But I’d fact-checked my theory on the map and plotted the line of springs that extends for nearly a mile. I glanced, now, at the riparian outposts along that fault line. “Maybe he’s not targeting just one. All he has to do is hit the alluvium. So some of the beads go directly into the springs and some go into the gravel — both here and upgradient — for a later round.” I wiped the sweat off my neck. “The gift that keeps on giving.”
“If we knew which spring, we could work our way upcanyon from there.”
“Oh.”
We reached the turnoff and I nosed the Cherokee off highway 190 onto the ragged road up the fan. As we entered the canyon mouth, I peered up the wall at the reddish mud and cobblestones caught in the declivity some twenty feet above. Some flood that had been.
Walter was looking too. He phoned the Park Service doppler radar guy for an update and learned that the precipitation pattern had not changed since the last call, in the parking lot.
The gunmetal sky had not changed, either.
I slowed, and the FBI behind us slowed, and we turned into the branching side canyon where we’d sampled yesterday and turned up the telling chalcedony. Point D. From here, we’ll be entering an unknown neighborhood. From here, we’ll be following the soil Walter extracted from Chickie’s boots.
I said, “Want to call Hector and let him know we’re here?”
“Let’s wait,” Walter said, “until we have something to say.”
Instead of: you’re wasting your time, Hector. Thing is, we couldn’t prove that. If we hadn’t lost a day to sabotage and wandering in the desert, we might have found our way here earlier and maybe Jardine wouldn’t have had the chance to pull that stunt at the Inn. But he did. And Soliano’s now busy with the target at hand. So don’t call unless we can offer him another.
I had a mining map and red marker in my pack. Soliano had its twin. Within a two-mile radius of Point D, there were eleven mapped mines and uncountable prospects and glory holes. We call Soliano when we cross a mine off the list. We call Soliano when the evidence or the Geiger counter says we’re there.
And then we get out of the way.
Of course there’s always the hope Soliano will call us first with good news — that he has cracked Chickie, or the ninjas have found Jardine hiding in the bushes at the Inn and Soliano has sweated the location of the mine out of him.
Otherwise, we’re on our own.
We stopped midway up the dead-end canyon, arbitrarily choosing the spot. Point D soil extended the length of this little draw. Evidence said Roy Jardine’s offroader rig had parked in here, and so did we. End of the line — by vehicle anyway.
I stowed the sat phone and Geiger counter in my pack and shouldered it.
Walter stowed the field kit in his.
Dearing slung the strap of the FBI sat phone over one shoulder and wrestled his submachine gun over the other, wincing as the strap caught his sunburned neck.
I said, “Try some aloe vera on that sunburn.”
Oliver nudged Dearing. “Sucks to be white, hey bro?” He slipped on his own subgun like it was a ceremonial sash.
We began the steep climb up the northern side of the canyon to the ridge above, to get the lay of the land.
The land, far as I could see, was riven by a tangle of steep canyons and skinny ridges. In the afternoon sunlight — pencil-thin shafts breaking through the smothering cloud layer — it was a shadowland.
Oliver and Dearing watched our backs while we put our noses to the soil.
Weathered quartzite and schist. Consistent with some elements of the soil in Chickie’s boots — and in the glop from the trailer’s tires. Inconsistent with other elements. I wished the boot soil had shown distinctive layers, like the offroader fender soil. Then we could have said: she walked hither thither and yon in these boots, picking up soils as she went, and we are most interested in the outer layers. But boots are like tires, not fenders, and the soil they pick up gets mixed with the soil already lodged there. We couldn’t say if the minerals we were tracking had been acquired in the last couple days on her way to and from the mine where she got the beads, or a month ago tramping through quartzite and schist on her way to and from the local tavern. We couldn’t even say that the quartzite was acquired the same place as the schist.
We were analyzing on the fly, armed with hand lenses and Walter’s encyclopedic eye for minerals.
The one unique mineral in the boot soil — a lucky find — was a silvery flake that Walter had ID’d as sylvanite, a telluride sometimes found in conjunction with the heavy metal ores. We were hunting a mine with a streak of telluride in its veins but first we had to find our way there via quartzite and schist.
As I pocketed my hand lens I was struck on the cheek by a pellet of rain. Within moments the ridge soil was cratered.
I phoned the radar guy.
The rain ceased. I looked up at the sky — where blue met the black leading edge of the next wave of thunderstorms — and I wished it would make up its mind.
Oliver and Dearing covered the mouth of a tunnel while Walter and I sifted through the soils around the one-stamp ore mill.
We crossed off another mine and reported in to Soliano.
I stopped. “What’s that down there?”
Walter glanced down at the cars.
We were threading our way up the narrow spine of the ridge. It ran easterly and dropped precipitously on each side down to narrow canyons. To the left was Disappointment Canyon, as we’d named it after striking out at the one-stamp mill, and to the right was the canyon we’d named Cherokee where our vehicles steamed dry in a passing blaze of sun.
“Under your feet,” I said, “in the brush.”
Oliver, just behind Walter, jerked back.
But it was not a snake. Walter toed aside the brush and bent to examine the thing. It was a metal spike, looking like a large needle with a rusted eye. Walter tugged but the spike was anchored in the bedrock. It looked like it had hung on there for a very long time, longer than the creosote bushes.
“Um,” Dearing said, “you gonna let us in on the secret?”
Walter stood. “It’s a guidepost. For a cable.”
“Do we care?”
Walter would not say and so we pushed on and within a few dozen yards came upon another spike, also scaled in rust. I began to care. We passed more and more spikes and then finally a length of cable rusting along the ridge. My interest stirred. I glanced down at the Cherokees, up to our ridge, down the other side. I saw a tunnel burrowing into the far wall of Disappointment Canyon, and the scar of a road running from the tunnel across the canyon and up to our ridge. I saw the knobby heads of rusting spikes, along that road scar. I let my thoughts run. Roy Jardine comes to dead-end Cherokee canyon and parks and now he faces a steep climb to get up to the ridge and onward. A climb hauling whatever equipment he needs to build his own little waste dump, and then hauling the casks to fill it. But the casks are large and very heavy. As were the ore containers the long-ago miners presumably hauled up and down these ridges. I eyed the old cable remnant. Jardine would have had to bring his own. I recalled the winch and cable drum mounted on the front of his offroader. So Jardine parks, unhitches the trailer, winches it up the ridge, cables it however far he’s going, then lowers it down the other side. Winches up an extra drum and engine, if gravity alone won’t get the stuff where it needs to go. I proposed my theory.
“You gotta be shittin me,” Dearing said, peering down the steep wall.
“It’s doable,” Walter said. “Gold miners used to fill Mack trucks with their ore and winch them up walls steeper than this.”
“You gotta be shittin me.”
We weren’t. Down we went, Oliver and Dearing securing the way. Down there, however, the geology said no. I phoned Soliano and told him that Disappointment Canyon had yet again justified its name.