 
### The Storm

by

James Whitesell

PUBLISHED BY:

James Whitesell on Smashwords

The Storm

Copyright © 2013 by James Whitesell

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Chapter 1 _Anno Domini MCMLXXXIII_

Chapter 2 Tombstone

Chapter 3 Dancer Canyon

Chapter 4 Metamophosis

Chapter 5 Zachary

Chapter 6 Colonel Redding

Chapter 7 Maria Alarcon

Chapter 8 Tony Parelli

Chapter 9 Skarp

Chapter 10 Sierra

Chapter 11 The Mine

Chapter 12 The Locker

Chapter 13 Epilogue

Chapter 14 The Elvis Chronicles

### The Storm

### Chapter 1

### Anno Domini MCMLXXXIII

### "It's a crime against humanity!"

So thundered a fire eyed President Ronald Reagan from his imperial seat in the American Century White House. President Reagan was damn well serious about it. And also dead-on right in the eyes of much of the world. Most were calling it an unjustified and brutal Soviet shoot down. And not without good reason. On this one even the creaky old somnolent Gods peering down from their Olympian perches would have cast their votes with the Gipper. The Soviet action was flat out coldly brutal. And a gloomy adumbration for what was to be a month full of brutality and violence. The month. September. The year.

1983.

### A Matrix

It began in the nascent baby steps of the month. The Soviets provoked the world into a eyeball-to-eyeball international crisis when they shot down a civilian airliner, Korean Air 007, killing 269 people. Bad enough in itself. But among the dead was a rabidly anti-communist U.S. congressman from Georgia named Lawrence McDonald who was a cousin of the famous WWII General George Patton. President Ronald Reagan's political blood pressure skyrocketed and the always shaky cold war international nerves got even shakier. Later that month, though very few people knew about it, things got really scary when the Soviet satellite missile defense early warning system malfunctioned and falsely gave a pair of incoming missile warnings. A quick thinking Soviet officer named Petrov recognized the error and alerted his bosses before they hit the buttons to launch their by-the-book mandated nuclear retaliation. The earth was saved from blundering into a nuclear war. It was a close one. Way too close--even though the world remained ignorant that it came within a nuclear whisker of being incinerated.

But the world did know what happened when another international incident that bloody month of September exploded. Literally exploded. Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal's bloody thugs turned on their own to extort protection money when they set off a bomb in Arab owned Gulf Air 771, killing all 112 on board. The bastards got their money. And in the same month the obdurate Catholic rebels of Northern Ireland caught the Brits with their punitive pants down when they pulled off the biggest prison escape in British history. Thirty nine hardcore IRA prisoners broke out of Britain's maximum security Maze Prison and were gone like Druids' smoke into the murky world of the Irish resistance. It was one hell of a turbulent month, September of 1983. And not just human caused turbulence. Tropical Storm Octave hit the arid state of Arizona with a biblical deluge that created utter chaos the length and breadth of U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater's home turf. The whole state had an environmental nervous breakdown. It was, as one meteorologist put it...

"....one hell of a muddy mess."

The heavens were in churning cyclonic tumult. The cause was a meteorological shotgun wedding of a pair of colliding weather events. A Pacific weather system slid down the rugged California coast from the north and began moving inland into Arizona. To the south a tropical storm named Octave petered out off Mexico's Baja coast. Octave might have been out of steam but he sure wasn't out of water. There was moisture aplenty left in this old man of the sea. The California storm front sucked that moisture up like God's own vacuum cleaner and pumped it east into Arizona with such force that Arizona experienced the costliest natural disaster in the state's history. The rain continued for days on end. Fourteen people died as a direct result of the storm, the Prescott railroad was permanently washed out, the Gila River bridge at Yuma was left high and dry when the flooding river cut a new channel, and Interstate 19 south from Tucson to the Mexican border was washed out. Severe flooding hit almost everywhere. Roads were closed, communities isolated all over Arizona and the paranoid bibliophiles were dusting off their ark building blueprints. It wasn't just the storm of the century. It was the Granddaddy storm of a whole bunch of centuries

And a tiny group of terrified desperate people found themselves fighting for their lives plumb in the middle of that Granddaddy Arizona storm of the centuries.

### The Ancient Matrix

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

It was somewhere in the piney Animas Mountains of Hidalgo County. What's today the 'boot heel' of the state of New Mexico, but was then briefly part of Old Mexico after the long dark centuries of foreign Spanish rule. John James Johnson, a rugged Kentucky born adventurer of the self reliant and hard bitten sort loosed on the expanding western frontier by Anglo America, was among the sprinkling of Americans living among the Native Americans and Mexicans of the Mexican southwest. In 1835 and 1837 the besieged desperate Mexican frontier states of Chihuahua and Sonora, forced to the edge of financial and cultural ruin from increasingly destructive Native American depredations, took the gruesome step of initiating a bounty system on the scalps of Apache Indians. The bounty grabbed the interest of a lot of people, including John James Johnson. He just was one among many. At first. But, unlike the many, Johnson was one of the few who made the sanguinary leap from mere interest to action.

Bloodily premeditated action.

In 1837, posing as traders with a pack train of laden mules, Johnson and a group of Missouri adventurers invited a band of Mimbreno Apaches into a trade parley. In a startling contrast to the complicated ancient blood feud with the Mexicans, Apaches had been on mostly good terms with the Americans. The Mimbrenos cautiously came in to trade. After a day or two of haggling and bartering, when the beguiled Indians were clustered together mulling over trade goods, the Americans let loose on them with rifle fire and a small hidden canon filled with scrap metal. At least twenty of the Indians died, including their chief, known by the Spanish name of Juan José Compas. Johnson scalped the dead Apaches, then quickly fled to Chihuahua City where he showed up at the doors of the State of Chihuahuas's bounty office with the blood hardly dry on his grisly trophies. The Mexicans paid John James Johnson for the Apache scalps.

One hundred pesos.

Apache retaliation was quick and brutal. A party of trappers on the nearby Gila River, led by a man named Charles Kemp, was murdered, as were a dozen men on a luckless passing wagon train. Tit for lethal tat. Was it then over? No. It wasn't the end. Only the beginning. The Apache had a long memory.

Far longer and beyond anything that even they could imagine.

### Jesús Teran

Jesús Teran could plainly see the United States from his humble sun bleached adobe cottage on the hungry side of the border in the dusty little border town of Naco. The jaggedy peaked mountains radiating off to the north were all in the U.S. But it was the San Jose Mountains just south of Naco, barely five miles in length but rising to tower three thousand feet above the town at a cool 7500 foot elevation, that drew Jesús Teran. The steep mountain slopes were home to a succession of habitat zones, each with its own home boy resident species of trees. Teran was a wood cutter who ranged the slopes to cut wood for marketing across the border to the wood hungry stoves and backyard barbeques of the Americans. On the middle slopes he cut oak and pinyon. Higher up he cut ponderosa pine. On the lower slopes he cut mesquite. Some of the mesquite he sold for fireplace wood. But most of it he burned down into charcoal to sell to the Americans for their barbecues. It was not a fat life, but a man had to do something to eat, and wood cutting was as good as most things open to a Mexican not lucky enough to be one of the few born into the privileged world of the Mexican elite. At least he, and his large family, had enough to eat. And there was no strutting patrón's butt that he had to kiss. He might be poor. But he was free. Jesús Teran was a man of dignity and self respect.

Jesús stood amidst a scattering of manzanita and black oaks heavily laden with ripening clusters of bitter tasting acorns. Teran and most of his compadres found them impossible to eat. Not so the gray squirrels and other critters of the mountains that dined with relish on the drooping bounty of the black oaks. And no one denied the graceful beauty of the oaks, bitter though their fruit may be. This was one of Jesús' favorite spots to linger and look and muse, a bluff a thousand feet above the browning expanse of the San Pedro valley. Below him the desert grasslands of the valley spread off into the distance to disappear over the rim of the horizon. Looking to Jesús' whimsical mind like a last minute addition by the Almighty, clumps of soaring mountains seemed like they were plunked down haphazardly all around the San Pedro Valley. And far beyond. The scientific minded used the geologic term of 'basin and range' to describe the topography of alternating broad valleys and towering sky island mountain ranges. Such words were alien to Jesús and as barren as the womb of his octogenarian grandmother. This place? Basin and range? Those were just words, hopelessly inadequate to describe what lay before his eyes. This was God's country. Jesús did not neglect to be grateful for it.

Teran stared off to the north. There were the American towns of Bisbee and Sierra Vista, the filthy smokestacks of the copper smelter at Douglas and the little moving flashes of silver light that were automobiles on the American highways that seemed to be continually in motion. Like a mechanical ant hill. Teran shook his head slowly. So many Mexicanos, especially those poor souls from deep in the downtrodden stagnant innards of the country, were obsessed with getting to the United States. Not Jesús Teran. He'd been north and he didn't like it. Why were the stressed out Americanos always in such a hurry? Life was too fast, too complicated, the culture too foreign, the pressures on the family too fragmenting. Was America efficient? Yes. English was the language of the engineer. And, Spanish? It was the loving tongue. The flowing vibrant river of the lover and the poet and the mystic. In his days of exile in the mechanical soulless Yankee north Jesús realized the urgings of his inner self. He didn't belong there. Jesús had to live in a Spanish speaking place with ancient roots bound up in both the land and the people. He went back home. And there he stayed.

Jesús was content to eke out a living as a woodcutter in Mexico, where he could raise his children in the traditional ways and not see them turn into some kind of strange mutant--such as had happened to the children of two of his older brothers who had gone to Phoenix. He shook his head again. What was he to say to swaggering nephews who sported vulgar tattoos, flashed gang signals and spoke in a gutter patois that was neither good Spanish nor good English? It was those same nephews who tried to get Jesús to join the growing numbers of border Mexicans who supplemented their meager incomes by backpacking bundles of marijuana over the border. Teran flatly said no. He was an old fashioned man who wanted no part of drug smuggling of any kind. He considered it to be dishonorable. Jesús would remain a simple woodcutter on the slopes of the San Jose Mountains. He fed his family, there was not an ounce of fat on his body, his muscles were as hard as the ironwood he sometimes cut and he always had enough money for a cerveza or two at the cantinas in Naco or nearby Cananea. It was good enough. Yes. Good enough for a simple man of the earth like Jesús Teran.

Jesús shrugged, shouldered his axe and turned to move up the slope. He instantly froze in utter astonishment. Looming right behind him, barely three feet away, was a tall and lean weather beaten gringo. The long-haired man was holding a knife, but what really struck Jesús Teran in those last few terrible moments was the man's eyes. They were like a wild animal's. The razor-sharp knife flashed in the sun.

Jesús Teran was not quick enough with his axe.

### Chapter 2

### Tombstone

She'd been a knockout once. No doubt of that. A chesty head turner of a looker. And her aging face was still strikingly pretty. But it was reigning over a body gone waddling over the caloric hill to flab. It was a story too often told in overfed modern America. A once gorgeous woman who hadn't come to terms with the changes time had brought to her body. The doughy woman was dressed in a skimpy tank top and too tight shorts. The woman pushed her way through the crowd in the Crystal Palace, her huge breasts bouncing sloppily as she walked straight for Riley. He had a sinking feeling in his stomach when he saw her coming.

"Are you a _real_ cowboy?" The woman demanded in an eastern accent, staring at his sweat stained straw cowboy hat, faded blue jeans, western shirt and scuffed cowboy boots. "Or are you one of those Chicago transplant phonies?" Riley looked at her expressionlessly.

"Peoria, actually", he said,

"Hrumph!", the woman grunted, then disappeared back into the crowd to recommence her search for the real thing in the wannabe larded modern day tourist trap of Old Tombstone. A second man reached over and poked Riley on the shoulder.

"Peoria?" Jim Garret said, grinning. "You are quick when you need to be, you mangy dust eater." Riley grinned back at his old friend with a mischievous twinkle.

"I was in Peoria once. Couldn't stand it. People kept asking me if I was a real native or just one'a them phony Tombstone transplants." Then he threw his old friend an uneasy look. "You sure this is a good place to talk, what with all these tourists?" Garret glanced around him at the noisy hubbub in the Crystal Palace. It looked like a set out of an old western movie, but the place, tourist drenched though it was, still was the real thing, a genuine 19th Century saloon with a room-long scarred mahogany bar and high zinc ceiling deeply patinated with age. Old West history oozed from the walls of the place. The tourists loved it. So did the locals--after the tourists left.

"Couldn't be better. There's too much commotion for anyone to notice. Besides, the ones we don't want overhearing us aren't too likely to be coming in here till the visitors thin out after dark." Just then a pair of passing tourists from Bavaria stopped to snap pictures of local color--in the person of the western dressed Riley. He ignored them. Other things were on his mind.

"All right, Jim", Riley said, his sun darkened rancher's brow lowering and a serious expression settling on his weathered face. "So just what the hell is this all about?" There was a touch of humor lingering in Nub Riley's face as Jim Garret began spinning his tale. Despite their differences, Nub was a bedrock solid friend of Jim, no little because Jim's fertile mind and crazy schemes both amused and bemused him. That's the way it had always been, ever since they were boys growing up in the grassy, mesquite studded San Pedro Valley that began just a few miles south in Old Mexico. Garret was a natural born hustler and as far back as Riley could remember he had been trying to talk Nub into joining in with his schemes. Mostly Riley had just politely said no. But as he listened to his old boyhood buddy, the amusement at Garret's wild ideas faded. Riley's brow furrowed. Nub had caught on to just what Garret was up to. His posture abruptly straightened bolt upright out of the conspiratorial semi-slump over his beer like he'd just been hit with one of the cattle prods some of his neighbors still used. His voice was low. Close to a whisper. The kind of whisper volcanoes emit before they begin to blow.

" _What?_ You want to sneak onto federal land and steal some old Indian pots? Damn it, Jim, don't you know they've been coming down on that hard lately? They send people to prison for that nowadays!" A nearby table of tourists from the deep snow country of the upper peninsula of Michigan heard a word or two of the conversation and looked over at them curiously. Both men dropped their voices, glancing uneasily around at the tables of tourists nursing drinks and soaking in the Old West ambiance of the place.

"Mostly just probation", Garret countered lamely.

"Now, look, Jim Garret", Nub Riley sputtered heatedly. "Most of your crazy ideas are harmless enough, but when you start talking about something that's downright criminal, then you're no friend of mine. Why...." Garret leaned forward and spoke in a soft, but very clear, voice with an eloquence of specifics that stopped Nub stone cold. Twenty thousand specifics, to be exact.

"$20,000 minimum. Yours and yours alone. That'd save the ranch and that little business of yours, wouldn't it?" He leaned so close to Riley that Nub could smell the salty beer on Garret's breath. "Don't you think that your way of life is worth a small risk or two?" With a dramatic flourish Garret pulled a thick envelope from inside his shirt and shoved it at Riley over the table. "Here's the first half. Ten thousand bucks. Just for openers." He nodded at the thick envelope. "Go on. Open it." Riley hesitated. "Take it, Nub", Garret said, watching his friend's face closely. "It's yours no matter how things work out." Garret leaned back, noticing with a touch of synchronous unease that the Tombstone Marshal was just walking by on the board sidewalk outside the saloon's swinging doors. He returned his attention to Riley, but Riley was gone, in thought if not in body, his mind wandering off somewhere in the mysterious crevices of the pondering human brain struggling with making a decision.

Nub Riley was speechless. How had Garret known just how bad things were? He wasn't more than a month away from foreclosure on his excavation business, maybe two or three on the ranch. He looked up slowly at Jim Garret, then quickly shot a glimpse inside the envelope. Sweet Jesus! It was money, all right. A _lot_ of money. His eyes darted nervously around the room to see if anyone noticed what was going on. No. The swinging doors were pushed open towards Allen Street and the curious Michigan tourists were on their way out the doors and to a long snowy winter ahead. To everyone else in the Palace, busy either in rapt conversation or gawking at the historic trappings of the saloon, Nub Riley and Jim Garret weren't much more than wallpaper.

Which is exactly what they wanted.

"Well, Nub", Garret said. "What's it to be? Stay on at the old home place or lose it and move up to Tucson or Phoenix to spend the rest of your life busting your ass to make some rust belt carpetbagger get rich?" Nub Riley locked his eyes with Garret's and held on like the stubborn bulldog he could sometimes be. His fingers stayed on the thick envelope of money. A few feet away an aging barmaid with rheumy eyes and a hefty bosom threatening to momentarily break loose from a low-cut 19th Century-styled blouse was softly humming her latest favorite Rolling Stones tune, _Start Me Up_.

"Damn you, Jim Garret", he muttered. "Damn your eyes anyhow!" Garret leaned back in his chair, a smug smile spreading across his handsome rugged face. There was no doubt of it in his mind. He had him, whether Riley was ready to admit it yet or not.

Yep. He had him.

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

### Galeana

James Kirker was an Ulster Scot, the same sturdy anti-English folk who came to America early on in the ax and rifle pioneer days and volunteered in bloody eyed revanchist ardor to fight the damned English and become the iron backbone of George Washington's rebel Revolutionary Army. Kirker sought his fortune in America like many another young adventurer of the time. He wandered down to the wild and lawless southwestern frontier and got wrapped up in the crazy anything goes spirit of those nebulous times, including dabbling in illegal trading with the Apaches.

When the floundering governments of Chihuahua and Sonora resumed offering bounties for the scalps of Apaches, the promise of easy money seduced Kirker. Whatever scruples the wandering Ulsterman might have had went out the easy money window. In 1846 he lured some Apaches to a parley near a northern Chihuahua town called Galeana under the protection of a peace treaty and a flag of truce. Alcohol was one of the Apaches' few vulnerabilities, which Kirker knew full well, having himself traded with them for liquor, firearms, ammunition and whatever other officially prohibited goods he could get his entrepreneurial Scots Irish hands on. All night long the liquor flowed freely. By morning many of the Apaches lay in a drunken stupor. Kirker and his diverse band of allies, some American, some Mexican, others non-Apache Native American, fell on the camp and bludgeoned scores of groggy Apaches to death. Men. Women. Children.

And then they scalped the dead Apaches for the bounty money.

Silas

Silas Oakes was the prototypical Yankee of fact and fiction. Tall, lean, dour. Craggy faced, with dagger sharp blue eyes that seemed to slice right through you. His was the kind of granitic face you might see in a dramatic painting of a Civil War Yankee officer exhorting his troops on to charge the damn Confederates and 'whip their Rebel butts'. And in fact his great grandfather was an infantry captain in a Massachusetts regiment that lost half its men on the Little Round Top at Gettysburg. Great grandpa got a minie ball in the thigh but survived to become a Massachusetts state senator and the progenitor of a large tribe of descendants. He was a no nonsense sort of man and his great grandson Silas inherited the dubiety gene set full blown. If you were talking to Silas Oakes, you'd damn well better be prepared to back up your statements with hard facts.

Silas' sharp tongue and confrontational and skeptical nature did not make him a popular man among his co-workers and neighbors in his adopted home of Tucson. But the sharp mind that went along with the sharp tongue did made Silas a small fortune in real estate investments in Tucson and beyond throughout southern Arizona. Which was why he drove the seventy miles down to Cochise County in the southeastern corner of Arizona on this pleasant late September day. He was checking out investment opportunities in the little tourist trap town of Tombstone whose name was nearly synonymous with the fabled Wild West. But he was more interested in the open grassy country near the Mexican border on the eastern slopes of the Huachuca Mountains.

"That Tombstone wild west hype is all bullshit", Oakes confided with a sarcastic snicker to his assistant, Manny Arzola, after they left Tombstone and drove down close to the border. "Those days are as long gone as the horse and buggy." Silas passed the Naco turnoff on Highway 90 and headed his Cadillac Fleetwood towards the southern end of the Huachuca Mountains looming to the west. South of the highway was the border town of Naco and the truncated but towering adjacent San Jose range in Old Mexico. He reached over to tap Arzola on the shoulder. "This country might have been the wild west years ago. No more. Look at that landscape, Manny," he said. Perfect for a subdivision." Silas Oakes had a genius for spotting demographic trends and he was certain the growing small city of Sierra Vista would soon stretch out to the south along the oak sprinkled flanks of the mountains. Silas already envisioned the gated community subdivision he would build there.

He even had a name for it. And why not? A man had the right to a touch of hubris now and then. Seeing as how the place had plenty of oaks dotting the landscape, why not call the subdivision _The Oakes?_ He reached over to tap on Manny's shoulder a second time. "No more wild west here. It's as quiet and peaceful as a Sunday school church picnic." A ray of sunshine bounced off Silas' windshield and a half dozen miles away a sepulchral buckskin clad linear figure on a bluff overlooking the sprawling valley saw the glint of sun flash off the distant windshield.

At his feet lay the bloody corpse of the woodcutter Jesús Teran.

### The Man With The Cold Eyes

The strange lean gringo stood on the Mexican mountainside, the southerly wind blowing his long, loose hair in undulating light brown waves around a dirty red bandana headband. He was wearing filthy homemade buckskins, faded and scratched by a rough outdoor life. Hard, emotionless eyes that seemed drained of color looked down at Jesús Teran's sprawled corpse. It was a very old quarrel, with the Mexicans, and there was no room for either mercy or remorse. The weather bronzed face of a young man who looked as old and hard as the rocks he was standing on turned from Teran's body to stare towards the north. The American settlements were plain to see across the wide valley, with their smoke and haze and pollution. He spat violently at the ground. Mexicans were not the only ancient enemies!

He began to walk back to the border.

### Chapter 3

### Dancer Canyon

Riley calmed down enough to listen to what Garret had to say. Jim Garret was a complicated man of sometimes crazily clashing parts. Border blend descendant of Native Americans, Spaniards, Basques, Mexicans and a bunch of hillbilly Anglos that he was, Jim Garret had an abiding interest in all of his ancestry, including a long time amateur's interest in local archaeology. An interest not always legal. Jim was not averse to slipping over the legal archaeological line into the murky world of gray market artifact dealing. He'd been indulging that not-always-legal interest one sunny autumn afternoon and was out snooping in a foothill canyon in the nearby Huachuca Mountains when he stumbled on an old Indian ruin. There was nothing about the ruin that was unusual, and it sure wasn't an unknown one. The locals had known about it for years. The exposed rock at the edge of the small canyon was cratered with fist sized holes that Native Americans had laboriously pounded into the rock long before Christopher Columbus's daddy's spermatozoa scored a direct hit on his mama's fertile egg.

Some said the natives used the holes to grind corn they grew along the nearby stream. Others said the holes were there to collect moisture from the morning dew in times of drought. Most said they didn't give a flying fig one way or the other. Who cared? It was ancient history. A generation earlier the surface artifacts had been examined by a survey team of research archaeologists from the University of Arizona and their studied conclusion was that it was a small and uninteresting bit of prehistory from just before the Spanish Contact. The pottery fragments and crumbled stone masonry were from a tribe of Native Americans known as Sobaipuri, a branch of a people the outsiders called Pima or Papago but who called themselves the O'odham.

Thousands of O'odham still survived on the huge Delaware-sized reservation along the border south and west of Tucson, some of their people still living on the Mexican side of the border in Sonora. But the Sobaipuri O'odham of the San Pedro River had been victims of an invading host. Not the conquering Spaniards. Nor their heirs, the equally bloody minded Mexicans. Not even the steamrolling Manifest Destiny-bent Americans. After the first Spaniards wandered through in their epochal heavy handed search for gold and whatever else they could loot and scrounge and purloin from the locals, another group of invaders came stealthily into the Sobaipuri country. This group stayed. The newcomers eventually drove the Sobaipuri west to the Santa Cruz River Valley near what would one day become the Arizona city of Tucson, where they were absorbed by other O'odham. It was the beginning of a long and bitter bloody struggle between the O'odham and the invaders. Who were these invaders? They called themselves the Nde. But the outsiders had a different name for them.

Apache.

Jim Garret was familiar with terms like paranormal and extra sensory perception and the concepts behind them. He was not an ignorant or uneducated man. But those were bloodless two dimensional words that he wouldn't use to describe himself. What he did know was there was something in his bones---always had been ever since he was a little kid--that spoke to him of other worlds and other dimensions that he often sensed, usually only distantly but sometimes so strongly immediate he was stopped cold in his mental tracks. He had heard it called it the 'veils between the worlds' and that image pretty much fit. Jim divined something else, some unseen presence, at the little pile of Sobaipuri ruins in a narrow infrequently visited shady canyon near the Mexican border at the southern end of the Huachuca Mountains. Something that lay beneath the surface of what was known. Jim Garret had long ago learned to pay attention to these peculiar sensings welling up from the caliginous innards of his subconscious. He hastened over to his rugged old Ford pickup and pulled out a shovel and a trowel he kept hidden under a heavy canvas tarp. Then he hurriedly retraced his steps back to the ruin.

And he began to dig into it.

Down he dug. Two feet. Three. Four. Five. As he dug, the hard packed earth transmuted in his hands, became animate, prescient, speaking to him, beckoning Jim to dig deeper. He dug deeper, to below where the archaeologists of a generation earlier had stopped their dig. And there it was. An older occupation layer underneath the Sobaipuri one. Garret switched from the muscular shovel to a cautious trowel. Hardly more than a minute later he uncovered a large fragment from a bowl, cleaned it off and stared at it. A gust of wind suddenly rustled the leaves in the huge Fremont cottonwoods crowding a nearby trickling streambed. He blinked. And he blinked again. He almost reached up to rub his eyes to clear his vision. Was he seeing what he thought he was seeing? A finely painted mule deer, done in black on a white background. Very precise, even elegant, brush work. The awareness came slowly, like a bowl quietly filling with water until it reached the lip and began to flow over. Only then did the recognition seep into his consciousness and Garret realize what he had found. Astonishment slowly spread over his border-blend face.

_Mimbres!_ This site, buried hidden under a later occupation layer for hundreds of years, was Mimbres. And the Mimbres made some of the most prized pottery of all prehistoric Southwestern peoples. His curious adventurous spirit began throbbing with excitement at the promise of discovery in the ancient dirt and its concealed traces of vanished humans. Garret continued to dig. Slowly. Carefully. Like tending to one of his new born babes back in those sweet early days of a long gone happy marriage. Very, very gently. There might be something of value below. Maybe even a pot. A Mimbres pot. Now, Garret thought in hopeful blooming excitement, wouldn't _that_ be something!

With a gaggle of colorful blue gray pinyon jays noisily chattering nearby in the mixed junipers and live oaks and pinyons of the canyon, and his tanned face flushed almost ochre with the excitement, Garret dug deeper into the old Mimbres occupation site. In two hours he pulled out a growing jumble of artifacts, mostly potsherds but also a handful of complete shell and stone necklaces and bracelets. Then he suddenly stopped, his trowel flash frozen motionless in midair. A pot! Before him was that most coveted of all southwestern pottery, a Mimbres black on white painted pot.

_¡Dios mío!_ Good God Almighty! It was intact! And with _no_ kill hole! Garret gingerly removed the dirt around the pot and then from a second one closely abutting it, scraping away the stringy vestiges of a decayed organic material that some ancient hand had long ago placed there with a judicious care. An adjacent third pot was so cemented into the surrounding dirt that he didn't dare disturb it.

Then the sound of a distant truck going through the gears climbing a mountain grade brought him back to his senses. Startled, he looked up from his secret little dig, realizing that he'd better cover up the site before someone stumbled on his digging. He hurriedly covered over the site, reburying most of what he'd found, concealing the spot with bits of forest detritus, juniper twigs, oak leaves and dead bunch grasses, taking the practiced outdoorsman's care to very precisely note the site's exact location. Then, walking with slow and deliberate steps and a mind riveted to the value of what he had in his hands, Garret carried the two pots, a handful of potsherds and the half dozen shell and stone necklaces he'd kept over to the tough old half ton Ford pickup he drove when he went out wandering in the boondocks.

"Nub", he thought to himself as he fired up his truck, the engine roared to life and he headed back out the little used rutted old ranch road that led out of the mountains. "I'll get ol' Nub up here with his Bobcat and we'll really clean up." A week later he was staring at Nub Riley over a table and a couple of cold Buds in the Crystal Palace and trying to talk his friend into just that. The two men eyed each other warily. Both were just a touch under six feet, Nub leaner from the rancher's rugged life, Jim with a powerful combination of a outdoorsman's fitness and the indoor muscles of a man who took his home gym seriously. Nub had the reddish hair and twinkling light blue eyes of his distant Scots-Irish ancestors. Jim was a handsome dark haired border blend of a man with eyes the color of time worn pewter. Neither man looked like someone you'd want to take on in a fistfight. Not that they were not the kind to start fights. They weren't. But they did know how to finish them.

While they sat eyeing each other at the table in the Crystal Palace, a man came swaggering through the door looking as though one of Wyatt Earp's deputies had just slipped through a time warp and popped out a hundred years into the future. The guy's outfit was complete right down to the shiny black Colt .45 Peacemaker hanging on his hip. Riley stared at him. He'd never seen the guy before. Where did these people come from? Looking at the real pistol with real bullets draped on the guy's hip, he had to wonder just what went on the minds of these peculiar Old West wannabes that regularly materialized out of nowhere in Tombstone. He was about to say something about it, but Garret derailed Nub from his detouring train of thought and back to the point of their meeting.

"I know I'm a hustler, Nub. I exaggerate sometimes." Nub couldn't help laughing. Loud enough that a pair of good looking thirtyish women at a nearby table looked over at him. One of them tried to catch and hold Nub's attention. He didn't even notice. But he did notice the latter day Wyatt Earp clone at the bar loudly ordering a drink. A Diet Coke. It brought a quick smile to Nub's ruddy outdoorsman's face. Then he turned to look at Garret.

"Jim Garret? Exaggerate? _Sometimes_?" Garret put his hands up beseechingly.

"O.K. O.K. Don't rub it in. But this is something big, Nub, Real big. Even if the damn thing busts out we still ought to be able to pull in at least $50,000." Riley was skeptical.

"50,000 bucks? How? For what?"

"I told you, Nub. I _already_ found two of the Mimbres pots and I'm certain there's a third one there near where I found the other two. I'm talking about what we already got, not what we might find. There's the pots and all the other stuff I found." He reached over to slap Riley's arm lightly. "And you get $20,000 just for riding along. You got nothin' to lose." Riley scowled, muttering softly.

"Except maybe a stint in the slammer."

Busily cleaning off a nearby table, the aging blond barmaid with the plunging cleavage bent so far over the table that one of her ample boobs threatened to slip loose from its moorings. Garret saw it out of the corner of his eye. He had to force his eyes back to Riley. "Look, Nub", Garret continued in a fervent but low voice, reaching over to clutch Riley's forearm. "I _need_ you and your equipment to move some of that dirt. It'd take forever to do it by hand and someone would eventually come by and see what was happening. This has to be done quick." Garret's face took on a flinty hard set expression. His hand detached from Nub's forearm to reach over and dramatically pat the envelope of money.

The nearby plunging neckline barmaid wasn't looking directly at them, but she knew there was money there. She could sense it. Her eyes narrowed with interest. But she kept her mouth shut. She'd learned the hard way to mind her own business in the nubilous world that was the real Tombstone underneath the histrionic fascia of the tourist town. She pulled her mind away from whatever it was the two men were doing and walked back to the bar. But she didn't forget to swing her hips suggestively as she walked. That, and her bulging public cleavage, went a long way towards fattening her tip jar. She needed the bucks. She was a single mom with three kids whose father was a meth tweaker doing a hard dime at the prison in Florence. Behind her, Riley looked grim. Garret still looked insistent. Outside a half dozen weekend bikers from Phoenix on Harley hogs went roaring across Allen Street and temporarily ended all attempts at conversation both inside and outside the Crystal Palace. Then they were gone. Garret resumed what he'd been about to say before being drowned out by the throaty roar of the Harleys.

"Are you in or not?" Riley stared into his beer. The $20,000 would save his way of life, and Garret damn well knew it. He had to accept. What would there be for Peg and the kids if he lost everything? But before he left for the site, just in case they did get caught, he would take the $10,000 in the envelope in front of him and pay up his mortgages so that Peg and the children would at least have something. His voice came out low and shaky, and the words seemed to echo inside his mind for a long time after he said them.

"I'm in", he said, softly at first, fatalistically, a touch apprehensively. " Damn your eyes, Jim Garret." He thumped his fist on the table. _"I'm in!"_

He said it with such emotive force that the pair of women again looked over at him. He still didn't notice. But Jim Garret did. He smiled at the women. After all, Jim thought, Nub would be going home to his wife soon enough. And, looking again at the two women, the thought danced into his mind that the evening was just beginning. A man had to be ready to grab onto muliebral opportunities when they popped up. He was wondering what it'd be like to go to bed with two women at the same time. He looked over at the women and flashed them one of his patented charming Jim Garret smiles. They smiled back. One of them turned sideways enough to profile a handsomely well endowed female form. Jim's gonads paid immediate and undivided attention to the sight.

It could turn out to be a real interesting evening.

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

### Goyahkla

In March of 1851 numerous Nde from different bands came riding and walking in from their mountain rancherias to trade with the Mexicans at the town of Janos in far northern Chihuahua. In the confusing and convoluted on again/off again blood feud between the two peoples there was a local truce between the two peoples and both were honoring it. They were. Others weren't. A small army of several hundred Mexicans under Colonel José Maria Carrasco came furtively over the border from Sonora and fell on the Nde encampment when the Apache men were off trading in Janos. Scores of Apache women and children were murdered by Carrasco's soldiers. Others were carried off to a dismal slavery in Mexico, lost to their people--and to themselves--forever.

One of the Apache men who was gone trading in Janos, a Bedonkohe named Goyahkla, came back to the devastated camp to find among the dead his mother, his wife and his three children. Butchered. Mutilated. Goyahkla plunged into a deep grieving despair. When he eventually clawed his way out of that dark pit of gloom, he became an implacable warrior who had a personal vision of invulnerability in battle that would put other Apaches in awe. Goyahkla visited a terrible revenge on Mexicans and Americans alike. His name would soon be on the nervous lips of Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans and even other Apaches. But not as Goyahkla. The Mexicans had a Spanish name for him that eventually all would know him by.

Geronimo.

The lean, agile form of the cold eyed man in buckskins moved easily down the brushy lower rock strewn slopes of the San Joses. He moved so quietly that he came within ten feet of a pair of Coues whitetail deer before they spooked, their thick snowy tails flagging alarm as they bounded away into the brush. The man lingered in the shadows of the mesquites in the depression of a narrow wash in the foothills until dusk, then started overland through the open grassy valley under cover of night. He moved carefully, noiselessly, pausing often to scan the horizon for signs of man. With the exception of the hardscrabble town of Naco to the east, they were very scarce on the Sonoran side of the valley. His carefulness was more precaution than caution. It was the American side of the border where people were scattered more thickly through the high desert grasslands. Thick. Like the plague of locusts that they were, he thought bitterly. He spat at the grassy ground beneath his feet. Even the grasses were alien, South African love grasses imported by the meddling intruders after they'd nearly wiped out the native species with their rapacious range practices. He spat at the ground again, more violently. Just as they'd done to the native peoples, the virgin forests, the great bears, the wolves, the antelope, the prairie dogs, and the ponds and free-flowing waterways They destroyed everything. Even the goddamn grasses!

As he approached the American border he veered towards the west and the roots of the 9000 foot high sky scraping Huachuca mountain range that swooped down to touch Mexico. Here was part of the sprawling U.S. national forest, the Coronado, and the borderland Coronado National Monument, and few people lived inside its boundaries. There would be no eyes to note his passing on either side of the border. He crossed the border, laughing at its hopeless impotence when he lightly vaulted over the simple wire fence that passed for the international frontier. When he reached the rising humps of the sere southern foothills of the Huachucas, he bypassed the American habitations in and around Montezuma Canyon near a place called Yaqui Springs. His ascent passed through the scattered low vegetation, the creosote bush and brittlebush, the ocotillo and velvet mesquite, the scrub oak and prickly pear cactus, the flourishing alien South African grasses and the numerous species of sparser native grama grasses until he was into the piney wooded core of the Huachuca mountains.

Dawn was gathering the force of its daily miracle just beyond the eastern mountains bordering the valley when he reached the towering ponderosas of the crest trail. Thousands of feet below him lay the wide-ranging firmament of lights from the settlements stringing south from the American Army's Fort Huachuca. He stopped to look and to think. Was there anyone down there among the thousands of Americans who could even imagine he was there, above them, watching? He thought not. A hard smile touched his leathered outdoor face. That would change. Soon. They would know. He would make certain of it. They would know. And then they would never forget.

_Never_.

### Nub Riley

Early that evening Nub Riley drove the twisty back road out of Tombstone towards his century old family ranch on the San Pedro River. As he topped one of the rises on the hilly, winding rollercoaster of a road--Nub sometimes hotfooted the road in Peg's old Toyota with their kids laughing in the back seat---he caught a glimpse of the distant lights along the base of the Huachuca Mountains bordering the west side of the valley. Riley shook his head, part in sadness, part in disgust. Before long the whole damn valley would fill up with people, just like another Tucson or Phoenix. The ranch might even end up as just another shallowly conceived cookie cutter subdivision. The thought filled him with a deep, profound loathing discordant to his normally easy going disposition.

Times had changed. He was among a fast shrinking minority in a sea of city bred newcomers. A lot of the new people looked upon men like Riley as curiosities and anachronisms. Or as narrow minded and old fashioned human antiques. One transplanted guy from Long Island working up on Fort Huachuca put it to him straight out. Why did Riley bust his butt working his ranch and running his little excavation business when he could get a 9-5 Civil Service job at Fort Huachuca with built in lifetime security? The modern world had grabbed Nub long enough for him to be a Viet Nam vet with a couple of purple hearts and that meant he would be perched at the very top of the federal hiring list. Why not take advantage of it?

Riley's laid back temperament had uncharacteristically flared at the man's imprudent words. But he held his tongue and suppressed the urge to lash out at the brash New Yorker. The guy probably just didn't know any better. He was hopelessly urban in his predilections, even if he was living in a wide open, mountain ringed Arizona valley. How could Nub explain to a guy like that what it meant to be born in a place, have his roots sunk deep into it, love it with such intensity that to see it abused actually physically pained him, or feeling like the very desert hardpan under his boots was somehow part of him? How could he explain the visceral freedom and the raw wildness in being out in God's own weather during all its moods? The wind rattling the cottonwood leaves along the river, the creosote bushes filling the air with the smell of coming rain. The murderous heat blasted sweating summers, the cool freshening winds of autumn, the pelting cold gray drizzle of winter, the wonderful gentle rebirth of every sublime spring, the wild lightning filled thunderstorms of the monsoon, the nighttime ethereal howling of the coyotes, the scream of the lion in the nearby mountains? Or the heart stopping endocrinal blitz when a rattler started buzzing underfoot? It fired the senses and made a man feel really _alive_ right down to the very marrow of his being. He couldn't explain that to a city man who had never known the freedom of the outdoor life.

Still, though he didn't like it one bit, Riley was not a backward looking kneejerker like some of his head-in-the-sand rancher neighbors. He saw the handwriting on the wall and it was done in suburban script. Whether he liked it or not had not one little bit of relevance. Change was coming. And that was that. It'd been inevitable since the day the U.S. Army reopened the old Indian fighting Fort Huachuca a few years after the Korean War. The Army and Fort Huachuca were there to stay, and with them came a thick stream of people, stores and gas stations and strip malls and streets and housing developments and a growing nighttime glow that blotted out the stars.

And with all that came the changing times that would forever alter the world Nub Riley had grown up in. He had little choice but to live with and try to accept the change coming over his valley. Traditional family ranching was clearly in a steep decline as a way of life. He finally wearied of barely scraping by from one year to the next as a rancher, so he'd started up his little excavation business. Like any other working rancher, Nub had a lifetime's worth of a thorough hands-on knowledge of a bunch of practical skills. Though he always felt uneasy with being part of an industry that was one of major engines of the urbanizing changes to his beloved valley, his business did well right from the start. He didn't like having to do it, but he'd had to mortgage the ranch to get the business started. Then the recession hit and when the bottom fell out of the construction industry it left him facing bankruptcy. Jim Garret had him by the short hairs, and he damn well knew it.

