel confirmed Alberta was in the grip of a mini heatwave that was expected to last at least until the end of the month. In some ways I didn’t mind at all; working in the dust was unpleasant, but rain meant mud, and mud was not good for digging.

The evenings were humid, making sweat prickle along my spine before I even left the air-conditioning in the motel.

Hunter picked me up out front, and I forced myself not to glance up at the window to the room I shared with Boner, sure he would be leaning out of it to get a good look.

“So, what’s the plan?” I asked as he pulled into traffic.

“There’s this local music festival going on. It actually started this afternoon, but the good bands all come on later in the evening. I’ve got beer and thought we could pick up some fried chicken and eat outside.”

I smiled. “Sounds perfect.”

We stopped at a drive-through to pick up the food and managed to find a spot to park the car in an adjoining field. By the time we arrived at the festival site, it was starting to get busy. Hunter found a spot that was pretty much central to the stage but a fair way back, giving us a good view without the crowds. I guessed there were at least a couple hundred people in the field: families, couples, and groups of friends who were looking pretty buzzed already.