Gid thoughtfully watched his protege stride lithely across the patio toward his suite. So tough, so strong-but in many ways still so naive. Was his Kosta naive enough to be getting ambitious? Or was he maybe skimming, starting to panic and trying to cover it up with a little flurry of killings that would suggest a Mafia power struggle was brewing?
Or was Kosta right about Mr. Prince being behind the killings? The trouble was that Gideon didn’t know enough about what was going on; so he would just stay here in Death Valley for a few days, tell jokes, play golf, until things got resolved. Gid was the ultimate survivor.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Dante watched them tee up, then set out to explore a little of Death Valley. He wouldn’t have been there except that in collecting data on Kosta Gounaris he’d found out about the single-engine Mooney 250 turbo Gounaris had bought for over a quarter million cash in Los Angeles two years before.
The Mooney was tied down at Marin Ranch Airport, a private airfield off Smith Ranch Road just north of San Rafael. Dante had spent a couple of hours poking around the little field with its tin-sided hangars and tiny office. With a twenty-dollar bill he’d recruited the skinny, engaging youth who pumped aviation gas into the planes. At seventeen, he had braces still on his teeth and was a chain-smoker. He had told Dante that Gounaris wanted his plane serviced and checked out thoroughly because he was planning to fly down to Death Valley midweek.
Dante went to Zabriskie Point. It was only four miles down Highway 190 from the inn, and he’d loved the music in the movie of the same name. He turned right into the parking lot, climbed the short trail to the overlook. It was breathtaking. Soft layers of what looked like mud hills rather than rock stretched in every direction. Below the low wall of the overlook the bare tan dusty earth was crisscrossed with trails. Youthfully energetic hikers of all ages panted their way up them, dwarfed by distance.
A slight sun-blacked man in his seventies, dressed in baggy red shorts and leather sandals and whose black T-shirt read GRATEFUL DEAD-WORLD TOUR came panting up the path leading to the overlook. He stopped to wipe his face with a red bandana and grinned at Dante. His skull showed beneath his leathery lizard’s skin like the Dead’s logo skull on his T-shirt.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Breathtaking-if I knew what I was seeing.”
“You’re seeing ancient lakebeds that have been upended and eroded into sandhills.” He flung out a long skinny arm. “Those yellows and tans and browns are mostly from iron minerals that have been weathered by exposure to the air.” He pivoted to jab a forefinger to their left, where the softly serrated hills ranged from gray- green to dark gray. “Those, the color comes from volcanic ash and ancient lava flows sometime between 9 and 3 million years ago.”
“You seem to have spent a lot of time here.”
“My favorite spot in the world. I’m a retired geologist. In Death Valley Mother Nature lifts her skirts and shows you everything she’s got.”
The little sun-dried raisin of a man headed down for the parking lot; Dante followed shortly. On his way back to the inn, he was surprised to see the old geologist walking along the shoulder of the two-lane blacktop. He stopped and opened a door.
“Hop in. It’s too hot out here to walk.”
The man slid gratefully into the car. “You’re right, it’s that afternoon sun. I parked at the foot of Golden Canyon, hiked up past Manley Beacon to the Point. Only about a mile and a half but mostly uphill. I do it every year. I tell myself that when I can’t make it any more, I’ll quit coming to the Valley.” He stuck out a hand. “Charles Thornton. Everybody calls me Chuck.”
They shook. “Dante Stagnaro. Tell me, what’s the best thing to see if you’ve maybe only got one day?”
“The sand dunes, just before dusk. I’ll show you.”
The vast sloping floor of the valley was smudged with cloud shadow. Harsh dark mountains rimmed it to the west, stretching up a mile or more into the stunning blue sky and reaching great hands of denser shadow out across the sunken valley floor.
“The Panamints,” said Chuck. “Death Valley isn’t the result of erosion, it’s what geologists call ‘basin and range’ huckcountry. The same forces that cause the California earthquakes are pushing the Black Mountains higher in the air and tilting the Panamint Range higher up on its side.”
“Dropping Death Valley down lower and lower in between?”
“Admirably put. Less than two inches of rain a year, evaporation a hundred times that, mean summer temperature readings the highest on earth. It’s a true desert. Lowest point in the United States is Badwater, south down the valley a ways-two hundred eighty feet below sea level. Dante’s View, straight above Badwater, is more than a mile above sea level.”
“Dante’s View because you’re looking down into hell?”
Chuck grinned at him. “A minority opinion, I assure you.”
They drove twenty miles north through the clear late afternoon light, with Chuck pointing out things they were passing.
“Gravel road to the left leads to the Harmony Borax Works. That’s where the twenty-mule teams left from- eighteen mules and two horses, actually. Round trip to Mojave and the railhead was three hundred miles and took three weeks. The teams pulled two wagons and a water tank, total weight close to forty tons.”
The road led across the lower slopes of alluvial fans spreading out from valleys in the Funeral Mountains to the east. The fans were dotted with desert holly, creosote bushes spaced out by massive ground-surface root systems stretching forty feet in every direction, and turtleback-great spreading bushes that looked much like their namesakes.
At Sand Dune Junction they went north. Here the Cottonwood and Grapevine mountains forced the winds to switch direction, swirl and slow enough to drop the load of sand they were carrying from their sweep across the valley floor.
“Hence, the Sand Dunes,” exclaimed Chuck. “Fourteen square miles of moving, billowing sand that look like ocean waves-but aren’t going anywhere. Oh, they shift around constantly, but because the winds turn on themselves here, the dunes never move far before getting pushed back.”
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