### Tommy

Nub Riley's older brother Tommy had years earlier moved to the nearby town of Sierra Vista that snuggled along the foothill fringes of the towering Huachuca Mountains. Tommy preceded Nub to Viet Nam, got lucky and spent half of his tour humping boxes at the huge Long Binh logistics base near Saigon and the other half in a Big Red One infantry company that managed to only have a couple of minor fire fights, mostly thanks to a cagey young company CO from a faded Indiana farm town who was more interested in keeping his men alive than padding the Pentagon's body count. Then the long-anticipated day finally came when Tommy climbed into a Boeing 707 at Tan Son Nhut Air Base on Saigon's fringes to rotate back to the world. Despite his intense relief at surviving Viet Nam, he didn't fail to sardonically notice as he climbed into the plane that the nearby sounds of artillery and air strikes were awful goddamn close to the sprawling South Vietnamese capital city.

Less than a week later his old Big Red One company, led by a brand new impetuous and dangerously inexperienced CO, walked smack into a classic NVA L-shaped ambush and got wasted. Close to 30% casualties, including the new CO who died instantly from a bullet plunked almost precisely in the exact middle of his forehead by an ancient scoped Moisin Nagant bolt action sniper rifle in the hands of a sharp-eyed teenaged Viet kid from Haiphong. And with the blundering captain went a half dozen of Tommy's closest buddies. When he heard about it, Tommy plunged into a despairing guilt. He had to salvage some meaning out of the deaths of his buddies. He had to do something, anything, to justify his surviving when the others didn't. He didn't know what it would be. But he did know he wouldn't ever go back to a life of chasing half wild cattle through the thorny scrub mesquite in the boondocks of the San Pedro River Valley.

Tommy Riley used his GI Bill to get a biology degree at the pleasant and surprisingly leafy University of Arizona campus in the Sonoran Desert town of Tucson. He also earned a teaching certificate. After graduation he took a job as a science teacher at Sierra Vista's Buena High School only a few miles from the San Pedro ranch of his childhood. Tommy gradually realized just where he was going to make that difference in life he'd vowed to make. The environment. Tommy was a solid outdoorsman who backpacked most of the mountain ranges of southern Arizona and beyond into New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. He saw up close the changes coming to the Arizona wild country, as it already had in parts of New Mexico and especially Colorado, from the influx of outsiders and what they euphemistically called development. He considered it closer to rape than to progress. Tommy was shocked that Tucson's once free-flowing perennial Santa Cruz River was dried up by over pumping of the aquifers feeding the river. All it took was a three or four meter drop in the water table and the wildlife rich verdant riparian corridor along the river dried up and died. It had already killed the Santa Cruz and the host of living creatures that it sustained. Except for the rainy season, the Santa Cruz was mostly just a wide sandy barren ditch running from Nogales through Tucson where the locals cruised on their dirt bikes and ATV's. And where they sometimes stumbled on the occasional body deposited by drug dealers permanently eliminating the competition.

Tommy was raised on the San Pedro with Nub and the other Rileys. Though he had long ago lost his affection for the ranch life, he still loved the river's environment fully as much as his brother. He had a sobering thought. If it could happen to the Santa Cruz in Tucson, it could also happen to the San Pedro. The big leafed canopy of arching cottonwoods and towering willows, the ashes and the walnuts and the habitat rich mesquite bosques, the hundreds of species of resident and passerine birds, all the world-class variety of plant and animal wildlife, would become just another human killed dead zone. Tommy had the same determined Riley stubborn streak that Nub had. By God, he wasn't about to sit back and let that happen to the San Pedro.

Thought jumped to action when Tommy learned that a development corporation by the name of Tenneco had acquired thousands of acres of land along the river by getting title to a couple of dusty old quasi-legal Mexican land grants from a century and a half earlier. _What!_ Tommy Riley jumped straight up in the air and hollered in outrage when he heard that Tenneco was planning luxury home developments along his beloved San Pedro River. It was damn well time for action. He hooked up with a catholic mixture of dissimilar people who for a wide assortment of reasons, some not wholly admirable, agreed on one bedrock fact: the San Pedro had to be saved from development. And that meant only one thing. The government had to take it over.

Which was what Tommy told his brother Nub one windy March day as they sat over coffee in one of the handful of local historic buildings. The old rambling structure had its share of wild west history, frontier ghosts and a randy checkered past. Jim Garret thought they should have called the well worn old building 'The Shady Lady'. But the current management made a business decision to go by the historically misleading name of the Cochise Stronghold Cafe'. That disgusted Nub Riley and even grated Jim Garret wrong. They all knew that the real Cochise Stronghold was east of the San Pedro Valley on the slopes of the bordering sawtoothed Dragoon Mountains. In the old days it was a very dangerous rough two day ride to the genuine Cochise Stronghold. And in those dim and bloody frontier days the ride could--and often did--abruptly turn out to be a way one trip with a hastily dug grave or an unburied mutilated corpse at the end. Nub's mind was wandering along those dusty lanes of historic memory when his brother brought him back to the moment.

"Nub", Tommy said, grabbing Nub's arm and staring intently at his brother. "We're working on getting the Tenneco development company to do a land swap with the Bureau of Land Management. Trade the old San Pedro Mexican land grants for a chunk of land outside Phoenix. Looks good. I think it's going to happen. But when the BLM takes over, the future of ranching on the river won't look any too good. You won't lose the old home place. They'll grandfather it. And like as not you'll still be able to lease nearby government land--at least for a while. But the price will go up and the river will be off limits to cattle. You won't be able to water and graze stock at the river any more." Tommy looked a lot like his brother. Sitting down they might be taken for twins. Tommy was a couple of inches shorter, thicker in the body, but with the same russet hair and light blue Northern Hemisphere eyes. Genuine brotherly concern lay plain on his bronzed hiker's face.

"And I have no doubt they'll be regulating water pumping along the river corridor in the future. Not very promising news for a rancher or a farmer." Nub listened glumly. He wasn't surprised. But hearing from his own trusted brother's lips what he had already suspected didn't exactly lighten his mood. He started to raise his coffee cup to his mouth, then put it back down. A sour taste had settled in his mouth in sensory tandem with the sour thoughts he was having. He relied on leasing. His actual ranch wasn't very big. Like many Arizona ranchers, he was dependant on leasing cheap government land. It looked like those days were about gone. Nub learned forward and listened raptly to the rest of what some of his neighbors disparagingly called his 'tree-hugger brother' had to say. But, unlike a lot of those same thick-headed neighbors, Nub knew when it was time to shut up. Shut up....

And listen.

Jim Garret was a born and bred local, too, but he had no such deep love for the land. Not as a way of life. It was a commodity to be bought and sold like any other. Anyhow, how much inherent value could the rocky desert scrub and the degraded grasslands have? Wasn't it better to build homes there than to squander good farmland elsewhere? Garret had seen the boom coming early and bought up as much cheap ranch land as he could. He made a small fortune out of it, but bad investments coupled with a very expensive divorce left him short of cash. At least by Garret's way of looking at things. If Riley had half the money that Garret still had, he would have thought of himself as well off. But Garret didn't see it that way, and that was one of the basal differences between the two men.

Riley pulled off the highway onto his ranch road just east of the meandering trickle of the tree crowded San Pedro River. There was a fair amount of water in the thin stream that passed for a river in semi-arid southeast Arizona. The summer monsoon rainy season had faded away a couple of weeks earlier, but water was still coming into the San Pedro from the underlying riverine aquifer that was the year round lifeblood of the little river. Even so, it still ran barely a foot deep in many places. Not much water. Not by the plentiful rainfall standards of the east or northwest. But it was enough for the green growing things of the dry country of Arizona. The huge thick trunked Fremont cottonwoods that lined the banks remained in green leafed summer foliage even as September was turning into October. Just fifteen miles away, but three thousand feet higher on the mountain slopes, the aspen groves were already shading into their full golden autumnal glory. There was a time when just about every day Nub had seen mule deer, whitetail, javelina and bunches of Gambel's and scaled quail along the river. Once in a great while he'd even seen a puma or a black bear down from the mountains. But the sightings were becoming more and more rare. About the only critters there seemed much left of were the coyotes and jackrabbits.

"Coyotes, jacks and nub Riley", he muttered to himself as he drove through the ancient mesquites and into his ranch yard bordered by the old stone buildings with their battered tin roofs and their century of family memories. He climbed out of his dusty pickup and walked down to the edge of the river and to a good sized flat rock near the river's edge. The same well worn rock had been there since before he was born, before his father or his father's father or any of the San Pedro Valley Rileys were born, polished smooth where the generations of Rileys plunked themselves down on it when it was time to do some serious pondering. Nub followed the ancestral inclinations and, sitting on the rock, with the wind in the cottonwood leaves and the soft rustling sound of the flowing river and the summery sound of a handful of late season cicadas, it was almost like nothing had changed. But if he listened hard he could hear the sound of the city a bare dozen miles off. Every year the sound got a little clearer and the lights of the city at night got brighter. His deeply loved way of life was slowly crumbling before his eyes. And now the insidious creep of what the land developers and realtors liked to call progress was about to make yet another corrupting leap. To Nub himself.

"Well, old Hoss", he said softly. "It looks like they got you, too." Off in the distance a coyote set into jabbering in the night. Nub glanced off in the direction the howling cane from. His face was ironic and a little sad, but still had a touch of humor to it. "They'll be getting' you, too, boy", he said in a whisper as faint as the rustling of the cottonwood leaves overhead.

### Goman

Benning Goman sat in the muted light of the dark-wooded paneling of his study, the door locked and bolted securely shut. In a reflexive frontier habit handed down from his great grandfather to his grandfather and then his own WWII Navy vet father, a well oiled Smith and Wesson .357 wheel gun lay on the table next to him. The menacing copper jacketed protruding bulges in the S&W's cylinder mutely testified that the weapon was loaded. A burnished bronze table lamp shone over a foot wide graceful object positioned in the middle of his desk. He handled the object carefully, gently, lovingly, as he rotated it under the light of the lamp and watched the ancient designs dance under the light. Goman nodded in exultant affirmation of what he had known with lucid immediacy when Garret first brought him the pot. _Yes!_ A Mimbres! Garret had been right, muddled layman though he was. It was indeed a first quality Mimbres pot. Well, not actually a pot. That was really just a generic word for pottery. This Mimbres was more of a bowl, a classic black on white, undamaged. And with no kill hole--which greatly enhanced its value. The hatching and painting were typically flawless. It was easily the best black on white Classic Mimbres he had seen. The pot was worth money. Big money. The distinguished looking middle aged man held the Mimbres admiringly in his hands a moment longer, then carefully put it down. He picked up the phone and punched in a long distance call to a number in the sprawling smoggy megapolis of Los Angeles.

"Hello, Meyer? This is Benning Goman." He listened a moment, then spoke again. "I have something very nice for you this time. It's a Mimbres. Black on white Classic. Just come in from an undisclosed dig." Goman's eyebrows arched in disdain." _Of course_ it is illegal. There hasn't been a legal one for years. You know that as well as I do." He scowled at what the voice on the other end of the line was saying. "Don't quibble, Meyer. It's demeaning to both of us. If you're not interested there are others who will be. First quality Mimbres are impossible to come across anymore at any price." He glared at the phone. Then a self-satisfied smile spread across his face. "That's better. Now let's get down to some serious discussion...."

Peg Riley came slowly walking out to where her husband was sitting, careful of her footing in the twisted cottonwood roots and clumps of bunchgrass in the evening darkness. She was doubly careful with her footing because of the precious burden she was carrying. Her husband's burnished old Martin D-28 guitar that looked like a kissing cousin of the one Elvis Presley played in his early days. Nub looked up at her as she came to his side.

"Hi, Hon", she said, bending down to kiss him lightly on the forehead. "I saw the truck lights." She sat down on a rock next to Nub. "Somethin' bothering you, Nub?" He looked over at the pretty dark haired woman with her intelligent gentle eyes. He loved her every as much as when they'd first married. He reached over to squeeze her hand.

"Looks like you figured that out already, Peg. I see you brought my thinkin' machine along." He nodded with a smile towards his guitar. She smiled back and handed it to him. "Kids O.K.?" He said as he gently took the old guitar into his hands.

"Playing those darned Atari video games like they always do if you let them." She reached over to touch his shoulder. "You want to talk, or you want to be alone?" Nub touched her arm. "Reckon I'd like to be alone for a spell, Peg. We'll talk later. O.K.?" She leaned into his touch, lingering a moment in a long practiced gesture between them. They didn't try to hide their feelings. From others. Or from each other. She loved him and he loved her. And both loved ranch life nearly as much as they loved each other.

"You got it, Nub Riley", she said, rising to leave. "Go ahead and pick and grin." She stopped to study his face for a moment. "Or pick and cry. Whatever it takes. See you when you come up to the house." She turned and walked back towards the ranch house and even in his dark mood Nub couldn't help but notice that she still had the seductive willowy shape of a girl to her. Then he took up his guitar and began to strum and softly sing an old folk song. One that fit his mood.

Worried Man Blues.

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

### Dasoda Hae

His name was Dasoda Hae. Among the Apaches. But in the wider world he was far better known by the name the Spanish gave him, Mangas Coloradas. Red Sleeves. Though not nearly so well seeded into the history books as men like Cochise and Geronimo, Mangas might have been the greatest Nde chief of them all. He was a giant of a man for the time, as tall as Abraham Lincoln and twice as thick, and he was the leader of the Chihenne Apaches, also known as the Warm Springs or Ojo Caliente Apaches. Mangas stood out in dimensions that reached far beyond his great bulk and height. Like all of the Nde leaders, he was a fearsome warrior. He was also a brilliant military strategist. In a society that practiced polygamy, he took only a single wife. He abstained from alcohol. He was a diplomat as well as a warrior. Alone among all the great Nde leaders, Mangas Coloradas tried to unite the fragmented and querulous Apache tribes into one people. Had he been successful, the catastrophic history of the Nde people might have taken a very different turn. But the other Nde leaders wouldn't--or couldn't--listen.

In 1851 Mangas diplomatically agreed to a meeting with a group of hardscrabble American miners who had lately insinuated themselves into the historic home country of the Chihenne in what is now southwestern New Mexico. Much to the Apaches' disgust, the prospectors looked like they intended to stay. Mangas hoped to convince them to leave or at least reach some kind of accommodation with them. He met them at a place called Pinos Altos. Tall Pines. The modern day city of Silver City isn't far distant. There was a long historical attachment to the place between the Nde and foreign miners. The Spanish and later the Mexicans had for many years mined copper there and come to a concordance with the local Apaches. Mangas had every reason to hope that this meeting would end agreeably as so many past ones had. But those had been with Spaniards and Mexicans. This was the first with the Americans.

Mangas' optimism was soon blunted by an obdurate wall of miners' distrust. The language barrier was insurmountable. Many Apaches had learned Spanish. Few knew any English. No one at the meeting could speak all three languages and the translators were at best marginally capable and likely trying to disguise their clumsy ineptitude by partly fabricating the content of their translations as the words flowed from English to Spanish to Apache and then back. Misunderstandings festered. Frustrations grew intense. The meeting came to an abrupt end when the imperious and impatient Americans took Mangas prisoner, tied him to a tree and taunted the giant Apache while the xenophobic miners flayed him with an ox whip. Then they let him go, thinking they'd taught Mangas and his people a hard lesson. They did. But not the one they intended. Mangas would be back. And he would not be alone. Many a hapless soul, be they Anglo or Mexican, would pay a terrible price for the miners' whip.

Mangas Coloradas' people went to war against the invading Anglos.

### Southeast Arizona

The mention of southern Arizona conjures up images of disagreeably hot desert places like Phoenix and Tucson where some claim you can fry eggs on car hoods in midsummer. The egg frying may or may not be a myth, but most of southern Arizona is inarguably hot. Over in Yuma, on the California border, close to both sea level and the Bay of California, the locals say the place is so hot that if you die and go to hell you won't know the difference. An exaggeration, of course. But maybe not by a whole lot.

Not so in Southeastern Arizona. This corner of Arizona bordering both Old Mexico and New Mexico is so different that the senses thump you on the perceptive shoulder with the obvious. This is a whole different environmental universe. East and southeast from Tucson the elevation rises and leaves the heat and the signature saguaro cactus and yellow tinged paloverde of the lowlands of the Sonora Desert behind. The valleys of the southeast are dry grasslands, though some are hardly recognizable as such, being badly degraded from the unconscious--and, in bare truth, sometimes conscious--lack of effective stewardship practices of the ranchers and homesteaders of a century earlier.

Breaking the sea of sandy colored dry grasses and bare ground is an eye startling verdant belt of a mostly perennial river bordered by giant towering cottonwoods and willows. The river, which early Spanish explorers reported the local Native Americans called something like 'Nexpa', now carries a name that has zero relevance to its natural history. The San Pedro. Saint Peter. Old Saint Peter might have been pretty well traveled in his time. But not _this_ well traveled. Still, the name the Spanish and Mexicans used stuck fast. The San Pedro. The river rises a few miles inside Sonora and flows north through the open grasslands of the southern portions of the San Pedro Valley, bordered by the Huachuca and Whetstone mountains on the west and the Mule and Dragoon mountains on the east. Some of the mountains climb to over a mile above the valley floor. Few would dispute that it is a spectacular place.

This is a landscape so varied that it leaves the mind struggling in trying to grasp it. Within a handful of miles elevations range from around 3500 feet in the valley floors to just over 9000 at Miller Peak in the Huachuca Mountains. The Chiricahua Mountains of the neighboring Sulphur Springs Valley are even higher, nudging towards 10,000 feet. Mother Nature graces the environment with an ever changing biological and botanical palette as the landscape rises a vertical mile from the warm and dry valley floors to the wintertime snow capped mountains high above. The vegetation types range from desert scrub to Canadian, with bordering habitat zones and their resident life forms overlapping and intermixing with each other. Elevation, rainfall, northern or southern slope location, soil conditions and numerous other micro environmental conditions render a confusing but bounteously diverse mosaic of habitat in the corner of southeast Arizona called Cochise County. It is a place full of life.

And also of death.

### The Lair

It lay hidden amidst a tangled transition zone of shrubs and scrub forest and big trees. Of Mexican and live oaks, junipers, pinyon, thickets of mountain madrone and sumac and the ubiquitous bloody-red-limbed manzanita, of wild grapes and wildflowers like globe mallow and Arizona roses. A tiny spring crowded by berry bushes trickled out of the unnamed little blind canyon that opened onto the much larger Dancer Canyon. Gravity pulled the trickle of precious liquid towards the tiny canyon's mouth. Most of the time the water got nowhere near the canyon's edge before it sank into the thirsty earth. It was a difficult thirty foot climb to get from the base of Dancer Canyon to the narrow chasm that radiated off from it into the thickly forested bowels of the mountains. When the rains came a waterfall dropped the thirty feet, making access dangerous even for the most sure footed of mountaineers. Few people knew about the little blind canyon, and almost no one bothered to go into it. The canyon was a superb hiding place for someone who didn't want his presence known.

It was a perfect place for Bennie Dewclaw to set up his main camp.

Benning Goman stayed up well into the yawning wee hours of the morning in his study. The room was paneled in expensive dark woods reminiscent of an old Sherlock Holmes movie or a stuffy Victorian London old boys' club. No coincidence. That was exactly what Goman wanted. Were he able to jump in a time machine and pick his era and place on this earth, he'd choose being a dashing globe trotting 19th Century English gentleman. Trekking darkest Africa. Or the mysterious Himalayas. Or the fetid jungles of the Amazon. Those were the best of times. But not for Benning Goman. He was stuck in the moribund dullness of the latter 20th Century. Good God, to have the country run by such common vulgarians as the crude Texas peckerwood Lyndon Johnson and the corrupt and deceptive Richard Nixon, the clumsy and unimaginative Gerald Ford and another peckerwood, the almost comically inept Jimmy Carter. And now, this dreadful California movie cowboy, Reagan. None could come close to the style and breeding of FDR. Even JFK was marginally acceptable. But Reagan the movie cowboy? It was enough to drive a man to drink. More than enough. Almost unconsciously, Goman poured himself another glassful of brandy from the expensive Italian cut glass decanter on his study's desk, the light from his table lamp refracting in bits of color off the decanter as he lifted it.

Goman's nimble mind was teasing over the few tidbits the wretched pothunter Garret had left as verbal clues. The little he knew was as deliciously tantalizing as the aromas escaping the steamy kitchen at his favorite Basque restaurant in Tucson. The plebeian clod Garret had somehow bumbled onto a new and undiscovered Mimbres site outside what was usually considered the limits of their territory centered on the rich floodplain soils of the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico. Garret had been careful not to tell Goman where the site was, but Goman deduced that it was in one of the mountain ranges not far from Garret's gauche nouveau riche home in the San Pedro Valley. It might be the Chiricahuas, the Dos Cabezas, the Swisshelms or the Perillas on the east, closest to the documented home territory of the Mimbres. Or the site might be farther to the west, in the Mules, the Dragoons, the Huachucas or the Whetstones. Garret might even have slipped across the border into Old Mexico and found the site in one of the numerous towering sky island mountain ranges of northern Sonora or Chihuahua. He doubted that, though. They had become too dangerous. The mountains just inside the Mexican border were the home ground of the cross-border drug smugglers. They were notoriously violent and secretive people. Not there, Goman reasoned. The site had to be somewhere on the gringo side of the border. But where?

### The Mimbres

Archaeologists and anthropologists long ago bestowed names on the prehistoric peoples of the desert Southwest that had about as much relation to what those ancient people had called themselves as a chunk of plywood had to a tree stump. But they had to call them something, so one name was probably as good as another. The officially bestowed names? Most famously, the Anazasi to the north, which was actually a corrupted translation of a Navajo word meaning something like 'ancient people', a people which the Navajo were unrelated to in language, culture, ethnicity and genetics. The Anazasi were the fabled cliff dwellers who built villages dangling on the edge of dizzying precipices. But there were also the puebloan Mogollon to the east and adobe-building Hohokam to the west and south, with a few other minor groups. Sin Agua was one. Spanish for waterless, which at least was one name that was eloquently descriptive even though these people vanished long before the Spanish arrived with their guns and horses, the flag of hegemony under the Spanish kings and the monks and priests of Catholicism.

The San Pedro river valley and the Huachuca mountains of southeast Arizona were outliers in the Hohokam culture zone. The Mimbres people were a branch of the Mogollon culture to the east in what is now New Mexico. Though there was some mixing of cultures in the San Pedro River Valley, with Anazasi, Hohokam and Mogollon all being present at one time or another, no one ever suspected that mainstream Mimbres culture had spread this far west from their home country along the Mimbres River Valley of southwestern New Mexico. But they had. The students of history are after all human. Which means they can be and often are wrong, whether they admit it or not. The Mimbres weren't supposed to be anywhere near the distant Huachuaca mountains on the western edge of the grassy San Pedro Valley.

But they were.

The Mimbres culture reached its rich prolific flowering around the time the Crusaders were trekking off for the Holy Land with their hands on their swords and itching to shed Muslim blood. The Mimbres were a mostly river based agricultural people who built adobe and stone pueblos ranging to scores of rooms, with ceremonial kivas tucked away in the room blocks. The Mimbres were exquisite artists who drew beautifully crafted geometric designs and animal and human depictions with black paints on white bowls. Which are called, unsurprisingly, Classic Mimbres Black On White. Their best work was truly superb and Classic Mimbres pottery is prized above almost all southwestern Native American pottery styles. Their flowering period lasted a couple of centuries and then they--like so many of the Southwestern peoples--mysteriously disappeared from the archaeological record. Poof. They were gone. The culture. But not the pots.

The congenitally dry and dispassionate Goman was visibly enchanted at the thought. Like one of the overworked detectives in the local Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department teasing over one of the numerous crime scenes in the active drug smuggling corridor that included Santa Cruz County, Goman's mind wandered off into speculative and deductive pondering. If the Mimbres had ventured out from their home base into the mountains and river valleys beyond the New Mexico border, how extensive had their previously undiscovered meanderings been? A sudden idea burst into Goman's mind and triggered a galloping chain of thought. Could that feckless amateur Garret have stumbled onto something even bigger than he realized? Could there be more than one undiscovered Mimbres site tucked away somewhere in the mountains of southeastern Arizona or northern Mexico? Was it not likely that, if there was one, there had to be more than one? How could a single settlement have existed in a vacuum, without intercourse with its kin, at such a distance? This could very well be a seismic event in the archaeological history of this corner of the desert Southwest. And he, Benning Goman, could be the archaeological seismologist who discovered it! That titillating notion so agitated the archaeologist in Goman's soul that he had to knock down a couple glasses of his cherished Cognac Tesseron to calm himself.

The tiny Arizona bark scorpion is the most venomous of North American scorpions. The dangerous little critters frequent riparian areas and they long ago infested the relatively moist landscape of mesquites and cottonwoods near Goman's ranch. Most scorpions are solitary. Not so the Arizona bark scorpion. In the cool months they sometimes cluster together. Unknown to Benning Goman a dozen Arizona bark scorpions had slipped inside his home. A few of them found their way into his study where Goman had a wet bar and a bathroom. One little reddish bark scorpion, unseen by Benning Goman as he was absorbed in pondering the mystery of the Mimbres site, was lurking only a few inches from him. An unwary wrong move by Goman could be a extremely unpleasant experience. Not fatal. But excruciatingly painful. Then the tiny scorpion sensed prey nearby. A roach living in the bathroom wall made the mistake of wandering out to where the scorpion lurked. It was a fatal mistake. Benning Goman was to be spared an unpleasant venomous experience.

At least of the insect variety.

Goman's breeding farm was near Sonoita Creek in the historic Patagonia greenbelt. It was within a kilometer of where the Apache wars began in earnest with the kidnapping of a ranch kid named Felix Ward just before the outbreak of the American Civil War. Detached intellectual though he was, Goman sometimes let his mind wander and imagine himself back in those wild fratricidal days. Goman's great grandfather was an officer in that war in several Confederate units, among them the 7th Regiment of the Texas Mounted Volunteers. Goman considered the American Civil War a foolish and unnecessary war, but still thought it likely he would have served just as his anti-slavery and anti-secessionist great grandfather reluctantly had. Goman only half jokingly mused that the Confederacy had accomplished at least one good thing in the fighting. Lieutenant George Bascom, the brash American officer who had foolishly precipitated the Apache wars that would lead to hundreds of people dying horrible barbaric deaths, was killed by the Rebels at the battle of Valverde on the banks of the Rio Grande in New Mexico. Goman sometimes imagined himself back in time at that battle and firing the fatal shot at Bascom himself.

"Served the stupid bastard right", he would mumble to himself.

Goman looked like an ad for a casual outing at the local country club, dressed in his customary chinos, Orkney crew neck sweater and imported Gucci Italian loafers. He moved to a black leather couch by his glowing fieldstone fireplace built with rocks from nearby Sonoita Creek by a bootleg crew of illegal Mexican stonemasons. A hot red oak fire threw out eerie dancing shadows on the walls. The open fireplace filled the room with the pungent odor of wood smoke Goman prized every bit as much as his cognac and his blooded Arabian mares and stallions. All the more so since his doctor in Tucson had prodded him into reluctantly giving up his briar and burl pipes and aromatic tobaccos.

Sitting with a stack of books piled high next to him on his leather couch in the flickering light of the oak fueled fireplace, an antique-styled china table lamp glowing softly at his side, he poured yet another glass of the dearly expensive cognac, sniffing with a fancied connoisseur's pleasure at its heady fragrance. As the night hours slipped by, Goman scanned book after book among his extensive reference library, searching for some little clue that might tell him where to look for Garret's secret site. Mimbres pots were on average by far the most valuable of all prehistoric Southwestern pottery. If he could get his hands on even a few of them it would mean a bloody fortune. Of course he would keep the best one for his own, very private, collection. Halfway through his fifth glass of cognac he slumped over onto the couch and fell sound asleep. His dreams were of mysterious explorations in dimly lit distant places led by a slender woman in a diaphanous white dress. A woman who seemed somehow very familiar to him in a oddly sensuous yet not directly sexual way.

And as he slept the tiny venomous bark scorpion still lurked just a few feet away.

### The Puma

Muscles tightly bulging in her powerful legs, a sleek young puma padded down from the ponderosa pined slopes in the rocky core of the Huachucas. Her acute predator's vision had spotted a small herd of mule deer browsing far below in a narrow grassy valley sprinkled with live oaks. She was making a slow and cautious stalk. The puma climbed over the jumbled rocks past a pair of wind twisted ancient alligator junipers posed like sentinels over the dry waterfall and lightly dropped down from the blind canyon into Dancer Canyon. She stopped for a moment to sniff at the low grass covered mounds of the ruin. A few generations ago one of her ancestors had watched the Apaches in the canyon below. Before that one of her ancestors had watched this place from the rocks above when the Sobaipuri village had been there. More generations before that another ancestor had watched the Mimbres village from the same rocks. And far before that in the distant dim mists of prehistory another ancestral puma had watched and snarled at the shaggy, spear carrying little band of men in foul smelling bearskins who had hunted the great Pleistocene beasts that no longer walked the earth.

They were all gone. Only the puma remained. Light glimmered in the big cat's eyes as though there were some deep feline racial recognition of that fact. But the puma was troubled. The old, old man smell to the place had something very peculiar about it. There was also another, different, man smell.

And it was fresh.

Jim Garret was one of those men who was born with an eye to seeing ways to make money. Where others saw nothing, Garret saw dollars. That side to him had always flabbergasted his boyhood friend Nub Riley. Nub nicknamed Jim 'Bucks' back in those boyhood days. Even in elementary school Garret dreamed up ways to make a buck--like collecting glittering chunks of worthless fool's gold to sell to tourists in Tombstone or buying cheap candy to resell at school to the other kids for twice the money. As far back as Riley could remember, Garret always had money in his pockets. And, hustler or no, Garret was always ready to share with his buddy Nub. Riley generally just politely said no. But he did appreciate the thought. And he never forgot it.

Riley and Garret were discrete personalities. Oil and water. Earth and fire. Two peas from very different pods. Their lives were dissimilar in a host of details large and small. Despite that, the buddy cement of their kidhood stuck fast as they grew. They remained close friends as the years piled on their maturing shoulders. Riley remained mostly amused by Garret's constant and sometimes hair brained schemes while Garret admired his friend's amiable and tolerant salt-of-the-earth ways. There were occasional wistful moments when Garret wished that he could be as low key and simple about living as Riley was. But he couldn't. It just wasn't in his nature. Low key was not Jim Garret. Period.

One of the bonds that held them most strongly together was music. They jammed just about every week, usually with two or three of their cantankerous individualistic-to-a-fault musician buddies in Tombstone. Riley was a passable guitar player and a fair hand at the mandolin and could manage basic backup on a doghouse bass. Garret had picked up fiddling from his Kentucky born great uncle Burl and also played a little of the old fashioned style of clawhammer banjo. Every year the two of them entered an old time fiddle contest in the nearby wide-spot-in-the-road farming hamlet of Elfrida. The town was over in the next valley to the east, the Sulphur Springs, where an agricultural economy made possible by the electric water pump still held sway over much of the valley. The old small scale agricultural way of life was still there, but it was fading and segueing into the modern world of agribusiness. The fiddle contests, like the small scale rural farming culture that weaned them, were dying out.

But not quite yet.

### Gypsum Built

When they first put up the place it was an instant eye grabbing landmark. Looming two and a half stories high. Towering over the dry grasslands of the valley where trees only grew in the few places where there were small ponds or springs or water close to the surface beneath the washes. The fortress-like building wasn't just unusual in its dramatic visual impact in the tree-sparse grassy valley. The material it was built from was just as unusual and was rarely used for construction. Gypsum. The faintly sandy yellow color of the blocks of locally quarried unsealed gypsum were laid up by confident rough hands in the nation building days of skilled craftsmen. It was ancient gypsum from a distant time and a different clime, deposited along with limestones and shales tens of millennia earlier when the dry grasslands in the Sulphur Springs Valley were preceded by a sprawling inland sea.

The original hopeful use for the building was that of a courthouse. But the locals didn't have political skills to match their construction skills. The courthouse location went to a more politically savvy town. The fortress-like gypsum building passed through a succession of uses short and long before it settled in as a country store. A successful and busy one run by an immigrant Jewish family named Liebnitz from the eastern Ukraine. They operated it for a half century before the last of them moved to Tucson. For fifty years three generations of the Liebnitz family sold feed and seed, baby chicks and turkeys, ducks and geese, bales of hay, tools and farm implements, and the sundry things large and small country people needed for their daily lives.

As the twentieth century's pace of change exploded and roared ahead, the Liebnitz store began to fade and fall behind. The factors were several. The rise of the automobile culture. The decline of family farming. The growth of the towns of Douglas to the south and Willcox to the north, with their bigger stores and cheaper prices and brighter lights. Plus the long, burdensome hours the weary Liebnitz family had to put in. All combined to eventually close the store's doors and send the last of the Liebnitz clan on the road to bustling Tucson. But the store's useful days were not over. The solidly built gypsum structure didn't melt back into the earth like the adobes did in Tombstone or the other 19th Century mining towns in the county. It stayed right where it was, looking as solid and imposing as ever, and the locals eventually found a new use for the sturdy building. It took on a new life and the doors swung wide again. The old gypsum building was reborn as the community center for the remnant rural population around Elfrida and the adjoining unincorporated chunks of the Sulphur Springs Valley. To the surprise of many, including the Liebnitz clan successfully transplanted to Tucson, it thrived. There still were a bunch of country folk who were disinterested in jumping on the runaway train of the latter 20th Century. They might shop in the bigger towns like Douglas or Willcox. But they didn't want to live there. They were country people.

And they damn well wanted to stay that way.

They came by ones and twos and family groups. Smiling. Expectant. Greeting friends and neighbors. There was a potluck, a cake drawing, maybe a dance later, but none of those were the main attraction. On this sunny Arizona late September Saturday in the year 1983 the old building made of ancient gypsum was the site of the annual Elfrida Old Time Fiddling Contest. It seemed an agreeable and fitting and peaceful place. And it was.

On the surface.

Not a solitary soul there, and a few among them were amateur local historians with a rich plenty of local knowledge and folklore, had even the slightest glimmering of what had happened there in the previous century. They were literally standing on the very same ground where Mexican Lieutenant Hernando de Varga's mounted troop disappeared from history.

Over a hundred years earlier. The small patrol of sweat stained Mexican cavalrymen galloped north through the grama grasses and low shrubs of the Sulphur Springs Valley past the huge San Bernadino ranch. They were hot on the trail of a band of Apache raiders who had killed a pair of vaqueros and stolen forty head of cattle and horses a few miles behind them in northern Sonora. Their brash lieutenant, the aristocratic red mustachioed Hernando de Varga, knew that he was on shaky legal ground crossing into the United States. De Varga didn't give a damn. He was a hothead of an ambitious young officer determined to make a name for himself fighting the Apaches and other hostile Native Americans. And more. This was personal. There was blood in his eyes. His uncle and aunt had been murdered by marauders near Janos in Chihuahua, his two little cousins kidnapped, and de Varga was convinced--though there was no proof of it--that Apaches were responsible. He was out for Apache blood. And Apache scalps. Men. Women. Children. No matter. So long as they were Apaches. _Dead_ Apaches.

The nine men with de Varga were not nearly as firmly cemented in their determination as their fiery young lieutenant. Ten men blindly blundering into the unknown Apache country? Ten seemed a very small number. Too small. One or two even considered turning around and pounding leather for the border. But they didn't. The punishment, if they were caught, would be severe. Maybe even a firing squad against some crumbling adobe wall in an tumbledown impoverished village in northern Sonora. The troopers reluctantly followed their lieutenant, their eyes uneasily scanning the grassy plains stretching out in all directions towards towering mountains ranging the compass around them. Mountains, they all knew, that held the hidden lairs of the Apaches.

Twenty miles north of the border Lieutenant de Varga's scout spotted a shallow depression in the grassy valley that was home to a stand of mature cottonwoods and an ancient grove of thick-trunked honey mesquites. As he rode cautiously closer and saw six foot high clumps of sacaton grass with their graceful feathery tops and, lower to the ground, the thick stands of side oats and black grama grasses, he knew. Water. There had to be water nearby. The lieutenant ordered his men to cautiously approach the small grove of trees, thinking that they could water the horses and replenish their canteens before resuming tracking the Apaches.

Though by nature brash and impetuous, de Varga was still a veteran frontier soldier and sharply aware of the possibility of ambush. The scout told him that the thick trail left by the Apaches with their driven herd of cattle and horses veered away to the east towards the lofty Chiricahua Mountains and didn't approach the water source. The canny Apaches must know they were being pursued and couldn't stop, even for water, the scout told the lieutenant. The scout was himself half Apache, born from a captive Mescalero mother in the Chihuahua town of Janos. His dress reflected his mixed heritage. Apache-style buckskin leggings and breechclout, along with standard issue Mexican military coat and hat. The suspicious de Varga ordered the scout to ride into the grove of trees and verify the place was safe. The man was at first reluctant, taut nerves sending a jangling warning at the possibility of an ambush. But he had told the lieutenant that the Apaches had gone on. How could he now backtrack on his own words?

Stolidly, masking his anxiety, the scout turned his horse and trotted towards the copse of trees. He reined the horse to a walk and rode slowly into the thickly wooded mesquite bosque and disappeared out of sight. The Mexican troopers nervously craned their necks, trying to make out the scout and his horse in the deep shadows of the bosque. Nothing. They could neither see nor hear anything. Nervous glances bounced between them. One trooper reached up to clutch at the Crucifix around his neck and mumbled something. All eyes and ears were keenly fixed on the mesquites and cottonwoods where the half-Apache scout had disappeared. There still was neither sight nor sound from inside the grove of trees. Not a word. Not a shout. Not a person. Not a horse. Nothing.

Only silence.

The mixed blood scout was the first to die, noiselessly, jerked from his horse and clubbed to death before he could yell out a warning. A young Apache of about the same size as the scout pulled off the dead man's coat and put it on, along with the scout's hat, climbed on the dead man's horse and rode just to the edge of the grove of trees where he motioned at the rest of the patrol to come in, then quickly vanished back into the shadows and lowering branches of the trees. The ruse worked. Lieutenant de Varga and his patrol spurred their horses forward, eager for shade and fresh water. Only one trooper held back, an eighteen year old from Fronteras named José Gomez, suddenly alarmed when his once wild ranging mustang seemed to sense something and shied away from the trees.

José was still struggling with controlling the animal when the shooting and the yelling started. It was just a few meters away but unseen behind the thick foliage. A second cavalryman, Gustavo Peralta, another peasant boy not yet twenty, came dashing back out of the trees on a middle sized roan gelding, man and horse both in flaring-eyed panic, and was almost to Gomez' side when three Apaches leaped up from their hiding places in the tall sacaton grass and shot the two Mexican soldiers from their horses. Both were dead within seconds. The Apache raiders, who had looped around from their wide trail to lay their ambush at the spring, were anxious to escape into the mountains with their stolen livestock. They did not linger. They killed the Mexican patrol to a man, stripping them of everything--horses, guns, equipment, even clothing--and left their mutilated bodies lying naked in and around the small spring that nurtured the cottonwood and mesquite trees. In the far distance circling buzzards began to turn towards the spring.

Two days later a second small patrol of dusty and saddle weary troopers, American Buffalo Soldiers riding big-boned U.S. cavalry horses, discovered the bodies when they rode into the trees looking for water. They paused only long enough to hastily bury the malodorous decaying corpses in shallow graves, all the while warily watching for the Apaches to return.

They chose not to drink from what they immediately took to calling Dead Man's Spring.

Over a hundred years later, on this same blood soaked ground, the artesian spring still bubbled beneath the shade of the leafy descendants of the cottonwoods and mesquites. Among them a single ancient mesquite survived, the sole remaining witness to the grisly few minutes of the patrol's death. Just a few yards away from the gnarled trunk of the ancient survivor, in a gypsum block building taller even than the spreading old tree, a group of old time fiddlers were unknowingly playing to a mute second audience. Beneath the floor of the building, mere inches beneath their feet, lay the decayed bones of Lieutenant Hernando de Varga and his Mexican soldiers long buried in their secret lost graves.

"Hey, Jimmy!", said a weathered old man wearing faded blue overalls and a stained beat-up cowboy hat. He was well into his 80's, but he had twinkling gray eyes and looked to have plenty of spring left in his step. He had a fiddle in one hand and a bow in the other. He held them both up and gently shook them at Jim Garret. "Today is the day I whup your butt." Jim Garret laughed good naturedly.

