Blowback(46)

Somewhere nearby, a bird made a sudden whickering cry, and it was loud enough in the heavy stillness to jerk my head around and up. At first I did not see anything in the glazed sky; then, off to my right, a hawk came wheeling down across the flat, made a long gliding loop as though reconning the area, whickered a second time and then vanished. Silence resettled, and the emptiness seemed so complete again that it was as if the hawk had never been there at all, was nothing more than a figment of my imagination.

Hawk, I thought.

And all at once I was thinking of the hawk I had seen yesterday circling up here above the mine-the hawk and the two ravens. I felt myself frowning, and there was a tickling sensation at the edge of my mind. Unusual to see birds like that in the same vicinity at the same time, now that I considered it. Unless…

Jesus.

The hair went up on my neck, and I could feel my stomach knot up in an empty, hollow sort of way. I tasted bile on the back of my tongue.

Jesus!

I swiveled my gaze to the mine entrance, rubbed a forearm across my eyes. I had to go in there now, no choice in the matter. Even though I was abruptly and painfully certain of what I was going to find, I wanted to be wrong-and I had to know.

Another moment of hesitation; then I stepped through the entrance and made my way forward heel-and-toe, swaying the light in front of me, not touching anything with my body, stepping over the mounds of rock and earth, avoiding the fallen and leaning timbers. The deeper into the shaft I went, the sharper the smell became-and I could recognize it now, and I began to breathe through my mouth to keep from gagging.

The ore track rails were intact here, extending into the blackness ahead like a pair of brownish-red ribs. Shadows wavered at the perimeter of the flash beam; timbers and the head of a pick and another toppled ore cart seemed to leap into the cone of light. A chunk of rock the size of a beach ball glittered briefly with squares of yellow metal: iron pyrites, fool's gold. Thirty feet in, the latticework of support timbers appeared to be in a more stable condition, and there was less rock, less debris, spread across the rough stone floor. The ceiling, more than seven feet high to that point, sloped abruptly downward until it was only a couple of inches above my head. I bent a little at the waist, shuffling-stepping; sweat matted my shirt to my torso, the sultry air put the tightness back into my chest.

When I had taken another half-dozen steps, the light picked up a turning in the shaft, hard to the left. The smell was so bad here that I had to pinch my nostrils shut with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand. I clenched my teeth, went forward to the turn.

I was halfway through it when I saw the body.

The beam flicked over it at the lower extremities: lying supine, one leg crooked under the other. Near the bent foot were two bloody towels and a sixteen-inch pipe wrench; the head of the wrench was faintly smeared with dried blood, as though it had been wiped off in a haphazard way. I stopped and planted my feet, and then pulled the light back and moved it over and put it on his face.

Only he did not have much of a face any more. The side of his skull was brutally crushed, and the goddamn hawks and ravens-carrion feeders-had sought him out all the way in here and pecked out his eyes.

But there was no mistaking who he was; his clothing told me that, if nothing else.

Walt Bascomb.

I turned sharply, and my stomach convulsed and I dry-retched a couple of times. Then the retching became a series of hard coughs, and finally nothing at all. And all the while my mind kept trying to sort facts and speculations, kept trying to open memory cells and drag out scraps of things seen and heard and perceived-as if I knew enough now, subconsciously, to piece the whole thing together, to identify not only Bascomb's killer but Vahram Terzian's as well. But I could not concentrate in there, with the stench and the ugly thing on the tunnel floor behind me. I needed to get out into clean air, sunlight, the inside of my car where I could let my mind work slowly in familiar surroundings. It would come together then: I could sense it grimly, as I had sensed such insights in the past.

Without looking at Bascomb again, I stepped out of the turn and started toward the dusty yellow rectangle that marked the entrance.

Thud!

The sound, sudden and explosive, came from up at the tunnel mouth, sent echoes rolling like hollow thunder through the shaft. I pulled up, muscles bunching in alarm, a chill sliding along my back. The sound came again, and close to the entrance thick puffs of dust burst down from the ceiling, turned the light there hazy, shimmering. The concussive noise came a third time, wood on wood or stone on wood; there were more plumes of dust, and the creaking of timbers and the bouncing clatter of rocks, and through the haze I saw movement, a man-shape without recognizable features, and then the shape shifted position and seemed to swing something at the rotted wood frame of the entrance Thud!