I shut off the truck and rested back in the seat. My thumb did the little dance on the phone, but I’d tried that trick often enough that I wasn’t expecting a response. When the first notes of La Cucaracha jangled out of the darkness, I startled so hard that I cracked my elbow on the door sill.
Lunging out of the truck, I took three steps and stopped, leaning against the hood. My hearing was by no means acute under the best circumstances, and the rock amphitheater played tricks with the sound. A dozen cycles of Cucaracha and I’d pinpointed what I thought was the general direction, up through several house-sized boulders. With flashlight in one hand and phone in the other, I picked my way toward the music.
Something large and energetic bolted off through the brush, and in a moment hard hooves clattered on the rocks up slope. I leaned against a buttress of limestone and gave both pulse and breath time to mellow. Switching off the phone saved some battery life and gave me time to think. The two truck-jackers would lug their victim up on the mountain? Not a chance. A mountain lion or coyote might carry off body parts, and that thought made me pause.
I dialed again, and the damn custom ring tone filled the night air, drifting down-slope from the right. The gravel was loose underfoot, and I was wearing a pair of smooth-soled boots unsuited for rock climbing. A large piñon loomed ahead, with La Cucaracha merry as ever, emanating from well above my head. I swept the flashlight beam through the limbs, seeing nothing but piñon needles. I grabbed a fistful, knowing I’d regret it, and shook. Sure enough, the ring tone cascaded down toward me. The phone had been flung hard enough that it should never have been found, caught high up in the piñon where it could have stayed for years.
Stretching on my tip-toes, I reached in and with a grunt of exhilaration almost grabbed the gadget. My brain clicked into gear then. I had no camera, and I’d already disturbed a crime scene. Making careful note of the phone’s position, and with the night once more quiet, I found a comfortable rock and sat down.
A couple of minutes later, my breathing had slowed enough for conversation. This time, Ernie Wheeler answered my ring, and a minute after that, Deputy Tom Pasquale had been dispatched to my location.
Less than a minute after I switched off and before I’d gathered the energy to push myself off the rock, my phone came alive again.
“What do you have?” Bob Torrez’s voice sounded unnaturally loud in this quiet place.
“Gabaldon’s telephone. Somebody pitched it. I just found it in a goddamn tree.”
That didn’t prompt any gasp of wonder from the sheriff, as if he knew that phones grew on trees. “What about him?”
“Not yet.”
“You think he’s there?”
“Has to be,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “Why would anyone drive all the way into this place just to pitch a phone?”
That prompted silence from the sheriff for a moment. “Be down in a bit,” he said. “Sit tight.”
I wasn’t able to do that, picturesque and peaceful as my perch on the rock might have been. Instead, the notion of trajectory prompted me to point my flashlight downhill until the beam bounced off my SUV. If the hijackers had parked within a few feet of where I had, throwing the phone this far off into the trees took a strong, athletic, over-hand fastball. Why would they bother to do that? If Pat Gabaldon was still breathing, pitching his emergency link provided a little insurance. Maybe they’d been startled when they’d heard it ring-I had dialed the number a dozen times during the day.
Behind the last fire pit, a deep arroyo choked with dense scrub oak marked the perimeter of the campground, and I made my way toward it, down off the slope and back across the parking lot.
By the time I’d reached the gash eroded through the jumble of rocks, I could hear Tom Pasquale’s SUV in the distance, howling up the state highway. At the same time, a high, thin sound keened through the night, like the desperate sound a deer makes just before a mountain lion breaks its neck. It wasn’t loud, but it was enough to snap my head around and freeze me in my tracks, the hair standing up on the back of my neck.
Chapter Eighteen
The cry didn’t repeat itself, but I’d heard enough to pinpoint it just below my position on the arroyo lip.
“Patrick!” I shouted, probing the light through the brush. “Patrick, can you hear me?” The cry repeated, this time from the left, and I slid down the bank in a cascade of gravel. Something let out a squeak and bounded off ahead of me, and I could hear Pasquale’s SUV jarring up the dirt two-track. “Patrick?” I stood in the center of the arroyo bottom, trying to find a route around a grove of scrub oak that had chosen that precarious spot.
“I can’t…” somebody said, and the words were so clear, so distinct, that they were like grabbing the end of a cattle prod. Finally, my light found him, crumpled behind a Volkswagon-sized boulder, crushed up against a mass of brush. It looked as if a cloudburst’s torrent raging down the arroyo had flung him into that spot, rather than a couple of thugs. The next storm would bury him.
“I heard…” he managed, but the sentence was cut short as I knelt beside him. I knew it was Pat Gabaldon by the stature and the clothing, but certainly not by the face. An enormous hematoma puffed the left side of his head, disfiguring the orbit into a purple mess. That damage hadn’t been enough to satisfy his attackers. A deep, gaping slice began just in front of the ear and extended all the way to the tip of his jaw, and I could see the exposed bone.
“We’re here now, Pat. Just lie still.” That’s all he could do. The effort to cry out had taken his last bit of strength, and I saw his shoulders sag as he slipped into unconsciousness.
Up above and behind me, a vehicle roared into the camp ground at the same time that brilliant red and blue lights pulsed across rocks and trees.
A door slammed, and I could hear the crunch of his boots as the deputy approached my vehicle.
“Thomas, over here in the arroyo!” I bellowed and waved my light so it criss-crossed the tree limbs above my head. As soon as his stocky figure appeared haloed by the revolving lights, I stood up long enough to bark a string of orders.
“We need an ambulance ASAP, and then whatever bandages you have in the unit. Big ones. Some of those big pads. And a blanket.”
“You got it.”
He disappeared and I knelt back down. “Just hang in there, buddy,” I whispered, but there was no response. I touched the side of the young man’s neck, feeling a thin, thready pulse.
Seconds later, Pasquale’s light added to mine. He handed me the blanket, then bent close, keeping the beam out of Patrick’s eyes. He examining the wound even as he tore open the first four inch gauze pad.
“We don’t want to move his head,” I said.
“This’ll help,” Pasquale said, and wormed a fist-sized rock out from under the young man’s right cheek. I backed out of the way a bit. “Make things a little better,” he said, and rested one hand on Patrick’s forehead, gently, just to make a connection. “Can you hear my voice?” He reached around and lifted Pat’s right eye lid as he said that, but gained no response. “He’s out.” The deputy ripped open two more pads and pressed them against the jaw wound. “No easy way to do this mess. How did it happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s use that,” the deputy said, and took the blanket that he’d handed me. “What other injuries, you know?”
“No idea. The hematoma on the eye, and the cut throat. That’s what I know.”
Pasquale ran a hand from the back of Patrick’s skull down the center of his back, then down each leg. “Everything points right.” He stood back, made a quick survey for blood, then shook open the blanket and let it waft down.