"Well, Uncle Burl", he said. "This time you just might do it." He reached over to thump the older man on the shoulder. "After all, it _does_ run in the family." Nub Riley stood off to the side, his cherished Martin D-28 hanging by a colorful woven Mexican strap from his shoulder, grinning at Jim Garret and his great uncle Burl. He'd known Burl all his life, same as Jim Garrett had. And he knew that Burl lost his only son in the Tarawa invasion in WWII and had unofficially become Jim's second dad. In some ways, they all knew, more of a dad to Jim than his own biological father, who was always busy with either work or his near maniacal involvement with his tiny fundamentalist church. The church members weren't quite as crazy as his religious snake handling kin back in Appalachia, but Jim always thought they were darn close to it. Early on he decided to hang with his mother's borderland Mexican Catholic heritage and gave his father's church--and his father--a wide berth.

It was Uncle Burl who taught Jim Garret how to fiddle and Burl didn't regret one bit that the pupil had eventually eclipsed the teacher. Nor did he mind getting whipped in a fiddle contest by his nephew. But that didn't mean he still wouldn't try his darnedest to beat him. He pointed the fiddle bow again at Jim and shook it, a broad smile on his face.

"Today's _the_ day, Jimmy." He leaned closer, touching the bow tip to Jim's chest. "Gonna whup your young ass this time!"

Jim just grinned back at him.

Ken and Mary Jean Kennedy, a couple of Tucson old time fiddlers who originally hailed from near Elfrida, came down for the day to judge the contest and jam and maybe play for a dance afterward if there was enough interest. They sat behind a partition so they couldn't see who was playing, supposedly so that they wouldn't recognize the fiddlers and be influenced by personal acquaintance. It was a formality with little point. The fiddlers all knew each other's fiddling and recognized the styles of the others without seeing them. But, partition or not, they did their best to be impartial. Which, they sheepishly admitted, wasn't always such an easy thing to do.

Close to thirty people were there to hear the fiddlers. Most of them were old folks from the farms and ranches. The young were either too busy, too rooted in the contemporary, or--and this was true of the majority--had moved to a city where they could find work One farm-tough pair of seventy year olds showed up in a horse and buggy much as their parents might have done a half century earlier. One-legged Parmalee Silva, who always told folks he lost his leg to a German machine gun at Normandy though he knew the real cause was friendly fire from a panicking GI wildly firing a Thompson submachine gun, was the MC. Whatever the cause of losing his leg, Parmalee nevertheless had the sense to be grateful to come out of Normandy with just the loss of one leg. Twenty five hundred other young Americans lost far more on that historic day. Their lives. Parmalee lost a leg, not an arm, and he was doubly grateful that his music playing was unaffected. He was a fair hand at the mandolin and the dobro. He personally preferred to play Bluegrass and classic country, but still liked to MC the old time fiddle contests whenever he got the chance. He had a sense of history and knew well enough that the old time square dance music was being pushed into musical retirement by the flashy Texas style of contest fiddling. A style that was in essence performance music rather than the toe tapping old time dance music. MCing the contests was Parmalee's way of saying goodbye to the old days and the old ways. Besides, with one often uncooperative prosthetic leg, he couldn't do much cavorting to the old dance music, anyhow.

Maylee Thompson, a lean, athletically good looking ranch wife in her forties, who also played the guitar and sang at cowboy gatherings with her two sisters, put folded numbered slips of paper into her white Sunday Stetson. Each of the nine fiddlers took a number. The number the fiddler drew was the order he or she would play in. Nub drew number four. Uncle Burl was first. By the time Burl climbed onto the raised platform that passed for a stage the crowd had increased to nearly fifty. Burl smiled inwardly when he glimpsed that now there was a scattering of young people among them. Like most all the aging old time fiddlers, Burl feared traditional music would die with them. Even just a few young faces gave him hope. Out of view behind Burl the Kennedys sat behind a wooden partition, pencils in hand, ready to start judging.

"Contestant number one", Parlmalee announced to the growing crowd, then moved off the stage with his signature prosthetic limp, as Burl lifted his fiddle and put his bow to the strings. The catchy old time tune called Hell Amongst The Yearlings burst magically out of Burl's ninety year old fiddle and not a foot in the gypsum built structure's main hall remained unmoved by the beat of the music. There was no doubt of it. This was genuine old time dance music. Behind Burl the lean ranch wife was playing backup guitar and swarthy Sonora born Ed Manriquez laid down a basic beat on the doghouse bass. Then Burl launched into a lovely lilting melody called the Midnight Waltz that set two couples in the rear of the room to waltzing. Burl's last tune of the three tune contest set--a hoedown, a waltz and a tune of choice--was the bouncy Peacock Rag made famous in the early days of radio by Fiddlin' Arthur Smith. Thunderous applause followed immediately upon the ending of Burl's last tune and Jim Garrett was thinking that maybe his uncle really would beat him this time.

The next fiddler was a rosy cheeked graying lady from nearby Rodeo, New Mexico, followed by a pimply string bean of a teenager from a farm near tiny McNeal a few miles south of Elfrida. Neither was very good, but the crowd nevertheless politely gave them a good hand clapping. Next up was Jim Garret, with Nub Riley accompanying him on guitar.

"And now", Parmalee Silva announced, trying hard not to show the excitement in his voice at the man he considered to be a good choice for the best old time fiddler in the entire state of Arizona. "Contestant number four". As soon as Jim Garret's bow hit the strings the Kennedys immediately knew who was playing. As did the entire crowd. Garret's fiddle fired the souls of the listeners and filled the room with the ancient sounds of the Appalachian hollers and frontier backwoods interwoven with echoes of the music's Celtic antecedents and more than a touch of the Old West. He started with a spirited hoedown called Bonaparte Crossing The Rhine, segued to the gentle lilt of the Cowboy Waltz and ended with the bouncy Jenny Lind Polka. The applause was immediate and at least as thunderous as that for Jim's Uncle Burl.

Several more fiddlers followed Jim Garrett in subdued succession. Though a couple of them were pretty good, they knew that beating either Jim or Burl was about as likely as a July blizzard in downtown Tucson. They were right. But the judges' decision still surprised everyone.

It was a tie.

They were supposed to do a tie breaking pair of tunes, a hoedown and a waltz, but Jim Garrett demurred, saying he had a business appointment and couldn't stay any longer. The contest winner, by default, was Uncle Burl. Which, Nub Riley knew full well, was exactly what Jim Garret wanted. As they left the venerable gypsum building to climb into their cars and head to their respective homes, Jim Garret took Nub aside, grabbed his arm and looked levelly into Nub's eyes. The intense look told Nub that this had nothing to do with anything as light hearted as a fiddle contest.

"OK, Nub", Jim said. "The fun's over. We've got some serious business to tend to." He took a step away, still looking at Nub, and pointed a finger at Nub, then towards the distant unseen Huachuca Mountains to the west where the Mimbres site awaited them. " _Real_ serious." He turned to head for his car, throwing his last words over his shoulder as he went. "Stay close to your phone!"

As he reached towards the door handle of his car, a chill suddenly ran up Jim's spine. He was momentarily taken aback. What was it? Not fear. No. Something else. A kind of vague, murky apprehension. Puzzled, disconcerted, he climbed into his flashy Lincoln, pausing just a moment to ponder the peculiar feeling that had just visited him before he fired up the Lincoln. Then he shook it off and shifted the Lincoln into gear.

Directly beneath him were the moldering bones of the Mexican soldiers José Gomez and Gustalvo Peralta in their century old unmarked graves.

Jim and Nub enjoyed themselves hugely at Elfrida, as they always did in the contests, so it didn't really make any difference how they placed. Garret had quick hands and a natural born ear for music. People who knew more than a smattering about the old time fiddling world compared his ability favorably to some of best backwoods old time fiddlers of Kentucky and the Virginias from the early days, men like Uncle Norm Edmunds, Bill Stepp, Emmet Lundy, even the great Ed Haley. Jim knew well enough that he wasn't near as good as any of them--but he _could_ have been. He didn't practice much, and he spent too much of his time drinking and taking drugs and womanizing. He kept himself somewhat in balance by heading for the outdoors at every chance and by faithfully working out on his home gym almost every day. But he had another habit that further complicated things--and also accounted for him always seeming to be looking to scare up some extra cash. Jim Garret liked to snort a line of cocaine more than occasionally. And that could cost some bucks. Big bucks. Even for a guy whose nickname once was 'Bucks'.

### Meyer

The aptly named stonefish lurks seemingly harmless and close to invisible on the rocky coastal seafloor of much of the Pacific. It is sham. Within the deceptive exterior of the stoic seafloor stonefish lies a deadly venomous predator. Not so dissimilar to the deceptively antiseptic and tasteless stainless steel and glass Los Angeles office bloc where Lucius Meyer held sway over the rapacious tentacles of his business empire. It seemed a bland building in an urban sea of bland buildings. But, like the stonefish cloaking itself among real stones, this building was anything but bland inside. It also was home to a lethal and venomous predator. Lucius Meyer. And the predator Meyer was awaiting the imminent arrival of Benning Goman.

Meyer seemed outwardly calm and unruffled. It was superficial. Underneath he was awash with an anticipation akin to the stonefish about to strike. He'd wanted a good quality Mimbres pot for a hell of a long time. The lack of one was the biggest flaw in his extensive private collection. How could a man say he had a representative collection of prehistoric Southwestern pottery without a good Mimbres? The answer was a big assed resounding _no!_ In Meyer's acquisitive mind. And also in the minds of many others in the surprisingly large and widespread underground illegal antiquities world Lucius Meyer, Benning Goman and even, sometimes, Jim Garret, frequented. They carried on an illicit love affair with antiquities, made all the more titillating by the opaque underworld of their collective passion. And Lucius Meyer, crude and vulgar though he might be, was one of the most passionate of them all. Far more passionate than he had ever been over any woman.

Meyer was a squat, pot bellied and bullet headed man with thin wisps of graying blond hair combed straight back over his oversized ears. He was probably the last person in Los Angeles to still wear polyester leisure suits. Meyer was not an attractive man by the stretch of anyone's imagination. Even his scratchy, high pitched voice was annoying. Did that condemn him to a life of unwanted celibacy? No. None of it really mattered. Meyer had the ultimate trump card. Money. Money was absolutely no problem with Lucius Meyer. He lived in a comfortable, mortgage free, expensively decorated oceanfront home and continued to add to his fortune with a gratifying pecuniary regularity. Good looking women, most of them steamy eye poppers more directly effective than a truckload of chemical aphrodisiacs, were usually hanging around him and his checkbook.

He'd made a bunch of money in real estate and was making even more money from financing bootleg music operations and occasional big money cocaine deals. Meyer was not a man to worry over quaint notions about ethics. To Lucius Meyer what was important was what he called the risk benefit ratio. Relatively low risk illegal operations that offered high profit margins were the most attractive to him. Whether or not a valuable prehistoric pot had been acquired illegally or not was completely immaterial to him. All he wanted was the pot.

Especially if it was a Mimbres.

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

### Cheis

His name was Cheis. Oak, in Chiricahua. To non-Chiricahua ears it sounded like Co-cheis. He came to be called by a variant of that pronunciation. Cochise. In 1861 Cochise was at relative peace with the Americans. He was called to a supposedly friendly meeting with U.S. Army Lieutenant George Bascom. The location was near Apache Pass in what is now an Arizona county bearing Cochise's name in the far southeast corner of the state. It was then the heart of the home country of Cochise's people. The Chokonen branch of the Chiricahua Apache. An unsuspecting Cochise rode in, trustingly, in a time of peace between the Americans and the Nde, bringing with him his wife, their two children, his brother and two nephews. Once there he was falsely accused of kidnapping a rancher's son and taken prisoner. Cochise managed to escape, but Bascom had the Apache leader's wife, his children, his brother and his nephews.

The inexperienced and inept Bascom was unable to deal with the resultant spiral of distrust and retaliation. A dozen Mexicans and Americans were killed, some by the outraged Apaches after Bascom refused a prisoner exchange. The Army's response? The soldiers hanged Cochise's brother, his two nephews and three Coyatero Apaches unlucky enough to be in the neighborhood. Bascom's actions were beyond foolish. He reaped the Apache whirlwind and a bloody Indian war exploded in which hundreds of people were to die. Bad enough. It got worse. Two years later Mangas Coloradas was murdered by U.S. Army soldiers. Mangas Coloradas was Cochise's father-in-law. Cochise's rage was literally boundless.

So was that of a very strange man, with eyes so scary that strong men avoided his gaze, when he read of the murders more than a century later in his hidden lair in the unnamed little blind canyon hidden in the Huachuca Mountains of Cochise County.

### Chapter 4

### Metamorphosis

Bernard Decleau looked in a mirror and saw an Indian looking back at him. He was alone in that perception. Nobody else saw an Indian in Decleau's features. To others he looked like a European. A Caucasian. Maybe with a touch of Indian blood. But still a Caucasian. But not Decleau. He thought of himself as an Indian. And he actually was. In part. Decleau was a Métis, a Canadian mixture of English, French and Algonquin in roughly equal parts who'd been born into a largely subsistence hunting and fishing rural central Ontario family. It was a violent alcoholic home and as a boy he was beaten and verbally abused. When his father finally got a well deserved prison sentence and his drug using mother ran off, Decleau's maternal aunt and her Algonquin husband took him in and brought a modicum of normality to his life. But it was only relative normality--and a distant relative of normality at that.

His aunt's husband Johnny White Bear had been a high iron worker who went from New York to a job in San Francisco during the loopy mind blowing days of the middle sixties.

Despite working the high iron in New York, White Bear still wasn't far from the naive' and superstitious young Algonquin who'd grown up in the frigid boondocks of Ontario. He was absolutely mesmerized by hippie culture and especially by a bizarre writer named Carlos Casteneda. Castenada wrote a long series of books beginning with _The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge_ that supposedly detailed his experiences with psychotropic drugs and weaving his way through the Byzantine spirit-packed alternate realities of a Mexican Yaqui shaman. Johnny White Bear was spellbound by Casteneda's writing. And he also almost killed himself when he tried to mix working the high iron with popping psychoactive substances. He was lucky that he only mangled a leg, even though it ended his high iron career.

He returned to rural Ontario. But not alone. He took San Francisco with him. The memories and the books also made the trip to Ontario and White Bear continued to order new Casteneda books as they came out. The home Bennie Decleau grew up in was filled with tales of Indian mysticism and the use of psychotropics to enter alternative realities, in peculiar juxtaposition to the bare knuckle reality of the rugged hunting and fishing subsistence lifestyle of the family. Bennie grew into a spooky, woods wise rugged youth. In his middle teens Bennie Decleau began to follow in his uncle's footsteps and started experimenting with drugs and alternative realities. Once onto that seductive path he never even thought of looking back. Like a young sapling rooting and taking shape from a combination of genetics and environmental conditions, Bennie gradually began to be obsessed, first with the mythos of the Yaqui warrior and later that of the Apache.

In his late teens he followed his uncle's footsteps into high iron work. He began in New York. Then he moved to the burgeoning skyscraper-hungry city of Chicago where he somehow managed to marry the high iron work in his mind with the misty legends of the Apache warrior. He became a warrior working the high iron among the clouds. It was an intoxicating life for the young Canadian Métis. At times he was on the very edge of convincing himself that he could leap off a tall building and soar off among the steel and concrete canyons. Just like Don Juan the Yaqui medicine man would have done. But Decleau wasn't ready for that.

Not yet.

After he fled to the rugged Arizona border hinterlands Bennie's tenuous mental finger hold on reality slipped ever further away. Decleau began to slowly cobble an entire new conceptual reality for himself. Once built, he stepped inside it and the world he left closed off behind him. He was an astral immigrant who permanently shed the inherited self of the old world for the chosen one of the new. Four times he went to an isolated mountain peak a long day's walk over the border into the towering mountains and desert grasslands of Sonoran Mexico. There he took the drug. The spirit drug. The drug of the ancestors.

Peyote.

Bennie had managed to make a peyote connection with a half blood Yaqui dealer in Tucson. The rugged scar faced Yaqui, pigtails hanging to his waist and a .45 1911 Colt automatic under the loose fitting colorful Filipino barong he habitually wore, had the dealer's wariness of undercover narcs and at first played dumb and refused Bennie's attempted buy. But the unblinking glacial stare from Bennie's eyes made him change his mind. And quick. The Yaqui was a tough street wise thirty year old ex-con and there wasn't much that could put a fright into him. But this strange man with the Devil's eyes? This guy, the Yaqui dealer's guts screamed at him, was not someone to mess with, gun or no gun. And he sure as hell was no narc. The Yaqui coughed up the peyote buttons in a hurry and was more than relieved to see Bennie Dewclaw's back disappear around a shabby Tucson street corner.

On the steep slopes of a Sonoran mountain Decleau climbed to a lonely unvisited meadow that he'd discovered several weeks earlier in his furtive roamings through the countryside of southeast Arizona and northwest Sonora. Just a few hundred feet below the summit, with grand views of the surrounding grassy valleys and of distant night-lit Mexican towns, it was an enchanting secluded glen with a small perennial spring that seemed to Bennie to be laughing with joy at his arrival. It was a place of mountain wild flowers and birdsong, of mixed aspen and Chihuahua pine and barberry bushes. He knew at once it was a place of power. The spirits were there. He was sure of it. The spirits of the Old Ones. Spirits.

Apache spirits.

He took the peyote and each time made the same gut wrenching leap from nausea to being violently ill, and, when the racking projectile vomiting ended and he was cleansed, gave himself over to the dancing colors, the visions and the presence of the spirits of the Old Ones. On his third trip to his secret mountain sacred place he built a small fire just as the night slowly darkened the secret world where Diablo felt the power of the ancient world all around him. He took the peyote, chewed it with rapt intensity for a long while until it was little but bits of stringy dry fiber, and spit it out. The sickness came and went and as Diablo sat by the fire, feeding it with collected bits of deadwood from the surrounding forest, he suddenly froze. A small troupe of long-tailed coatimundis, adapted to humans from the Tarahumaras in a nearby village regularly feeding them, crept in from the darkness and sat down one by one near the fire, their purple eyes glistening in the firelight. Diablo knew they were the spirits of the ancestors come to visit him. He settled into a cross legged sitting position. And watched.

And listened.

His own personal vision finally appeared to him on his last trip to the Mexican mountaintop. On this last trip he did not take the peyote. He prayed and meditated for three days, fasting, taking into his body nothing but the sweet cold water from the mountain spring. At the end of the third day, as a violent thunderstorm streaked the heavens with numinous flashes of zigzagging lightning bolts over the ancestral haunts of the Nde in the towering Sierra Madre to the south, he knew. He was to be a warrior. A warrior who would pick up and carry the bright flaming torch of the ancient traditions. Like those who had broken away from the reservations a century earlier and wandered these same ancestral mountains, Bennie Dewclaw had himself broken out of the reservation and taken to the wild. And soon, very soon, the warrior would strike.

He now knew why. But he did not know how. Or when. Not yet.

But he did know it could not be far off.

The reservation that Bennie Dewclaw had fled from was a universe removed from the reservations of a century earlier. Nana, Ulzana, Vittorio, Naiche, Juh, Loco, Lozen, Geronimo, and all the others, they had been raised in the old ways and fled the humiliation of reservation confinement. But Bennie Dewclaw was raised in boondocks Ontario and moved to high rise Chicago and the reservation he had fled from was the Cook County Mental Health Center. As Dewclaw's delusions about himself and his self image as an Apache grew in intensity, as he maniacally devoured every book he could get his hands on about the Apaches and the old Southwest, and especially after he had legally changed his name from Decleau to Dewclaw and started talking about violently avenging the wrongs done to the Apaches, his wife became so frightened she knew she had to do something. With the assistance of a sympathetic shirttail relative who was licensed to practice law in the State of Illinois she managed to get him committed to the psychiatric hospital for observation.

The commitment was the final catalyst for Dewclaw. He came within a few millimeters of severing the jugular of an elderly night security guard and made his escape, hitchhiking to Arizona. He picked up rides with sleepy eyed truckers on Interstates 55 and 70 and finally robbed and brutally beat the overweight gay truck driver who picked him up near Kansas City. He used the money to outfit himself in Tucson. Then he walked south into the mountains and found his hiding place in the blind canyon. He had been there since early spring, a full half year. Six months of learning to live in the wild. It wasn't at all difficult, was in fact easier than the rugged woodsman's life of his youth in the frigid Ontario hinterlands. He took to outdoor life in the mountain Southwest so naturally that in the fragment of his mind that still hung precariously connected to his past he knew deep down that he had found his true self. He grew hard and wily in the wild. In a matter of a few short weeks he began the first raids.

As any self respecting traditional Apache from the old days would.

Nub Riley piled the kids in the family's venerable Toyota and took them down to the hilly winding highway and waited for the ancient diesel belching Tombstone school bus to pick them up. Then he drove slowly back through the rare centuries old big trees of the mesquite bosque his far seeing great grandfather had spared from the axe. There weren't many of the huge mesquites left. Most were thoughtlessly cut down a century earlier in the optimistic pioneer exultation of his ancestors' peers. Would he have been any different in those days? What seemed rapacious now seemed like golden opportunities back then. He was dwelling on that thought as he turned into the hard packed dirt driveway of the homey old ranch house where he grew up. They kept the place as low key and unmodern as they could. They liked the generation-spanning feeling of time and place it gave them.

Peg was waiting. He'd had his time alone to think the night before. Now she would want to hear what was on his mind. He couldn't blame her. How could their marriage stay strong if they didn't share with each other? She was at the breakfast table, already dressed in sweatshirt, blue jeans and boots for a day of ranch work, sipping at a fragrant cup of freshly brewed raspberry herbal tea. Peg didn't care for coffee. Even in her worn ranch work clothes Nub thought she looked beautiful and even sexy in her robust outdoors way. He shuffled through the door and pulled out a battered chair at the worn kitchen table that was already ancient in his father's day. He sat down heavily. She looked at him with her quick hazel eyes.

"You ready?" He smiled gently and nodded.

"I reckon so", he said. And then he began to tell her about his seismic meeting with Jim Garret and what they had decided to do.

### Garret

When the Sun Belt migration hit the San Pedro Valley Jim Garret started making some serious money from land speculation. He used it to build a house for his family a dozen miles east of Tombstone close to the abruptly upthrust slopes of the fabled Dragoon Mountains. The same mountains that once were home to the equally fabled Apache chief, Cochise, and where his body still lay somewhere secretly hidden by his people, the Chokonen Chiricahua Nde. Jim's home was an expensive one, but tasteless, not unusual for the newly monied. Jim was the son of a copper miner. He wasn't raised in poverty because the unions had already come in. But their life had been simple, without ornamentation, without sophistication, and, Garret always had believed, without substance, either. He lacked the perspective of his elders, who'd known empty bellies and hard times in the Great Depression and were happy for steady work of any kind. Theirs had been a very different America and Jim never really did understand or appreciate the difference.

Jim Garret wanted to escape that physically grueling, humdrum life as far back as he could remember. And he had. Being a wheeler dealer and a hustler could string out a man's nerves, but it beat the hell out of a lifetime in the mines. Especially now that they were laid off or on strike so much and many of the mines were played out. Jim Garret had no regrets about that part of his life. He did regret losing his wife and kids. Especially the kids. Marge packed them all off to Los Angeles. She wanted no part of Jim Garret or his isolated house in the ominous brooding shadow of the Dragoons or his life in the San Pedro Valley. Marge Garret wanted the glamour and the comfort and conveniences of the big city. The generous divorce settlement had made it possible for her to do just that. She went back to college, got herself a degree in cinematography and married a low level producer in the film industry. Garret never saw his kids anymore. The only time he ever heard from them was when they wanted money. He always sent it.

Garret was alone in his big house, except for the occasional parties and more than occasional visits by ladies of his acquaintance. Sometimes the loneliness bothered him. The worst times were when he was coming down off a drug. It was a horrible empty feeling to be down and sick and depressed and having only miles of empty countryside around him. The austere stark beauty of the countryside compounded the desolation of his mood. A time or two he'd even thought of suicide. Another time or two he'd thought about going into a drug rehabilitation program or maybe A.A. But then he'd pick up his fiddle and start playing and get lost in the intoxicating sensual magic of the old time music of his Kentucky hillbilly ancestors and forget about everything else.

Until the next time.

### Skarp

Clad in a T-shirt with a Chicago Bulls logo, bib overalls and timeworn work boots, Skarp left his room in the otherwise unoccupied dusty ranch bunkhouse and headed for the horse barn, chased by the scolding chatter of a family of ill tempered resident cactus wrens. He tended the horses, a rare smile touching his dour lips at their friskiness in the cool of the morning, then went stolidly into the stone built ranch house to fix Benning Goman's breakfast. Skarp wasn't surprised when his boss came grumpily out of the study after a few hours of sleep on his ridiculously pricey leather couch. His aloof patrician employer often did that. The study, and the precious collection of antiquities in the locked room adjoining it, often drew Goman's attention until the late hours.

Skarp didn't think much about it. So long as Goman continued to pay him as handsomely as he did, what the man did with his time was none of Skarp's bloody business. Skarp had his sense of priorities finely honed. Life at Goman's ranch was light years better than the Fort Grant prison where he'd done five years for almost killing a man in a drunken Nogales bar fight. He was paid reasonably well, the work was not particularly demanding, and there was all the hell raising and womanizing he could ever want just an hour down the road on the Mexican side of Nogales. Besides, Skarp actually liked working with the horses. It beat the hell out of a shadow life stuck behind the bars of the dreary Fort Grant prison.

### Peg

Peg Riley didn't say anything for what seemed to Nub like an ominously long time. He was hoping that this wasn't the lull before the storm. The Peg Riley storm. And Nub well knew she could raise one hell of an angry tempest when some damn fool--usually him--hit the wrong button and set her off. Peg held the tea cup in her hands and silently stared into it. So far as she knew, her husband had never done anything which would make her ashamed of him. Not that she thought digging up a few pots from some old ruin was something to be ashamed of. People had been doing that all over the Southwest for a hundred years. What worried her was that it was illegal and the government had recently put teeth into what had been toothless laws about plundering public lands. If the Forest Service caught him, Nub could very well end up doing some jail time. And that _was_ something Peg Riley would be ashamed of.

"All right", Peg Riley finally said. "lf you're that damn set on doing it, then _do_ it." Her quick hazel eyes flashed at him and her unpainted full lips were turned down in a deep scowl. "But I want you to know that I don't like the idea one damn bit that you could get caught and go to jail." Then she wheeled around, stomped through the door and slammed it so hard behind her that a pair of cottontails munching on bits of Johnson grass in the yard outside jumped straight up in the air and then took off in a panicked dead run.

Goman's fork lay untouched on the table. Not a hint of movement towards the hearty country breakfast Skarp had hustled up in Goman's well furnished gleaming modern kitchen. He couldn't eat anything. Not the steak. Or the eggs. Or the hash browns or tomatoes or fresh peppers. Not even his sweet toothed favorite, Skarp's oven fresh sourdough bread with homemade peach marmalade. On most mornings Goman had the rapacious appetite of a Mongol horde exploding out of the hungry eastern steppes. Not today. His lust on this peaceful early autumn morning was for pots, not food. His blood was up. An adventure was unveiling. A real adventure. Not a book. Not a historical tour. Not the emasculated so-called adventure travel so popular with other members of the Sonoita Country Club.

No. This was real. Exquisitely real. He felt like a sprinter at the blocks, nervous and excited, swept into an adrenalin rush, impatient for the starting gun. His thoughts bounced between musing on various possible future scenarios, the realities of the present and his imaginings over the Mimbres past. The antique German grandfather clock in his den was still well on the unchimed side of 8:00 when Goman gently picked up the classic black on white Mimbres pot he had carefully packed in an insulated container the night before and went outside. He climbed into the roomy leather-covered back seat of his '82 Cadillac De Ville, nodding agreeably at the deep throated rumble of its powerhouse aluminum block V8 engine. Goman would continue his musings and maybe catch up on his sleep while Skarp drove them to the meeting with Meyer in Los Angeles. The lean Arizona country gentleman wasn't about to risk the Mimbres on an airplane. He dozed off just after Skarp pulled onto Arizona State Highway 82 and the beginning of the day long drive to L.A. through a crazy mixture of soaring mountains, endless barren wastes and the hurtling metallic chaos of the Los Angeles freeways.

The Mexican border, that schizophrenic human scratched line across the sunburnt desert landscape that both separated and conjoined two disparate nations and cultures, was hardly a few miles from Bennie Dewclaw's camp. But that was only by mere rectilinear crow flight measurement. The actual footsore distance was several lung challenging miles greater on the plunging crest trail with its spectacular fifty mile vistas from where it snaked over the tops of the mountains. The trail, the one used by almost everyone who came into the mountains, was where people were the most likely to be. Bennie was a secretive shadow, a specter, an ephemeron of a presence who didn't want to go bumping into anyone. He shied away from the traveled trails in much the same the way the Nde of the ancient days had given wide berth to the dens of the great bears.

There was also a hard trail through the mountains that he thought probably was an old mountain goat track. The goats were long gone but the track was still there. The scree-filled steep slopes made it dangerous and difficult. Good in Bennie's mind. Hard for him would be even harder for others. The mountain trail became Dewclaw's secondary escape route. He trekked the trail repeatedly until he knew every crook and bend in case he needed to make a precipitate exit. No free ranging Apache would camp anywhere in the mountains without scouting out an escape hole.

Dewclaw used the trail once to make a quick raid into Mexico, just as the old time Apaches had done. He came down on an isolated farm near the border in Sonora, killed a small pig and carried it back with him to his camp. It was too much time and effort for what didn't amount to much and he knew it. Dewclaw's main escape route was a lower mountain trail that was longer but much swifter to travel. He could streak down this easier track and outdistance any pursuers until he crossed the border and ducked into any of a dozen hides he'd scouted out. The lowland trail was an Indian track many years ago and was later used by cattlemen. Sometimes ranchers leasing federal land would be back in the foothills tending their stock and would use the trail. They were no problem. He viewed them with an acidic contempt. How could an ordinary cowboy hope to match wits with a wily wild Apache on his home ground? He considered them clumsy and ignorant in the ways of the wild. And, from the distant perspective of those who had once lived wholly off this land, they in fact were.

Dewclaw carried out a few night time raids into Mexico using the lowland trail, but they were little more than nostalgic recreations of the old time Apache raids than anything of much value to him. The common people in Sonora were dirt poor and the pickings slim to none. He concentrated his raiding on the growing settlements along the American side of the border in the canyons of the southern Huachucas--Hunter, Ash, Ramsey, Miller and Carr. There the pickings were anything but slim. The American canyon people lived fat lives. With each passing day Dewclaw's memories of his former life faded further away. He was becoming what he had always wanted to be. A wild Apache raider.

Just like in the old days.

Jim Garret's place was ugly. Even Jim agreed. The place was uglier than the south end of a longhorn going north. Some of his Tombstone buddies called it Garret's Folly. He had never liked it, but his ex-wife had designed the place, calling it her dream house, and Garret had reluctantly given in and gone along with her plans, though he privately thought her dream was really a nightmare. Garret might have loathed the house itself, but he was deeply, mystically enchanted with the location. That was the bargain with his ex-wife. He picked the spot, she picked the house. And the spot he picked, in the shadow of the abruptly rising jagged peaks of what was not so long ago the home ground of Cochise's Apaches, the Dragoon Mountains, was at times ethereally beautiful.

Mule deer grazed on the lush grama, Arizona cottontop and green sprangletop grasses at the base of the mountains, Gambel's and scaled quail marched daily with bobbing-headed determination through his yard, hawks and eagles ranged over the slopes above and javelina nightly visited his flower beds and cactus garden, causing him to try–with mixed success–to fence off the plants from the foraging peccaries. The coyotes serenaded him every dawn and dusk with their wild raucous caterwauling and at times all the creatures of the dark would stop cold when the primeval scream of the mountain lion split the night. Jim Garret thought the ugly house was a small price to pay for living here. Of all his friends, only Nub Riley really understood that.

Jim would often sit outside in a weathered handmade Mexican wicker chair made as a wedding present by his cousin Chuy in Cananea, a glass of flavored iced tea or maybe a cold beer in his hand, and watch the wonderful cosmic magic of a sunrise or a sunset over the ethereal slopes of the Dragoons. This was the deepest reason Garret had chosen this place on the flank of the historic mountains to build a home. There was something beyond ordinary reality about it, a powerful subliminal charisma, that drew him inexorably to its slopes. Cochise's body was still there, Jim knew, secretly entombed by his people for all time, and sometimes Garret thought he could hear voices coming from the mountain. He would raptly listen, then catch himself and shake his head almost in embarrassment. It was only the wind.

But he never was really sure.

Then the world shattered and crashed in pieces to the marital ground and his wife was gone with the kids and he was stuck with her nightmare of a dream house. And the hulking eyesore was expensive to maintain. The payments alone would have busted the budget of most of the locals and, with the other costs, made the place a money pit. The place was an albatross to Jim Garret. The house itself wasn't worth it. No way. But it was a symbol to Jim, a palpable hulking edifice proving that he had escaped the mines and the grubby little daily tedium of the blue collar worker. To have let the house go would have been like admitting failure.

And that was something that Jim Garret couldn't and wouldn't face.

### Water

In the latter half of the Twentieth Century the Anglos and Hispanic Americans of the Southwest liked to think of themselves as the civilizers of the wastelands. Sprawling cites metastasized in what had been desert. Subdivisions, small towns, hobby farms, all popped up in what had been sparsely populated range land. Much of the best farm land, scarce as it already was, disappeared, gobbled up by a numbing juggernaut of subdivisions, sprawling malls, ubiquitous chain stores and restaurants and untold thousands of paved parking lots. In a calculated roll of the environmental dice, other land, more marginal for agriculture, was at the same time opened to cultivation. And successful cultivation, at least at first. The secret to the success was what had always powered the engine of the Southwest. The ubiquitous liquid almost everyone took for granted. Oil? No. Not here. Not in the desert. It was water. The Americans drove deep wells and pumped the precious liquid to the surface to quench the thirst of the fields and the cities. Huge amounts of water were used to run the living machines of the civilizers of the desert. Every time a toilet flushed, every time any clothes or dishes were washed, every bath, every shower, every unnatural green lawn and garden, all the vast fields of cotton and alfalfa and winter vegetables, all these gulped down more of the ever diminishing supplies of water, much of it irreplaceable fossil water.

At first only a few souls gave it much brain time. Skeptical hydrologists. Recalcitrant old timers. Habitual worriers. Tree huggers. Then, as the hydrologists' warnings gained wider public knowledge, more people began to think. The water? How long would it last? Some even began to say that it couldn't sustain for long the present population, much less the explosive growth that had already started and was expected to expand exponentially well into the next century. The water worriers' dire predictions fell on deaf ears. Few people heeded the warnings and those who did give it much thought usually came up with the evolutionary model to explain and rationalize what they called a simple minded extrapolation of the present into the future. Civilization evolved, they contended, and the first beginnings of a broad based, vigorous desert civilization necessarily involved the mining of fossil water. True, it was being pumped out far faster than it was being replaced and the reserves were diminishing. But that was true of all non-renewable natural resources, and was a risk inherent in any high civilization.

This argument went on to say that once a solid base of civilization was built using the fossil water, then new technologies, new ways of living, would be found. Water would be conserved. Water would be piped in from somewhere, water would be trapped from the mountain snow melt and the summer storm runoff, water would be desalinized at the Gulf of California or the Gulf of Mexico and piped overland to the Southwest. There were even those who spoke of tapping the Mississippi and piping its waters from east Texas to the arid Southwest.

But these were still all ideas of the future, wishful prognostications. For now, and this was the Sunday punch of the evolutionary model, civilization could simply not develop in the bone dry Southwest to any significant extent without the mining of the fossil water. And this almost no one doubted. If you wanted your shining city in the desert you had to pay the price. And the price was fossil water.

The first land hungry pioneers bold enough to venture into what was still the contested home ground of the Apache in the San Pedro Valley built their homes and farms and ranches along the river itself. It wasn't much of a river, and sometimes it was dry, but at least it was water and at least it ran most of the time. And even in the dry times there was water, literally a liquid buried treasure, in the underlying riverine aquifer only a few feet beneath the surface. The rugged and tough minded ranchers and farmers of the early days pulled out their picks and shovels and were able to laboriously hand dig shallow wells, hook simple pump driven windmills to them and have a reliable supply of water. The other places where there was water were in the canyons of the mountain ranges all around the valley. The canyons of the mountain ranges were also the places frequented by the natives--the Apaches, the Nde--and where the Nde plunked down their temporary rancherias. Like the Spaniards and the Mexicans before them, more than a few of the first Anglo pioneers met an ugly death in the hands of Nde raiders--or at the hands of those pretending to be Apaches.

But the Apaches finally were beaten into submission--in no small measure because numbers of their own people defected to the Anglo soldiers and helped to track the holdouts to their mountain aeries. The ranchers and miners and settlers moved up into the ethnically Nde-cleansed canyons, finding the streams and the springs that afforded them a reliable supply of water. They also found ruins that were already old when the Apaches had first come into the country not too many years after the wandering seafarer Christopher Columbus missed India by half an Earth and blundered into the New World.

The Anglo newcomers couldn't help noticing the unnatural piles of stones that marked where ancient pit houses had been or the holes pecked into boulders along the streambeds in the canyons. The first intrepid souls into the mountains were too wary of lurking Apaches to do much snooping. Once the Nde were finally gone, either dead or to imprisonment of one kind or another, the newcomers turned their curiosity to the stones and holes. They dreamed up all kinds of theories about the origins of the piles of stones and manmade holes in the boulders. One fringe fundamentalist religious family was absolutely certain they were left by one of the lost tribes of Israel. The more perceptive folk among the Anglo newcomers realized a different Native American group than the Nde had once lived in these canyons and the stones and holes were the inanimate vestiges of their vanished presence.

They were not alone in that realization. The first scientists and archaeologists to begin exploring the newly opened country of the Southwest arrived and did their own, more or less measured and scientific, turn at snooping in the ruins. But no great interest ever did develop in the prehistoric ruins of southeastern Arizona. They appeared to be small and insignificant. A few sites were dug and some artifacts and information dutifully collected and recorded, but it didn't amount to much. What minor interest there was centered on the existence of Paleolithic hunter gatherers of the San Pedro Valley in great antiquity--the raggedy, short lived people clad in stinking animal skins who so improbably hunted hulking mammoths armed with just spears and guts. The dirt-grubbing prehistory scientists who found the ancients' leavings christened them the Clovis People, a name taken from the location in New Mexico where their traces were first formally documented. What could such a folk have called themselves? Maybe, like so many other native groups, they referred to themselves simply and directly.

They were The People.

The Clovis presence and the later cultures in southeast Arizona drew a scattering of scientific notice, but it was a mere footnote in the history of the Southwest compared to the widespread scholarly and popular interest in the mysterious intriguing prehistoric ruins that remained in the country in and north of the towering Mogollon Rim. In that rough built country thousands of spectacular cliff hugging ruins lay long ago abandoned in the rugged landscape. The Mimbres presence in the San Pedro Valley would undoubtedly have been discovered had anywhere near the energy been spent there as had been north of the Mogollon Rim. But it wasn't, and it was left to boondocks-snooping Jim Garret to stumble on it almost by accident. Any archaeologist or anthropologist would have been taken aback to learn that the Mimbres had sent off a tribal offshoot that had settled in the San Pedro Valley and its surrounding mountains. The anthropological chain of evolution and diffusion would have to be rethought for that small part of the Southwest.

For the scientists, anyhow. To the pothunters the revelation of the Mimbres presence would be of a whole different color. The color of money. An entirely new and untapped source had been found for probably the most highly coveted of prehistoric Southwestern pottery. The Mimbres. Besides the more organized surreptitious professional pothunters, every yahoo, peckerwood, vato and wannabe pothunter in the Southwest would have loaded up his rusty old pickup with digging tools and headed out to the boondocks. Overnight, illicit digs would have sprung up everywhere. Every single site in the entire valley would be scavenged and end up looking as though human pocket gophers had trashed the place. And that meant, from an archaeological as well as an aesthetic point of view, that they would be utterly destroyed. The irreverent pothunters would trash the place but good. And permanently. The concept of historical preservation only made most of them snort in amusement. And those who knew better kept their mouths shut and their bank accounts open.

