"Oh, no."
He grinned, stuffing the paper into his pocket. "I've worked it out. Shane will handle the clinic on Saturday while we fly to Tucson, fossil capital of the world."
"We?"
"I'm not leaving you here alone with a murderer roaming around."
"Tom, I've got a whole gymkhana planned on Saturday with the kids. I can't leave."
"I don't care. I'm not leaving you here alone."
"I won't be alone. I'll be surrounded by people all day long. I'll be perfectly safe."
"Not at night."
"At night I've got Mr. Smith & Wesson here-and you know how I handle a | gun."
"You could go to the fishing cabin for a few days."
"No way. It's too isolated. I'd feel a lot more nervous up there."
"Then you should check into a hotel."
"Tom, you know I'm not some helpless female who needs watching over. You j go to Tucson and do your Mr. Kim song and dance. I'll be fine."
"No way."
She gave it one final push. "If you're so worried, go to Tucson for the day. Fly 1 out early Saturday morning, return in the evening. That would give you most of the day.
We're still having our usual picnic lunch on Friday, aren't we?"
"Of course. But as for Saturday-"
"Do you plan to stand guard over me with a shotgun? Give me a break. You go to Tucson and get back before dark. I can take care of myself."
PART TWO
CHICXULUB
The Tyrannosaurus rex was a creature of the jungle. She lived in the deepest forests and swamps of North America, not long after it had broken off from the ancient continent of Laurasia. Her territory encompassed more than five hundred square miles, and it stretched from the shores of the ancient Niobrara inland sea to the foothills of the newly minted Rocky Mountains. It was a subtropical world, with immense forests of prodigious trees the likes of which have never existed since. There were monkey-puzzle trees that reached almost five hundred feet in height, giant magnolias and sycamores, metasequoias, huge palms, and giant tree ferns. The height of the canopy allowed little light to reach the forest floor, which as a result was open and clear, giving plenty of lebensraum to the huge predatory dinosaurs and their prey as they acted out the great drama of life.
She lived during the last great flowering of the Age of the Dinosaurs. It was an age that would have gone on indefinitely had it not been abruptly terminated by the greatest natural disaster ever to befall planet Earth.
She shared the forest with a host of other creatures, including her favorite prey, two species of duckbill dinosaurs, Edmontosaurus and Anatotitian. Occasionally she
attacked a lone triceratops, but she avoided their herds, except to follow and pick off a sick or dying member. A huge type of brontosaur, Alamosaurus, roamed the land, but she rarely hunted it, preferring to consume it as a scavenger rather than risk killing it as a predator. She spent a great deal of time hunting along the shores of the ancient seaway.
In this body of water lived a predator even bigger than she, the fifty-foot-long crocodilian known as Deinosuchus, the only animal capable of killing a T. Rex unwise enough to venture into the wrong body of water in pursuit of prey.
She hunted leptoceratops, a smaller dinosaur about the size of a deer, with a par-rotlike beak and a protective frill on the back of its neck. Another dinosaur she hunted, but warily, was the ankylosaurs, as well as her own cousin, the nanotyran-nosaurus, a smaller, faster version of herself. Once in a while she attacked an old and feeble torosaurus, a dinosaur with a viciously horned, eight-foot-long head, the largest skull that ever evolved on a land mammal. Occasionally she killed an unwary Quezalcoatlus, a flying reptile with a wingspan about the same as an F-lll.
ihe ground and trees swarmed with mammals that she scarcely noticed--fruit-eating rodents, marsupials, the earliest ancestor of the cow (an animal the size of a r<tt) and the world's first primate-a creature named Purgatorius that ate insects. "m w^re dinosaurs beyond her ability to hunt: the ornithomimus, an ostrich-sized inosaur that could run more than seventy miles an hour; and the troodon, a fleet-footed carnivore about the size of a human being, with dexterous hands, keen eyesight, and a brain-to-body ratio even greater than that of T. Rex.
She was a creature of habit. During the rainy season, when the rivers and swamps pushed out of their banks, she moved westward to the higher ground of the foothills.
During the dry season, after mating, she sometimes traveled to a chain of sandy hills in the lee of an extinct volcano, to build a nest and lay eggs. When the dry season began, she moved back to her haunts in the great forests along the shores of the Niobrara seaway.
The climate was hot, wet, and humid. There were no polar ice caps, no glaciers-^ the earth was in the grips of one of its hottest climate cycles in its history. The ocean levels had never been higher. Large parts of the continents lay under inland seas. Great reptiles ruled the air, the land, and the water, and had done so for two hundred million years. Dinosaurs were the most successful class of animal life that had ever evolved on planet Earth. Mammals had coexisted with the dinosaurs for almost one hundred million years, but they had never amounted to much. The largest mammal to live during the Age of Dinosaurs was about the size of a bread box. Reptiles had a hammerlock on all the higher niches.
She occupied the highest niche of all. She ruled the top of the food chain. She was the
greatest biological killing machine the earth had ever seen.
1
THE MORNING SUN burned over the high mesas, cauterizing the land. Jimmie Wilier halted in the shade of a juniper, easing himself down on a rock. Hernandez took a seat beside him, his plump face beaded with sweat. Wilier slipped a thermos of coffee out of his rucksack, poured a cup for Hernandez and one for himself, shook out a Marlboro.
Wheatley had gone on ahead with the dogs, and he watched them moving slowly across the barren mesa. "What a scorcher." "Yeah," said Hernandez.
Wilier took a deep drag, looked out over the endless landscape of red and orange canyons, domed rocks, spires, ridges, buttes, and mesas-three hundred thousand acres, frigging hopeless when you stopped to think about it. He squinted into the brilliant light.
The body could be buried at the bottom in any one of a hundred canyons or in God knows how many caves and alcoves, walled up in some rock shelter, deep-sixed down some crevasse.
"Too bad Wheatley didn't get on the trail when it was fresh," said Hernandez. "You can say that again."
A small plane droned in the sky overhead-DEA, looking for marijuana. Wheatley appeared beyond the rise in front of them, struggling up a long incline of slickrock shimmering in the heat, four heavy canteens slung over his shoulders. His two unleashed bloodhounds tumbled along ahead of him, tongues lolling, noses to the ground.