“Is half of that enough to fund your work?” Dwayne smiled back at her. Hers was the smile he recalled when he first saw photos of her; the smile that wrinkled the freckles across her nose.
“Well, let’s not leave any behind,” she said and stooped to enter the cave again.
They widened the depression they made around the place where the gold lay. More plates and beads were there; embedded where they’d been crushed into the soil by the weight of years. There was a stratum of crusty flakes of oxidation starting at the edge of their excavation. Jimbo carefully uncovered a portion of it and found more skeletal remains―the bones of a human arm.
He scooped away the loose sand as the others searched for gold bits on hands and knees by the ghostly glow of the light sticks. Jimbo found what amounted to the full remains of a skeleton lying atop a streak of dark crimson earth. He cleared away the gritty red soil and shell all around the yellowed limbs and torso. The bones had fallen apart over time, but their placement described a figure lying prone. The skull was crushed in on one side. Whether while the owner was alive or postmortem, Jimbo couldn’t tell.
“I’m no expert,” Jimbo said to the others. “But this is no skinny.”
Caroline crawled over to the remains and poked a trowel at the skull.
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s an adult male. Homo sapiens. He was six feet tall when he was alive.”
“Renzi,” Chaz said and met the eyes of the other Rangers. “Has to be.”
“You think he died here?” Dwayne said. “I’d like to think he bought it on the mesa. You don’t think they took him alive?”
“If they had,” Caroline said, “they’d have eaten him, right?”
The Rangers turned to her silently. “Sorry,” she said and lowered her eyes.
“What’s this discoloration in the soil he’s buried in?” Jimbo said. “It’s not blood, is it? Not after all this time.”
“It’s rust. Something oxidized here long ago and decayed into the sand,” Morris said. He lay on his stomach and ran fingers over the soil. He picked up brittle chunks of soil that were fused with shells. They crumbled in his hand into flakes.
Chaz held a light stick higher and looked at the streak of red soil with which the bones of their Ranger brother Richard Renzi had intermingled in the thousands of years since it was laid here. The streak was more than seven feet in length and only a foot across at its most narrow.
“It’s the Ma Deuce,” he said. “Excuse me?” Caroline said.
“The fifty-caliber machine gun,” Dwayne said. “The one Ricky was manning to cover our asses while we went through the Tube.”
“They brought it here as a totem,” Jimbo said. “They carried the Ma Deuce and Ricky up here and laid them at the feet of their god with the bodies of the old woman and the shaman. And I’m betting they never came into this cave again.”
“They were afraid,” Caroline said. “So many of their tribe died that day. And all at the hands of a kind of men they’d never seen before. And weapons they couldn’t understand. They brought this gun and this man to the most sacred place they had and prayed to their goddess to protect them.”
“That is badass,” Chaz said with a chuckle. “Ricky would have loved it.” Dwayne grinned. “Seriously?” Caroline said with an arched eyebrow.
“You never got to know Ricky Renzi,” Jimbo said. “Having the last word meant everything to him.”
They slept again through the day, and this time Caroline succumbed to exhaustion and slept hard despite the heat, the grime, and the flies.
When night came again, Jimbo and Chaz went and retrieved the two four-wheel-drive trucks. They drove them slow, with lights out and using night-vision gear to steer. The plastic buckets of gold and the sections of the statue were loaded on board and strapped down under a heavy tarp. Rick Renzi’s skeletal remains, in a canvas bag, were carefully placed behind the seat in the cab of Chaz’ Dodge Ram.
“What will you do with your friend’s bones?” Caroline asked.
“We sure as hell can’t get him into Arlington,” Chaz said.
“We’ll bury him somewhere out of the way and have a few beers over him,” Jimbo offered.
“Bury him with a pack of smokes and a bottle of Jim Beam,” Dwayne said.
“I don’t mean to offend you guys so cut me off if I’m out of line. I have a friend in forensic archeology at University College London. She could tell us about Renzi, things we haven’t had an opportunity to study until now,” Caroline said.
“You mean cause of death?” Dwayne asked. “I think that’s pretty clear to all of us.”
“I mean the possible physical effects of travel through the disruption field. There are all kinds of data in these bones,” she said. “But if you guys think that’s a bad idea—”
“I think Ricky would like the idea of going to college,” Chaz said.
They worked on covering the traces of their excavation until the first purple glimmer along the eastern horizon. They shoveled dirt over the remains of the shaman. It was lost on none of them the crime against paleo-archeology they were committing by callously concealing what would be The Find of the Century. They refilled the trench and smoothed the floor as best they could in the unlikely event that someone might wander across the dig site.
Sunlight was just touching the tops of the range to the west as they drove away down the valley toward the service road for the highway. The trucks rode low, burdened to their weight capacity with the tarp-covered loads.
10
The Morning After the Night Before
Lee Hammond was sure someone had nailed his head to the bed.
He searched his forehead with his fingertips and was sure he’d find a nail head there. A big fat sixteen penny spike driven right between his eyes.
No