Benning Goman, despite his dabbling with expensive antiquities taken from illegal digs, did not much care for the thought of what would happen were the presence of a new Mimbres offshoot in southeast Arizona to explode on the screens, airwaves and presses of the mass media. The tall, slender patrician fancied himself a lover of knowledge as well as of beauty. It went against his aesthetic grain to have an entire area, with its largely unprobed raw data in the numerous scattered ruins, lost to serious scientific inquiry. Especially to the unwashed rabble he so openly loathed. And most especially if he were not the one to directly benefit from the scavenging.

It was a gentle January winter day. Far to the east the sanguinary clouds of war were billowing menacingly overhead as the nation was about to plunge into a cataclysmic fratricide that would hemorrhage an entire generation's young blood. But here, far to the west, it seemed peaceful that mild winter day. The narrow valley, hemmed in by elevations ranging from hilly to downright mountainous, was post card beautiful as well as tranquil. The cold waters of Sonoita Creek sparkled in the sun as they followed the imperative of Mother Earth's gradients leading to the Santa Cruz Valley and the river of the same name that flowed north to Tucson. Huge, wide-crowned cottonwoods lined the river, stripped of the last of their autumn leaves by the winter winds, but still home to flocks of overwintering northern birds. The creek was within a hefty stone's throw of where a young boy was tending a small herd of livestock. The animals lazily grazed the native grasses bordering the tree lined creek in what was then called the New Mexico Territory but would soon become the southeastern lip of Arizona Territory. Nearby was the fertile chunk of grassland and mesquite bosque where in a few historic years the first of the Goman family would put down their roots and establish the family ranch where Benning Goman still lived more than a century later.

Peaceful here, at this moment, in this pristine bit of rare riparian valley countryside, but the reality was that it was the year 1861 and a time of roiling turbulence in the dry western land that would one day be Arizona. Tensions were growing between the native Apaches–the Nde–and the newcomer Americans over mutual depredations, some imagined, others all too real. Arizona was a powder keg about to blow every bit as much as the eastern United States. And on this mild southern Arizona winter day a 12 year old boy tending the family livestock in the beautiful Sonoita Creek drainage would be the spark that set off the Arizona powder keg.

They seemed to come out of nowhere. One moment they were not there. Then, apparitions that were not apparitions at all but– _¡Dios mío!–_ real Apaches, were within grabbing distance. The boy, 12 year old Felix Ward, hardly had time to react before they had him. Scary looking men. Wild. Dangerous. Men such as those his own grandfather had fought against in Mexico a dozen years earlier. Felix Ward carried the last name of his stepfather, Irish born John Ward, but he was no Irishman. Not by birth. His biological family was Mexican. Some said he might even have been part Apache. Culturally he was a borderland mixture. His widowed mother, Jesúsa Martinez, had partnered up with expatriate Irishman John Ward on his Sonoita Creek ranch. And that was where Felix Martinez, now Felix Ward, would meet his fate.

The bitter irony was that the rest of the incident, later to be known as the Bascom Affair to the Anglos and the Cutting of the Tent to the Apaches, was based on one whoppingly tragic false assumption. John Ward and the local U.S. military garrison at nearby Fort Buchanan assumed that the Indians who had kidnapped young Felix Ward and run off with the Ward family's livestock were the Chiricahuas, an Apache tribe whose home country was a hundred miles to the east and whose leader, Cochise, was soon to become famous–or, to most of the growing population of Anglos in Arizona, infamous. It was towards the Chiricahuas that the military's punitive expedition headed. Half a hundred of them, hard bitten regular soldiers mounted on sturdy Army mules, but unfortunately led by an inexperienced officer fixated on the false assumption of the Chiricahuas' culpability for the kidnapping. And from that false assumption about the Chiricahuas would spiral a human catastrophe that led to a brutal years-long war and hundreds of often horrific deaths. The inexperienced young officer, 2nd Lieutenant George Bascom, a Kentucky born West Point graduate brand new to the Arizona frontier, blundered his way into a cultural morass that quickly morphed into an epochal human tragedy the first act of which culminated with the US Army hanging their Apache captives–Cochise's brother and two nephews, along with three other hapless Apaches. That did it. Just like back east in the United States.

It was war.

While for the next ten years the Chiricahua Apaches and the Anglos were locked in bitter deadly combat that began with the kidnapping of Felix Ward, the boy was growing to manhood in a different Apache tribe's camps far to the north. Felix was a fortunate age when the northern Apaches crept onto to his Irish stepfather's Sonoita Creek ranch. A year or two older and the Apaches might have killed him. Instead they took him prisoner and carried him back north to their own country where he was raised as an Apache. He would die a half century later an old man on the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona just when Europe was beginning its own bloody work of murdering an entire generation of young men in the First World War.

Felix Ward died a quiet, largely unnoticed, death on the Fort Apache reservation, yet his fate was already well known. Years earlier, Felix, as a young man, resurfaced from among the northern Apaches and became a scout and translator for the U.S. Army in the final wars against the last of the Chiricahua and other Apache recalcitrants. His new identity would be inscribed in the western history books. But not as Felix Ward. He took a new name. A curious name. One that very likely spoke for itself.

Mickey Free.

From the comfortable armchair viewpoint of a century later, Benning Goman's thoughts wandered from the Mimbres to the Apaches and then to the Ward kidnapping. He'd been hearing about those distant days ever since he was a toddler at his mother's knee. Benning thought the entire mucked up Bascom Affair ludicrous and even droll. A viewpoint his incendiary great grandfather, who had many a close scrape back in those turbulent bloody days, would have found flat out stupid–which, despite his several flaws, Benning Goman was not. He was just a product of his own time and place. As was his great grandfather. And as was Mickey Free. Goman knew about the Bascom Affair, the Apache wars and Mickey Free. What he didn't know was that his house was literally plunked down smack on the middle of the trail that the kidnapped boy and rustled livestock were spirited away on by a party of northern Apaches raiding far south of their mountain fastnesses. But what did it matter? It was all history. Ancient history.

Or so he thought.

Goman's mind wandered back to the present. He was a student of civilizations, of archaeology and anthropology. Had been ever since his undergrad days at Stanford when he spent a summer as a student intern on a dig at Quintana Roo in the Yucatán. His greatest interest was closest to home--the American Southwest, but Benning also had minor interests in Mesoamerica and the Indus Valley. The widespread mainstream fixation with Pharaonic Egypt he considered both manic and tedious. He far preferred the American Southwest and could more than hold his own on the subject against at least the average archaeologist. He had one of the most extensive private libraries in the Southwest on prehistoric peoples, subscribed to numerous scholarly journals, and kept up with the latest professional literature in the field. Goman was also very much aware of the evolutionary model for the development of civilization in the Southwest. He had taken pains to familiarize himself with the implications of modern development as much as prehistoric development, and even occasionally lectured locally on the subject. He was of course repelled by the very idea of development. He preferred his world to stay as it was. And for him to be at its center.

But where his views on modern civilization were vocal and public, his views on prehistoric civilizations were much less so. The infighting among the professionals, and the disdain with which they treated the amateur without mainstream academic credentials, grated on him fully as much as the common oafish masses disgusted him. Goman reserved his greatest scorn for that body of contemporary archaeologists who sought to validate their science in the public eye by attaching to it notions of social relevance. It smacked far too much of some convoluted Marxist pollution of an otherwise reasonably untainted science.

Not that Goman didn't think they had a point. They did. Any dolt could see that the rise and fall of previous civilizations in the desert had to be of direct relevance to the future of the current civilization. Natural forces moved in much more monumental cycles than the merely human and it was likely that the same hydrological and other forces that had undone the Anazasi, the Hohokam, the Mogollon, could just as easily undo the American Southwest of the 21st Century. When you ran out of water, Benning Goman knew with acidic certainty, you also ran out of luck. Thus the opportunists among the archaeologists and anthropologists justified their sciences and hustled funding with the backbone argument of social relevance. By finding what had brought down the civilizations that had gone before, they argued with telling effect, their own civilizations could better manage their own futures. Even Benning Goman had to admit it was a solid argument that made good sense. And made a dandy justification for funding.

But Goman still detested archaeologists who didn't have the professional chutzpah to stand up for their discipline for its own sake and had to resort to social relevance to justify themselves and their science. It wouldn't disconcert the imperious Goman one whit if the presence of the Mimbres offshoot remained a secret. To hell with them and their inbred academic pretensions. Anyhow, he rationalized, at best the general knowledge of the previously unknown Mimbres expansion would only modify a minor part of Southwestern history. Would it really matter that the Mimbres presence remain secret? Benning Goman would bloody well not go toddling off like the dutiful little amateur and obsequiously report the Mimbres find to the nearest officially sanctified archaeologist. He would be keeping this secret to himself, at least for the time being. But there was one small problem.

He had to find out where the goddamn site was.

### Reiser

Twenty five years earlier Taos born Max Reiser did the cap and gown walk at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and emerged chock full of idealism and enthusiasm. He chose a career of public service in a field he cherished as deeply as any woman he had ever loved. At the fuzzy cheeked age of twenty one Max Reiser became a park ranger for the National Forest Service. He would spend his life living in and protecting the wildernesses, forests and historic scenery of the Southwest. Max felt like he'd found a temporal heaven on God's green earth. It was a dream come true.

Life with the Forest Service fulfilled that dream for the first ten years. But after five more years the dream was tattering. Other men and women came into the Service after him, worked with him, learned, were promoted and moved on. Yet Max Reiser never seemed to get anywhere. The Forest Service, like any other organization, had a gallopingly wide variety in the abilities of its employees. Some looked like gods in their snappy uniforms but were as empty as a desert arroyo in the dry season. Reiser sourly noted that some of those good looking but empty people were promoted far over him. And there were others. The ones who could talk the leg off a one legged man but knew very little about their profession. And there were still others--the silver spoon folk who were the sons or daughters or otherwise connected to those who had insider clout.

They all scampered up the promotional ladder above Max Reiser and he had to wonder why he was still on the bottom rungs. Had he been brilliant or even just extraordinarily talented, Max would probably have been able to rise above his shortcomings. Unfortunately for Max, he was neither, being a man of only slightly more than average abilities. The fates hadn't dealt him much of a hand in the game of life. Had he been a looker or a talker or well connected, he still might have risen to an intermediate level of responsibility. He was at least fundamentally competent. But Max had the misfortune of being a dumpy little man of undistinguished appearance with an instantly forgettable face. Nor had he ever been able to talk to people or present himself very well. So Max Reiser slid toward retirement with almost nothing of distinction behind him to mark his career. By the twentieth year this began to aggravate him with an ever increasing abrasiveness. And, to make things that much worse, in the same year his second wife left him, alone and childless, to face the bleak future alone.

The tentative diagnosis of the psychiatrist who gave Bennie Dewclaw his initial examination at the Cook County Mental Health Center was as gloomy as the drizzling day, another in a string of chilled-to-the-bone rainy gray days made even grimmer by a steady icy wind off Lake Michigan. Dewclaw, the woman strongly suspected, was at the very edge of moving into a psychopathic world of utter delusion. Her preliminary findings were that the prognosis for Dewclaw was bleak and that he would require long and intensive institutionalization. But whatever edge Bennie Dewclaw was drawing close to, it had not stopped him from intuiting what the interviews and tests with the flinty eyed woman in the white coat with the tape recorder and notepad would mean. The very night that the tests were completed he brutally beat a sixty year old guard, cut his throat almost to the jugular and escaped into the night. The consulting psychiatrist in Cook County hit the psychological bull's-eye with her diagnosis. In the wild outdoor environment he was living in Dewclaw slipped farther and farther away from the world of his real origin and went deeper and deeper into the world of his fantasies. His fantasies were transmuting into his realities. The Mexican woodcutter Jesús Teran was the first to experience Dewclaw's violent jump from fantasy to reality. Teran was the first.

He would not be the last.

Lucius Meyer's cool was blown. The squat dweller of the economic twilight was plainly astonished. The Mimbres pot was even more than he could have hoped for. The sight of it took away his usual penchant for dissembling and the cash flush shady businessman took to studying it with a slavering absorption. Benning Goman smiled smugly to himself. Meyer obviously did not have his own Mimbres and he would be able to get a very nice price for it. A hungry man, he thought, is rarely a judicious man. Goman patiently waited for Meyer to finish fawning over the pot so that the haggling might begin. Goman could barely keep a smile from sneaking onto his face. There were a good many Lucius Meyers in the world.

Jim Garret drove into Nub Riley's ranch yard in the middle of a lovely sun blessed southeast Arizona early autumn morning, startling a flock of white winged doves in the nearby trees and sending a pair of raccoons drinking at the river scampering off into the seep willows in a big four-footed hurry. Jim's gaudy '81 Continental Town Car was out of alignment again from the bad roads Garret had to use to get to and from his house, but that didn't stop him from driving the car. It, like the house, was a symbol to him. Jim Garret in the big Lincoln, and Jim Garret in the big house, gave the rest of the world a clear message. James Sosa Garret, son of a miner, grandson of a miner, descendant of hardscrabble Mexican peons, wild-riding Spanish colonial vaqueros, Basque sheepherders, a bunch of moonshining Kentucky hillbillies and a father/son team of Pancho Villa-style banditos, had made the big time.

"You still drive'n that big city car?" Nub said as he came out of the house. Garret grinned and jerked his head at Nub's pickup. "Yep. You still driving that old dinosaur bucket of bolts?" Nub tried to grin back as he walked to his old friend's side. It didn't work. He looked nervous. And awkward.

"O. K., Jim", he said, his face now somber. "What are we gonna need and when are we gonna need it?"

_Damn!_ Meyers' eyes bugged out. The man was normally popeyed anyhow and Goman thought, with barely suppressed amusement, that he looked like a pale carp with a wispy fringe of sandy hair. Meyer's devious scammer's mind half expected a fraud or some kind of elaborate flim flam orchestrated by the blueblood jerk Goman. Hadn't he pulled off more than a few nifty hustles himself? But then Meyer laid eyes and hands on the Mimbres vessel. Any hesitancy or suspicion of fraud fled his mind, swept away by a singular crystalline recognition. Not the faintest glimmer of doubt remained in his suspicious mind. This was genuine! The real deal. A goddamn genuine Classic Mimbres Black on White, done with the characteristically superb workmanship of that long vanished river valley people. A finely drawn likeness of a wild turkey was in the center of the bowl. His hands suddenly flew away from the Mimbres and gesticulated explosively in open palmed agitation towards the heavens. Good God! There was no kill hole! Lucius Meyer was almost beside himself with excitement. He would never have dared to hope that he could put his hands on such a fine Mimbres specimen. The pot was flawless. The pot was perfect. And the pot was going to be his! Benning Goman smiled beatifically as he watched Meyer. Goman neglected mentioning the second Mimbres carefully snuggled into his safe at home. Or that it was even better than this one.

Quite a bit better, actually, Goman gloated to a private audience of one--himself.

They went by the generic name of Anglos, though they were actually a hodgepodge of peoples and ethnicities and races. What unity they had came from most of them speaking the language of the ancestral Anglo-Saxons of Mother England. After these so called Anglos avalanched into Arizona in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Huachuca Mountains experienced a beehive flurry of intrusive human activity. The settlers were there. The farmers and ranchers, the squatters, the fugitives and hermits and castoffs and runaways, the loggers and the sawmills, the copper and gold and silver miners. Nor were they the first intruders into the long-held country of the Native Americans. Centuries earlier the Spaniards had tried to mine gold and silver in the canyons close to what was to become the Mexican border. The obsessive search for gold continued into the present. One stubbornly anachronistic shaggy bearded man still worked a small claim in one of the southern canyons, and an extractive industries conglomerate was considering plans to reopen one of the old mines. But most of the human activity in the mountains was long gone and the mountains were under the jealous protective eye of the Forest Service's Coronado National Forest division.

The Forest Service had long since removed almost all of the last stubborn holdouts among the human remnants from the old days and stopped cold the creeping scourge of mountain vacation homes before many were built. The Forest Service razed most of the old buildings and other structures, crumbling relics of the mining and lumbering days. What few remained were in ruins. A few of the lower canyons had people living in them at the foothills level beyond the boundaries of the Coronado National Forest, and the northern part of the range was in the U.S. Army's Fort Huachuca military reservation. Otherwise the core of the mountains was empty of people. The only exceptions were a handful of hardy souls who'd managed to hang on despite Forest Service restrictions--mainly those where someone in the murky legal past had the clout to get their properties grandfathered. Summertime hikers were the major living hominid ingredient in the mountains, and that meant something directly crucial to Bennie Dewclaw. The Forest Service had constructed an extensive network of hiking trails. Those, along with old trails going back to sure footed Indian days, provided a network through which Dewclaw could move fluidly through the mountains and slip down in every single one of the canyons.

Dewclaw learned how to avoid the occasional hikers. Most stayed away from the more difficult trails and those few who didn't were less than graceful and could be seen and heard from long distances. They rarely camped overnight. He could move down the trails in daylight at most times or travel quietly at night when there were too many humans about. Bennie Dewclaw found it darkly amusing. The Forest Service had built him a network of raiding trails. The enemy was contributing to his own vulnerability and didn't even know it.

The U.S. Army's Fort Huachuca held sway over the mountains on the northern end of the Huachucas and Dewclaw haunted those parts less frequently. But he did go there sometimes to stare malevolently at the sprawling military reservation and to bitterly reflect on the changes the Anglo invaders had made on the stolen Native American lands. Meadows were turned into picnic grounds or ball fields or tennis courts, brooks dammed, forests felled, the Anglo structures of the fort and adjacent Sierra Vista defiling the landscape nearly as far as the eye could see. Here was a reason to hate, here was something to feed his growing insanity. Did not somebody have to fight back against such callous defiling of the earth? They would never stop until the whole world was paved over.

One day he moved furtively beyond the fort's boundary fence and into the deep interior of the mountainous part of the military reservation. When he found a jutting granite bluff where he could look far out over the San Pedro Valley, and saw the spreading foreign metastasis everywhere making the mountains and valley look subdued and ugly, something snapped in him. The last conscious fragment of his being that was Bennie Dewclaw, deranged high iron construction worker from Chicago, was gone. _Gone!_ He was the last of the wild Apaches. His vision was now complete. He now knew what he was to be called for all time. His dream name came to him in a flash of intuition with such psychic force that it literally rocked him back on his heels and almost made him lose his footing on the lip of the plunging granite bluff. Yes! That was it. His name. His warrior name. In Spanish, like Mangas Coloradas and Geronimo. He was Diablo.

The Devil!

The next day he killed the woodcutter Jesús Teran just over the border on the slopes of the San Jose Mountains of Old Mexico.

Even if Goman had been smugly loquacious over his mental chess match with Meyer, which he wasn't, Skarp still would have had little to say to Goman on the trip back from Los Angeles. In Skarp's world there was no understanding Goman's passion for antiquities. Nor could he fathom why a grown man of wealth and station like Goman would spend so much time and money on old pots. Couldn't you buy a perfectly good pot in almost any store for only a few dollars? Rich men were like that, Skarp thought. Strange. Damn strange. Like spending their lives slavering over old pots. Not that Skarp didn't have his own take on intense personal absorption. Skarp did his own slobbering in the fleshpots of Mexican Nogales. He went there once or twice a month and spent a day or two drinking, smoking the potently hallucinogenic Mexican marijuana and bestializing the cowed and pliable young girls. Occasionally he went deeper into Mexico to places where the prices were cheaper and the girls less jaded by Americans. But that was dangerous, because of the volatile temper of some of the Mexicans, and he did not do it often. Skarp had already done time in American prisons.

He knew better than to land in a Mexican one.

### Migrants

Rolando Jimenez and Jaime Gomez came from a squalid ejido near the town of Alamos in the heat battered far southern part of Sonora. Life was never far from the hungry edge for a Mexican peón there. Times always were hard. And it had grown worse after the peso devaluations. Like so many other Mexicans they had heard the numinous tales of life in the United States. Millions of other Mexicans had trekked there and prospered. Some stayed, some returned with bankrolls to start farms or businesses, others sent money back to their families. Jimenez' cousin César had gone to Denver nearly two years earlier and found a job first in a Chinese restaurant bussing dishes and then in a factory making prefab housing units. Like many of the other Mexicans he lived packed sardine-like with his fellows in slum housing made expensive by the owner's knowledge that they were illegals. César Jimenez remarked bitterly that not all of the greedy owners were gringos. Some, he spat out angrily, were other Mexicans. Just like the predatory greedy bastards at home in Old Mexico.

Still, César Jiminez was a rich young man compared to life in the dirt-poor ejidos of rural southern Sonora. His letters and the money he sent to his family fascinated his cousin Rolando and his friend Jaime Gomez. When César told them in one of his letters that he could get them a job at the same factory he worked at, where the owners hired illegals because they were cheaper and unlikely to cause trouble because of fear of deportation, Rolando and Jaime made their choice. North! They would head north into the land of Mexico's perennial love-hate fascination. The great cornucopia. The land of the gringos

The United States.

Those who had gone before and returned warned them. Beware the smugglers, who often robbed and then abandoned the illegal trekkers in the hot desert to fend for themselves. Scores died from heat and hunger, dehydration and exhaustion, as they wandered lost in the barren fringes of the very country they hoped would be their salvation. Most of the abandoned and hopelessly lost survivors ironically were saved when they were apprehended by the United States Border Patrol.

The pair of suspicious young Mexican peónes would have nothing to do with the smugglers. They tried three times to sneak across the border by themselves. The first time they went across near Douglas in the southeast corner of Arizona and were caught within a half hour. The Border Patrol returned them to Douglas where they joined a score of other would-be migrants in the dejected shuffling walk back into Mexico at Douglas's border twin, Agua Prieta. From there the two men walked a dozen miles to near the town of Naco. There they slipped across the border at night and were almost to Tombstone when the Border Patrol caught them again and escorted them back to Mexico at the Naco border crossing.

The third time they tried to get across the border the men determined to be both more cautious and better prepared. At a dingy cantina on a dusty unpaved alley on the Mexican side of Naco they found a wizened but mentally agile octogenarian named Diego Urquidez. The ancient Urquidez in the days of his youth and mature manhood had smuggled into the United States using the old trails in the Huachucas. A few cervezas loosened up Diego's dry tongue and in relived memories he spoke in animated whispers of the ancient smuggling trails, of the eerie emptiness of the higher mountains, of how a man could easily get to Tucson by traveling carefully, moving through the valleys at night and hiding in the mountains by day, right under the noses of the pinche gringo La Migra. There were a half dozen ranges of mountains and hills besides the Huachucas where they could hide, all mostly empty of humans and all with ancient trails. He even gave them the address of his nephew in Tucson where, for a reasonable fee, they could stay until they made their own arrangements.

After listening to Diego's tales, which included the spry old man several times launching unannounced into vivid alcohol fueled border corridos, which he sang in a surprisingly rich and strong voice, they made their plans. The two Sonoran peasants spent much of their remaining meager supply of cash outfitting themselves for a week's outdoor camping. That night they slipped across the border on one of Diego's remembered trials near the Coronado National Monument and climbed up into the Huachuca Mountains. They figured four or five days at most to make the seventy miles to Tucson, where they'd lose themselves in the large Hispanic population and find a way to get to Denver. This time, they were pretty sure, they would make it into the U.S. without being caught.

They were right. They did make it. Gomez and Jimenez were feeling, if not quite smug, at least confident, as they made camp at dawn in a mixed grove of catclaw acacia and ironwood amid a concealing tangle of sumac and thorny blackbush in a southern canyon of the Huachucas. Somebody would have to walk right on top of them to find their campsite. They had a very good general idea how to move through the Huachucas, cross over the Bonita drainage to the Santa Rita Mountains and move from there to Tucson. Like millions of others among their countrymen over the years, they had successfully slipped into the United States. Prosperity lay just over the horizon.

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

### Mangas

The year was 1863. January. The American nation was ripping itself to pieces in a bloody fratricidal war whose outcome was by no means then clear. After a decade's absence the American prospectors were back at notorious Pinos Altos, where in 1851 Mangas Coloradas had been ignominiously whipped and humiliated by a gaggle of imperious American miners. This new bunch of rough prospectors was guided by the aging legendary mountain man, Tom Walker. Again the miners wanted to talk. Against the urgent stern advice of his fellow Apaches, the hopeful diplomatic Mangas surprisingly agreed. The towering seventy year old Chokenen leader would soon bitterly regret that decision. Although under a white flag of truce, Mangas was betrayed and unceremoniously again taken prisoner. A camp of California U.S. Volunteer Civil War soldiers was nearby. Their leader, General Joseph West, took charge of the prisoner. There was murder in West's eyes. His boss, General Joseph Carleton, commanding the California Volunteers, had ordered a policy of extermination against the Apaches. West dutifully obeyed. Mangas was dead before the next morning, murdered by the soldiers on West's orders. Later Mangas was scalped, beheaded, the flesh boiled off the head and the skull sent east for 'phrenological examination'. Many years later General James West would die an old man from natural causes not long before the dawning of the 20th Century. But, thanks to West's ignorant chauvinistic murder of possibly the greatest of all Apache leaders, many a luckless resident of the Southwest would die not in bed of old age but suffer horrific deaths at the merciless hands of vengeful Apaches.

A century later a cold-eyed insane man living in the rugged mountains of southeast Arizona read of the murder of Mangas in a well thumbed history book he had stolen from a canyon dweller's home. The man was so incensed by it that he was consumed with a blood lust so intense that it was like a commandment rising from deep within his seething outraged innards. He knew he had to kill. Something. Anything. He stormed off into woods, tracked a badger to its den and killed the snarling burly creature with nothing more than a homemade spear, a knife and his wild-eyed rage.

As any prudently cautious seasoned Apache warrior would, Diablo scouted out his home country ridge by ridge and canyon by canyon and then deeper into the specific local environmental idiosyncrasies even down to gully by gully and boulder by boulder. He was every bit as intimately familiar with his new mountain home as he had been with the wild hunting grounds of his youth in remote rural Ontario in those dimming days of memory when he had still been Bernard Decleau. Every Huachucua canyon held its potential hiding place, its alternate escape trail, its source of water. He had raided down nearly every one of them, finding food, weapons and clothing in the homes of the Americans who lived in the lower canyons or beyond the roots of the mountains.

Burglaries were already common and most people blamed them, especially those in the southern canyons close to Mexico, on Mexicans sneaking across the border. How could anyone possibly have even imagined the truth? That a violently insane Canadian Métis whose psyche had morphed into that of an ancient Nde warrior was hiding out in the mountains above? Diablo cached small amounts of emergency supplies from his raids in a half dozen places in the mountains. But most he took to the small cave he'd found completely hidden behind a tangle of chokecherry, sumac and mountain mahogany in the blind canyon above Dancer canyon. There he made his main camp. Diablo ranged the wild mountains for things he could use or eat, using as a guide a book on Southwest wilderness living he'd stolen in a canyon home in his early days of hiding. Also from his burglaries--raids, to his mind--he gradually accumulated sleeping bags, utensils, coffee, flour, sugar, spices and tobacco--which he used only as ceremonial offerings to Ussen. There were stacks of canned food he had stolen and a growing refuse dump in the rear of the cave where he tossed the empty cans and the bones of the animals he trapped or stole. But the most important part of Dewclaw's equipment was carefully stored in a stolen locker he'd lugged one moonlit night from an Ash Canyon home and carefully set up in a dry corner of the shallow cave.

His weapons.

### Parelli

Tony Parelli sometimes wished he was still with the Border Patrol. It had been boring and tedious at times, true, and there had been all that stupid government bullshit to put up with. But at least it had its interesting moments and a man had his security. A government job was for life unless you really screwed it up. Tony Parelli was one of the few who had managed to really screw it up. His expensive gambling habit made him an easy target for the Mexican smugglers who were always looking for the vulnerable and the corruptible. There were barroom whispers of Parelli's gambling and money problems and the trafficantes cautiously approached him. With success. The dollars were too good for Parelli to turn down. It went on for nearly five years before he finally was caught out. The evidence against him was circumstantial and the Border Patrol had recently been burned by bad publicity and didn't want any more. Parelli's bad luck in gambling might have got him in trouble in the first place, but his luck did a fortuitous about face at the very end. He skated with just five years probation and an unceremonious boot out of the Border Patrol.

### Chapter 5

### Zachary

Dominic Zachary's make-a-buck persona walked the dim corridors between the worlds of the legal and the illegal. He thought unironically of his world and his work as 'extralegal'. He considered himself a thorough professional in his work and that solid self image projected with equal force to those he worked with. Cool and competent. Intense and incisive. Zachary's chosen murky economic world required that he employ men like Parelli for his private detective agency. His agency, Zachary Investigations, ostensibly walked on the sunshine side of the fine line between the legal and illegal, but in fact often strayed--not so accidentally--into the latter. Had not Zachary been a man of luminous intelligence, as careful and elusive as the legendary snow leopard he considered his personal totem, the Tucson cops or the Pima County Attorney's office would have put him out of business years ago.

Corruption did not stop at the dark side of the law and Zachary knew how to get Parelli an investigator's license despite the man's blemished record. Grateful for a job and a decent income, Parelli repaid Zachary by taking on some of his messier jobs. But this one didn't seem like much. He didn't know who had hired the agency, only that he was to follow this guy Garret and find where he went. He was pointedly cautioned by Zachary to immediately report in if the man headed off into some remote location in the nearby mountains. That admonition did raise Parelli's antennas. But not much.

Jim Garret was a bottom dweller on Benning Goman's list of agreeable companions. The suave country gentleman recoiled in patrician revulsion at the crassness of the nouveau riche, and Goman considered Garret to have it in spades. Yet the man did have a certain facility for snooping things out and had not infrequently known how to find one of the rare gray and sometimes black market artifacts Goman coveted. Benning locked his study door behind him as Skarp parked the limousine in the garage and went to care for the horses, the dour hired man actually smiling when the horses whinnied at him as he approached. It pleased Skarp. Doubly so, knowing that they never greeted his patrician boss like that. Horses, Skarp knew from his boyhood on the family's hardscrabble Arkansas farm, were sharp judges of human character.

In the house, standing in the muted light, a film noir shadow among the dark woods of his study, Goman was so much in his element that he seemed to be a physical part of the room itself. He was a handsome man, tall and slender, his graying wavy hair longish and worn swept rakishly back. It was a stark contrast to see him alongside his man Skarp, who was squat and square and course. Almost everyone agreed, whether they liked him or not. Benning Goman was an elegant man. And Goman did not neglect to cultivate the image every chance he got. He was a man who could stare evenly into a mirror without the slightest discomfiture or self doubt.

It was mutual with Jim Garret. He didn't like Goman, either. He thought the man a pompous pendejo–an asshole. But he did have respect, if not for the man at least for what he represented, which was everything that Garret aspired to. Goman was a wealthy country gentleman of leisure and refinement. Had Garret known that Goman's inheritance had come almost solely from his grandfather who had run grim and dangerous copper mines that claimed dozens of victims among the underpaid, exploited miners, Garret's admiration for Goman would have plunged into the pit of vehement loathing. Some of Garret's own family died or were crippled in those mines in the old days. But he did not know, and Goman brushed off any questions about the source of his inheritance with facile allusions to his grandfather's 'making fortuitous mining investments'.

Skarp, on the other hand, for all his lowbrow crudeness, would not be in the least surprised at the ultimate source of his employer's wealth. Skarp had resided far too long in the twisted dark alleys of the raw underside of life to take anything at face value. In fact he had guessed that Goman's fortune came from something quite like it actually had. Scratch a rich man, Skarp thought in his hardened cynical way, and you would find the blood of the poor men he had sucked dry in gaining his wealth. Skarp had been raised on America's impoverished fringes in a red dirt Arkansas farming family of defeated people working depleted land. His father was a drunk and a child beater and one day when he was thirteen Skarp beat his father senseless and left home forever. He'd been in trouble most of the time ever since.

Skarp started feeding the animals their daily grain supplements, sweetened oats that reminded him of honeyed breakfast granola, talking to them softly as he moved through the stable. He scratched their noses, stroked their necks, whispered in their ears. Most of the animals responded by gently nudging him. Skarp's eyes wrinkled with a satisfied smile. He'd loved animals since his boyhood on the Arkansas farm.

It was people he didn't like.

Goman unlocked the inner room off his study, switched on the overhead light and padded over to his wall safe. A few deft twists of the dial and the door swung open easily on it's graphite slathered hinges. Goman reached in and gently retrieved the Mimbres pot in the safe. Cradling it tenderly--but firmly--in his hands, he carried it carefully back to his desk, switched on his slender goose neck reading lamp and sat down. This was a much rarer and more valuable Mimbres classic polychrome. The artifact he sold to Meyer was a very uncommon and valuable one, but this one was even more so by a factor of five, possibly ten.

Excitement danced a graceful slow ballet in Goman's pale blue eyes. He had never even heard of a classic Mimbres polychrome of such exquisite design without a kill hole. Neither of the Mimbres pots Garret had brought him had kill holes, which was in itself tantalizing. Most Mimbres pots were found with inhumations and the pots had been ceremoniously killed by punching out a so called kill hole in the bottom. Goman found this ancient ritual a singularly distasteful one, for it considerably detracted from both the aesthetics and the worth of the otherwise magnificent Mimbres pottery. Were he able to jump into the fanciful time machine he sometimes visited in his reveries, he'd go back to the Mimbres in the old days and raise hell with them for stupidly punching holes in their beautiful pots. Bloody goddamn fools! Didn't they get it? It was the beauty of their pottery that immortalized them, not their dreary primitive religion or superstitious inhumation rituals.

Like an investigator teasing over scenarios with a series of 'what ifs?', Goman's mind again began playing with thoughts about the pots. What if this secret site Garret had stumbled on was full of such undesecrated pots? What if this little branch of the Mimbres flung out on the ancient culture's western frontier had abandoned the unfortunate practice of ritually killing their burial pots? If that were the case, and it was certainly not beyond the possible, then they had stumbled onto something which could literally be worth a fortune. Goman's tongue unconsciously snaked out to rim his lower lip. Yes. A fortune. A Mimbres fortune. Goman's dancing blue eyes sparkled. Ah--but what a delicious thought that was!

The notion of a nice haul of pricey Mimbres pots was of much more immediate meaning to Benning Goman than the mere excitement and adventure of one-upping the tediously self important professional archaeologists. His own blood stained inheritance, though still in the seven figures, was steadily dribbling away. Globe trotting to exotic places, the costs of building his private collections and the hefty sums needed to keep his gentleman's horse ranch going were putting sizeable dents in Goman's cash reserves. It seemed a man could never be wealthy enough. Poverty was relative. It always began when you slipped below your current living standard. Goman thought a considerable addition to his fortune would be most judicious and the discovery of a number of classic undamaged Mimbres pots would be a brilliant way to make that addition. A lovely thought, indeed. Rather like making an archaeological hole-in-one.

An entirely new idea materialized on the cusp of his consciousness and came slowly sliding into Benning Goman's head as he studied the captivating ancient beauty of the Mimbres polychrome. What if he were to go to the site, apply scientific discipline to its excavation, carefully note and photograph the strata, collect and catalog the artifacts and then prepare a scholarly paper on the results? All the known Mimbres sites had long ago been cleaned out. People would have to notice the mysterious appearance of a new series of pots. Where did they come from? Goman would know. And he'd have already prepared a scientific paper on it. But he wouldn't tell them. Not yet. Let the bastards stew on it. He'd wait to publish.

For years the archaeological community--legal and illegal--would scratch their collective heads and launch fruitless shotgun searches for the source of the pots. They wouldn't know where to look and the searches would fizzle. When Goman's final days approached and he was about to disappear over the temporal horizon to join his ancestors in the great Goman beyond, he'd arrange to have the paper published posthumously. It would absolutely stun the archaeological community. Goman looked up from his mental machinations over the Mimbres polychrome. The portrait of his portly white-mustached grandfather--Skarp privately referred to old man as a 'that fat old robber baron'--was smirking down at him from the wood paneled study's wall. Goman had always thought his grandfather was laughing at the world in the old portrait. Goman chuckled to himself. He'd be laughing at the bastards even from beyond the grave.

Just like grandpa.

Jim Garret knew Max Reiser from the Tombstone bars. They weren't quite friends. The men were somewhere in the uneven middle ground between acquaintance and friend, mostly because they had a handful of mutual interests. Hiking. Nature. Archaeology. Anthropology. And especially the sky island mountain ranges of the Coronado National Forest where Reiser worked and Garret often went hiking to poke and sniff and wonder. They sometimes talked about the mountains and the natural and human history that clung to them in whispers and mists beyond the merely paper scratching academic. After the tongue loosening powers of a few cold drafts, Reiser would grumble bitterly about the Forest Service. Reiser's grousing about his bosses popped into Garret's mind as he began making his plans for the secret dig in Dancer Canyon. Why not approach the man and check out the possibility of his cooperation?

Jim found Max in Big Nose Kate's saloon in Tombstone one evening and made his first tenuous contact with him over the excavation. He took it slow and careful and he remained cautiously vague about the details. The Forest Service man was dubious. Garret hadn't told him much and Reiser wasn't sure what it was about, but he suspected it had something to do with the southern end of the Huachucas where he spent most of his working day. Reiser was an increasingly bitter man but he had not yet gone far enough to consider something altogether outside the law. And that, though Garret had not admitted it, was very likely what it was all about. Reiser was noncommittal.

Just a couple of days later, in his usual ranger's careful footed quiet fashion, Reiser came almost noiselessly through the back door of the Huachuca ranger station on the outskirts of the sprawling strip city of Sierra Vista that spread out along the linear flanks of the Huachuca Mountains. He stopped to drink from the hallway water fountain. There were voices talking inside the open door of Superintendent Murillo's office. For some reason, maybe some fragment of his subconscious reaching out to tap a warning on his shoulder, and very much out of character for him, he moved closer to the door and stood there listening. Superintendent Murillo was talking to one of the other rangers. It was Ralph Bantner, a recent transfer into the Coronado who most frequently worked with Reiser.

"I'm sorry, Ralph", Murillo said. "I can't really do anything about it. I know Reiser is a jerk sometimes. Nobody likes to work with him. But I have too few people to do too much work and a personality conflict is hardly a reason to redo all my personnel schedules."

" _Personality conflict_?" Bantner replied heatedly. "The guy is a first rate jackass. And he's an incompetent to boot. Why don't you get rid of him and hire a competent younger man?"

"I can't do that", Murillo replied, irritated." And you know it. The Service's personnel rules and Civil Service regulations protect everyone but the worst of the worst. I couldn't get rid of him." Murillo paused and then said something he would have been wiser to keep to himself. "Look, Ralph, let me tell you something in confidence. I tried to get rid of him once before. District came back down on me hard right away, saying I should know better. A guy practically has to be a mass murderer or a child rapist before you can bounce_'em. Why, there was....."

Max Reiser didn't listen to any more. Ashen faced, he slipped back out the rear door of the ranger station. That evening he called up Jim Garret.

### Rosa's

They met at Rosa's Cantina in the mountain ringed Sonoran town of Cananea twenty five miles south of where the worlds collided at the dusty little border town of Naco. While the copper mines and smelters on the Arizona side of the border a few miles off had often been silent over the past few years, the Cananea mines and the smelters of nearby Nacozari continued going full blast. The air was hazed and stunk of sulphur, but neither Garcia nor Andrews paid it any attention. They sat warily eying each other under a pair of flowering mimosa trees at a rickety and rust flecked wrought iron table in the cantina's inner courtyard. They had their orders from the bosses. They were told what to do. It was up to them to work out the details of how to do it. They couldn't even _think_ of screwing it up. Failure had only one outcome. A headless corpse dumped by the side of the highway to Hermosillo or a barren unmarked grave in the Sonoran desert.

