There are postures that the human body does not adopt in life.
Roxbury had the broken-doll look of someone struck down from a standing position and dead or unconscious before he hit the ground. His feet were splayed at uncomfortable angles, legs bent when the knees buckled. He'd landed on his hip, his left arm flung back from his torso and falling behind him. His right was trapped beneath; his face pressed against the grid over the cave.
'Brent?' Anna said again, but she was talking to herself. Crouching over his inert form she felt for a carotid pulse. Finding none, she took the liberty of rolling him onto his back. Spinal injuries were the least of his worries. Her hand came away from his navy windbreaker dripping with blood. Not marked or smeared but dripping as if she'd dipped it in a bucket. She could feel the salt sting of it in the myriad scrapes and cuts her Lechuguilla adventure had left on her knuckles.
'Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' came a line from Shakespeare's Scottish play, one in which her husband had carried a spear. Brent's soul had been gored from his body by a bullet from a high-powered weapon. No neat black hole between the eyes had let his life leak away. A furrow chewed up from his clavicle into his neck, severing the carotid artery on the left side of the pharynx, then continued up till it blew away the point of his jaw, much of his dental work, and his left cheekbone.
Due to the severe facial trauma there was no way Anna could have effected an airtight seal to begin rescue breathing. It was a moot point. Without blood to carry it, oxygen had no way of reaching the vital organs. The throat wound no longer spurted but merely seeped. No heart left to push the blood, no blood left to flow.
Feeling mildly insensitive, Anna wiped the gore from her hands on the dead man's trousers. Nothing else was available, and she sure as hell wasn't going to wipe it on her own.
Blood had become toxic waste. Paper trail: if she played out the paranoia, there'd be reports and doctors' offices visited to leave a record in case she tested positive for HIV after the incident. Every class, every lecture drummed precaution into the brain. The greater danger of being mowed down by a drunk driver did not worry the public. Maybe because it did not carry with it the horror of death by inches.
A crack of sound and the sting of needle-fine pieces of stone sown into her cheek jerked her back to more imminent danger. What with one thing and another, she'd overlooked the obvious. The shooter was not necessarily gone, nor was he necessarily finished. Not daring to look around for the rifleman, she flattened herself on top of Brent Roxbury. Blood, warm as bathwater, drenched her face and neck. He couldn't have been dead more than a minute or two. A second shot cracked, then sang high and angry off the rock inches beyond Anna's skull. She could feel-or imagined she could-the stirring of its wind in her hair.
She had two choices for cover: behind Roxbury's corpse or down through the rusted bars wiring the jaws of Big Manhole. As tempting as Brent's company was, a wall of flesh and bone would scarcely slow a bullet down. Unpleasant images of WWII executions clicked behind her eyes.
Quick as a wounded snake, she writhed over to the iron-barred trap and dropped through. The black enclosed well of the cave held no terrors for her. She figured the fall would kill her before claustrophobia could set in. Knuckles wrapped around the grid, she looked down expecting to see nothing but darkness. Today the gods were kind-or in a playful mood. The neck of the immense limestone bottle was not neat and sheer but a ragged crevice with plenty of ledges upon which a small and determined woman could find footholds.
Where Anna dangled, the aperture was no more than three feet across. Jamming both boots on a ledge eight inches wide, she planted her back against the opposite wall. Wedged in, she could wait a good long time. Confident she was secure, she peeled her hands from the metal of the bars. Her fingers weren't slippery with Roxbury's blood. The man was a good coagulator. His plasma glued her skin to the iron.
Two more shots rang out, lending the scream of lead and limestone to the shriek of the wind. Both times Anna winced, though she knew her cover was complete. In the security of the newfound shelter, her mind changed gears from instinct to intellect. Who would shoot Brent Roxbury? In the Southwest, particularly New Mexico, local militia groups had threatened to shoot BLM rangers on sight. Militia. Bubbas with IQs lower than the caliber of their handguns. Guys who felt cheated because 'varmint hunts,' the senseless competitive slaughter of coyotes that lived so far out on the desert they'd never so much as tasted chicken or lamb, had been interfered with. Men dispossessed because bicycle trails were infringing on traditional shooting ranges, and the government, afraid a few of the Spandex-and-ponytail set would catch a stray bullet, had closed more than one.
