Tyrannosaur Canyon Read Free Page B

other side, kicked it in frustration. He looked around. The man's burro stood a hundred yards off, still packed, dozing.
    Maddox undid the diamond hitch, pulled off the packsaddle. Yanking off the manty, he unhooked the canvas panniers and emptied them into the sand. Everything fell out: a jury-rigged piece of electronic equipment, hammers, chisels, U.S.G.S. maps, a handheld GPS unit, coffeepot, frying pan, empty food sacks, a pair of hobbles, dirty underwear, old batteries, and a folded-up piece of parchment.
    Maddox seized the parchment. It was a crude map covered with clumsily drawn peaks, rivers, rocks, dotted lines, old-time Spanish lettering-and there, in the middle, had been inked a heavy, Spanish-style X.
    An honest-to-God treasure map.
    Strange that Corvus hadn't mentioned it.
    He refolded the greasy parchment and stuffed it into his shirt pocket, then resumed his search for the notebook. Scrabbling around on the ground on his hands and knees, combing through the spilled equipment and supplies, he found everything a prospector might need-except the notebook.
    He studied the electronic device again. A homemade piece of shit, a dented metal box with some switches, dials, and a small LED screen. Corvus hadn't mentioned it but it looked important. He better take that, too.
    He went back through the stuff, opening up the canvas sacks, shaking out flour and dried beans, probing the panniers for a hidden compartment, ripping away the packsaddle's fleece lining. Still no notebook. Returning to the dead body, Maddox searched the blood-soaked clothes a third time, feeling for a rectangular lump. But all he found was a greasy pencil stub in the man's right pocket.
    He sat back, his head throbbing. Had the man on horseback taken the notebook? Was it coincidence the man had showed up-or something else? A terrible idea came to him: the man on horseback was a rival. He was doing just what Maddox had been doing, trailing Weathers and hoping to cash in on his discovery. Maybe he'd gotten his hands on the notebook.
       Well, Maddox had found the map. And it seemed to him that the map would be as important as the notebook, if not more so.
    Maddox looked around at the scene, the dead body, the blood, the burro, the scattered mess. The cops were coming. With a great force of will, Maddox controlled his breathing, controlled his heart, calling up the meditation techniques he had taught himself in prison. He exhaled, inhaled, quelling the battering in his chest down to a gentle pulsing. Calm gradually returned. He still had plenty of time. He removed the rock sample from his pocket, and turned it over in the moonlight, then took out the map. He had those and the machine, which should more than satisfy Corvus.
    In the meantime he had a body to bury.

 
    4
     
     
    DETECTIVE LIEUTENANT JIMMIE Wilier sat in the back of the police chopper, tired
    as hell, feeling the thudding of the rotors in every bone. He glanced down at the ghostly nightscape slipping by underneath them. The chopper pilot was following the course of the
Chama
River
, every bend shimmering like the blade of a scimitar. They passed small villages along the banks, little more than clusters of lights-San Juan Pueblo, Medanales, Abiquiii. Here and there a lonely car crawled along Highway 84, throwing a tiny yellow beam into the great darkness. North of Abiquiii reservoir all lights ceased; beyond lay the mountains and canyons of the Chama wilderness and the vast high mesa country, uninhabited to the
Colorado
border.
    Wilier shook his head. It was a hell of a place to get murdered.
    He fingered the pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket. He was annoyed at being roused out of his bed at
midnight
, annoyed at getting Santa Fe's lone police chopper aloft, annoyed that they couldn't find the M.E., annoyed that his own deputy was out at the Cities of Gold Casino, blowing his miserable paycheck on the tables, cell phone turned off. On top of that it cost six hundred dollars an hour to