Reuben Garcia was a bilingual Mexican-American who was an American citizen by birth. He moved back and forth across the border, mostly between Arizona and Sonora, sometimes living in Mexico, other times living in the United States. Troy Andews lived in Tucson and was a gopher and a small time leg man for big money that had grown nervous. The smuggling routes into south Florida and the Gulf Coast were tightening up and the good-ol'-boy corruption of local border officials had recently been broken up with a string of arrests. The money men wanted to experiment with cutting their risks by returning to the old mountain smuggling and raiding trails of the long gone frontier times. Those frontier times might be long gone but the trails weren't. Carrying the drugs over the mountain trails involved a lot more bull work than had been necessary for years, but at least they weren't being heavily patrolled and searched like so many other smuggling routes both along the border fences and through the ports of entry. The powerful shadowy figures behind the scenes that controlled the drug traffic made their deal over glasses of imported French wine and plates of boiled Maine lobster in a swank Phoenix country club. Garcia and Andrews were the errand boys sent to work out the specifics.

The wary maneuvering didn't last long. The arrangements were made with increasing alacrity if not affability as Andrews downed a few bottles of Corona rimmed with lime juice and salt and Garcia knocked down a series of micheladas of beer, lime juice and hot sauce. They went down that well traveled familiar ethyl alcohol route from wary semi-adversaries to table thumping drinking buddies and it was soon woozily agreed. Garcia and Andrews would meet in one week at the border in a secluded Mexican canyon just south of the Coronado National Monument. There they would make the trade. $300,000 for forty pounds of Mexican black tar heroin, plus a couple of pounds of dynamite Michoacán cannabis flower tops for the dealers to party with. The two men shook hands, each, despite their woozy booze flavored moods, still with a touch of lingering semi-paranoid smuggler's suspicion, and parted to their separate ways.

Andrews returned across the border to Tucson. Garcia went deeper into Mexico to make his arrangements. Garcia remained relaxed and confident, but only to a moderate degree, knowing the eye of the narco bosses was on him. He took care of business but still didn't let up much on his steady hard drinking and partying. Not Andrews. He spent the next week stone cold sober fretting about the arduous trek he would have to make through the mountains. Troy, he hissed to himself, your goddamn big mouth has done it again. What the hell have you gotten himself into? But he knew. His big mouth had gotten him into trouble. Big trouble. He needed help. And bad.

### Soldiers

Specialist Fourth Class Maurice Ashby and Staff Sergeant Alvornia Lister were electronics technicians stationed at scenic Fort Huachuca in southeast Arizona just north of the Sonoran border. Both men had come up hard in Cabrini Green in the impoverished black sections of Chicago and wanted out of the life. Neither had ventured out of the city much before the Army. The desert and mountain landscape around the fort blew their hard-raised urban minds. It was like being reborn. No. Not like being reborn. They _were_ reborn. They fell into open mouthed astonishment when they first saw the immense spectacularly scenic basin and range country of southeast Arizona spreading out from horizon to horizon seemingly to infinity. It was so different from the shabby people packed Chicago world they'd grown up in that it was literally a different universe to them. And one a hell of a lot more agreeable than the world they'd known of dead end kids on rundown neighborhood street corners hawking dope and stoned young girls who sold their bodies to feed their addictions. There were good people there, too, lots of them, but they were buried in an avalanche of hopelessness. In the Army, at least, Ashby and Lister had what the others lacked. Hope.

The two young men surprised the hell out of their back home city folks when they took up backpacking and started humping the mountain boondocks. The people back in Cabrina Green were aghast. A couple of one time Chicago street hustlers now doing mountain backpacking? They stared open mouthed at the photos the young men sent back of them in hiking gear standing on the edges of plunging cliffs with soaring mountains behind them. It was as unlikely to the home folks as a black man playing goalie for the Chicago Black Hawks in the NHL. But there it was. Unlikely or not, that is exactly what Lister and Ashby did. Army Special Services cleared them to hike all through the military reservation that covered the northern part of the Huachucas. And they did just that. Enthusiastically. Then the towering mountain backbone of the rest of the Huachucas beckoned to them. As soon as Lister and Ashby discovered the less restrictive and more pristine southern parts of the mountains, they zeroed in on doing most of their hiking there. Every free weekend both men had they'd hotfoot it for the mountains and a weekend of hiking. They'd worn out their first pairs of hiking boots trekking most of the mountains and had only a few more miles to do before they'd made it through the entire range--including the major trails in the numerous canyons that radiated out from the towering spine of the mountains.

On the final weekend in September of 1983 they were back in the mountains. By the end of Sunday afternoon they planned to complete their hike through the last southern stretch of the Huachucas. The evening before they began their final Huachuca trek they each drove their cars to the parking lot at the southern trailhead in the Coronado National Monument not far north of Old Mexico. Lister left his little Plymouth Horizon there, a plain little car not likely to be of interest to car thieves, and rode back to Fort Huachuca with Ashby in his flashy Chevy Malibu. Once they were done with the Huachucas, the two young soldiers planned on hiking the towering mountain ranges--the Rincons, the Santa Ritas and the Santa Catalinas--that ringed nearby Tucson. And after that? Who knew? The Sierras? The Alps? Maybe even--and what a thought for a couple of Chicago home boys--the Himalayas! They were full of energy and enthusiasm and the limitless possibilities of a ripening future. They were young.

And they had discovered a world that made room for them.

It didn't take long to select the equipment they'd need. Garret wanted Riley to load his aging but meticulously maintained little Bobcat onto the small trailer he hauled it on, hitch it to the back of his four wheel drive Jeep, load the Jeep with supplies for camping and digging and be ready to go in the morning. Riley couldn't go that soon. He'd already contracted for a two day excavation job that was to begin the next day. He stubbornly insisted that he couldn't cancel it and Garret finally gave up trying to talk him into it. They'd have to wait for a few more days. The two men agreed they'd leave for the site in Dancer Canyon in three days. Garret was so excited that he had trouble sleeping the next few nights. So did Nub Riley. But for very different reasons.

Peg Riley loved her husband for his honesty. That was one of the reasons she married him. She was just as honest as he was and would have no part of a man who wasn't up to her strictly principled country code. Peg Riley was no prude, and she certainly wasn't inhibited on the marital bed, but she was the first to admit that she was old fashioned. Peg Riley was born on a ranch and she intended to die on a ranch. She loved ranch life, all of it, even the bad parts. She could ride a horse as well as Nub, mend a fence even better, handle the stock, tend the animals, do all the chores that had to be done. And she loved it in the deep, serene way of people who have put down roots in a place they love. Yet she would gladly have given it all up in a fraction of an eye blink rather than see her husband go to prison.

Tony Parelli tailed Garret to his rambling house. Even Parelli, who was clueless about much of what was going on in life beyond casinos, bars and cat houses, architecture included, thought the house ugly and tasteless. The house. Not the location. Garret got that much right. His home squatted in the expansive prickly pear cactus and soaptree yucca studded desert grasslands at the foot of the abrupt mountain wall rising to the jagged peaks of the magnificent and historic Dragoons range. Mountains Parelli knew had once been home to the Apaches, including Cochise and even at times Geronimo. After following Garret once to his place, Parelli figured there was no need to watch the house. The only road into it came from Tombstone, so Parelli rented a motel room where he could watch the road. Tony'd had enough of rough living in the Corps and with the Border Patrol. After the novelty and youthful zest for living in the rough wore off, he'd learned how to scrounge up creature comforts to make himself as comfortable as possible during his work assignments. It had gotten him in trouble more than once and damn near landed him a dishonorable discharge from the Corps.

When he saw Garret go down the road in his big Continental, Tony didn't have to wonder about what Garret would be up to for the next day or two. A woman was in the car with him, a flashy looking redheaded woman whose company had an obvious enough purpose. Parelli had earlier snooped around old Tombstone until he found a chubby indiscrete local gossip with a floppy hat and a wagging tongue. He'd learned that Garret was a womanizer with a reputation tipping towards the jaded. At least to Ms Wagging Tongue. It was enough of a confirmation for Tony Parelli. After Garret disappeared down the road to his place with the redhead in the big Continental, Tony caught up on his sleep and then took in some of the touristy sights of Old Tombstone. Including the infamous OK Corral, where the abrupt flashes of light and sound from blank rounds exploding out of period revolvers during a reenactment gunfight almost had Parelli instinctively grabbing for his own concealed weapon. He left the place grinning at the thought that these guys were Old West play actors but he was the honest-to-God real deal in today's world. Their bullets were fake. His weren't.

Tony had done enough tedious infidelity surveillances working for Zachary to know when a man was heading for a weekend shack job. Garret would be busy for at least a day. Parelli mused over whether the woman was a redhead at both ends of the physical compass. Probably not. So what? When things got that far who the hell cared, anyhow? He went back to his motel, picked up a paperback spy novel about covert Nazis and WWII and drifted off into yet another reality. One that his own father knew as one all too real when he was a ground pounder with the Big Red One in Europe.

Parelli was right. Almost. The woman, Heather Sosa, was Garret's squeeze for the weekend. But she was more. Heather Sosa was a second cousin of Jim Garret. They were both the product of the border intermingling between Mexicans and Anglos. Heather looked more obviously Hispanic than Garret, with a seductive salmon skinned Spanish/Indian look that in her younger days fired up many a hot blooded prospective suitor. She had grown hard looking in recent years but remained a handsome woman who at times was still stunning. And, strange as it might seem with her bronzed Spanish/Indian appearance, she was actually a natural redhead. Hair the color of chestnuts--or Indian Red as they used to call it. And a name that in his fonder moments Jim Garret often used for his more-than-kissing cousin Heather.

Both Heather and Jim spoke fluent border Spanish. Like Garret, Heather came from a mining family. Hers was one where her mixed Tarahumara Indian/Mexican father retained the ancient hard drinking machismo attitudes into his middle age. He drank himself into the self imposed prison of an alcoholic's world and never escaped it. Heather Sosa's upbringing was a soul crushing combination of drunken outbursts and parental neglect. It left her bitter, hardened and manipulative. Heather Sosa didn't have a lot of familial fondness for her second cousin Jim Garret. But she did like his money, his huge antique four poster bed with its luxurious feather mattress, and his ability to get drugs. Especially the drugs. Counterintuitive though it might seem, Heather--like many a product of a chemically dependent home--was headed down the same road herself. Mostly she just drank. Sometimes she took tranquilizers or amphetamines. She'd tried most of the other drugs, too. Quaaludes, angel dust, LSD, mescaline, marijuana, hashish, peyote, all kinds of pills. But the only time she ever took cocaine was when she was with Jim Garret. He was the only person she knew who could afford it with even a remote suggestion of regularity.

She never turned him down when he invited her out to that sprawling ugly big place of his out by the Dragoons. She would dutifully give Garret a lay when they got to the house, faking passion and an orgasm. Sex was a damned easy way to get a night of coke sniffing. Screwing Garret was a convenient tool to open the door to the cocaine rapture. She was so eager for the coke bliss that afternoon that as soon as they cracked open the heavy Mexican red oak front door of his house and stepped inside she grabbed Jim Garret and seduced him right on the thick shag pile carpet of the hallway floor. Heather was single mindedly zoomed in on getting to the sniff and wanted to get the preliminaries out of the way and get down to the real purpose of the day. Cocaine. The chorus to an old song flitted through her mind.

Cocaine, Cocaine

Through my heart

And running through my brain

Cocaine, my sweet cocaine

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

There were enough villains to go around on all sides in the great swirling bloody hubbub that was the 19th Century Southwest frontier of Chihuahua, Sonora, New Mexico, Arizona and West Texas. The American military had General Joseph Carleton and his kind. The Mexican military had Colonel José Maria Carrasco and his ilk. The worst of the lot were probably the civilians, men like James Kirker and John James Johnson and a bunch of anonymous Mexican butchers. Among the Apaches Geronimo was the most famously brutal, though there was no lack of other candidates in the sprawling war-ravaged merciless world of Apacheria.

There were also plenty of exceptions. Among the Indians, though brutal in war, Mangas Coloradas, Cochise and Vittorio could be even tempered men of honor. Among the Americans there were fair minded, if hard, men like U.S. General George Crook and the civilian Tom Jeffords. And others who rose above their times and the prejudices of their races. One was U.S. Army Lieutenant Royal Whitman.

Lieutenant Royal Whitman took over command of Fort Grant, some fifty miles northeast of Tucson, in 1871. He treated a handful of passing Apache women with compassion and the word got around in a big hurry. Soon they came in. By ones and twos, then dozens and scores, they came cautiously in until five hundred Apaches under an Aravaipa chief named Eskiminzin were camped near Whitman's post. At first they hunkered close to Camp Grant, but then moved to a more agreeable location a few miles away. Big mistake. A bunch of Apache-haters from Tucson came one dark night and fell upon the Apache camp at dawn. Most of the killers were other Indians, O'odham from south of Tucson, plus several dozen Mexicans and a handful of Anglos. Over a hundred Apaches were murdered, almost all of them women and children. Most of the Apache men were away hunting. An outraged U.S. government put one hundred of the murderers before justice in a Tucson courtroom to be judged by a jury of their peers. The peers did what Arizona peers were most likely to do in those Indian-hating days.

It took less than twenty minutes for the jury to find all one hundred innocent.

When Diablo read this in the stolen well thumbed history book about the old west he thought his head would explode with rage.

Bennie Dewclaw had made the dark tortured metamorphosis from Bernard Decleau to Bennie Dewclaw to Diablo. He grew wild and tough and wily in his mountain haunts. No one could hope to trap him on his home ground. His raids were as quick and precise as military operations. He repeatedly swooped down from the mountains to raid the enemy and returned undetected to his mountain lair. He had now even killed, to the south in Mexico, on one of his raids. Yet it had all been practice. Training. Preparation. Foreplay. Prelude. It was also furtive, hidden, shadowy. The time was growing near for him to burst out of the shadows and cast down the challenging ancient blood feud gauntlet of Diablo, last of the Apaches. He opened his senses for the sign that it was, finally, time. He knew deep down in the very marrow of his Apache raider bones that the time was drawing near. And when it did come? He would be ready. He pulled out his knife and drove it violently into a chunk of pinyon firewood.

_More_ than ready.

Heather's day segued from a gentle, sun kissed Arizona autumn afternoon into a sensual orgiastic evening lit by a numinous rainbow hued chemical alternate reality. A reality that she communed with only when she was in the cocaine rapture. She spoke to herself in that other dimension from one cocaine high to the next--but never in between. Heather Sosa didn't have to fake it after the ecstasy of the cocaine high swept her away into the chemical rainbow. Jim Garret felt damn good inside her and she reached a genuine orgasm that made her feel as though her whole body had turned inside out and blossomed into a giant luminous sunflower. God, how she loved cocaine. And, God, how she loved Jim Garret for having it. She gently kissed his chest and stomach and began trying to arouse him again.

Troy Andrews wasn't just uneasy. Scratch Troy Andrews' surface and cowering just below you'd find fear. Plenty of it. Troy was scared. What in the hell had he gotten himself into? He tried hard to hide his fear and his doubts behind his tough alley fighter bluster when he returned to Tucson from the Mexican cantina in Cananea to report to his boss, a mysterious man known only as Deal. He was all too clearly aware that it was like pulling on a Halloween mask, the way he hid his inner doubts and put on his well practiced tough street kid face to tell Deal how he'd hammered out the dope deal details with Garcia. Deal told Andrews to wait to be contacted.

Troy had no idea who the men behind the money were. He didn't even know the real name of the dealer who was their go-between. These people were careful, right up to the unpredictably dangerous edge of being paranoid, and they always did the contacting. He had no idea who the dealer really was or even where he lived. The man always referred to himself simply as Deal and they did all of their business when Deal called Troy and either gave him instructions or arranged for a meet in busy public places where they were effectively anonymous as they strolled the sidewalks and spoke in guarded low voices.

Troy Andrews was a tough kid, a street fighter who'd come out of Gary, Indiana. He paid for his dope by becoming a dealer when he was still in high school. Dealing dope didn't win him any passing grades and he eventually was kicked out. By then the local police were on to Troy and started to watch his movements. Andrews decided it was time to move and he floated around the country until he met Deal in Los Angeles. Deal sent Andrews to Tucson and set him up as his drug runner and occasional enforcer. It was nothing Troy couldn't handle and at first everything was cool. Until they got him mixed up with these heavy Mexican guys and a really serious dope deal. Troy was over his head and he knew it. He wanted out. But there was no way out. These people played for keeps. They didn't cut anybody any slack. The only way out was in a body bag.

### Maria

Maria Alarcon hit her twentieth birthday the month before. Maria was a hot-wired ball of kinetic young woman. She'd already backpacked all through the Rincons and the Santa Catalinas, as often alone as not, and had started to learn mountain climbing. She was about to start at the University of Arizona in Tucson after finishing up two straight-A years at Tucson's Pima Community College. Maria was that squared away species of independent, self disciplined young person who would go on to an advanced degree and a life as a professional. All of her friends and family recognized that. But there was one big qualifier about Maria Alarcon that scared her parents and even disturbed her friends. Maria's sense of adventure was overdeveloped. One day she might very well blunder into something even she couldn't handle. Everyone told her to be more careful. But she would openly just laugh at them for their timidity. Get over it, she'd say. Life was meant to be lived. And she did just that.

Maria was short, nimble, dark and athletic. She was a champion sprinter in high school and lettered in three sports--and still maintained a 4.25 GPA. She was also strikingly beautiful. But Maria Alarcon was not one of those young women enchanted with her own beauty. Nor was she one to trade on it for what she wanted. She was aware of the beauty, though not impressed by it, and considered it just one aspect to the many parts of her character. Beautiful women, Maria Alarcon wryly observed, too often ended up being trophy wives, high priced punch bags or pathetically self absorbed. Maria Alarcon was not about to let any of those things happen to her.

Troy Andrews was just another passing phase in the sexual kaleidoscope of her young life. He was involved in the underground drug world, she was certain of that, and he said he was a dealer. That didn't bother her. Neither Maria nor most of her generation bought the government bullshit about drugs. Almost everyone dabbled with some kind of mood altering drug and knew of a dealer or two. Many of the younger kids partied with Ecstasy both before and after the drug ayatollahs made it illegal. Almost everyone smoked marijuana. Plenty used mood altering prescription drugs. Some experimented with hallucinogens. Others walked that dangerous line with the heavy drugs. Maria's favorites were peyote buttons and magic mushrooms, along with the ubiquitous kickass marijuana that in Tucson was just about as plentiful and available as a gallon of milk down at the local corner grocery. Troy Andrews talked big. He didn't fool Maria for even a hint of a minute. But he had drugs, he made love with the strength and durability of a bull, and there was a certain air of mystery and adventure about him. She pried it out of him, seemingly against his will, knowing how to play on him through his gonad fixated immature ego. All it took was one of Maria's sizzling blow jobs and a bug eyed Troy spilled a lot more than his semen. When Maria learned that Troy was going to go to the border, pick up a load of drugs and backpack them through the mountains, there was no stopping her. She was going along. And that was that! This would be a one whopping great BIG notch on her Maria Alarcon adventure stick.

At first he argued. Or at least tried to appear to argue. There was about as much real conviction behind it as a used car salesman attesting to the durability of an old Ford he knew had an engine about to give up the piston driven ghost. Beneath the deception and the bravado the real Troy Andrews was hanging by his fingernails on the edge of desperation. He knew with a crystalline clarity rare to his unschooled brain that he needed Maria. And _bad_. She was a tough, trail wise backpacker who could read maps and compasses. Troy had blundered far outside his narrow zone of street thug competence when Deal gave him the smuggling job. Andrews mentally kicked himself. His bravado act had been too goddamned good. He'd somehow managed to scam Deal into buying the whole I-can-do-anything act Troy put on.

Troy Andrews might have been a tough city kid but he didn't have a clue about the world that began where the blacktop gave way to dirt and desert and streetlights were only distant flickering pinpoints of light on the horizon. He was as lost in the outdoors as a TV politician without a teleprompter. Even a Moses-style burning bush wouldn't have helped him. There weren't more than a half dozen shrubs, trees or birds that he could put a name to. Despite the maps that Deal had given him, he knew he couldn't make it. Christ! He couldn't even read the maps. He had lied to Deal, as he'd always lied to everybody, saying he done some backpacking and could find his way through the mountains. When Maria Alarcon furrowed her brow in stubborn determination and insisted-- _demanded_ \--on coming along, and after he put on his brief little charade of resistance, Troy let out a huge sigh of barely concealed relief.

He hated to even think what would happen if he screwed up and Deal came after him.

_Diablo, look!_ , the lean hard-muscled man with the unblinking cold wolf's eyes whispered softly. Talking to himself had gradually become an unconscious behavior as the long months of isolation from human contact continued to distort a character that spiraled ever deeper into the bizarre deluded insanity that had captured his mind. _Who are these men_? Diablo watched with an emotionless detachment as the Mexicans approached along the mountain trail. One string of his jumbled brain synapses still was able to comprehend the contemporary external world and somehow mingle and blend it into his newly wrought Apache persona without conscious perceptive conflict. He stared at the men with intense appraising interest for a few more minutes before he was certain who they were and what they were doing. These two were not typical backpackers. They stumbled clumsily on the trail and paused frequently, their heads swiveling as they gawked all around them. They looked unsure of where they were. Or perhaps they were looking to see if they were being followed. Diablo was sure of it. These men were not hikers. They were not dressed like any of the hikers he had seen in the mountains over the months. They looked more like outdoor laborers than hikers. And the bulky knapsacks with rough woolen blankets tied on them were unlike any gear Diablo had seen hikers carrying.

Then he saw their faces clearly The mysterious synaptic connections that somehow connected and interpreted the external world to his insane inner self recognized who they were. A couple of humble illegals coming north through the mountains. Peónes on a quest for the modern day Cibola, the city of gold. A quest all too often as fictive and illusory as the imaginary city of Cibola itself. Diablo's mouth cracked open in a spooky, hair raising smile. If he were to kill ordinary hikers the mountains would be quickly overrun with government uniforms searching him out. But these two rough-dressed Mexicans were different. Who would know they went missing in the mountains? They would simply vanish, slide through the crack between the worlds without a trace, and be gone. As had so many others. Even if someone wanted to look for them, how would they know where to look? The guardian spirits were sending Diablo a message. This was the opportunity he was waiting for. He would be coming back for the Mexicans. It was almost time.

Diablo's Raid was about to begin.

Benning Goman's very private unlisted phone didn't ring often. Not more than once a week. This morning it rang twice The first call was a wrong number from some untended abrasive brat playing with his parents' phone. Goman cursed at the little bastard as he peevishly cut off the call. The second call was the one he was impatiently waiting for. It was Dominic Zachary. Dominic's man Parelli finally checked in with his boss and what he had to report brought a tingling to Goman's acquisitive brain. Parelli followed Garret out to a ranch on the San Pedro River where Garret spent some time talking to the owner. The man Garret had gone to see wasn't only a rancher. He was also a small excavation contractor. His name was Nub Riley.

Zachary noted with amusement that this fellow Riley was in a similar business to himself. The business of digging things up. Riley dug up dirt. Zachary dug up information. And, as often as not, it was also dirt. The dirt of buried secrets. Zachary did some of his own digging and what he found was that Nub Riley's excavation business, and his ranch, were close to bankruptcy. The man had to be on the edge of desperation. And likely therefore open to desperate measures. Goman plunked down the phone, his mind racing, convinced that Garret had made a contact to excavate the Mimbres site and that they would probably be beginning soon. Zachary's man Tony Parelli would follow them to wherever it was, then pass on the information. His left eye starting to rapidly twitch, a tic that often set in when he was agitated, Goman grabbed at the ranch's two way handheld radio, called Skarp and rattled off instructions to pack up the essentials for at least a couple of days of camping out. Then Goman stopped, ran a practiced meditative mantra through his racing brain and slowed himself down enough to thoughtfully consider what specialized personal items he'd need to bring--cameras, film, tape recorder, notepads. And his pistol.

When the next call came from Zachary he and Skarp would be ready to move.

"Heather", Jim Garret said, gently touching her shoulder. "Heather. Wake up." Heather's eyes blinked open. The sun still lay low and roseate in the morning sky and she was spread out buck naked in Jim Garret's huge antique four poster featherbed. She might have been run hard and put up wet, as the cowboys liked to say about rough women. But Heather was still a fine looking female and she hadn't lost the firm curves of the mature woman. She had no children and there were no scars or stretch marks etched on her salmon colored breasts and stomach. For a moment Garret's privates tingled with renewed interest. But then he caught himself. First things first. Even when your impolitic bollocks demanded otherwise.

"Heather, I've got something I have to do", he said, holding out a small bindle of cocaine. "Here", he said with a grin. "Take a solo flight while I'm gone." He put the cocaine on the bed stand next to Heather. She nodded, yawned, stretched and then rolled over and went back to sleep. She was snoring loudly by the time Jim Garret had pulled his big Continental out of the garage. Max Reiser was waiting for him at a wayside rest just below the crest of Mule Mountain Pass outside of Bisbee. The two men unlimbered themselves from their cars and trooped over to sit under a huge wind-twisted Arizona Cypress. They talked quietly as they looked at the rolling oak parklands in the foothills below. Reiser was blunt.

"Spit it out, Jim. Just what is it you are up to?" Reiser said in a voice that sounded to Garret defiant to the point of being openly challenging. Overhead, nature's sanitation engineers, a pair of turkey vultures, expertly rode the air currents, their swiveling heads scanning the country below in the incessant search for something to eat. Garret held back a moment, glancing up at the soaring buzzards, considering whether now was the time to lay out his scheme for Reiser. The park ranger's defiant and angry behavior convinced him. Something had really pissed off the guy. Now was the right time. So he began to spin out his plan. When Garret finished his flagrantly illegal proposition to Reiser, the ranger didn't hesitate a fraction of a moment with his answer.

"O.K", he replied. "I'm in".

Garret's eyes blinked. Reiser's abrupt turnaround caught him by surprise. For a moment he was speechless. The guy who'd waffled and wavered just a couple of days ago now was firing on all cylinders and raring to go? Reiser wouldn't go into the demeaning details, but he did admit that the decision was made for him by the overheard conversation between Superintendent Murillo and his fellow ranger Brantner. To hell with them and to hell with the Forest Service. Max Reiser was going to worry about taking care of old number one from now on. But he wasn't about to sell himself cheap.

"How much we talking, Jim", Reiser asked. Now it was Max's turn to blink.

"$10,000", Garret said. "Half now. The other half when we're done." The long years of disappointment had made Max Reiser a man who was very good at hiding his emotions, but this was one time when he couldn't. He slapped his knee. Hard. His voice was loud and excited.

"Damn!" He said. "Ten thousand bucks. That's a bunch of money." Garret handed him an envelope full of cash like the one he'd given to Nub. Max looked inside, whistled softly and agreed to wait for the other $5000 until the dig was completed. But that wasn't all. Max had a caveat. If they found any more Mimbres pots he was to get half of the money from the sale of one of them. Max had an idea about the value of Mimbres pottery and knew he'd get another sizeable bundle of cash. Maybe even another $10,000.

"Agreed, Jim?" Max asked, trying to control the excitement in his voice.

"Consider it done, Max", Garret replied evenly. "Having you cover us is damn well worth it." And Garret meant it. He was dead certain they would find a bunch of pots and the security of being able to dig without fear of discovery would make everything one hell of a lot easier. He knew Reiser well enough to be sure that the man could effectively screen the dig from any possible prying eyes. Reiser might not have been a star in the eyes of the Forest Service's big shots but Garret knew him to be a fundamentally reliable and competent man. A bit like Jim's no nonsense buddy, Nub Riley. The two men talked a minute or two more, then climbed back into their rides and went their separate ways. Max Reiser had not a single dangling loose end of a doubt about his decision. The overheard conversation between Superintendent Murillo and Brantner was burned into his memory as deeply as a ranch brand on a yearling calf in one of the foothills ranches of the San Pedro Valley.

In Diablo's long months of lingering mental twilight when he was making the slow and tortuous descent into madness, the gradual metamorphosis from Bernard Decleau to Bennie Declaw to Diabo, he had read with deep interest of the great 19th Century raids of the Apaches. Cochise, Juh, Nana, Chatto, Ulzana, Vittorio, Mangus Coloradas, Lozen, Geronimo. Ah, those were great raids! But then had come the long dark century of dishonor and humiliation. No more! It was time to strike back. Now there was to be another great raid. One fully equal to the others in blood and stealth and cleverness. It was time to go beyond mere stealing. It was time to strike back at the outsiders. It was time to kill. He would take his rightful place among the other great Apaches in the history books. Diablo's Raid was about to begin. He stood up, the vertebrae in his back cracking and popping as he violently stretched out his lean six foot three height, and thrust his outstretched arms with open spread-fingered hands held beseechingly towards the heavens. Then he cupped his hands to his mouth and began to howl like a coyote starting on the night's hunt.

In the foothills below a pack of a mother coyote and three pups yipped in startled reply.

Dominic Zachary cautioned his street operative, Tony Parelli. This guy that he was shadowing, this Jim Garret, might be heading into some godforsaken isolated place out in the boondocks. Maybe in the foothills. Maybe deeper into the mountains. Could be some rough going. Parelli might need to pick up some basic outdoors gear. Parelli did what his boss suggested. And also managed to screw up while doing it. The cashiered former border patrolman had been off in Tombstone trying to scrape up the bare essentials for a night or two of camping when Garret came driving out the road from his home at the base of the Dragoons. Later, Parelli was back in his motel room, the former blissful quiet of the motel blown to hell by the arrival of a noisy busload of chattering German tourists trudging past on their way to their rooms. "Goddamn foreigners", he grumbled to himself as he sat by the window of the shabby motel room watching the road, sipping coffee and munching on a chorizo burrito he'd picked up at an overpriced restaurant in Tombstone. Overpriced, maybe. But at least they did a pretty good job with the burrito. Not bad. Sure not as good as a whole bunch of Mexican places in Tucson. But still OK. He took a bite and picked up the cup of coffee. And then his day really went to hell. He almost dropped his coffee and choked on the burrito when he saw Garret come driving down the highway and pull into the road heading towards his house.

_Goddamnit!_ Parelli spit out angrily, kicking the wall of the motel room.

Garret's contact with Max Reiser remained undiscovered. Parelli didn't say a word to Zachary about it. Tony Parelli was no poster child for IQ tests, but he sure as hell knew better than to tell Zachary he'd screwed up. Dominic Zachary was a smooth operator and not at all a violent man, but he lived and worked on a legal tightrope. He didn't cut any slack with employees who messed up. One chance was all you got. Blow it and you were history. And Tony Parelli had far too much history already.

The driver Deal sent--Maria puckishly nicknamed the guy 'Triple D' for Designated Dope Driver--nailed his show up time almost to the minute. The man had darting nervous eyes and, knowing Deal, Troy figured the guy knew better than to be late. The guy was a self inflicted candidate for a heart attack. Middle forties, overweight, with the stink of stale beer on his breath and the unpleasant odor of cigarettes clinging to him and his car. Andrews had never seen him before. Nor, after this was over, would he likely ever see him again. Which was just fine with both of them. Andrews and Maria Alarcon packed their hiking gear into the trunk of the man's battered ride, a five year old Carina, painted a convenient desert beige that hid its habitually unwashed state of Toyota being, and climbed in, Maria wrinkling her nose in disgust at the odor of stale cigarette smoke.

Maria had studied the maps and marked out their trails. Trails, the experienced hiker Maria well knew, that often were descended from the free ranging days of the Chokonen tribe of Chiricahua Apaches who had made the mountains and valleys of southeast Arizona their home. Maria and Troy's route back to Tucson from the border would take them on marked hiking trails from the Coronado National Monument directly through the towering ponderosa pines of the Huachucas, then over the grassy Babocomari drainage to the small range of the Mustang Mountains, through more grassy rolling country around Rain Valley--which, this being supposedly arid Arizona, was actually an accurate name. From the valley they'd move into the rugged Whetstone Mountains, where a century earlier the U.S. Cavalry's most famous Apache hunter, Lieutenant Howard Cushing, was killed, never knowing that the powerful bear of an Apache named Juh had long been hunting the hunter. Juh caught Cushing in the Whetstone Mountains and killed him. And in so doing probably saved a bunch of Apaches lives from Cushing's relentless vendetta against Juh's people. Many years later the Apache view of the facts of Cushing's death were revealed by descendants of Juh's Nde warriors.

From the Whetstones Maria and Troy would cross more rolling ground to the range of soaring bare hills called the Empire Mountains. Beginning on the third day the driver Maria called Triple D would stop at noon at an isolated prearranged location in the brittlebush and creosote shrub of the baked brown foothills on the relatively little traveled Old Sonoita Road. He would wait for fifteen minutes. If they didn't show he was to leave and return the following day at noon and repeat the procedure every day until he picked them up. Maria Alarcon had not the slightest doubt that she could successfully guide them to the rendezvous. But then Maria could have no idea that a nightmarish antithesis of serendipity lay just over her adventurous horizon. She was headed straight into Diablo's Raid. She didn't know it then. But she would soon enough.

She was headed straight for hell.

Nub had always loved the graceful lines and the melancholy cries of the mourning doves. And they were at it again, serenading him that morning as he worked, a family of homegrown doves perched on the drooping branches of the apple and peach and pear trees in the small orchard next to the ranch yard. An orchard planted over sixty years earlier by his hard working grandparents in a kind of humble Riley micro-victory celebration. Celebration at America's victorious leap onto center stage in the century's first world wide conflagration, World War I. And the very personal victory of his grandfather Thomas Michael Riley making it home in one piece from fighting in the crazy Allied Russian Intervention at the end of that war.

Personal commitment to national service was an ancient Riley family tradition and Thomas Michael Riley in WWI was just one in a long line of Rileys who had gone off to war. Nub's farther James Thomas Riley commanded one of Patton's tank crews in WWII and was one of those shocked American soldiers to stumble on the horror of a Nazi death camp. Nub's great grandfather James Michael Riley did a six year hitch in the U.S. cavalry during the Indian wars and carried an arrowhead buried in his thigh to the day of his death. And James' father, Virginia born Patrick Michael Riley, had marched off with the 33rd Virginia of the famous Confederate Stonewall Brigade in that bloody fratricidal slaughter called the American Civil War by the historians but still remembered by the Riley clan as the War Between the States. A clan that never forgot that James' twin brother Richard Michael Riley was literally blown into bloody pieces by a Union cannonball on a leafy Pennsylvania hillside near a town called Gettysburg. His brother James was not twenty feet away when it happened. Later than sultry sanguine afternoon the twenty seven surviving members of James's Company I fell upon a battery of Union artillery and in a rage James single handedly killed four boys from New Hampshire who had nothing to do with his brother's death. He later regretted it. And he would never forget it.

Nub himself was an infantryman in the First Cavalry Division in another of America's confusing wars, Viet Nam, and he did try to forget the whole damn mess. He had little doubt his own son, James Patrick Riley--or, with the changing times and attitudes, maybe his daughter Katherine Maureen Riley, might march off to war somewhere. South America or the Caribbean. Maybe Africa. But, given all the hubbub since the rise of Israel, most likely somewhere in the Middle East. As long as there were wars, Nub thought in tandem to the mournful cries of the doves, there would be Rileys to fight them. He shook the thought out of his head and concentrated on his work.

Nub spent the afternoon fussing over his machines, the Jeep and the Bobcat and the trailer, checking tires and fluid levels and making minor repairs and adjustments with the sturdy tools of a journeyman mechanic and his practiced workman's hands. By suppertime he had the Bobcat loaded on its trailer and hooked up to his four wheeler. The work-worn shovels and picks and rakes were lashed down to the roof carrier. Next came the camping gear and non-perishable food. The perishables he'd load into a cooler just before they pulled out for the dig site. The phone rang just after supper and Peg talked softly for a few minutes with one of the neighbors. Nub wasn't really listening while he distractedly sipped at the single cup of after dinner unsweetened black coffee he allowed himself every evening, but he heard snatches of the conversation and wondered at her tone of voice. It sounded almost like a conspiratorial whisper. Was she planning another of her surprises? He got curious when he heard her say something about the kids staying over at the Rodriguez place for a few days.

"What was that all about?", he asked when she returned to the stout antique Mexican oak supper table after the phone call. Peg at first didn't look at him.

"Making arrangements for the kids. I'm going to drop them off at the Rodriguez home tomorrow afternoon," Nub looked up from his coffee, confused.

"What? It sounded like they were going to stay overnight." Peg still didn't look at him.

"They are." Nub put the coffee cup down and stared at his wife.

"But the next day is a school day. How will they get home in time to make it to the bus stop?"

"They're going to go from the Rodriguez place. They won't be coming home first." Nub still was confused, but let it go. Too many other things were on his mind,

"Oh Well, I guess that's all right." Then Peg finally returned his gaze. Her eyes were smoldering amber coals.

"Anyhow, I won't be home." Nub caught his wife's stare and was instantly wary .

"Just what the hell are you getting at, Peg Riley?", he said with rising suspicion. Her voice came back at him with the same fire and determination that were in her eyes. "Manny Rodriguez is going to watch over our place." She looked at him fiercely. Nub's stomach churned at what he was afraid she was going to say.

"I'm going with you", she said with the utter finality of a lid slamming shut on a coffin.

Diablo watched the plodding progress of the flatland Mexicans moving into the mountains for a few minutes, then left his hiding place to hike back to his cavern stronghold that lay obscured behind the tangle of mountain mahogany and chokecherries. He liked the word. Stronghold. It reminded him of the ancient days and of Cochise's Stronghold that lay hidden across the San Pedro valley in the rocky viscera of the Dragoon Mountains. People called the distant outline of the Dragoons on the horizon saw toothed. Not Diablo. He knew they were dragon's teeth. _Apache_ dragon's teeth.

Diablo moved with a practiced lithe ease back along the rocky mountain trail, searching out among the brushy thickets of mountain mahogany, the pines and pinyons and jumbled boulders, for a suitable spot to spring an ambush. The man was as much part of the natural world as the four footed and winged critters that made the mountains home. And also just as pitiless in the way of all things wild. It was growing dark after the long lingering twilight of the mountaintops and as he moved nimbly up the trail his attention was suddenly grabbed by another unexpected sight. The light of a campfire several hundred yards ahead of him. More people in the mountains _?_ The little knots of summertime hikers were gone. It was late September and the weather in the higher elevations was starting to change. The nights were growing colder. The summer rains had lingered longer in the higher elevations and the trails were often wet and slippery, discouraging late season hikers from even heading into the mountains. Who would be out here?

_Come, Diablo_ , he said to himself, again unaware he was talking out loud. There was tension in his voice. And excitement. _Let us see_.

As quiet as any of the mountain creatures that instinctively knew to shy away from him, Diablo crept up to near the campfire, then, as the dark night finally swallowed the world around him, quietly crawled to only a few feet away, hardly even aware of the sharp edged rocks and the thorny catclaw mimosa the locals called the wait-a-minute bush that jabbed and grabbed at his body as he crawled. He crept close. Very close.

And listened.

"Fuck, Big M, ya sure we oughta do this, man?" Lister said, using Ashby's old street name from their growing up days in Chicago's grim Cabrini Green ghetto. Though clean cut and squared away in his on duty military persona, the off duty Lister still laced his sentences with expletives like they did back in Cabrini Green–which wasn't all that noticeable in the Army since soldiers in general were notoriously profane. "It's frickin' goddamn dangerous to be climbing over the edge of that motherfucker of a waterfall." His muscular tattooed arm reached towards their campfire and stirred it with a thick twig he'd earlier ripped off a nearby dead aspen. A small flame shot up, for a moment throwing a thin sliver of firelight on Lister's face. Usually quick with a wink and a joke, he looked unnaturally somber. "I ain't so sure we oughta be doing this. Don't you remember that white boy from the Intel company that got his ass dead on that fuckin' waterfall last year?" He stirred the fire again and nothing much happened beyond a hopelessly impotent tiny flare, so he reached over and grabbed another chunk of dead pine to throw in the fire. "That dumbass white boy thought he could climb out on that waterfall and you saw how the fuck that worked out. Killed his peckerwood ass." Just then the resin in the chunk of pine ignited and the fire flared a foot high, sending up a shower of sparks that could have been disastrous had there been any wind. Both men blanched, well aware of the Forest Service warnings about fire danger and campfires and thinking it was a goddamn good thing the forest was still mostly wet from the summer monsoons. Had they been looking in Diablo's direction they might have seen him in the light of the sudden flare up. But they weren't.

