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The Dinosaur Hunter(86)

By:Homer Hickam


Now I came to thinking abut Tanya and Ted Brescoe. Why had they spent the night together at the marina the night of the dance and Toby’s murder? And who was right about what happened? Ted or Tanya? At least a certain part of me believed Tanya because, after all, I’d taken her to my bed last night without a thought of Ted. This, I believe, is not normal behavior for a male human being. If another man has been with a woman, a certain amount of time has to pass before we male creatures consider the woman clean enough to screw. OK, that probably has a direct correlation with a man’s age. Teenage boys would mate a knothole, no lie, even if King Kong had just finished with it. We older guys get a mite more discriminating or so we like to think.

So, OK and anyway, why had Ted and Tanya been together that morning and was that somehow tied in with Toby’s death? If the Haxbys had done it, and I had decided they had, then no, it didn’t. Basically, to clear this up, I needed to ask Tanya. But if I did, I might hurt her feelings. I was sure she wanted to put that night behind her. The truth is, I did, too. Another beer. That’s what I needed.

Now I needed to think about Cade Morgan. What was up with Cade? He had visitors at his ranch who came in a dark limousine. Dark limos did not necessarily mean Russian mobsters. Since he made skin flicks, maybe he had brought in a bevy of gorgeous girls. In fact, I hoped he had but that’s also a never mind. My working theory was the limo passengers were connected with Toby. For all I knew, maybe ol’ Cade had been exterminated by now and the boys in the limo had departed the county. I could only hope.

Then there was Edith, our fair mayor. Was she connected to all this? I just didn’t know. And what about Jeanette? And Pick? After all, most everything Pick had told us had been proved a lie. And now he and Jeanette were lovers. Was there something I was missing? I shook my head, finished the beer, and tossed the bottle into the fire pit on top of the others. The truth was I hadn’t solved anything. My conjectures on the cow murders, Toby’s murder, the Haxbys, and Cade Morgan could all be wrong. I got up and, carrying my pack with the Glock in it, climbed the hill, got my ice pick and trowel, and went back to work on the Cretaceous. Deep time was all that made sense on Blackie Butte.

Jeanette didn’t come out until the next day. I was glad she’d come, mainly because I got to studiously ignore her, which I did with a vengeance. By then, we had most of the exposed bones of the top and bottom T’s jacketed and carried or slid down the hill. All of us, even Brian and Philip, were getting to be very good at digging, pedestaling, and jacketing. We had almost made an assembly line job of it. A few more tiny baby T bones were found, a femur, Laura said, and a couple of vertebras, so tiny they were almost missed. “What we need to do when we’re finished with these big ones,” she said, “is to bring in a screen and go through all the spoil matrix to find the rest of this little guy.” Great. That sounded like hot, backbreaking work, just like all the other work on the dig.

So now it was time to see what remained of the front parts of the two big T. rexes. What we found first was the upper neck of the top T. This part of the neck of a Tyrannosaur, it turns out, is a very complex series of bones. The neck bones themselves were each about the size of the fist of a professional heavyweight boxer. Attached to each on opposing sides were sharp prongs that reminded me of tent pegs. These were the neural spines and below them was the neural arch or pathway of the spinal cord. Atop this arrangement were somewhat rectangular-shaped bones that acted as stops to keep the neck from bending too far. According to Laura, this whole crazy combination of bones in the neck allowed it to be flexible. “Although,” she said during a rest break, “the neck of the T. rex, if we just look at the bones, is much too thin to support their massive skulls.”

Ray asked the salient question. “Wouldn’t that mean they would be walking around with broken necks?”

“Don’t be silly,” Amelia countered. “If their necks were broken, they wouldn’t be walking around.”

“You know what I mean,” Ray shot back.

“I never know what you mean, Ray Coulter,” Amelia spat.

It was nice to see the kids were still getting along.

Anyway, Laura cleared the mystery up, explaining that the neural spines were attachment points for extremely powerful muscles that stretched all the way to the back of the skull. She also said that as we approached the skull, we would see some long rib-like bones that nearly wrapped around the throat. These, she said, were to provide places to connect muscles and also probably to protect the windpipe although why such protection was needed, she didn’t exactly know. What creature in the late Cretaceous would be able to or want to bite a T. rex neck?