“It was me that cut you. It was me Pizza Face ratted out his buddies to, it was me. All me. You should’ve seen yourself. Pathetic!” It sounded like Bethy was standing up.
“Did you bury Kay?” Anna asked, afraid no response would bring Bethy back to the cliff edge.
“Shut up,” Bethy said. “I gotta pee.” Anna heard her footsteps walking away, the need to hide behind a rock or bush for the private act apparently unabated by the fact there was no one to see her for miles in any direction.
This was it. This was the chance gamblers bet on. Mentally walking with Bethy, Anna pictured her stopping as the faint crackle of her shoes on the sand ceased, pictured her undoing her belt, unbuttoning her shorts, unzipping, pulling shorts and panties down, and squatting. She would get no more vulnerable than that.
Anna shoved her cuffed hands over the lip of the canyon, forcing the chain to move under the taut rope. Skin was scraped from her forearms; she didn’t feel it, just noted the red streaking the dirt.
Closing her fists around the rope as far as she could reach, she levered herself up by her forearms, her feet scrabbling for purchase. The loop of rope, no longer stretched and held by her weight, whipped around her legs. Then her chest was on solid ground. Sweat blinded her, and dirt was scoured into her mouth as she grunted and gasped for breath. Her belly was on the plateau. Only her legs and feet still hung over the sixty-foot drop.
“What’re you doing?” she heard Bethy call. “Are you doing something?”
No breath to spare for an answer, Anna dragged herself a few more inches and twisted. One foot, one knee, a leg, jackknifed on the tableland.
“No!” she heard Bethy yell. Anna didn’t dare pause to look up. With an effort that wrenched a scream from her as muscles in the small of her back tore, she got her other leg up on the plateau and began to belly-crawl from the edge of the ravine, her manacled hands scraping across the broken landscape. The earth, mere inches from her eyes, unrolled with agonizing slowness, inches only as Bethy’s furious shriek, guttural, then high like the war cry of a banshee, pulled the oxygen from her lungs and the blood from her heart.
FORTY-NINE
At one thirty Regis realized he’d forgotten to eat lunch. He’d been on the phone interviewing a fascinating woman in Olympic National Park for the district ranger position at Dangling Rope. The woman was eminently qualified but hadn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the job. Three veterans were blocking the register. Vietnam had dumped an endless supply of vets into the federal system, and they got preferential treatment. If they all dropped dead, he still doubted she’d get it. He didn’t think Glen Canyon had ever had a female district ranger and doubted Andrew Madden was chomping at the bit to change that during his tenure.
At one thirty-two Regis was unrolling the top of a paper bag, soft from being reused a number of times, to see what his wife packed him for lunch.
At one thirty-four he was running from his office, ignoring startled looks from the people he passed.
At the small municipal airport on the outskirts of Page he untied his Super Cub, started the engine, and cleared for taxi, without pausing for a preflight check, a flight plan, or even to close the clamshell doors.
Folded on top of his tuna sandwich had been a note: “Hi Baby! Meet me at the head of Panther. I got a surprise for you! xxxooo Bethy.” He thought he would faint or vomit as he’d raced to the airport, but the fear solidified into a column of ice that ran from rectum to sternum.
Takeoffs and landings were a point of pride with him. An airship was most at risk when moving from one element to the other, from earth to sky and back again. The rest was easy. This time he didn’t so much take off as jerk the airplane off the runway and stagger into the sky. In the superheated air of the desert there was little lift. Fear of wrecking the Cub shoved aside the panic of Bethy’s upcoming “surprise” for a tense thirty seconds until he got enough air under the wings to stabilize the plane.
He was already late. Usually he ate lunch around twelve thirty. Bethy knew that. Bethy might have waited for him. He hung on to that thought as he climbed free of the traffic pattern and leveled off at seventy-five hundred feet on a north-by-northeasterly heading. Once across the bottom of the reservoir, he turned right, flying along the jagged northern shoreline. Winds over the lake were unpredictable. Besides, he didn’t particularly want anyone to recognize his plane and wonder what he was up to in the middle of a workday.
The Piper Cub, built in the fifties, wasn’t a fast plane. Her top speed was around seventy miles per hour, slower than most cars on the road. Push the throttle as much as he might, the flight to Hole-in-the-Rock Road, and the head of Panther Canyon, took the better part of an hour. Hot wind and engine noise buffeted Regis through the open doors, sucking the moisture from his lungs and fanning the flames of a vicious headache, but he couldn’t focus long enough to wrestle them closed.
Forcing calm, he made himself execute a neat pattern over Hole-in-the-Rock Road. The prevailing wind was from the north. He touched down near the canyon rim and slowed. Chafing, he turned and taxied back toward Glen Canyon. When he ran out of dirt road, he jumped from the Cub and chocked the wheels as best he could with rocks.
Hands on a wing strut, he ceased his frantic movement for a moment, staring at the ecru sand between his feet, trying to make room in his mind for thought.
His head jerked, and his hands fell from the aluminum wing support. Moving deliberately he opened a small baggage compartment behind the rear seat and lifted out his desert survival pack, a precaution most small-plane pilots took in rugged country.
Having ripped open the Velcro straps, he folded back the flap and removed the hunting knife in its leather sheath. He didn’t thread his belt through the loop on the sheath. He unbuttoned a shirt button and pushed the knife in where it could ride between belt and belly.
After closing and restowing the survival kit, Regis headed toward the head of the slot canyon that eventually widened out into Panther.
He did not run but walked, swift and sure.
FIFTY
Enraged, Bethy descended on Anna like a hoard of furies, kicking dirt in her face, kicking her head and ribs and back. Reflexively, Anna curled into a ball to protect her belly, her hands closed over her skull, forearms over her face, letting her daypack absorb the worst of the blows.
For a fraction of time the kicks ceased; then a jackhammer blow hit her shoulders. Half stunned, Anna felt herself shoved nearer the precipice. Another blow and another few inches. Until she’d hit Regis with the canteen and rolled rocks down on him, Anna had never struck out at anyone in anger, at least not since she was three and beaned Jimmy Newton with a dirt clod. The beast instinct had not atrophied. Time to fight or die.
Rolling to elbows and knees, she sustained another shattering blow that nearly knocked her back to her side. Refusing to let the shock nullify her mind, Anna forced herself out of her defensive position. The instant her head came up she could see what Bethy was doing. She’d dropped to the ground and, propped on elbows and back, was using the powerful muscles in her legs to drive Anna over the edge.
Thrusting out with her toes, Anna lunged forward, sprawling on her attacker. Bethy’s bunched legs pistoned into Anna’s midsection. Gasping for breath, Anna fell to the side, her shoulder slamming into Bethy’s. Before the other woman could recover, Anna slipped her manacled hands over Bethy’s head, trapping her in a mockery of a lover’s embrace.
“If I go over, I’m not going over alone,” she promised in a voice more akin to an animal’s growl than a human utterance.