"Look, Alvornia," Maurice Ashby replied in an even tone, his language, unlike his buddy's, clear of the street jargon and profanity of the days in Cabrini Green, "we've already worked this all out." Ashby was a sturdily built athletic young man who'd been known back in the Green for his ability to throw a football almost the entire length of a football field, though–unfortunately shooting down any scholarship potential–he couldn't do it with much accuracy. In the Army he'd had a personal epiphany. He was determined to make a mainstream success of himself. Ashby was three quarters of the way to getting a college degree and was going to apply for OCS-Officer Candidates School–as soon as he got his diploma. Both his company and battalion CO's encouraged him and said they'd give him written recommendations. But that didn't mean he would shun his buddy from those hard years growing up. They'd been through too much together. They both were survivors from a world where there weren't many. This would be their biggest adventure together, and one free of the grim baggage of the misadventures of the old street life. "We do it slowly, carefully, make sure the ropes are secure", he said to Lister. "We've got the equipment to do it. And imagine what people will say when we bring back photos taken on the waterfall itself. Nobody's ever done that. We'll be in the Sierra Vista Herald for sure and probably in the Tucson Daily Star." He grinned and gave his friend a genial mental slap on the shoulder across the flickering fire. "And just think what the people back home will say when we send them the pictures and articles." That set Lister to chuckling.

"Oh, man, I could just see the eyes of the home boys bugging' out!" That did it. Lister was convinced. Tomorrow they'd take on the waterfall and what they were pretty sure would be the biggest adventure of their lives. And so it would be.

Somewhere in the dark trees not far off a foraging raccoon almost stumbled onto Diablo and screamed in alarm.

For a long time Diablo lay still, listening to the hushed conversation over the campfire. The two black soldiers with their peculiar mixture of Southern and Chicago accents were talking about their weekend trek. The obscure part of Diablo's brain that still some somehow made a synaptic connection with the modern world recognized the accents from the days when he worked the high iron in Chicago and lived in the city. Home boys. Home boys one hell of a long way from home. The thought amused him for some obtuse perverse reason unknowable to anyone but him. Diablo listened as the pair of soldiers hashed out their plans for hiking down to the treacherous waterfall head at Carr Canyon the next morning. His face took on the spooky, hair raising leer that was the genuine iteration of what they only could only approximate in the fictional horror films in the movie houses. But this wasn't fictional. This was real. An apocalyptic phantom in the murky night beyond the flickering light, he slipped noiselessly away from the campfire, trod noiselessly several hundred yards down the trail and sat down on an ancient wildfire blackened pine stump to think. The foreigners in his mountains were like fruit on the mountain chokecherry. Bitter to the taste. But still there for the picking.

Now he had to figure out just how to go about it.

Diablo unlimbered his lanky lean height and headed back to his cave, looking, listening, sniffing. Studied and furtive in his movements as he always was no matter what degree of danger he might sense. He ducked through the low entrance into his lair and quickly had a fire of dry pinyon going in the rock lined fire pit he'd scraped out of the cave floor. Though it didn't pop up in the direct consciousness of his convoluted brain, something deep and distant inside the strange man knew that the bottom of the scraped out fire held secrets thousands of year old. This cave had been used before. Many times. By beasts. And by men. The tracings of their presence lay long buried beneath the cave floor.

He put the last of the pork he'd stolen from a lowland home's freezer the day before into a skillet over the fire, then sat and stared into the hypnotic flames, the details of his plans dancing in meditative syncopation with the flaring fire. He went to sleep early. Dawn would still be lying quietly celestially abed when he'd already be on his way. His sleep was excited. Agitated. Full of numinous dreams. Blood red numinous dreams. The next day would be the beginning of Diablo's Raid. It was almost like the excitement at the beginning of the legal hunting season back in those distant hard days of his Ontario boyhood, fictive though the 'legal' season was to the subsistence hunters of his family. To them it was always hunting season. And so it was again. With a difference. A quantum leap of a difference because of the identity of the prey species. Deer? Elk? The rare protected Woodland buffalo? No. Geese or ducks or partridge? No. Coyotes or even timber wolves? No. This time the prey was human. The thought of it brought a grim humorless smile that slowly spread like a malevolent lunar eclipse across his face--and smothered once and for all the few tattered shreds of humanity that still lay within.

### Chapter Six

### Colonel Redding

Colonel Edward Redding, honorably retired from thirty vigorous years in the U.S. Army, stood in the yard of the modest twenty year old earth toned slump block rambler he called home. Middle height, compactly built, the colonel just didn't look to be in good physical condition. He _was_ in good physical condition. Regular workouts at the post gym, hiking in the mountains and biking in the valley kept him trim and fit. Ed Redding was a young lieutenant and then a captain in his two tours in Viet Nam. Like his great grandfather had said of his own hard service in the Confederate Army's Cherokee Legion in the War Between The States, Redding had 'seen the elephant'. He had a box full of medals to prove it. He rarely looked at them. And he rarely thought about the war any more. But, as Redding stood staring at the mountains that rose so precipitately above his foothill canyon home, his mind was clearly locked on thinking hard about something. His brow was furrowed in preoccupied cerebration as he squinted at the looming shrubby mountainside that climbed steeply away from his home.

Thornton Manning lived across the leafy narrow lane that broke off from the winding blacktop road in the canyon where they lived. He was out in his verdant manicured yard tending to his garden and his flowers. Brightly colored bougainvillea, azaleas, oleanders and his temperamental Tombstone rose bushes. Manning looked across the narrow street and noticed the way the retired colonel kept staring at the mountains. He grew curious and bestirred his considerable bulk to head over to the colonel's yard to find out what was so preoccupying his neighbor.

"What the devil are you looking at, Ed?" Manning said as he walked up to him. The colonel glanced over at him.

"Up there. In the mountains. There's something strange up there. Damn strange. I can sense it." Manning, a high-ranking Civil Service engineer working on nearby Fort Huachuca who was locally infamous for his brusque manner, was more than a little skeptical. He had the mathematical mind of an engineer and had little patience for supernatural nonsense. Thornton Manning was certainly not a man given to foolish flights of fancy.

"Sensing something is hardly a basis for establishing facts, Ed. You sound like a superstitious old Indian." Colonel Redding snapped a veteran fighter's hard look at his neighbor. The guy always had rubbed him the wrong way. Thirty years ago, when he was a young hothead, he might have laid the guy out then and there. But time had taken the edge off his aggressive side. At least the directly physical side of it. The body. Not the tongue. There was still lightning left there aplenty. The words exploded out of his mouth. Gone was even the most distant hint of neighborliness.

"You should learn some tact, Manning. I might not look much like it, but as a matter of fact I do have Native American heritage. My mother was a card carrying full blooded Cherokee from Oklahoma and my father one quarter plains Apache." Manning didn't much care for the colonel, either. Though he never said anything about it, he didn't care for military people, period. He much preferred his machines. They didn't give orders. And they didn't have big strutting macho egos. But Redding's snappiness didn't phase him much. Manning didn't take offense. He was a large man and not easily intimidated.

"Sorry", he said, not sounding as though he meant it. "So just what would it be, Ed, that is so strange up in the mountains?" He was still obviously skeptical. "What _could_ there be up there?"

"The burglaries", the colonel replied. "Haven't you heard about all the burglaries recently around the mountains?"

"Sure", Manning replied. "Scratchbacks sneaking in over the border. It's been going on for years." Colonel Redding snapped another hard look at Manning.

"You certainly are a man set in your prejudices, aren't you?"

"I am a man set in my realities, Colonel", he replied. Redding actually laughed.

"You wouldn't know a reality if it slapped you in the face."

Manning nearly did take offense at that, but he thought better of it. Colonel Redding was in superb physical condition and not a man to trifle with despite Manning's huge bulk. Besides, Manning knew he often was tactless and rubbed people the wrong way. It was a character defect he sometimes regretted. But not so much that he tried to change it.

"O.K, Ed", he said finally, pushing away the impulse to be sarcastic. Skepticism remained on his face and in his voice. '"Just what is it about these burglaries that makes you feel something is up in the mountains." The colonel returned his gaze to the slopes behind them and the mountain peaks stair stepping beyond. A Chihuahua raven flew overhead, squawking noisily as flapped its way out of sight behind the tall trees of the canyon. Redding paused for a moment to watch the raven, then continued.

"I was talking to a friend of mine in the Sheriff's Department. They're puzzled in the Department, too. Seems somebody has been coming into homes all along the southern end of the Huachucas and taking things like food, clothing, weapons and camping equipment." Manning's taut body language telegraphed what he was thinking.

"There's hardly anything unusual about that', Manning snorted. "This is what's making you uneasy?" Redding kept his eyes on the mountains, the hard planes of his face hidden by the muted light of the clouding day.

"No. It's what _isn't_ being taken that makes me uneasy. Expensive electronic gear, cameras, jewelry. Even gold and silver. All the typical high value, easily disposed of things that burglars are usually after." Manning had to stop and think about that. But not for long.

"Yeah? That sure seems like someone is raiding for supplies. Still sounds like scratchbacks--er-- _illegals_." Colonel Redding turned to look at his neighbor. His rugged soldier's face was distant and thoughtful. Even solemn. Manning thought Redding fit in perfectly with the brooding unnatural daytime twilight of the cloud shrouded mountains behind them. A curve billed thrasher suddenly chirped in alarm from somewhere inside the riot of flowers in Manning's yard. Neither man paid it any heed as the bird flew noisily away in avian panic from Manning's fat Siamese cat.

"Somebody broke into my house the night before last while I was gone up to Tucson. You know what was taken?" The mocking look instantly fled from Manning's face. The burglary of a neighbor's house hardly a hundred feet from his home grabbed his attention and held it fast. The discussion immediately morphed from casual chatter into the burglarized intense. Manning leaned closer to Redding, riveted on what the colonel was about to say, the clashing odors of his jasmine scented deodorant and sour human sweat assaulting Redding's nostrils.

"Whoever it was that broke into my place took a few canned goods", the colonel continued. "Some coffee. Sugar. Food from the refrigerator. A camp stove and pup tent. And a side of pork from the freezer." Manning's concerned expression shaded back into a smug, almost triumphant, look. His relaxing body language telegraphed his thoughts.

"Why, that _has_ to be illegals", he said. "They're stealing food on the way north. Has to be." The solemn look on Colonel Redding's face remained frozen in place. His posture was erect, his arms folded tightly across his chest. The colonel's tense body language mirrored the tension in his voice.

"But there were two other items taken", he said. "And that is what has me really uneasy." Redding looked at Manning, thinking that there should be some kind of cognitive recognition of concern from him. There wasn't. The mocking doubt was still lingering on the fringes of his expression.

"What was that, Ed?" The bulky big man asked, barely hiding his skepticism. The colonel turned to stare at the mountains again, the hard planes of his face again shaded by the clouding day. His voice came out low and hollow, in an ominous tone that Manning had never heard from Redding. It surprised him. Even frightened him a little.

"A couple of books", Colonel Redding continued. "One was on the Apache wars of the last century", he said. Then he looked Manning directly in the face and poked a thick finger into the man's chest as an emphatic physical punctuation to his words that sent Mannings' mind recoiling at much as his body.

"And the other one was on guerrilla warfare."

The puma cautiously approached Diablo's lair while he was gone. The great nimble golden eyed cat crept up to the edge of the cave entrance and peered inside. She was puzzled. A man living like a beast was something new. But then it wasn't new. The cougar's aurulent eyes glinted with a dim race memory of a time long ago when men were more like beasts and they had competed with the other predators for food. The big cat growled and furrowed the ground with her lethal curved claws.

She did not like this man living here in a new old way she did not understand.

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

### Nana

In 1881 began one of the great Apache raids of the twilight days. The leader was a tough-as-nails man of 75 years who was partially lame from an old injury. Nana. With usually only a mere dozen fighters accompanying him, the tough old man laid waste to parts of southern New Mexico and successfully evaded over a thousand soldiers and civilians who attempted to run the raiders to ground. They failed. Nana's raiders fought a pitched battle with a mixed force of U.S. buffalo soldiers and civilians in Gavilan Canyon on August 19th and whipped them. Altogether the raiders covered close to three thousand miles, stole hundreds of horses, killed three dozen people and safely returned to their secret Mexican haunts. Nana would be one of the last holdouts among the fighting Nde, being at Geronimo's side at the very end when the final surrender came in Skeleton Canyon in 1887. Nana was then in his 80's. He would live to be nearly a hundred. Diablo had a fond name for the tough old chief of a century earlier.

He called him grandfather.

Dawn was crawling over the peaks of the Mule mountains on the far eastern flank of the San Pedro Valley, spreading its precursive weak gray light over the eastern face of the Huachuca mountains on the other side of the valley. Maurice Ashby and Alvornia Lister crawled out of their sleeping bags. They yawned and scratched and spit and pissed and then made their morning coffee. The young Chicago bred soldiers watched sleepily while the day dawned into its rose tinged spiritual glory over the San Pedro Valley and the Huachuca Mountains, sipping coffee and munching on a breakfast of oatmeal bars and dried fruit. They cleaned up their campsite, and, being seasoned campers, judiciously made sure the fire was completely dead.

In a few minutes they deftly packed their gear and in the vigor and optimism of youth jauntily headed down the trail crowded with tall redolent pines on their way to the head of the Carr Canyon waterfall. They tramped up to it in the full light of morning and suddenly stopped cold in their tracks, stunned by the grand view of the valley below and the encircling mountain ranges with still more mountain ranges in the distance thrusting towards the heavens as far as the eye could see. They had stepped into God's own Cathedral. And they knew it. The soldiers began speaking to each other very softly, reverentially, as though the sound of a loud voice would break the quiet serenity of the ethereal early morning mountain forest. Then the pair of young black soldiers left their gear at the Forest Service barrier cordoning off the treacherous waterfall and cautiously inched beyond it to get a bird's eye look at the notoriously lethal precipitous drop. The waterfall chute, which ran heavy with runoff during summer thunderstorms and spring snow melt, had not a hint of running water. Most of the time the waterfall chute was dry. But the rocks of the chute remained slick with drops of dew and slippery green algae.

Ashby and Lister were as wise to the treacherous rocks of the waterfall chute as they were to the dangerous hallways, alleys and tough streets of their Cabrini Green Chicago boyhood. Just over a year earlier another young soldier from Fort Huachuca had ventured out too far in the rocks and gone over the falls. He was a novice in the mountains with the novice's naive' bravado. It cost him his life. His companions--either not so naive' or not so incautious--called 911. Cochise County Fire And Rescue responded and it took nearly a full day for the rescuers to work down to where the young soldier's body was caught on the rocks and retrieve the soldier's broken remains. He was far from alone as a victim of the Carr Canyon waterfall.

Over the recorded Anglo decades at least a score of people died on the rocks when they slipped to their deaths over the edge of the deadly waterfall. Only God knew how many died in the ancient days before the paper scribbling record keeping began. The reason was almost always the same. The feckless and the reckless alike ventured out on the rocks to catch a glimpse of the precipice. The rocks were deceptively slippery and, once out too far, the foolishly impetuous doomed souls could not get back to safety. Wide-eyed with panic, they slowly slipped down the rocks until they went screaming over the edge of the falls and fell hundreds of feet to their deaths. A couple of the plummeting hikers had survived the fall. But most died. Eventually the Forest Service put up a cordon, a fence, with a sign telling people to stay away from the waterfall because of the danger. But there were always those, the young, the adventurous, the foolish, and always, always, the suicidal, who climbed the fence anyway.

Ashby and Lister knew about the string of fatal plummeting hikers from the waterfall's treacherous sloping rocks. They were far too experienced at backpacking in the mountains to take foolish risks. But they were youthful and strong. And adventurous. And, what the hell, weren't they soldiers who were supposed to face up to danger and overcome it? They were damn well going to take a look at the treacherous rocks of this lethal waterfall. They were even going to snap some photos. Man, they would be _some_ photos. No one had ever taken photos directly of the waterfall's gaping maw protruding menacingly out from the overhanging bluff. The two tough young soldiers were going to climb out on that maw and take those pictures. They'd hashed it all out again last the previous evening over the smoke of their resinous pine-fed campfire

They'd do it with assiduous care and expertise. They fastened a sturdy right-twisted climbing rope around a huge rock beyond the Forest Service cordon and double snapped it to rings on the climbing belts they'd brought with them for this very purpose. They repeatedly pulled heavily on the rope, double and triple checking the fasteners to make sure the rope was securely anchored, before they cautiously made their way to the edge of the falls. hey began their descent, intent on moving down the slippery rocks, Ashby with his camera dangling by a thick strap off his shoulder while both he and Lister continually checked the rope's tension. As they began their descent, just out of their sight. a furtive figure slipped through the pines and bushes above them towards the head of the waterfall.

The two soldiers were twenty feet out on the slippery rocks from the Forest Service barrier and just going over the dizzying precipice. A mixture of fear and excitement surged through them, Ashby felt like a giant hand had reached inside his chest and was squeezing his heart. What a rush! They were peering down at the plunging rock face and didn't see a figure stealthily creep out from the shadows in the jumble of rocks above. Diablo crept noiselessly on his hands and knees to the safety rope looped around the huge boulder. He pulled a wicked looking razor edged knife--the same one that he used to kill the woodcutter Teran--from a scabbard on his belt and started cutting into it. He went at it slowly, watching the rope intently, like a craftsman taking professional care with his work, until he cut just beyond halfway through the rope. Then, satisfied it was enough, he stopped and leaned back to watch as the remaining strands started to fail under the added stress and one by one began to fray and gradually lose the battle with the soldiers' weight on the rope. The first of the strands snapped.

Lister's eyes suddenly shot up from looking at the rocks below to where the safety rope was fastened to the big boulder. He'd both felt and heard the snap when the strand broke. In a mind-searing moment of utter terror he realized what it was.

"The rope!" He yelled frantically to Ashby. "It's breaking!" There was no time for any more words. Silently, eyes bugged wide open in terror, both men began to quickly--but still with the prescience to do it with even steadiness so as not to put extra stress on the rope--pull themselves back to safety. Suddenly a lean and weathered buckskin clad figure with long yellow-brown hair appeared above them. Though grimly struggling with himself to keep from panicking, Ashby's racing mind still managed to register the peculiar impression of the person above as being like some weird apparition from another time. But he was no apparition. Diablo stood staring down at them. Whatever or whoever he was made no difference to Ashby. The guy was _here._

"Hey!" Ashby yelled when he saw him. "Help us! Pull us in! The goddamn rope is breaking!" Diablo looked at the fraying strands of the rope, then at the men. The barest hint of a feral smile touched his lips. He had already fashioned a rough pole from a slender aspen sapling with his wickedly lethal knife. He extended the pole towards the two frantic soldiers. As the wild-eyed frightened men pulled themselves closer, Ashby reached out and grabbed the pole. Diablo leaned back, grunting, to firmly hold the weight. Another strand of the rope snapped and then the whole rope let go. Lister lurched as the rope went slack and grabbed the pole, Ashby having grabbed onto it a moment earlier. While Diablo leaned back against the weight of the two men, they began to pull hand over hand up the length of the pole, Ashby's galloping mind thinking that whoever this strange person was, or wherever the hell he had materialized form, the guy was saving their lives. It was just miraculous, Ashby thought, his mind somehow oddly lucid and even almost calm. Just goddamn miraculous. But then the thought died. Abruptly.

Diablo let out a blood curdling whoop and thrust his body forward with all his wiry strength, thrusting the pole out as hard as he could and letting it go. As the pole flew away he kept his hands outstretched, palms out, in a mocking gesture of finality that was a perfect match for the expression on his face. Diablo's cold bloodthirsty look was the last human memory Ashby and Lister would have. For a moment utter horror played on the faces of the two doomed soldiers. They stood as though frozen in motion and time. But then gravity crushed the fleeting moment of inertia and they began to slide backwards, wildly thrashing with their feet for footing on the slippery rocks. First Lister slipped and tumbled down the rocks and over the edge of the falls, screaming as he went. Ashby went onto his hands and knees and frantically scrambled for even the tiniest purchase in the slippery rocks. For a moment he found one, but his fingers slipped and he went sliding on his belly backwards down the rocks and over the falls. He screamed all the way to the bottom. Diablo stood for a moment, looking at the empty rocks, then turned to vanish into the mountains. Diablo's Raid had started.

It had begun well.

Later than morning a car drove up the serpentine switch backed unpaved mountain road that climbed to the head of Carr Canyon falls. The teenaged occupants intended to smoke some weed and hang out in the fragrant cool of the mountain pines by the waterfall. But then they found the gear of the two dead men by the Forest Service cordon.

"Hey", a pimple faced redhead kid named Mikey McVey said to his buddy as he knelt by the soldiers' backpacks and rifled through them. "There's some good stuff here." He looked furtively around him, thinking maybe the owners were nearby. He saw no one. "Let's take 'em." His friend Tommy Salcido had other ideas. The second kid whistled lowly in dawning recognition. He'd just spotted the dangling fragment of rope still attached to the big boulder at the head of the falls. The two teenagers' eyes bugged wide and they forgot all about smoking dope and hanging out as they hotfooted it back to the black Ford F-100 pickup Salcido had taken without his father's permission while the elder Salcido got in some sleep after working a night shift.

They drove down the twisty mountain road as fast as they dared, which in their reckless youth was a hell of a lot faster than Tommy Salcido's father would have driven, and called the Forest Service from the first occupied house they came to. That evening the fire department's Emergency Rescue Team brought out the bodies. It was the lead story on the evening news in Tucson that night when a TV reporter with blow dried hair and an expensive tailored suit announced with histrionic flair that 'The Killer Falls' had killed again. Similar dramatic headlines topped the front pages in the local and regional papers the next day. The Carr Canyon falls had claimed two more victims

The latest two had been more cautious than most, but they had the fatal bad luck of using a defective rope to support their weight. The rope had failed and they had fallen to their deaths. Probably because the uncut half of the rope had frayed and snapped, giving the superficial impression the entire rope had failed, it occurred to no one that the rope might have been intentionally cut. The Forest Service again sternly warned people to stay outside of the cordon at the head of the falls. The only person in the entire valley who did not immediately accept the deaths as yet another unfortunate accident was Colonel Edward Redding.

And even he was only distantly suspicious.

Nub Riley saw the evening news that night and the pair of deaths in the mountains only served to deepen his uneasiness. If he had been a superstitious man he would have called it an evil omen. Peg Riley wasn't much more superstitious than her husband, but she did consider the deaths an evil omen. She tried again to talk him out of going into the mountains. Her stubborn husband wouldn't budge. Oddly, it was the worldly wheeler dealer Jim Garret who was the most shaken by the news of the deaths in Carr Canyon. Beneath his meet-and-greet gregarious salesman's exterior, one part of him was a man not far removed from the ancient mixed pagan and Christian folkways of the Mexican peasant. He had been weaned on his great grandmother's Mexican and Indian folk tales, many of them bizarre and often downright scary parables of the supernatural. Like La Llorna, the spooky crying woman of Mexican folklore. Or the Witch Moth, a real moth which, if it landed on your door, meant death was lurking nearby. The same thing with the presence of an owl. If a big owl went swooping over your head, you'd best grab hold of your rosary and get your fingers moving on some real serious prayers. Garret was spooked. But not enough to give up on the dig. He was a man of many parts and the part that wanted to keep on with the dig won out. Yet even then he somehow intuited it was a mistake.

Maybe a real _big_ mistake.

Garret had at times flirted with the fringes of the occult in his secret inner life. The more he used drugs and alcohol, it seemed, the more he began to tune into the paranormal. He felt things in the mountains, sensed presences and phantoms that he did not tell anyone about. He couldn't. He had his image to maintain and peasant superstitions sure as hell weren't part of the image. Heather Sosa was the one person he did talk to about it and that was an underlying reason why he often brought her to his home. She had the same heritage, the same scary story telling great grandma and the same drug-fueled feelings. She at least had a semblance of understanding. Garret got drunk that evening and in his muddled inebriation imprudently told Heather everything. An evil presence was in the mountains, he said. Did he dare still go in there after the Mimbres pots? When Heather Sosa learned what Mimbres pots were, and how valuable they were, she became very attentive.

Heather was not nearly as drunk as he was.

Django Perez was an auto body man. He was in his tenth year at Vacek's Garage in the nearby town of Bisbee. The town lay cradled in the southern folds of the Mule Mountains on the opposite side of the San Pedro Valley from the Huachuca Mountains. It was only a few uphill miles north of the faded border straddling town of Naco. Perez was raised in the mountains so it was second nature for him to take up hiking and backpacking as a hobby. The beauty and serenity of the mountain country was a pleasant contrast and a needed escape valve to the murk and din of the garage and the sometimes weird vibes in strange, eclectic Bisbee. The old copper mining town could also be a place of utter astonishment, like the time a stunned Perez passed John Wayne as he came sauntering down Brewery Gulch Street. Good God! John Wayne as a Bisbee tourist! Perez recognized Wayne's trademark swagger long before he saw his face but was too dumbstruck to even think of asking for an autograph.

But mostly the urban pretensions of the cash rich big city expatriates who were steadily moving into Bisbee and displacing an earlier wave of immigrants, the mostly harmless and inoffensive dope smoking 60's time warp hippies of the town, often got on Perez' nerves. Not that he yearned for the good old days in Bisbee. The good old days hadn't been so good. Bisbee had been a rough, hard-drinking, brawling miners' town in the old days. Perez wasn't sure which he liked most--or disliked most--among the various faces of Bisbee. Brawling two fisted drunken miners. Dope smoking infrequently bathed hippies. Or the strutting fat bank accounts of the latest newcomers.

So he headed for the mountain trails at every chance to forget about all of them. Perez was camped overnight barely a half mile from where Lister and Ashby had their camp. Their campfire was clearly visible to Perez. They had not seen him, nor had Diablo, because Perez was a dry camper who rarely built campfires. His small portable camp stove was sufficient for his needs. Perez loved to watch the profound magic of the mysterious universe in the starry night sky rather than a flickering campfire, no matter how enchanting a fire could be. He counted four shooting stars and a half dozen moving points of light, the amazing satellites of his human kind, in the sky before the clouds began to move in and shut off the heavens. He dreamed of stars and clouds and woke with an odd hypnogogic image of an Indian galloping over a hill on a bright red stallion.

Early the next morning he passed where the two soldiers had been, saw the cold ashes of their fire pit and the empty campsite and the tracks from two sets of hiking boots. Mountain-weaned Perez moved along the piney trail with fluid ease and he figured he'd catch up to the pair from the campfire some time that day as he hiked south. The stocky Perez moved at his usual brisk pace but never did pass them. He guessed that they'd detoured on a side trip into one of the brushy canyons that radiated out from the mountain core all around the Huachucas. That was fine with him. Django Perez came to the mountains to get away from people and noise. He preferred the solitude. He got plenty of noise and conversation at work and about town. But, thankfully, no longer at home. Since his divorce he lived alone, free of the ex-wife who came out of the womb chattering and hadn't stopped since.

As he trekked south through a pungent clump of Arizona cypress and into a stand of pinyon, Perez stepped into a menacing twilight world, completely unaware of the danger that lurked nearby and that he was framed in the crosshairs of a scoped rifle. He was being keenly watched by a lean man in worn buckskins who lay hidden amid the rocks and a tangle of manzanita and mountain mahogany under a handful of towering ponderosa pines. Diablo tracked Perez for several minutes, watching him through the scope of a rifle. More than once Diablo's finger began to tighten on the trigger. Tight. But not tight enough to release the firing pin that would send a hurtling metallic projectile at Django Perez' spine. This one he would have to let go. He couldn't risk a gunshot, and the man was too far ahead and moving too briskly for Diablo to catch him and use his wicked knife. No matter. There were still the two Mexicans, guilelessly unaware he knew of their presence nearby in the mountains. He took one last look through the scope, then slowly lowered the rifle. Perez continued on his brisk way, blithely unaware of Diablo's murderous surveillance, and reached the trailhead at Coronado Peak by mid-afternoon. He was soon on his way back to his homey little eight decades old miner's cottage in Bisbee's San Jose district that he had inherited from his maternal Wales born grandfather. He never would know how lucky he had been. He had just won the jackpot on the biggest lottery of them all.

Life itself.

That same day the seedy lumpish middle aged man in his battered aging Toyota Carina dropped Troy Andrews and Maria Alarcon off only a few hundred yards from where Perez had earlier emerged off the crest trail. Not a soul was around to see them slip down through the rocky barren brown foothills sprinkled with low scraggly shrubs, taking a little used back trail to the border at Yaqui Springs. There they hid in the rocks until dark came and Reuben Garcia appeared on the Sonora side of the border. Maria Alarcon didn't fail to notice the irony that a nearby hump of land was called Smugglers' Ridge on the map. They were not the first furtive beings to use these mountain trails for smuggling. Nor were they the first to face hidden dangers. But nothing in the dark bloody past could compare to what the insane future would bring.

Jim Garret pulled his big flashy sunburst orange Continental into Nub Riley's yard just after 4:00 Monday morning and rudely awakened a flock of scaled quail over nighting in the big mesquites by the road. The lights were already burning in the Riley ranch house. Garret hadn't even switched off the Continental's ignition before Nub came out the door to meet him. He was looking grumpy. It got worse. And fast. His face flushed and he looked about to explode into a red faced anger when he looked into the car and saw Garret was not alone. Heather Sosa was sitting next to him, scrunched down in the seat and trying to look inconspicuous.

"What the hell is this?" Riley hissed at Garret with a very un-Nub-like venom in his voice. "Goddamnit, Jim! What the hell is she doing here?" Garret climbed out of the Continental and then cautiously approached Nub with the outstretched palms of the supplicant. He knew that Riley, despite his easy going and non-aggressive nature, could be a dangerous man to provoke.

"Now, Nub...," he began, trying to explain.

There was no explaining anything to Riley. He was way beyond being merely angry and was teetering on the edge of exploding. His fists were unconsciously flexing and unflexing in angry frustration. The last thing Nub needed was some loose tongued lush of a strumpet coming along on the dig. How the hell did Garret expect that she'd keep her mouth shut about what they were doing? A heated argument broke out in the dappled light and shadow of the Riley place's yard under the muted glow of the ranch's outdoor security lights. Garret lamely tried to talk his way out of it, but what headed off the argument was something that caught Jim more completely by surprise than any sucker punch ever had. Peg Riley came marching out of the old ranch house and stomped up to the two men with an air of stubborn determination so obvious that it immediately shut both of them up. They stared at her with veteran wariness. Both men'd had the unpleasant experience of being the target of Peg Riley's ire when her blood was up. She was a pissed off wildcat no wise man would mess with.

"I'm coming, too", Peg Riley said with jutting-jawed finality. "And that's that." Then she wheeled around and marched back into the house.

That derailed the argument. How could Riley fume at Garret for doing the same thing he was doing? Garret took Nub aside and whispered to him what had happened. He had little choice about bringing Heather. After he'd foolishly gotten drunk and told her about the illegal dig, she insisted on coming. When he tried to refuse, she threatened to turn him into the Forest Service. Garret had to grudgingly agree to Heather's coming to the dig with them. But he didn't like it. And Nub liked it even less. A whole lot less. His sun baked rancher's face remained an angry deep red. The argument was not over yet.

Something stirred up a whiskered screech owl--Peg Riley could tell you the scientific name of the critter was Megascops trichopsis--in the cottonwoods along the nearby San Pedro River. The disturbed owl was loudly beating its wings through the trees as the two men stood out in the pre-dawn Riley ranch yard arguing with heated intensity. Nub was hovering on the very edge of refusing to go until Garret had stopped him in his mental tracks with a verbal grace not unlike a Spanish picador deftly stopping a raging bull.

"Nub", Garret said, his hands still held palm up in the submissive gesture that was a conscious attempt to placate Riley. "Calm down. And....listen to me, _dammit!"_ Riley stared wordlessly at Garret. Except for his grim expression, he looked calm enough. But then so did the eye of a hurricane. Garret quickly explained in a low, rapid fire voice that the reason he agreed to let Heather come along was that her presence would make her as guilty as they were. His cousin was already on probation for felony drug possession. Another offense and she'd find herself in shackles on a institutional bus with barred windows and hard set grim faces on a one way trip to the woman's prison in the barren heat blasted middle of desert Arizona. Heather Soya would have no bloody choice but to keep her mouth uncharacteristically shut about the dig.

Garret made his point. Eloquently. Riley muttered darkly to himself, but also nodded in reluctant understanding. A Few minutes later the four silent and atypically glum people climbed into Nub's four wheeler Jeep and drove away on the Riley ranch road towards the nearby highway. There was no traffic. Garret wanted to get into Dancer Canyon before light came and curious eyes saw them going into the mountains with the trailered Bobcat. They made it. Barely. Dawn was creeping out from the Mule Mountains to the east just as they reached the dig site at the upper end of Dancer Canyon. They wasted no time in hiding the Jeep and trailer under the spreading evergreen boughs of a small clutch of towering one seed junipers. A family of javelina feeding under the trees glared at the intruders through near sighted eyes for a moment and then scrambled away into the tangled brush along the little trickling creek that drained Dancer Canyon of moisture from the springtime mountaintop snowmelt and the wild summertime thunderstorms.

They weren't alone. Keeping well back, and sometimes driving without lights to avoid being spotted, Tony Parelli followed in the nondescript dull gray Ford sedan he'd rented at the Tucson airport using a phony identity. He stopped when they left the highway. He knew better than to pull off the paved road and follow them in on the rutted dirt track. Too risky. If they saw him tailing them the whole deal could well fall apart. And then Tony Parelli would have to do some very fast talking to save his ass from getting fired. Or worse. He didn't know who had hired Zachary. He shuddered at the thought of what some of the hard cases who hired Zachary were capable of doing when they were really riled.

The barren vastness of the Arizona desert had long been a dumping ground for the corpses of those who'd crossed the wrong people. Parelli knew that for a sobering first hand, don't-tell-anybody, been-there fact. Some gruesome memories from those days flashed though his mind. He shuddered again, then stopped by the side of the road, the car's headlights shut off, and watched the bouncing progress of the four wheeler's tail lights into Dancer Canyon until they disappeared into the predawn darkness. When dawn came he would drive in as far as was prudent, then foot it the rest of the way until he found their camp. When he pinpointed the location he'd put in the call to Zachary. He'd have pulled off his assignment, and done it competently. It might even be worth a nice bonus from his grateful boss. " _Ladies_ of Miracle Mile", he muttered softly, thinking of the veteran acrobatic hookers back in Tucson. "Tony Parelli will be _seein'_ you soon."

Reuben Garcia's ride was a recent model cherry red 4WD Chevy pickup stolen in Tucson two months earlier and less than two hours later driven across the border at Nogales. Garcia bumpily drove over the uneven open country almost smack up to the actual border. There was no need to be as stealthy on the Mexican side of the border as Troy and Maria had to be on the American side. Enough gringo dollars to the right people in Sonora invariably had doors swinging wide open in all kinds of welcome. Garcia knew who to prime with the money. He probably was seen driving in but he was certain no one would dare to bother him as he pulled the Chevy up to the border. He sat inside the pickup awaiting Andrews' arrival, the tape player turned low but still audible a few feet away with the fiddles and horns of a Sinaloa Mariachi band called Los Tigres. He was to meet Andrews here, near a place called Yaqui Springs. The name puzzled Garcia. From what little he knew of local history, he had the distinct impression that the Yaqui people had never lived around here in the old days. This had been the dangerous home turf of the Chiricahua Apaches. So why Yaqui Springs? He never would know. Intellectual curiosity rarely visited Garcia's brain.

Night approached and began to throw its obsidian shroud over the unpeopled mountain foothills of the border. At last light Troy and Maria crept out of the rocks and headed towards Garcia's pickup. The swarthy Mexican-American was at first angry when he saw that Andrews was not alone. He had company. What? _¡Chinga!_ A _woman!_ What the hell was Andrews doing, bringing some bitch with him? He didn't like it one bit, for in Reuben Garcia's world a woman had no place in the daily affairs of men. His anger fizzled when the woman started talking. Maria Alarcon stripped his macho ego with an easy feminine celerity, disarming him with her beguiling dark eyed charm, talking in fluent Spanish and telling him that Andrews was clueless about the mountains and would get hopelessly lost if she didn't guide him. Garcia studied the stunning beauty of the young woman and the luminous acuity of her mind and made a mental note to look her up in Tucson the next time he was there. This was a woman, he thought to himself, well worth knowing. He wondered how she was in bed and made himself a promise to find out. And soon. Or so he thought. Maria pegged him instantly as what she thought was the worst sort of Mexican male. Pompous, hopelessly macho, probably a drunk and a woman beater and almost certainly a financial deadbeat. Garcia had about as much chance of bedding Maria Alarcon as he did of winning the Indianapolis 500 on a bicycle.

They made the exchange. Mutely. A timeless exchange. At once both ancient and contemporary. Money for contraband. Andrews' money for Garcia's drugs. Neither dared to even think of a rip off because of the powerful and deadly forces behind each of them. Then they parted to their separate ways and separate worlds. Reuben Garcia hit the accelerator on the stolen Chevy and headed for a cantina in Cananea known for its pliable young women. The young Americans set off uphill towards the north, their calf muscles already flexing with the exertion of the long hike that lay ahead up the steep path to Coronado Peak and the long high country crest trail trail running from there through the Huachucas. They wanted to trek as far into the mountains as they could before first light. The two moved north, Maria in the front guiding them, Troy in the rear with the heavy pack of drugs on his back. By dawn they were past the trailhead and well into the rugged spine of the Huachucas. They made their day camp in a tree-screened rock overhang not far from an infrequently visited place the locals called Dancer Canyon.

The morning shadows still lay long on the Huachucas when a solitary figure walked along the mountain trail hardly fifty yards from the hidden day camp of the drug smugglers. The man was wearing sturdy hiking boots and was in a Forest Service uniform. He moved with the practiced ease of someone at home on the mountain trails. The man stopped directly above Dancer Canyon, took out a pair of old Zeiss binoculars from a battered leather case and for a long time studied the canyon below. Finally he put away the binoculars and hurried back down the trail towards were he'd parked the Forest Service pickup at the Coronado Peak trailhead. Max Reiser was satisfied that no one could see the camp of pothunters from the mountains above.

Tony Parelli had to wait. They could easily spot the Ford's headlights from the higher elevation of the canyon where the Jeep and trailered Bobcat had gone. He couldn't use the headlights, and he couldn't see well enough to drive without them on the jarring dirt track leading to the canyon. He waited, impatiently, fingers drumming on the steering wheel, for the coming dawn to cast enough early morning cinereal light for him to see without headlights. Then he slowly maneuvered his rental car down the rough track through sloping fields of browning grasses, wide patches of soap tree yuccas and occasional solitary mesquites towards the canyon in the mountains ahead. There was a pair of rugged spots where erosion had rutted the road so badly that it was only barely passable to a passenger car, but his back country Border Patrol experience had taught him how to ride the tops of the ruts. He made it through easily, though one chunk of rock scraped the Ford's oil pan and made him back off on the gas pedal. When he thought that approaching any closer in a car might be spotted or heard from inside the canyon, he pulled off the old ranch road, shut down the Ford's engine in a dry swale where the car couldn't be seen from any distance, and began trekking down the rutted dirt track on foot.

He had thought ahead enough back in Tombstone to have bought a pair of rugged outdoors Redwings, even though he was none too happy with the tourist inflated price. He was soon thankful for that little bit of foresight. It was farther than he thought. Three miles in he finally caught a distant glimpse of the group of people Zachary had hired him to follow. They'd set up a camp largely obscured from view under a stand of evergreen junipers just inside the mouth of the steep sloped canyon walls peppered with ocotillo and stunted oaks and pinyons. The Jeep and trailer were parked nearby, almost completely hidden by the overarching thick foliage of the trees. His senses unconsciously switching back to the mindset of his infantry days in the Corps, Parelli quickly and quietly slipped out of sight behind the cover of a clump of low growing mesquites and started to move towards a nearby hill where he could climb up to get a closer look. He had not neglected to bring along his own set of binoculars.