As near as Anna could remember, most of the ill will was centered in northern New Mexico, near Farmington. Southern New Mexico had been spared that particular ugliness. At least it had in the past.
That train of thought derailed. She loved the novels of Thomas Hardy and was a great believer in coincidence. But never when one needed it. Two members of the survey team meeting untimely ends from unrelated sources was highly unlikely.
Brent had been with them when Frieda died. He had been much distraught by her death. He'd wanted to speak with Anna and had foolishly left a message to that effect on the answering machine at Zeddie Dillard's. Everyone there-all the members of the core group, with the exception of Sondra-had heard it, right down to where and when he and Anna could meet. Zeddie had conveniently pointed out that it was an easy walk from park housing to Big Manhole. Before Brent had an opportunity to talk, he'd been killed. It didn't take a great thinker to trace the thread. Brent knew something about Frieda's 'accident.' Possibly he'd seen or suspected who had made Anna's cherished butt-print. That person had decided Brent was to carry his secret to the grave. A one-way ticket had been provided.
Lost in thought, Anna let a minute's silence tick by, then two. The shooter had given up. She would wait till he'd gone, then come out of hiding. Minute three passed and with it Anna's illusion of safety. She had no reason to believe the rifleman would slink away in defeat. Why should he? A glance disabused her of any hope she might have harbored regarding cover or alternative egress. The slot where she hid was eight feet long, two to four feet wide, and bottomless. Anna had incarcerated herself in the ideal trap. No place to hide, no place to go but down, and no way to get there but fall. Big Manhole, having no cause for regular visitation, didn't boast a standing line, and Brent had been gunned down before he'd rigged a descent.
Options skittered through her mind. They were few in number and low on appeal. She could remain in her chimney and wait to be shot. Slim possibilities occurred to her: the would-be attacker might make a mistake, create an opening she could parlay into an escape. A mistake of that magnitude would require a gunman both unbelievably stupid and a tad psychotic. Judging by the deadly efficiency with which Brent had been dispatched, this fellow was probably neither. There would be no long cinematic tortures or lengthy rationalizations. Chances were he'd not poke the rifle barrel through the bars to prod his caged quarry so she could wrest the weapon from him in a moment of glorious heroics. He'd point, shoot; she'd fall, die; a crumpled, dead, middle-aged lady on a heap of antique bat shit. No glamour there.
'Shit,' Anna whispered, then, with a nod to the Hodags, 'Shucks.' She needed all the help she could get. The saw of the wind precluded any possibility of listening for approaching footsteps. Not that early warning would do her any good. Diving into a hole had been a serious error in judgment. Odds were, running, she'd have made it, if not unscathed, then at least alive. Moving targets were devilishly hard to hit with any kind of accuracy.
Now whoever it was would be closer, know precisely where she was, where she could and could not go.
Anna eyed the rectangular chunk of uncut blue in the iron grid. She was in fairly good physical shape, but climbing out was going to be considerably slower than dropping in. At best guess, there would be thirty to sixty seconds during which she'd be a tempting target.
Still, there was nothing but to do it, and she tensed up, gauging the distance with the concentration of an Olympic gymnast: eighteen inches, a jerk, a push, a scramble. Readying her muscles, she shifted her weight and flexed her fingers, mimicking the tiny nervous movements of a cat preparing to pounce. On three, she told herself.
Before she'd begun her countdown, a glittering ruby detached from the sky and fell to a narrow shelf of white limestone. The red was unreal, luminous. Blood, Brent's blood, dripping through the bars with mesmerizing slowness.
A second drop, perfect and beautiful in the harsh light of the winter sun, formed on the underside of the iron, quivered, sending thousands of microscopic reflections across its scarlet surface. Caught up in this minuscule drama, she watched as it grew too great to support its own weight, then fell three feet to explode in sudden and sparkling splendor. In this brief life and death of a droplet Anna's mind had time to paint a grisly future: her grabbing for the bars on either side of the trap, ramming her boots into the sides of her rock prison, and shoving her head and shoulders up through the grate. A bullet ripping through her spine, bits of bone, white and sharp as