Those binoculars in hand, and with the disk of the rising sun, still bright despite a growing layer of clouds, at his back, Parelli lay unseen at the brushy brow of the hill sized chunk of rocky outcrop. The hill stood like a granitic omen of the mysterious round topped foothills and the craggy brooding mountains beyond. The four people from the Jeep were in the early stages of setting up a camp. Two men. Two women. None of them looked fat or out of shape. Not young. Not old. They worked with the unconscious measured movements of the mature adult. Parelli put down the binoculars and thought for a moment. This seemed to be their final destination. But he'd learned in the Patrol not to jump to conclusions. Things often were not what they at first seemed to be. He brought the binoculars back up to his eyes and focused in on the camp, looking for something that would verify that this was their final destination.

He was watching from his brushy hilltop hiding place as Garret and Riley walked over to a series of low mounds and stood there, staring, as though the two men were studying the mounds. Parelli's pulse quickened. A dig. This was looking an awful goddamn lot like an illegal dig about to happen. It wouldn't be the first one he'd seen, though all the others were of the ruined ransacked sites left behind by pothunters. A few moments later definite confirmation came when Riley climbed onto the Bobcat, started it up and maneuvered the machine over to the mounds. Whoa! Wait a minute. He could hardly hear the Bobcat engine from his hide. He wasn't that far away. They must have done something to quiet the engine noise. Only one reason for that. No doubt of it now.

It was an illegal dig.

Parelli was ready to slide back down the hill and quietly make his way back to the rental car and the phone call his boss was waiting for. His infantryman's situational awareness fled before his excitement at what he thought was the successful culmination of his mission. His mind was already drifting to his buddy Mick's Sonora Lounge on Grant Street in Tucson and the women who liked to hang out there. He was distracted and in a hurry and didn't notice the little spreading cat claw mimosa next to him as he put his weight onto his leg to stand up and pushed himself heavily against the mimosa bush. When the cat claw thorns bit deeply into his thigh Parelli almost hollered out in anger. Almost. He hadn't come this far to blow it at the last minute. He bit his lip and luridly blasphemed silently to himself. As he made his way back down the hill, mutely cursing all the way, he didn't see the black tailed rattlesnake, out late in the season looking for one last meal before hibernation, lurking in a clump of grass hardly a dozen feet away. The snake's tail signaled no warning. Parelli was only a fleeting distraction. The snake's flicking heat seeking tongue had sensed a kangaroo rat busily collecting grass seeds for the coming winter. The rat meandered ever closer to the black tail rattler. Like Parelli, the rat never saw the snake.

Until it was too late.

Rolando Jimenez and his lifelong buddy Jaime Gomez blundered and stumbled and cursed and got thoroughly lost their first night's attempt at trekking north in the mountains. No surprise. They were after all calloused-hands men of the earth, campesinos from the ejidos of southern Sonora, from a whole different universe than that of the backpacker. Even the idea of hiking was exotic to them. Who had the time or the money or even the desire to go off wandering around in the bush? After several frustrating hours of bumbling around in the dark the two men finally found their way back to the trail, but not before most of the night was used up and they had little to show for a night's effort but a bunch of scrapes and scratches from the rocks and thorny bushes that populated the mountainsides. Not daring to travel by daylight, they settled into a deep crevice in the rocks off the trail and realized with disgust they had barely moved a mile north of the border. As they were getting ready to bed down, a lion screamed from the rocks not much farther away than the length of the dusty soccer field they'd played on as boys. The two men started. Both knew well the hairy tales of the tigres--the jaguars--in the Sonora mountains. The mountains were scary places of dangerous creatures both real and legendary. They had always avoided them. Until now.

"Lando", Jaime said uneasily to his old friend as they were unrolling their course but colorful factory made Mexican blankets. "I don't like these mountains. Maybe we should change our plans."

"Si, Amigo mio", Rolando replied softly. "Pienso asi"--I think you're right. Talking in weary whispers in the colloquial Spanish dialect of their southern Sonora home they explored with words what they had earlier explored with their feet. No more of that. No more of that liquored-up chortling Naco viejo's fabled ancient high mountain smuggling and Indian raiding trails. It wasn't for them. They tiredly agreed that when night came again and plunged the mountains into silent darkness, they would find their way to the foothills on the sparsely populated western face of the Huachucas. From there they'd travel along the edge of the valleys under the protective cover of the dark nights and ferret out a place to hide in the foothill canyons by the revealing light of day. In a few days they'd be safely into Tucson and make the arrangements to travel to the interior of the United States and to their share of the great American cornucopia that beckoned them.

The decision to change the course of their northward odyssey settled, the two spent Mexican men ate a simple meal of hard bread and cheese, washed down with water from their canteens. They talked softly for a while longer, then spread out their bedrolls ready to drift off to sleep through the coming day. As they tiredly bedded down Diablo watched, silent and unblinking and malevolent, from behind a huge granite boulder spiderwebbed with shallow cracks from generations of winter frosts. He was less than thirty yards away. He straightened up to his full lanky height, stretched his body until the bones cracked and began to move, as quiet and as sure footed as the mountain cougar, towards the two Mexicans.

The lethal honed knife ready in his hand.

Benning Goman picked up the phone, his hands uncharacteristically starting to tremble just so slightly when he realized the caller was Dominic Zachary. When Zachary told him he'd located the dig site, Goman's face lit up in a golden moment of self satisfied triumph that he hadn't experienced since he'd picked a big dollar winner at the Preakness four years earlier. _Yes!_ This was it. He and his man Skarp had spent the past two days preparing everything he thought they'd need. They were ready to move. After Goman plunked the phone down they did just that. Move. They were rolling in less than fifteen minutes. Skarp was behind the wheel of Goman's ranch truck, a pricey, durable Series III 2.5 liter Land Rover. The lean gray haired patrician wasn't surprised to hear that Garret had slipped into the mountains on the east facing slopes of the southern end of the Huachucas near the distressingly drab desert gobbling little strip city of Sierra Vista. With its high mountains and availability of both water and game, the Huachucas had already seemed to the analytical Goman one of the most likely locations for the Mimbres site. Nor did he neglect to congratulate himself on being right on this pick, too. As the Land Rover ate up the miles and they grew closer to the Mimbres dig, Goman's nervous tic returned. His eye began to twitch.

Ninety minutes later Skarp pulled up behind Parelli's rental car in the oak cloaked mountain foothills on Highway 92 between the automobile-defined new city of Sierra Vista and the quaint old mining town of Bisbee. Parelli was parked on the shoulder exactly where Zachary said he'd be--close to the turnoff on the paved secondary road that led to the Coronado National Monument. Parelli recognized Goman's Land Rover from Zachary's instructions, stuck his arm out the window of the Ford rental car, waved and then pulled out onto the highway. The Land Rover followed close behind with an agitated Goman shifting nervously in the passenger's seat, his eye twitching so rapidly that even Skarp noticed it. And why shouldn't he be excited? It wasn't every day a man stumbled onto a genuine unexcavated Mimbres site. Good God! Think of it! This was the terrestrial equivalent of salvaging a treasure ship lost centuries ago during the golden age of the Spanish Main.

Unseen by the men in the Land Rover, or by any others among the species called human, a golden eagle soaring overhead on the thermals rising off the foothills spotted a luckless rabbit in a patch of lovegrass, an exotic grass imported from South Africa early that century which had eventually overwhelmed the native species. High above, the eagle dipped its wings and plunged at the rabbit with the keen eyed intensity of a combat pilot diving on a target. The Land Rover followed Parelli's Ford onto the Coronado access road. Just as the two vehicles pulled onto the access road, the golden eagle streaked down, claws out, and struck the rabbit with suck force that bits of blood and fur flew two feet into the air.

The poor creature cried piteously as the eagle rose into the sky and carried it away.

"Oh, come on, Maria", Troy whined. "Why not?" Maria could barely contain her anger. Andrews clumsily tried to seduce her in the shallow rock shelter they had chosen for their day camp. She flatly turned him down, and violently slapped his hand away when he tried to touch her. He had bitched continually about the heavy pack of drugs he was carrying during the long hard night of struggling through the darkness into the rugged core of the Huachucas. Maria was disgusted right down to very bottom of her seasoned hiker's hard core. Troy Andrews might have been a tough street kid at home in the alleys of a big city, but he was hopelessly inept in the mountains. Maria Alarcon would have nothing more to do with him after this trip was over. It was time for her to move on. Had been even before they'd come into the mountains. Maria had already lost interest in Andrews but the lure of the adventure of smuggling in the dope made her postpone dropping him. Troy Andrews was already ancient history in her adventurous young mind. He'd be a long way from being the only former lover in Maria Alarcon's young life. Nor was there much of a possibility he'd be anywhere near the last. Maria's inquisitive nature wasn't confined to just exploring mountains. She explored men, as well. They were almost as interesting as mountains. Almost.

Tony Parelli hit the brakes on his nondescript rental Ford. To Skarp it seemed like the middle of nowhere, just an empty place on the narrow paved Coronado Monument road that arrowed through the wide expanse of the yucca-speckled valley grasslands. The San Pedro Valley and the Huachuca mountain foothills were already turning from green to brown after the recent end of the tumultous thunderstorms of the summer monsoons. Parelli pointed out to Skarp and Goman the dirt track that snaked its rutted way towards Dancer Canyon. That didn't end Parelli's involvement. Goman had instructed Dominic Zachary to have Parelli screen the site in the canyon while the pothunters were doing their surreptitious digging and to keep a careful eye out for intruders. Tony, who'd done plenty of boot time in the bush with the Border Patrol as well as before that when he was a young hothead of a ground pounder in the Corps, was supposed to make himself look like a novice hiker exploring the back country of the Coronado National Forest. In his macho arrogance he was uncertain whether he could pull off the novice act. He considered himself far too experienced. And in fact, he really was right, but not for the reason he thought. Tony Parelli was about as subtle as a Harley in the Tour de France. Grumbling to himself over having to stay on, he had no choice but to do as he was told. Zachary signed the paychecks.

But Tony Parelli did not look happy.

As Goman and Skarp bumpily headed off on the dirt track in Goman's Range Rover, Parelli drove two hundred yards down the track and parked the forgettable Ford in a hard-packed dry wash, careful that it was out of sight from the paved road. Then, lugging a backpack with food and water and a pulp fiction crime novel that would have pissed Zachary off if he knew about it, walked over a mile to a good sized hill covered with a scattering of ocotillo and yucca where he could see a long distance in every direction. He climbed the rock strewn hill, his mind wandering to the memories of all the other rocky hills he'd climbed as a Marine and as a BP officer. There'd been a bunch of them. Too damn many. When he got to the summit, noting with testosterone tinged satisfaction that he was only slightly winded, he sat down and started watching. Just like he'd been told to. He let himself get distracted watching the comical acrobatics of a pair of nearby mockingbirds and didn't at first see Max Reiser's Forest Service pickup stop on the paved road and then pull into the Dancer Canyon track.

"Well, what do you think?" Garret said to Riley as the two men stood at the edge of one of the grassy mounds of the ruin. An adult coyote and two pups watched them unseen from the hill rising behind the two men. One of the pups started to yip but the adult coyote cut him off with a gentle cuff of the paw to his muzzle.

"Sure don't look like much, does it?" Riley replied. Garret smiled. The deaths of the two soldiers and the argument over Heather were fading in his memory. He was returning to his old self. And that old self was animated by both the idea of the money he was going to make from the dig and, even more, by the excitement of the dig itself.

"Be glad it doesn't look like much, old buddy", he said to Riley. "That's why it sat here for so long without being bothered. No one guessed what lay underneath." Riley's apprehensive mood eased off some since unpacking their gear and noting with no little relief that their location was very well hidden. His posture and his voice had lost much of their tension. He looked almost relaxed.

"So why were you so different?" Riley replied. Garret blanched a little.

"Well, ah, well....you might say I just had a kind of feeling about this place. So I dug into it a little and found the pots." Riley shot a curious glance at his friend when he mentioned he'd had a feeling about the place. Garret didn't realize that Nub had long understood that his buddy Jim had a spooky side to him. Riley suppressed a grin and stared at a low pile of dirt that looked like it might have been recently disturbed.

"That where you dug before?"

"Yep. That's it", Garret answered. "Found the Mimbres stuff a little more than five feet down." He glanced over at Nub. "I measured it to make sure." Riley glanced at the Bobcat sitting nearby, also unconsciously kicking at the leafy ground of the canyon floor, then glancing up at the hardy ocotillos and stunted trees climbing the steep mountain slopes and the fat grey clouds gathering on the distant peaks. A storm was coming.

"So what do you want? Should I scrape away five feet from the whole place or what?" Garret slowly shook his head and probed the ground with the toe of his boot. With the dramatic backdrop of the canyon walls behind them, and the shafts of filtered light from the shifting shadows of the clouds passing overhead, Peg Riley thought that the two rugged men talking over the old Indian mound looked like they could easily have fit in with the hardy pioneering souls who had wandered their way into the Huachuca mountains a century earlier. She knew she would have fit in, too, just as her own ancestors had more than once in the ineluctable Manifest Destiny westward spread of the United States.

Garret took a step forward. "No" he said. "Let's be slow and careful. Just do say about a hundred square feet around where I dug. Take it down maybe four, four and a half feet. We'll do hand work from there." Riley grunted and turned to walk to his Bobcat. In the nearby oaks a pair of grey squirrels set to jabbering at the intruders into their peaceful mountain world. Hidden in the dense foliage of a bushy nearby juniper, a long-eared owl stared unblinking at the squirrels. Watching. Waiting.

"You got it, Jim", Riley said, his voice and mind making the jump from furtive pothunter into the far more comfortable mental clothing of the practiced contractor concentrating on starting a job. "One hundred square feet down to four coming up." He clambered with a long practiced ease onto the Bobcat, fired up the machine and sent the pair of chattering grey squirrels scampering for cover and the long-eared owl fluttering away in owlish disgust. Riley deftly maneuvered the machine over to Riley's Mimbres sweet spot and began to clear away the layers of forest leavings and chunks of rock debris on the canyon's surface. Jim Garret stood back and grinned expectantly at the sound of the Bobcat digging. Jim might have liked it, but the noise of the machine didn't agree with the natives. Every bird and mammal within two hundred yards followed the squirrels and the owl in beating a hasty departure from the alien sound of the human machine echoing through the canyon and cracking open the solemnity of their natural world to the dark unseen forces lurking within. And that was from a machine silenced to less than a third of its normal roar.

No wonder most of God's creatures avoided the noisy habitats of humans.

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

In 1885, during a harrowing close pursuit by sharp eyed Indian scouts and hand picked American soldiers in northern Mexico, Geronimo's wife was captured in a lightning raid on the renegade's camp and hauled back north to Fort Apache in Arizona. Undaunted, the wily old warrior, with only a handful of companions, infiltrated the closely guarded American border, rode all the way to Fort Apache, stealthily made his way into the camp, liberated his wife and returned with her and several others to his Mexican hideout. No American even so much as saw him the entire time.

Diablo slapped his side and laughed out loud when he read about it a century later.

Jaime Gomez was lingering in the fuzzy twilight before sleep. It was the time when he often had strange colorful and vivid hallucinations. When the hand appeared over his face he at first thought it was another bizarre escapee from the world of dreams. But then the hand clamped over his mouth, a dim figure appeared behind it and something thin and hard drove into his chest. His mind filled with bright, fearsome images and then the hard, thin thing drove into his chest again and Jaime Gomez' lights went out permanently.

Rolando Jimenez heard a grunt and propped himself onto his elbows to peer into the gathering light. He saw the dim shape crouching over his friend and was immediately lucidly awake with a electric fear jangling every nerve fiber in his body. As he leaped to his feet the dark figure whirled and a knife blade slashed at Jimenez' stomach. Jimenez reeled back, yelling, as the blood began to pour from the wide wound across his belly. As Jimenez wildly backpedaled away from Diablo, he tripped on a rock and fell heavily onto his back. In an instant Diablo was on him, his arm striking viciously at Jimenez' chest. The knife pierced his heart. Rolando Jimenez died in a few seconds, the violent face of a wild-eyed, long haired man the last image his mind registered before he disappeared down a long dark tunnel with an impossibly bright light radiating at its end.

.

Diablo hid the bodies in a steep crevasse and covered them with rocks. He buried their gear with them. Diablo took nothing. The poor Mexicans had nothing worth stealing. A small sliver of his being from the dimming memories of his rough raised boyhood understood their poverty and the hard upbringing of their world. But he felt no pity for them. They were of the people who had so often deceived and cheated, kidnapped and enslaved, and murdered and massacred the Nde. How could he feel pity? They were the ancient bitterly hated enemy.

They were the Mexicans.

"What the hell?", Garret said in angry surprise when he heard the Range Rover downshift as it drove down the dirt track towards their camp and then watched it lurch into view. Nub Riley was off the Bobcat with an explosive athletic leap and was at Garret's side in an instant, a grim scowl on his face. Nub Riley looked angry. Dangerously angry.

"I thought your ranger buddy was going to screen us. That sure as hell is no Forest Service truck." Rebounding from his initial shocked surprise, Garret tried to project his usual smooth composure.

"Stay calm, Nub", he said, touching Riley lightly on the shoulder. I'll handle this."

Startled, with tingles of fear needling their spines, Heather and Peg hurried over to join Garret and Riley. They watched in mute apprehension as the Land Rover drove into their camp, coasting to a stop just a few feet from them. Garret was plunged in anxious thought, wondering who these people were--and especially how the hell he would be able to explain away what they were doing with a Bobcat in a protected National Forest. But then Garret recognized Benning Goman and a thunderbolt of realization tore into his brain. The wily bastard had him followed! Garret was disgusted with himself. He should have known Goman would want to be in on something as big as the excavation of an unknown Mimbres site. The dapper patrician climbed out of the Range Rover with a swaggering exaggerated hubris. He was beaming so broadly the reflection from a ray of morning sun that broke through the clouds seemed to bounce off his teeth. Or so it seemed to Jim. It was the first time Garret could ever remember seeing the smug bastard smile anything beyond an arrogant condescending smirk.

Goman's eye was no longer twitching.

### The Students

Tom Bohach and Alice Wong were regulars in the bicycle friendly world of Tucson and wanted to expand their congenial outdoors physical exertions by getting into backpacking and hiking. They had a few days free from their sophomore year classes on the campus of Pima Community College and headed to the stunning mountain and valley country along the border a couple of hours drive southeast of Tucson. The young couple and their college buddy, Keith Jonathan, a foreign student who was a Nigerian Christian from a prosperous family in the oil rich part of Nigeria, drove down from Tucson with their bikes racked incongruously on the roof of Bohach's cramped aging Chevy Chevette. After biking on Cochise County's scenic rural roads for two days, the two young college students left the Chevette and bikes for their buddy Jonathan to take back to Tucson, strapped on their backpacks and hitchhiked to the Coronado National Forest to set off eagerly for the foothills of the Huachuas and a touch of mountain adventure. They told their Nigerian student buddy they would be back in two or three days. If the weather continued seasonably pleasant, they'd hitch a ride back to Tucson. Otherwise they'd take a bus from the nearby town of Sierra Vista. That was the plan.

Plans don't always work out.

All hell broke loose after the Range Rover showed up with the ominous looking Skarp behind the wheel and a wolfishly grinning Goman in the passenger seat. Nub Riley was not a man much given to cursing, but this was one time when rapid-fire expletives exploded from his angry lips. This was a furtive clandestine dig? It looked more like a pot hunters' annual reunion. Far too damned many people were getting involved in a supposedly secret dig for Nub Riley's tastes. He threatened to pack up and go home, especially after Goman stepped in and began acting like a pit boss. When Goman tried to start ordering everyone around Riley almost blew his stack.

Quick thinking Jim Garret reached deep inside himself, marshaling his practiced powers of persuasion to find a way, any way, to string the right words together that would smooth things over and make this goddamn mess still work. Garret was in a big fat double bind. He needed Goman as much as he needed Riley and as he tried to calm down both men there was a pained expression, one sliding downhill towards desperation, on Garret's reddening face. Damnit! It seemed absolutely everything was going wrong. He came within a to-hell-with-it whisker of deciding to agree with Riley, pack up and leave. But he didn't. He couldn't. That would have been admitting failure. Which was something Jim Garret couldn't or wouldn't do. Couldn't. Wouldn't. No. Not Jim Garret. No way. Absolutely.

No goddamn way!

After Diablo hid the Mexicans' bloody bodies under a pile of rocks, first cleaning the blood from his own body with their soiled cheap blankets, he began searching for the camp of the man and woman he's seen hiking into the mountains. Diablo found the camp easily, his long-jawed weathered face twisted in derision at their pathetic attempts at concealing where they'd left the trail for their day camp. He had yet to encounter hikers in the mountains who had any idea of how to hide the traces of their passing. The lean, nimble limbed man in his foul smelling filthy buckskins lay hidden nearby in a tangle of barberries and dwarf juniper while he listened to them talking in low voices. He sneered when he heard the woman grow angry when the man made advances toward her. Did the fool not know to just take her and be done with it? He detested weakness of any kind. Especially towards women.

A monarch butterfly, somehow lingering past summer in the mountains, suddenly iridescent as it flickered through a ray of sunshine, fluttered by Diablo and landed two feet away on a fallen manzanita twig. iablo stared at the butterfly for a moment, a thin smile creasing his lips. He slowly reached out his hand and let the butterfly flutter onto his outstretched palm. The thin smile remained on his face. Like Diablo, the butterfly belonged in this place, in these mountains, the ancient home of the Nde, of Ussen and the spirits. They belonged. The two people in the camp did not. These people were alien beings who upset the natural balance of things. Diablo would soon see to righting that balance.

With a gentle shake of his hand he sent the butterfly fluttering away.

Was it possible for an insane man to conceive and carry out elaborate plans? Counterintuitive as it might seem, Diablo could and did. Despite his crazy delusions of the 19th and 20th Century scrambled into his own insane abstruse reality, Diablo was nevertheless ruthlessly capable of deliberately thinking through his raid. It was still in its beginnings. Too early to kill somebody whose disappearance might be immediately noticed. That might come later, at the end of the raid, but not yet. He listened for a long time before he understood who these people were. Then recognition spread over his hollow cheeked sepulchral face. Drugs! They were smuggling in drugs over the border. Like the Mexicans, they would not be officially missed and no government people would come looking for them. And whatever unofficial people from their dark smuggling world who might surreptitiously come to look for them would find nothing but Diablo and their own violent deaths. He smirked in a grim humorless way that would have scared the hell out of just about anybody who saw it. He'd be coming back to the drug smugglers' camp.

Soon.

Diablo quietly crept away from the smugglers' camp. Lean and sinewy from months of outdoor living, leathery callosities rendering him insensate to the rugged terrain, he scrambled easily up the mountain slope to get a broad view of the mountains and valley below. His mouth dropped open in surprise. He could hardly believe what he saw. Another pair of hikers was moving through the scrub junipers into the southern end of the mountains from the Coronado trailhead just north of the Mexican border. They were still far off in the foothills and he watched them through a pair of stolen binoculars he'd taken on one of his raids into Ash Canyon, having no idea that he had stolen a rare and valuable WWII war trophy German made set of Steiner binoculars. He burgled them from the home of Doctor David Silverman who, as a 19 year old Jewish-American infantryman in the 29th Infantry Division in Germany at the end of WWII took the binoculars from a dead German Waffen SS officer No one besides three other members of his infantry squad who were there knew that Silverman had shot the German officer after he surrendered even as the young Catholic German was thanking God for his salvation after somehow surviving three horrific years and four wounds on the Eastern Front.

Had he known the history of the stolen binoculars, Diablo would have found it amusing. And instructive.

Never surrender.

Diablo watched the distant pair laboring slowly and clumsily along the foothills trail on the flank of the mountains for a few more minutes, then put down the binoculars and slid them back in their worn leather case with the word Steiner etched on the flap next to a few faint desiccated flecks of human blood. This clumsy pair could wait. It would be another day before they came near his camp. He'd crawl in to look more closely at them later. Diablo nimbly climbed down from his hiding place among Gamble oak and honeysuckles into the tangle of evergreens on the slopes above where his hidden camp lay in the unnamed blind defile above Dancer Canyon. In his own jumbled-brain psychotic way, in a passionate animistic reverence, Diablo loved the mountains, the trees and bushes, the wildflowers and berry bushes, the birds and animals and even the very rocks themselves, as much as he had ever loved anything. No _._ More than anything he had ever loved. This was his home. _His._ The other humans in his mountain world? They didn't belong. They were alien intruders.

They deserved to die.

He suddenly stopped in his tracks. What was _that?_ A machine? It was the sound of Nub Riley's Bobcat in the lower canyon. He edged up through the rocks and lay on the rock strewn low ridgetop, staring down at the people in the trees close to the mouth of Dancer Canyon. Below was another camp, a bigger one. Unlike the others he had seen, this one had the look of at least semi-permanence to it. A group of people was clustered together by the ancient Indian ruin while another one was digging into it with the machine. Diablo lay motionless for a long time, watching and thinking. Then he slowly crawled backwards until he was out of sight, stood up and headed for his cave shelter. There was no need to hurry. This new camp wasn't going anywhere for a while. Even better. It was located conveniently near to his own hidden camp. Diablo nodded to himself in a baleful gestating comprehension. Yes. No longer merely speculative and nebulous, Diablo's raid was taking on a definite shape and direction. It was developing a life, a force, a momentum of its own. It was not only just becoming Diablo's Raid. The time had finally come.

It actually was Diablo's Raid.

### The Dig

Nub was as angry as Peg had ever seen him. The muscles in his jaw were working furiously as he unconsciously ground his teeth together. She thought he'd say to hell with the whole mess and pack up and leave. And he came within an irate mental millimeter of doing just that. Goman's patrician arrogance and annoying attempts at bossiness grated on him so much that he was half tempted to punch the overbearing jerk's lights out right then and there. He was already more than a little irritated with Heather Sosa's presence. Goman showing up just about pushed him over the edge. But not quite. He had already come this far and the reasons that he had come were still stuck in his mind with the luminosity of the electronic billboards he'd seen in Times Square on a trip east a few years earlier. The ranch. The business. Money. He needed the money. His family needed the money. Their way of life hung in the balance.

Still, even that wasn't enough to cement him in place. Nub was snared to Jim's scheme by old, time tested ties of best buddy close friendship. He wasn't going to cut and run and leave Jim hanging. But that didn't mean Nub Riley was about to linger in Dancer canyon. He set in single mindedly working his Bobcat with a careful but urgent diligence excavating the ruin without stopping to rest or talk. He was damn well going to see this mess through, but he wasn't about to let it take a single minute longer than was absolutely necessary. The sooner they were done with it and on their way out, the better . A dark memory of something his hard working, hard luck rancher father used to say popped into his head and stayed there while he worked. Once things started to go wrong, his dad used to say, they usually only got worse. Nub's mood hadn't been this dark since those unforgotten nail biting nights on the company perimeter in the Viet Nam jungle highlands with the First Air Cav in the boonies outside of An Khe, knowing Victor Charlie was lurking in the night out there waiting for a chance to hit them. It was no fantasy. The VC did hit them. Hard. It was history now.

Nub was worried that history was about it repeat itself.

There wasn't much the others could do while Riley was doing the initial excavating except watch Nub scrape away the layers of ancient dirt with the Bobcat. Only Goman was busy, hovering near Riley and the Bobcat to make certain nothing was destroyed, taking pictures, making notes, both verbally into his tape recorder and scribbling on a note pad, collecting stone flakes and pottery sherds that he found on the surface and in the sides of the excavation. He had one eye on the excavation and the other one on the scholarly paper he now was certain he would eventually write. Peg Riley, Jim Garret and Heather Sosa stood back a short distance from the digging, huddled in an anxious quiet knot. Skarp stood apart from everyone, impassively looking on at the bizarre spectacle of a group of grown people hell bent on grubbing about in the dirt for some shabby old pots. And he quietly shook his head in a combination of disbelief and disgust when his dapper boss somehow managed to look fresh and clean despite his ceaseless hustling in the dirt and dust of the place. This guy's last act on earth before he died would probably be to comb his frickin' hair. Couldn't be meetin' God with messy hair, could ya, now, Goman? The edges of Skarp's mouth curled just slightly in the hint of a smile. Or maybe, _Mister_ Goman, it'll be the Devil that you meet.

"Be careful there!" Goman yelled at Riley as Nub's Bobcat dug deeper into the hole, scraping away the ancient dirt and dumping it in neat piles beyond the edges of the excavation. Riley shot him a hot look and muttered something back at him, but it wasn't intelligible to the others. Peg Riley thought it was just as well. Nub was not a man to rub the wrong way. Then Jim Garret pushed forward out of the little knot of people, waving his arms and motioning for Riley to stop. The hole was getting close to the Mimbres level. Garret was growing increasingly excited.

"Hold up, Nub. You're about there", Garret said, looking down at the hole, then over at Nub. He shrugged and then grinned. "Time for the grunt work." Nub backed the machine away, shut it down and clambered off it as Garret, with the palpably eager Goman so close behind him that Skarp had to stifle a snicker from where he was watching, scrambled into the hole with a shovel in one hand and a trowel in the other. For the next hour Garret and Goman painstaking worked the excavation by hand. Goman yelled at Skarp to come over and began to continually hand up artifacts to him that he was uncovering in the centuries-old soil layers. While Skarp laid out the chips and flakes and sherds, Goman repeatedly took photographs and noted the location of the more important ones on a series of grid maps he prepared the day before.

"Look!" Goman suddenly exclaimed, pulling out a dirt encrusted projectile point he found, then a large fragment of pottery that lay next to it. The handsome tall man was so visibly agitated that it even got Nub Riley's interest. "This is Mimbres", he said in an excited voice to Garret. " _Unmistakably_ Mimbres." Garret didn't answer, or even look up. He had his nose inches from the dirt as he intently worked around something in the bottom of the hole. Probing carefully around the object with an archaeologist's narrow trowel, Garret slowly exposed its sides and then gently picked it up. Goman moved over to his side, his eyes wide in amazement.

"A complete Mimbres pot", Garret said softly with a touch of self congratulation mixed with a genuine reverential awe. He turned it over and looked at the bottom. A smile blossomed over his face. "And _no_ kill hole."

_"Sweet Jesus in heaven!"_ Goman blurted out, hands reaching out in his fervent and imperious desire to touch the Mimbres pot. "It's another perfect one!" The archaeologist in Goman was afire with the excitement of discovery. When Skarp, who was standing above at the edge of the hole, saw the childish look of joy on his employer's face, he had to turn away. It wouldn't do for Goman to see his man Skarp laughing at him.

For the next three hours they worked the hole down until they were past the Mimbres level. It began at just over five feet beneath the surface litter of pebbles and stones, oak leaves and dead bunch grasses, past the previous occupation layers, and went down another foot and a half. Below that were a few scattered artifacts of a relatively primitive pit house culture that Goman found uninteresting except for its juxtaposed stratum relationship to the Mimbres level above. They found two more complete pots, one of them another rare polychrome and the other a common, undecorated utility vessel. They also found dozens of stone artifacts, tools and flakes and projectile points, nearly a dozen manos and metates and a growing number of the characteristically beautiful Mimbres necklaces made from stone beads and shells. Goman was as excited by the necklaces as he was by the wonderful Mimbres pots. Though not so precious as the pots, the necklaces nevertheless were in high demand in the circle of wealthy private collectors he had insinuated his gray market tentacles into. Goman would be able to get a nice price for the necklaces. And of course he would keep the most exquisite one for himself.

The discovery supercharged the little group of illegal pot-hunters. The electricity of the finds crackled through the campsite and everyone was soon immersed in the work of the dig. Heather and Peg cleaned off the artifacts that Skarp brought from the widening excavation. Goman and Garret worked in the hole and wouldn't let anybody else come in for fear they might carelessly destroy something valuable. Riley sat atop the Bobcat and continued to dig as Garret, and, much to Riley's irritation, Goman, directed him.

Then the beehive activity of the place suddenly topped stone cold still, as though a divine hand had thrown the cosmic breaker on the place's crackling electric human energy. A truck was coming up the track into Dancer Canyon. Alarmed looks bounced off the pothunters' faces as they craned their heads towards the sound of the truck. The looks turned fearful when they saw that the approaching truck was a U.S. Forest Service pickup. But then Garret recognized Max Reiser as the truck pulled up and quickly whispered to the others who he was. A moment later the Forest Service ranger climbed out of the truck and walked over to look into the dig. His eyes roamed over the excavation, then he turned to Jim Garret, holding out his hand in greeting.

" _Damn_ , Garret You're making good progress here. We don't want to take too long at this, you know. Someone would eventually come by and see this."

"Two, three days at the most", Garret said as he shook Reiser's hand. Reiser nodded a reluctant approval.

"Better two than three", he replied, giving Garret a steady authoritative look. Then he said what was laying heavily on his mind with a hopeful pregnant expectation. "Find anything yet?" The answer came from an unexpected direction.

"A Classic Black on White. A polychrome. One plain brown. A number of stone and shell beaded necklaces and bracelets." It was Goman's voice that Reiser heard, and he turned to see the tall man walking towards him. Goman was an incisively quick study and had been all the way back to when he was a precocious and often grating inquisitive little kid. He instantly grasped the importance of Reiser's protection and was bent on using his charm and knowledge to further nail down the ranger's cooperation. Goman had many facets to his character. Some good. Some not so good. Being a fool was not one of them.

"Then you should end up taking quite a haul out of here", Reiser said, thinking of the value of the pot Garret had promised him and the dollars piling up nicely in his money starved imagination. And then an exquisite revanchist realization flashed into his mind. They'd be plucking all this Mimbres loot from under the very noses of the arrogant bastards in the Forest Service office. Then he heard an all too familiar sound and wheeled to stare at the road coming into the dig. The sound came from a pair of boots tramping up the road towards them. Reiser's thoughts of revenge and riches abruptly stopped in mid-reverie.

A specter had materialized out of nowhere and was heading into the camp.

It was Tony Parelli. He lumbered into the camp and hurried up to Goman, no longer panting from the exertion of his long run because he'd stopped for a couple of minutes outside the camp while he tried to figure out the meaning of Reiser's presence. Parelli knew his way around corruption well enough. When he saw Garret and Reiser shaking hands, he understood. Then he came the rest of the way into the camp.

"Is everything all right, Mr. Goman?" He asked, "I saw the Forest Service truck come in here." Nub Riley stood by the Bobcat and threw up his arms in utter exasperation. Another stranger at this supposedly secret dig! How many were there going to be?

"And who the goddamn hell is this?" Jim Garret demanded, glaring hotly at Goman. The tall patrician held out his hands and patted downwards in front of Garret, trying to soothe him and calm him darn.

"Parelli's been screening us from prying eyes, just like the ranger here has been. "He's how I found you in the first place. Private detective. Been following you around for several days."

"Damnit", Garret muttered. "I should have been more careful."

"It wouldn't have made any difference", Parelli said with no little hubris. "I still would have found you here. Anyhow", Parelli said, abruptly changing the subject, "there's more to tell. It wasn't just the ranger that brought me in here. I seen a couple of kids wandering in the hills just to the south. Hikers. Amateurs by the look of them. They set up camp already, but the way they're heading, it looks like they might stumble on you here tomorrow." Reiser looked sharply at Parelli. He hadn't seen the hikers.

"I'll take care of them", he said quickly, starting to move towards his truck.

Parelli was looking very curiously at the excavation and the equipment around it.

"Digging up an old Indian ruin, huh, Mr. Goman?" He asked.

"Yes", Goman replied, without going into any of the details. "This is an archaeological expedition." Parelli shot him a quick penetrating look.

"Not exactly on the legal side, I'd guess", he said. Goman replied in his unflappable suave fashion.

"Nothing in this life that is worthwhile ever is", he said. Parelli laughed.

"You hit it there, boss", he said. Then he turned to yell at Reiser, who was just climbing into his truck.

"Hey! Ranger! Gimme a ride back, will ya? Save me the walk back."

The rough canyon track might have kept the Forest Service pickup from moving very fast, but it didn't stop Tony Parelli's mind from racing. He'd found a way to get into the camp and see just what the hell they were doing. As he rode back on the rough canyon road with Reiser expertly steering the pickup over the ruts and bumps of the old ranch road, his mind set to pondering at how he might find a way to make himself some bucks out of the secret dig back in that narrow canyon. He turned to look at Reiser.

"Hey, man", he said to Reiser in a tone he thought was friendly. "Just what the hell are they digging for back in the canyon?" Reiser didn't look at him.

"Don't know", he said flatly. Parelli blinked.

"You don't know?" Parelli tried hard not to sound sarcastic. "You got to know, man. A guy don't risk his career over something without knowing why." This time Reiser blinked. Parelli hit too close to home. He shot a glance at him.

"That sounds like the voice of experience." Parelli's eyes flared at the memory of all years with the Border Patrol down the tubes and shook his head emphatically.

"You can bet your sweet ass it is, buddy." Then, hopefully, he added. "So just what are they digging for?" Reiser shook his head.

"Can't tell you." He threw another, more lingering, look at Parelli. "I...just....can't...."

And that was all Parelli could get out of him.

Like Nub Riley, Max Reiser was thinking too damned many people were sticking their noses in what was supposed to be a secret illegal dig. He locked his mind firmly on two days being the absolute maximum for the Mimbres excavation. But he wasn't about to say any of that to Parelli as he dropped Tony off near his hide on the small hill and then headed off to find the pair of young campers in the foothills south of Dancer Canyon. They weren't hard to find. A half mile off he could see the smoke of the campfire where they'd decided to pitch their tent for the night. It was still afternoon, far too early to be setting up a night camp. But the hormone charged youngsters had other things in mind more immediately sensual than a leisurely hike into the lofty pines of the mountains. The horny young couple jokingly called it 'sex under the stars'--which was impossible to do on the roof or in the yard of their little place in the perennially lit up electric nights near downtown Tucson. So what if it the stars were invisible in the waning afternoon? For every rule there was an exception. When the age old call comes, the young must heed the call. So they hurriedly set up their camp, climbed into a sleeping bag and moaned their way through act one of their evening's entertainment.

They were sitting by the fire in a dreamy intermission when Reiser showed up.

It was a hell of a good start. Two beautifully done and immensely valuable Mimbres pots, another one less valuable, a score of easily saleable beadwork bracelets and necklaces worth many thousands of dollars. And some very nice axes, manos, metates, projectile points and assorted stone tools that had a underground market sale value far beyond their archeological value. They worked until dusk, then ate a simple supper of hot dogs and beans, washed down with water. Riley had insisted there be no alcohol or drugs on the dig. Goman worked at his notes while the others sat around a campfire after supper. Even Skarp, who had begun to pick up a little of the excitement of the dig, joined the group. They were dog tired, but the excitement of the dig, and adventure of it being illegal, energized their moods. And their tongues. They talked in low, fervent tones well into the evening about what they might find the next day. It was the first time in many years that Skarp came anywhere near to enjoying being part of a group. But even so he was the first to break off and wrap himself up in a sleeeping bag for a night's sleep.

In the mountains above the puma descended from the high peaks and sniffed at the rocks piled over the bodies of the two Mexicans. The big cat had never smelled a fresh dead man smell before. She was puzzled. What manner of beast had done this? With the rare transitory exception of a wandering Mexican jaguar, the puma had been the undisputed presiding resident queen of the mountain predators.

But....now....?

Colonel Edward Redding pulled on the comfortable old scuffed pair of prewar leather hiking boots he'd bought years earlier in Europe from an eighty year old Sudetenland refugee grown too old to use them. The handsome old boots, handmade by a skilled Bohemian shoemaker, shone with care, with lanoline and beeswax. They were old friends, the colonel and the boots. They'd been many places together over the years. In a blustery late afternoon under a strangely ominous sky of skittering clouds that seemed to have no fixed focus to their movement, he left his foothills rambler and swung onto a nearby trial that climbed steeply into the mountains above his canyon home. He wandered along the mountain trails until nearly dusk, not knowing what he was looking for, or even why. The colonel found nothing. As night gathered he descended the canyon trail to his home hidden beneath the trees in the canyon below. The colonel was troubled. The disquieting feeling of some vague menace in the mountains remained lodged in his intuitive gut.

Not far off the southern California and Baja coast, where the Great Whites lurked and the behemoth whales sounded, the last Pacific warm water storm of the season was building. It was well on the way to being a whopper--what the coastal Mexicans called _una Tormenta gigante_. One heck of big storm. In a season of unusually numerous and severe storms this one promised to be the worst of them all. This gestating granddaddy of a tempest would dwarf all the earlier storms of the season by a factor of ten. As the storm front began to wind up to deliver its meteorological knockout punch, forecasters in California started putting out warnings. And not just ordinary cautionary warnings. These were dire Big Storm warnings. All along the oceanfront worried people began to chew on their mental fingernails. But it was the people hundreds of miles inland who would be in for the nastiest surprise. The storm of the centuries was about to hit the parched desert country of Arizona and create utter climactic havoc in the normally rain starved Grand Canyon State. The weather gods were brewing one whopping meteorological slam dunk of a storm. And Arizona was ground zero.

Tom Bohach and Alice Wong warily watched the pickup approaching. In the slanting light of the gathering afternoon they recognized the Forest Service's logo on the door well before Reiser reached them. The two young people were vexed. What had they done to draw a ranger's attention? But, being typical college kids, they also had an undercurrent of rebelliousness and youthful defiance of authority. Two pairs of uneasy, suspicious young eyes watched as Reiser pulled the Forest Service pickup near their fire. He climbed out of the truck and approached them, intentionally putting a slight swagger to his walk and stepping heavily on the ground to enhance the effect of his approach. It had worked many times before. It worked again. The two kids gulped and were still.

" _Good evening_ ", he said in the well practiced modulated ranger's tone intended to both assure and slightly intimidate forest visitors. "Sorry to bother you folks", Reiser said in the same friendly but unmistakably authoritative voice. "But there's a fire danger in the lower foothills this year. Brush is close to getting tinder dry. I'm going to have to ask you to keep a very close watch on that fire tonight and then move up into the higher elevations in the morning."

"Oh", Bohach said, surprised. "We had no idea there was a fire danger." What he was really thinking was that the ranger's appearance was just one more example of typical government BS harassment. Didn't the asshole think he knew how to handle a campfire? Alice knew what he was thinking and shot him a warning look. For once at least Bohach had the sense to keep his mouth shut.

"You didn't stop in at the ranger Station on the way out here?" Reiser said, already knowing that they almost certainly hadn't. His voice had a well practiced accusatory hint to it that reminded Tom of his controlling bitch of a former stepmother. Thank God his dad finally had the sense to dump her. Big boobs were cool. A big mouth wasn't.

"No", Alice replied guardedly, wondering if there was some permit or something that they were supposed to get. Bohach was having suspicious dark thoughts. Was that was this was really about? Gouging them for the cost of a permit? But he also still had the sense to keep this mouth shut. Being a youthful rebel might be fashionably modern in the eyes of his college buddies, but it sure didn't include doing something stupid that might screw up a comfortable middle class suburban life in the after college years ahead.

"Well, if you _had_ stopped in at the station", Reiser said to the young people without twisting the truth too much since there was always at least some level of fire danger in the Huachucas, "you would have heard about it. But, no matter. Just watch that fire and move up into the mountains first thing in the morning. Its wetter up there and there's much less fire danger." With that Reiser said goodnight to them and returned to his truck, hit the ignition and drove away, trailing a faint cloud of exhaust from an aging engine as he disappeared from view. The young people watched him leave with puzzled expressions.

"Can you _believe_ that?" Bohach said. "Fire danger after all the rain we've had this year." Alice Wong shrugged.

"But he's a ranger, Tom. He certainly wouldn't have made it up." Bohach shrugged in disgust and spat at the ground.

"Yeah, well, I think he's just some little government shithead throwing his weight around to make himself feel important." But it really no longer mattered much to Tom. Max Reiser was slipping from his mind. And fast. His attention was redirecting with gonadal swiftness to an entirely different subject of far more testosterone charged direct interest than some jerk ranger. With a wink and a grin, he grabbed Alice by the hand and the two young people jammed themselves into one sleeping bag with salacious haste and began to caress each other by the smoky glow of their flickering campfire. It didn't really make any difference whether they made love in the foothills or the mountains, under the stars or in the late afternoon. So long as they were alone to celebrate the sizzling sexual rituals of youth. Just a few yards away, in a late blooming clump of mountain sunflowers, an adult rufous hummingbird violently attacked a young female rufous and drove her from the precious nectar of the sunflowers.

It mattered not that he had sired her the previous spring.

### In The Fading Light of a Doomed People

Sanchez. That's what they called him. Sanchez. A Spanish patronym. Yet, like Mangas Coloradas and Vittorio and Geronimo, this man was not Mexican. He was an Apache, one of the warriors in Vittorio's band of Chiricahuas. As a stripling Sanchez was captured by Mexicans in a raid on a small camp of foraging Apaches. He was neither killed nor sold off to slavery in the interior of Mexico, but raised by his captors, possibly by a childless family, possibly to take the place of a dead or kidnapped Mexican boy, but more likely in a kind of convoluted involuntary servitude that the Spanish and Mexican colonials practiced among the native peoples. Whatever the reason, Sanchez grew up near the frontier, became a fluent Spanish speaker, and arrived at young adulthood seemingly indistinguishable from the Mexican vaqueros. He was accepted by the Mexicans as one of them, and even informally considered to be part of the extended Sanchez family that lived on the fringes of the desert grasslands of northeastern Chihuahua. After all, didn't most of them have a strong Native American strain in their genetic makeup?

But beneath the facade of the hard riding, hard living Mexican vaquero he retained a personal image that he kept solely to himself. In his heart he longed to rejoin his ancestral people. The Chihenne Apache. He was torn. Which to choose? Mexican? Apache? One rainswept day at a ramshackle line camp not far from the mountain haunts of the Apache, he rose before dawn, stealthily saddled up his horse and vanished into the sparsely peopled vastness of northern Chihuahua. The choice was made. The next day, stripped of his vaquero clothing, Sanchez rode into an Apache camp to great whoops of surprise and delight and to a life as one of Vittorio's stalwarts. Though there were certainly some agreeable parts to it--the cantinas, the women, the freedom of riding the open range, even the promise of salvation through their One God--his Mexican past was behind him. He kept the Sanchez patronym because he had come to deeply respect Alejandro Sanchez, the man who had raised him as his own. The relationship between the Mexicans and the Indians was as complicated as it was bloody. They shed each other's blood. And they shared each other's blood. They killed each other's men. They kidnapped each other's women and children and made them their own. And in Sanchez, with the interwoven genetics and language and every day experiences between the two peoples, Vittorio found one of his greatest weapons in his people's grim struggle to survive.

Sanchez's Spanish fluency and ability to easily pass as a Mexican was far more valuable to Vittorio's Apaches than the gleaming chunks of gold and silver the Mexicans dug out of the creeks and canyons of the Sierra Madres. He sometimes rode into the impoverished towns and villages of northern Chihuahua and Sonora dressed in his vaquero clothes and passed himself off as an itinerant ranch hand. If the squalid village had a church, which most did, he went there and knelt before the cross to quietly pray. This was partly a sham meant to deflect suspicion among the lugareños of the place. But for a part of Sanchez it was no sham. The Christian God continued to beckon to him. Then, almost always, he took his horse over to the bustling nerve center of the village, the cantina, and tied it where it was easily accessible--ready to leave in a big hurry should suspicions grow dangerous. But the black flag of doubt was never raised against this Indian looking vaquero who spoke an easy borderland Spanish and knew the border country as well as any of them. Sanchez didn't have to act. He was a Mexican vaquero as well as being a Chihenne Apache. After a few drinks with the locals loosened their tongues, Sanchez gleaned whatever information he could that Vittorio's band could use. Twice Sanchez discovered plots to trick the Apaches and ambush them. Warned, the Apaches avoided the traps by simply packing up and vanishing into the mountains.

But one time a trio of drunken Mexican soldiers told Sanchez in grisly detail how they had captured and repeatedly raped a young Chihenne woman, then laughingly described how they cut her Achilles tendons so that she couldn't walk and then rode off leaving her to face the wild beasts of the mountains. One of them would make a meal of her, they joked as they rode away, be it wolf, coyote, bear, puma or the great jaguar, jokingly betting among themselves which creature it would be. The soldiers said the Chihenne woman had strange grey eyes and a club foot. Sanchez knew immediately who it was. Vittorio's young niece, No-Tay, who Vittorio had raised after her parents and older brothers were treacherously murdered by Tarahumaras. She and an elderly relative, the brother of her grandmother, vanished three weeks earlier while out in the foothills searching for agave to harvest.

The trio of Mexican soldiers also told Sanchez about a trap their leader, Captain José Maria Contreras y Verdugo, was planning to spring on the Apaches. This same captain, the drunken soldiers confided to Sanchez, had given them the captured Apache girl to do with as they pleased as a reward after they chased down and killed the old Apache man who was with the girl. Captain Contreras was a brash man, the drunken soldiers said, who declared himself unafraid of Apaches and boasted of the horrors he would visit upon Vittorio when he finally caught him. When Sanchez returned to the Apache camp and told Vittorio what he had learned, the Apache leader's decision was what Sanchez knew it would be.

This time the Apaches would not be fading away into the mountains.

Hernán Arvizu Garcia's world lay in the shadowy ill defined ground between cultures and peoples. Hernán was one of those Mexicans who illicitly traded with the Apaches and other Native American groups for the proscribed manufactured goods the Indians could not make themselves. Rifles. Pistols. Ammunition. Whiskey. And also the non-proscribed staples they had come to consider necessities. Sugar, coffee, cloth, blankets, iron pots and pans, steel knives and axes. He claimed to only trade in the latter, non-proscribed items. Something almost no one believed.

Arvizu walked a dangerous path with one foot in each world. He lived like a Mexican in the tiny village of San Cristóbal on the border between Sonora and Chihuahua just below the American boundary, but made his living from bartering with the Apaches. He spoke only a smattering of Apache, but that didn't hinder his trading. Many among the Apache spoke at least some Spanish and they were always able to come to a satisfactory mutual agreement in their dealings. There was great profit in dealing illegally with the Apache, but Arvizu was careful to not gouge the Indians too much. Were they to become aware of it the best he could hope for would be to lose their trust and their business. And the worst? He wouldn't let himself think of it. As it was, Arvizu made a comfortable living for his large family. He was a man reasonably content with his place in the world, though he sometimes had frightful nightmares about being mercilessly tortured by opaque figures he never could quite identify.

Then came that fateful spring day, blossoming mesquite and acacia scenting the air, when a squad of mounted Mexican soldiers reined up in the yard outside his comfortable adobe home in San Cristóbal, all but one sitting their horses in the shade of a pair of huge cottonwoods. Their leader, an energetic muscular young officer of less than thirty years, hopped nimbly off his horse and went to Arvizu's threshold, knocking loudly on the heavy sun bleached and cracked oak plank door. Captain Jose Maria Contreras y Verdugo had a fierce look in his eyes that immediately alerted Arvizu that trouble lay ahead. Another look at the captain's face and Arvizu knew it was more than mere trouble. This was big trouble.

And it was. El Captain Contreras had been gathering proof of Arvizu's illicit dealings with the Apache. A recent law passed by the Chihauhua government made such dealings a crime against the state punishable by death. Contreras said he would overlook Arvizu's crimes. But not without a price. Arvizu shifted nervously on his feet, already sensing what was coming.

"Which is what?" He said in a wavering voice to Captain Contreras. "What would you have me do?" The captain leaned into Arvisu's personal space, the scent of coffee and cigar smoke on his breath.

"You will lead us to Vittorio and his Apaches." Arvizu blinked nervously but said nothing.

In return for the captain looking the other way, Arvizu would be the bait for the trap to catch and kill Vittorio's Apaches. The mounted soldiers outside Arvizu's adobe heard the loud conversation inside and understood what it meant. And this was what the drunken soldiers foolishly revealed to Sanchez one lonely night in the dimly lit, smoky cantina in a rundown dusty Mexican village in the boondocks of northern Chihuahua.

Arvizu sent word to Vittorio that he was ready to trade and that he had a new supply of the coveted Winchester 1873 repeating rifles and Colt Peacemaker revolvers, as well as several casks of supposedly imported whisky. Vittorio send word back that he would come in with his people to trade. The location would be one they often used, a brushy hidden canyon with a thin ribbon of perennial water midway between San Miguelito in Sonora and Casa de Janos in Chihuahua. The appointed day came and Arvizu rode in with two companions and a dozen mules loaded down with what appeared to be trade goods. A few hundred yards behind him in the brown rolling hills dotted with creosote bush and tarbush, hidden in a deep swale, Captain José Maria Contreras y Verdugo waited. With him were his company of Mexican cavalry and two score Mexican vaqueros and ranchers bent on revenge for a long and bloody history of Apache depredations on their lands. A hard looking itinerant vaquero who had joined the expedition, a man several soldiers who knew him from the cantina vouched for, volunteered to ride ahead to watch for the Apaches, with orders from Captain Contreras to return with the news of their arrival. Sanchez rode out from the body of soldiers and Mexicans, his nerves jangling with anticipation of an entirely different nature than what Captain Contreras would have expected.

Vittorio rode in from the west and approached the center of the canyon. Arvizu watched his approach from under the ash and walnut trees that were sustained by the thin stream. White winged doves and swallows flitted between the trees and over the water. With Vittorio were less than twenty men. Arvizu was surprised. And worried. Where were the women and children that always came to these trades and made them into colorful fiestas full of laughter and pranks? Where were the rest of Vittorio's people? The answer was that the noncombatants were secreted safely miles away and the fighting men were at that very moment taking up positions in the rocks above the canyon, with more men in the rocks above the western canyon entrance and still more on horseback ready to shut off escape at the eastern end. Vittorio looked at Arvisu with disgust and just a hint of compassion. He knew the man was forced into what he was doing. But that didn't alter the fact that Arvizu had consciously betrayed him. Vittorio killed him quickly with a steel knife he had traded with Arvizu for the previous year and his men did the same with Arvisu's two companions. Not long after that Sanchez came riding in. Vittorio waved at him. "Go!" He yelled. Sanchez wheeled and raced back to the waiting soldiers and Mexicans.

"They're there!" He hollered, arriving at the Mexicans' hiding place in a cloud of dust, his horse lathered and Sanchez looking crazily excited. "Already drinking. And no lookouts!" With that Sanchez wheeled again and started out for the hidden canyon, Captain Contreras and his troops and the Mexican civilians hard on his heels. Although irritated by Sanchez' impetuosity, Contreras nevertheless admired the man's bravado and enthusiasm. If his troopers were more like this man, Contreras thought, he would make short work of all the troublesome indigenes in Chihuahua.

It was over quickly. Captain Contreras was one of the first to die as they came charging into the canyon with wild yells and blazing revolvers. A handful of soldiers and Mexican ranchers managed to fight their way back out the east entrance and make their escape. But most died in the canyon, the majority in the first minutes. A few hid in the rocks and fought until they, too, were finally killed. Three men were captured. Sanchez recognized one of them as among the soldiers who had raped Vittorio's niece and left her to die in the mountains. The soldier's death was so ghastly that even some of the hardened Apaches had to turn away. When it was over, Vittorio grasped Sanchez by the shoulders and hailed him as a hero of his people.

Sanchez was also the hero of another man. A man from a different time and a different place. But a man with the same searing racial hatred inside him.

Diablo.

### Chapter 7

### Maria Alarcon

It was late afternoon. Troy Andrews and Maria Alarcon's routines were upside down from the usual. Maria joked that they were on the smugglers' night shift. They were having their evening meal, but it was at the beginning of the day's work, not the end. The thought of the sweaty, grueling work of resuming their rugged trek through the mountains after nightfall muted their movements and their conversation. Troy took a couple of bites and looked at Maria in amazement. How had she managed to make such a surprisingly tasty meal in this godforsaken place? But she had. The enterprising Maria had brought along a handful of Mountain House freeze dried backpacking meals. And she knew how to prepare them. What a woman, he thought to himself. And she was.

More than either of them could have imagined.

By dusk they were ready to go. Maria started out of the rock shelter first carrying her gear and acting as the pathfinder, with Andrews coming behind her with his gear and the weighty pack of drugs. At first Troy staggered under the heavy load, but he caught himself and stumbled out into the open. He started to mumble something. The sentence remained forever unfinished. Diablo jumped out from behind a boulder not six feet away and drove a knife into Troy Andrew's throat before the bug eyed Troy could even begin to react. He fell to the ground making horrible gurgling noises and Diablo turned on Maria. She was already running for the trail. The young woman's facile mind immediately grasped what was happening. Maria didn't hesitate any more than a jackrabbit would have from a dive bombing red tailed hawk.

In an instant she set out on a dead terror fueled run up the talus slope for the crest trail above. Diablo was right behind her, running hard. Maria agilely dodged up the slope and made the trail a bare half dozen feet ahead of Diablo. She turned south, towards the Coronado Monument ranger station she knew to be a few miles away. The very people she had been trying to avoid now afforded her the only hope she had. Better caught with drugs than murdered by a maniac in the mountain back country.

Maria Alarcon was a superbly honed athlete and a swift and nimble runner. She could outrun most men. But she was burdened and slowed by the weight of her backpack. And Diablo was hardened by his outdoor life and used to scrambling among the rocks of the mountain trails. When Maria momentarily stumbled on a loose rock, Diablo hurtled through the air and caught her by the legs. She went over onto her face into the rocks of the trail, bloodying her nose and lacerating her face. Yet she instantly turned on him with the fury of a brave woman desperately fighting for her life. Diablo was surprised by the flurry of kicks and punches thrown at him. Dodging the blows as best he could, many of them still hitting him and one splitting his lip, he managed to pick up a rock and whack her hard on the head. She collapsed in a heap and he swiftly lifted up her limp form in his arms and carried her back down the trail.

Heather Sosa surprised herself. She was in the thickly forested mountains, digging in the dirt like some feckless kid at a summer camp--and she was enjoying it! She hadn't had anything to drink, or any drugs, and it was the first time in longer than she could remember that she hadn't taken either a drug or alcohol at least once in the day. When that realization hit her she was so surprised that she sat and thought about it for nearly five minutes. She wasn't sure whether she missed the booze and the drugs or not

Jim Garret wasn't as deep into the muddy minded pit of mind bending chemicals as Heather. He was making it through the dig without any need for chemical mood boosters. Anyhow, there was no choice about it. Riley had insisted, in his determined, set jawed way, and put it to Jim bluntly. There would either be no booze or drugs at the dig, or there would be no Nub Riley. Garret had a keen--Nub would say overdeveloped--sense of adventure and the illegal dig had so fired him up that there was little thought of alcohol or drugs. The thought of what they were doing was in itself intoxicating. Here he was, in an ancient secluded leafy canyon where the human presence went back thousands of years, plucking out Mimbres pots almost within sight of the Forest Service. It was a delicious thought. The Forest Service carried on sanctimoniously about protecting what it called the archaeological heritage in the parks and national forests. Yet it had allowed one of its own employees to become so disenchanted with its inner politics that he was willing to cooperate in the dig. Garret's cynical side laughed at that. Beneath the sanctimoniousness and the arrogance of many human institutions was a hypocrisy that Garret held in contempt. He glanced around at his companions. In their own way, each of them had intuited much the same thing and made the decision to step outside the rules because of it. He looked at each of them in turn, musing.....

His second cousin Heather Sosa, deep down, was a rebel. She had shunned the abusive narrow minded small town religiosity of her upbringing and was searching for an alternative. Benning Goman had been snubbed by mainstream professional archaeologists and not forgotten it. Peg Riley was very much her own person and ignored the pretenses of the world to live her own quiet life as she saw fit. The man Skarp he knew nothing about, but he could guess by his raw solid jawed face that Skarp might well have many a battle scarred tale to tell about stepping outside the rules.

And Nub Riley? What about his old bud Nub? Even Mr. straight-and-narrow Nub Riley finally stepped outside the circle. When his back was up against the wall Riley wasn't going to play by the rules set by the bankers and the bean counters who hunkered in their comfortable safe worlds, men and women who never got their hands dirty, but were quick to grab the fruits of other people's labor. No, Garret thought with a touch of amusement, even old Nub wouldn't let that happen. The bankers in their air conditioned offices and polished leather chairs weren't going to get the ranch that generations of rough hewn Rileys had struggled and sweated to build. Garret's companions, rebels all in their individual ways, were turning to a dead village of a long vanished people to fulfill their various dreams--and maybe even exorcize a personal demon or two while they were at it.

The Mimbres might be dead, but they weren't gone. Certainly not their physical inheritance. It was what had brought them here. The pots. But what else? Was there some kind of incorporeal otherworldly presence from these people still lingering here? Jim Garret found that a very odd thought. And a disturbing one. Though he was cold sober the thought was enough to bring the shadowy world of feelings and intuitions washing back over him. He felt it in his bones. Jim Garret was absolutely certain there was some kind of presence haunting Dancer Canyon. But he had not the slightest inkling that the haunting presence might actually have a flesh and blood reality. A nightmare reality. A nightmare reality that had a name.

Diablo.

Maria Alarcon slowly regained a foggy consciousness. Her mind meandered between the conscious and the subconscious. Then the fog lifted and was instantly displaced by utter terror at the frenzied thrustings inside here. The manic was raping her. She was in a dark, fetid cave, the man had ripped off her clothes, and he was wildly driving himself towards an orgasm. His eyes were crazed, his breathing hoarse and labored. She was so revolted by it that her recent meal rose in her throat and she was sick all over herself. Diablo didn't even seem to notice. Not until he had finished with his brutal thrusting into her and let his seed go. Without a word he rolled off her and went to wash himself.

Outside the wind was blowing even harder.

### The Storm

It was as though a primeval God of the sea--Poseidon or Neptune or the Polynesian sea god Takaroa--had come unhinged. The ancient Greeks and Romans and Polynesians would have plunged into terror at the untamable sea's fury. And so did the modern Californians. The huge boiling fury of a storm slammed into the California coast with an elemental fury unseen in generations. Everywhere beachfront owners fled in panic from the raging tempest, some just before the towering waves starting beating down the foundations of their dearly cherished homes. The rain came in stinging wind driven sheets, in some places as much as an inch an hour. It didn't just rain hard for a little while, then stop. Hour after hour and inch after inch the rain kept on. Rivers and creeks filled with scary stunning rapidity and began to overflow beyond the limits human settlement had thought were secure. Normally empty washes became wild treacherous torrents, neighborhood after neighborhood was evacuated as the waters rose. The vicious storm slowly moved eastward, and before its violent approach the winds preceding it built up to the threshold force of a wild gale.

As the wind continued to build in the junipers and live oaks by their campsite, Tom Bohach was fretting over the glowing embers of their fire. He untangled himself from Alice Wong's naked body and crawled out of the sleeping bag to go over to the fire, jumping and swearing angrily when he stepped onto a thorny twig broken off a nearby mesquite. Although chilled by the building wind and starting to shiver, he couldn't get his mind off the warnings of the ranger about fire danger. The ranger hadn't been so full of crap after all. In such a gusting powerful wind an ember could easily escape the fire pit and blow into the brush. Bohach grabbed a frying pan from their gear and hurriedly began scraping dirt over the fire. Only when it was completely covered over did he return to the shelter of the sleeping bag. Alice Wong stirred awake as he climbed in and pulled him to her. He warmed his body against hers as he began to make love with her once again in the tireless and timeless circle of life ritual of the unsated young.

Maria Alarcon lay naked on her back, Diablo's sperm dripping down her thighs, her own vomit on her chest, her body scratched and bruised from falling on the rocks, her head bloody and aching from the blow he had given her during the chase. As her consciousness slowly focused she began to grasp the utter horror of where she was. Even the most stalwart soul would lose heart. Most would have been despairing and frozen with fear. Maria was despairing too, and deeply fearful for her life, but even in her shame and pain and disgust, Maria Alarcon's resilient agile mind was already racing to find a way to save herself. There is always hope, she told herself. Always. Hope. Tell yourself that, Maria. Over and over. Hope. Hope. There is always hope.

But deep down the despair was fighting to claw its way to the surface.

Diablo returned from washing himself and stood over her, staring down at the beautiful woman he had just raped. He had been a long time without a woman and Diablo was aroused again. He took a dirty piece of cloth, wet it from one of the water jugs he kept stored along the wall of the cave and washed the vomit and blood from Maria's face and chest. Then he roughly pushed her legs apart and drove himself into her once more. Maria Alarcon's response almost made him stop in astonishment.

She sounded like she was enjoying it.

Maria Alarcon was a trail hardened backpacker. Alice Wong was not. Nor was Tom Bohach. There were bears in the Huachucas. Not grizzlies, the huge brown bears were exterminated from the local mountains a century earlier. The grizzlies were gone. Not the black bears. They were not huge behemoths like the Grizzlies, but a mature male was a large and potentially dangerous creature. Black bears were known to occasionally attack humans and one of the stimuli that could draw a bear's interest besides the smell of food was human sexual activity. After Tom Bohach had spread the odor of human love making into the wind by standing naked and unwashed in the open while single mindedly concentrated on putting out the campfire, a black bear nearly a mile downwind had sniffed the scent, nostrils flaring at the twin odors of food and of sex. The big male bear sat on his haunches and snorted at the wind. Then he dropped onto all fours and headed directly for the source of the smell. As the two young hikers worked themselves into a writhing passion, the bear accelerated its pace. As it got closer the scent grew more acute.

The big black bear launched into a dead run.

`

The last thing Nub Riley would have thought to bring with him to the Mimbres dig was his battered and scarred old Martin D-28 guitar. His mind was singly fixated on getting into the dig site and back out as quickly as he could. But Peg Riley thought of it. She packed the Martin with the other gear in the four wheeler, knowing that once in the mountains her husband would probably unwind some. Anyway, Peg Riley figured, the guitar would help him to ease off on some of the tension that had his blood pressure spiking. It worried her. Nub was wound tighter than she'd ever seen him. Peg marched over to the four wheeler, took out the guitar case and brought it to Nub. The low talking around the campfire had put him into a reflective and more receptive mood. When the others urged him to play it, he took the old Martin, its seasoned tone resonate and rich, out of its scuffed and scarred hardshell case, checked the standard EADGBE tuning for pitch and then began to play.

He played a few old tunes that everyone knew, alternating between finger picking and a restrained but precise flat picking of the melody lines. First up was the old family favorite, _You Are My Sunshine_. Then _Red River Valley_. And _Nine Pound Hammer_. From there Nub went into a couple of contemporary country songs, Waylon Jenning's _Lucille_ and Shelly West's _Jose Cuervo You Are A Friend Of Min_ e. Garret joined in and sang harmony and then Peg and Heather were singing, too. Even Skarp joined in for a folk song or two in his rough monotone. But not Goman. The patrician scion of the wealthy Goman clan was above such mindless amusical doodlings. Goman had his nose buried in the organization of his notes and studying the day's finds from the dig. As the others sat by the fire and chatted and sang, the wind began to build. They were sheltered from most of it from the overhanging branches, but the trees overhead began to sing in their own kind of wild song. The storm was starting to move inland from the Pacific coast. Jim Garret looked at the sky and an old sailing nostrum popped into his head.

Red sky at night, sailor's delight

_Red sky in the morning, sailors take warn_ ing

Jim was absolutely certain that the morning would dawn a turbulent red. A turbulent _blood_ red.

Just then a Great Horned Owl exploded out of a nearby giant sycamore and flapped directly over his head above the amber glow of the fire and disappeared into the stygian gloom of the upper canyon. Heather Sosa saw it, too, jerked impulsively, and swiftly turned to look at Jim. In both of their minds were the same memories. Of the spooky venerable peasant folk tales their great grandmother had scared the hell out of them with when they were little kids. Tales passed down through the generations in the whispered quiet of smoky fireplaces and the wizened ancient faces of people close to the earth and its secrets. One was about the witch moth--a genuine creature--whose appearance signaled impending death. One of the scariest of the somber hoary tales was about the owls and how they were sometimes also the harbingers of death. Jim grew uneasy when he saw Heather's eyes. They were wide with fear. Then he remembered what was already stuck dead center in Heather's mind. One drizzling autumn afternoon twenty years earlier a Great Horned Owl landed in the gnarled Apache pine outside their great grandmother's stuccoed mud brick Sonoran cottage. The owl stayed through the dusk and into the night.

The next morning their tale spinning ancient great grandmother was dead.

It wasn't just Jim Garret. The Great Horned Owl was an avatar for the unspoken. The others seemed to intuitively pick up the same vague sensing of something unpleasant lurking just beyond their collective horizon. The caliginous pall affected everyone, dampening their earlier jubilation at the dig's success that day, and the music gradually faded away. One by one they left the waning campfire for their sleeping bags and a night of fitful sleep full of strange and even foreboding dreams. Only Nub Riley remained by the dying campfire. Both Nub and the old Martin D-28 were silent.

The music died along with the earlier hopeful mood of the evening's beginning.

"What do they call you? Maria Alarcon asked in the timid, submissive voice that she rigidly forced herself to project despite her seething inner outrage after Diablo had taken her again. He dropped down onto a filthy wool blanket on the far side of the fire he had built against the growing chill the building storm was bringing and was staring silently at her. He picked up a fat chunk of pinyon and tossed it in the fire. "What are you called?" She repeated. He still did not answer. "My name is Maria", she said softly, holding her voice rigidly free of the tension and fear and anger that was boiling in her insides. But in her mind she conjured up a wickedly sharp knife ready to slash the bastard's throat.

"Diablo", he finally replied. "I am Diablo." Maria thought the Spanish word for the Devil was a perfect name for the murdering rapist pendejo, but was bloody well not about to say that to him. She was searching for some way, some niche, some opening, some vulnerable or approachable place in the evil man, where she might strike a responsive chord with him that might help her to figure out how to escape him and save her life.

"That's an interesting name", she said, resolutely marshaling her iron hard inner strength to keep from unveiling her true feelings to him through the shadings in her voice. The fire suddenly flared when it burned into the sticky resin in a chunk of pine, filling the small cave with sinister flickering dark shadows. It startled Maria and she had to pause a moment to marshal both her courage and her wits. Her voice quivered. Just a little.

"How did you happen to be called Diablo?" She said, and as she said it hating the lunatic as much as she had every hated anything or anybody in her whole life, but still managing to hide it from him. Barely.

"It is my name", he replied tersely. "'That's all. My name." Maria realized that she was on a dead end with this tack. She reset her probing course in a different direction..

"What happened to my friend? Is he dead?" Diablo grunted without giving a direct answer. Maria blanched, knowing the grunt meant that Troy was dead. Troy Andrews might have been a hopeless macho jerk, but she never would have wished him dead. Never. That kind of thinking was alien to Maria. Or at least it had been alien. But now? With this murdering rapist bastard Diablo? Would that the Archangel Michael would come roaring out of the Heavens with the Sword Of Righteousness and behead the son of a bitch on the spot. But that wasn't going to happen, it was just another of her salvation fantasies, and she kept her own counsel. Which was to play the bastard as best she could.

"And what of the drugs?" She continued. "Is that what you are doing? Hijacking the drugs?" Diablo only grunted again. Maria pulled one of her athletic legs up to her side and reached over with a toe to nudge Diablo's foot. "Can you make love again, Diablo?" She said. "I am ready. It has been a long time since I have known a strong man who could satisfy me." Diablo showed his first emotions to her. Surprise. And doubt. He had intended to rape the woman until he was completely sated, then kill her and hide the body with that of Troy Andrews. But now? He was not so sure. Maria's tactics were starting to work, though the gall of what she had to do was rising bitter in her throat at the same time as it sank into the very center of her being. She knew it. Even if she did survive.

She would never be the same again.

Diablo got up, walked a few steps and picked up a package from near the side of the cave. He carried it back, sat down near Maria and began to tear open the package. Maria's eyes flickered in recognition, if not understanding. The package was from Troy Andrew's backpack. Not the heroin. This was the marijuana. The powerful hallucinogenic cannabis that had been part of the drug shipment intended to liven up the dealers' parties. Diablo took out some of the marijuana and stuffed it into his mouth like a wad of chewing tobacco. Maria blinked again. She'd never seen anyone take marijuana that way before. Diablo held out the package to Maria, motioning to her to take some.

"No", she said. "It makes me very sick, this plant. I can't take it." That was not true. Maria used marijuana often and it was one of her favorite drugs. But she knew better than to be at all impaired in the lethal situation she was in. She used marijuana to relax and drift into dreamy reveries. It wasn't an action drug like speed, which Maria shunned after seeing what prolonged use of the drug did to some of her friends. For once one of those stuffy political nostrums was actually true. Speed did kill. But Diablo wasn't accepting Maria's protestations. He motioned at the package again, his manner directly menacing.

"Take it", he said in a coldly ominous voice. _"Now!"_ Maria couldn't refuse him a second time. She made a show of grabbing a handful of the marijuana but hid the actual small amount inside her hand, putting it deftly in her mouth before Diablo could gauge how much she'd taken. She pretended to cough and immediately swallowed the marijuana hoping to minimize its effects. Then, again catching Diablo by surprise, Maria coaxed him onto her again and responded to his bestial love making with such seeming passion that Diablo began to grow less rough. He pumped his seed into her twice more in the next hour and then fell asleep by her side.

It was at once the most bizarre and disgusting experience of her life, to have the powerful marijuana working on her mind while this wild beast of a man was ravishing her body. Could Hell be any worse? She was certain that if she survived this ordeal that there would be nothing left on Earth for her to fear. In a flash of precognitive understanding welling up out of her perennially restless subconscious, she knew what her life's work would be. She would go to law school and become a prosecuting attorney. Specializing in the permanent incarceration and/or death row for predatory bastards like this murderous maniac Diablo. But there was a caveat. A very, very big one.

First, she had to survive.

She lay awake while he slept, her hands tied behind her back by the bastard before he went to sleep, wishing she could feed the comforting warmth of the fire from the woodpile he had stacked against the rough craggy side of the limestone cave and wondering if she could slip away without waking him. But an intuition warned her that Diablo was expecting just that and would be ready--and the consequences would be lethal. She stayed where she was. By the fire. There was no thought of sleep. It wasn't possible. Maria was far too consumed by thoughts of escape--and, already, even revenge--for sleep to have the slightest chance at elbowing out her galloping consciousness. The busy little molecules of the supercharged tetrahydrocannabinol that put the powerful punch into the Mexican marijuana were bouncing around the nooks and crannies of Maria's blitzed brain and made everything both more vivid and more confusing at the same time. Fantasies of escape danced through her mind in numinous colors in bloody counterpoint to dark brooding fantasies of a half dozen different ways that she could kill and mutilate the murdering rapist bastard and cut him up in tiny pieces to feed to the buzzards and the ravens.

Outside the gathering wind began to shriek in fury.

Hard rains rode the backs of howling winds from the reclaimed desert croplands and barren mountains of eastern California over the Colorado River and across the Arizona border. Everywhere the rains fell urgent flash flood warnings went out within a few short minutes. he hard packed desert soils shed most of the rain. Water flowed off in rushing torrents into the washes and arroyos and streambeds. They were filling fast. Strongly worded TV and radio broadcasts went on the air warning the population of Arizona to stay home and avoid all travel. The National Weather Service predicted continued heavy rain for at least two days. State officials cautioned that as the rain continued to fall road closures would become inevitable. Street flooding would be universal in the cities and bigger towns in the normally water starved dry country of Arizona. Farms and ranches and even many of the small towns were very likely going to cut off and be even more isolated than they already were. And those near watercourses and drainages had best beware of fast rising storm runoff.

By midnight the clouds were piling up over southeast Arizona. Diablo rose from his sleep and walked outside his cave shelter to relieve himself on the rotting leaves and pine needles of the forest floor. As he glanced up he could see only a single holdout star still faintly visible through the growing cloud cover. The storm that his instincts told him was coming was just about there. If the storm was as immense as he thought it was going to be, the waters of Dancer Canyon wash would build with the treacherous surprising rapidity of intense mountain storms. The wall of plunging water--a sight that was the last thing untold numbers of hapless desert hikers and campers over the centuries had seen--would soon block off the road. Diablo's mouth twisted in his humorless sepulchral smile. The people in the camp below would be trapped. He finished urinating, shook his recently well used male member, and thought of Maria. Then he went back inside to stare at the woman.

And wonder what he was going to do with her.

" _Quick, Tommy---quick_!" Alice moaned. She spread her legs as wide as she could in the cocoon of the sleeping bag as Tom Bohach pushed himself into her and began to rhythmically pump towards the beckoning Big Bang ecstasy of sexual release. The black bear had just come within sight of their camp and saw the shape of the sleeping bag rising and falling with the rhythms of the two young hikers' lovemaking. The bear's nostrils quivered excitedly at the smells of the humans and it charged for the moving shape in the darkness. Alice was right at the edge of orgasm and moaning loudly when Tom Bohach's body suddenly was violently jarred. At first she thought it was just another of Tom's dramatic synchronous orgasms. But then he began to scream. Alice froze. Good God! What was happening?

"It's a bear!" Tom yelled frantically at her between his screams. "A bear is attacking us!" Alice began to scream, too, as Tom tried to cram himself down inside the sleeping bag away from the claws and teeth of the frenzied bear. Blood poured from a gash on his face as he wildly pushed himself into the bag and pulled the top over their heads. "My God", the terrified young man gasped. "Oh, my God, what are we going to do?"

"Maybe it'll go for the food", Alice whispered, her pupils flared wide, remembering they'd carelessly left a pan of leftovers by the fire pit in their haste to celebrate the genital acrobatics of youth. The backpack with their stock of food inside lay next to the pan of cold food.

But the bear's interest remained fixed on them. The big black bear furiously thrashed at the sleeping bag, tearing at the fibers with its long claws and biting at the opening Tom Bohach was holding closed with the adrenalin fired strength of a life-or-death struggle for survival that had come so precipitously exploding into his once orderly and uneventful world. One of its claws ripped through the sleeping bag on the bottom and gashed Alice's leg. She began to whimper in fear as the bear tore at the bag and huffed and growled at them. Suddenly the wind freshened. A gust brought the odor of the food by the fire pit to the furious bear. It stopped the attack, lifted its head to sniff the air, hesitated a moment as though sunk in an ursine moment of indecision, then turned and lumbered away from the two terrified young hikers.

For the next twenty minutes they cowered in terror inside the frail shelter of the ripped sleeping bag while the bear raged through their camp, plundering it. The bear seemed to have forgotten about them in its four footed clawing rampage through the camp. At least temporarily. It still might come back for them after it finished ravaging the camp. But before that thought revisited the big bear's furious mind another face of raw nature came howling in with the hard driving winds and stinging rain of the first wave of the gigantic Pacific storm that was pummeling the hell out of the state of Arizona.

The bear was gone, lumbering off in a shaggy wet furred lope to find shelter from the storm. The two bleeding, terrified young people emerged from the sleeping bag into a cold, driving rain that stung their naked bodies and chilled them to a dangerously low body temperature. The biggest danger to hikers was hypothermia and Tom and Alice were already on the edge of it, their body temperatures already below 97 and still dropping. The intense relief at surviving the bear attack evaporated when they realized that their escape from the bear had left them in a predicament potentially as lethal as the animal attack. Their camp was destroyed, ripped to pieces by the bear, their food gone, their gear in shreds. They were at least a half dozen miles of hard going rough country away from the ranger station and there likely wasn't a soul anywhere nearby to help them. Tom pulled Alice and their torn sleeping bag to a partial shelter under the boughs of a spreading pinyon tree. Their clothes had remained mostly dry crammed in the bottom of the sleeping bag and they pulled them on in urgent gelid anxiety while they spoke in anxious whispers about what to do next. Their voices were mere whispers, but their eyes were frenetic balls of darting energy, starting at ever noise, ceaselessly looking around, fearful that the big bear might return. Their adventure had turned into a misadventure growing more dire by the minute. _Good God, how could this be?_ Alice thought to herself in a sobbing inner voice. Oh, to be back in their snug little student apartment by the college. Alice followed Tom into a mute despondency.

Consciousness slowly began to slip away.

The rain slackened. Mentally and physically lethargic, from shock, from the rain and wind and chill, they at first didn't notice. When they did they stared in surprise for a moment before erupting into an awkward numb limbed action. The pair of desperate young city kids stumbled out, found their flashlights and shoes, their ripped but still serviceable rain gear, packed everything salvageable into their torn packs and went back to huddle under the pinyon tree just as the heavy rain resumed beating down on the saturated earth. After a miserable half hour of huddling half frozen under the tree, the rain still falling steadily with no sign of letting up, they grew more and more chilled. They shook and shivered continuously as their bodies fought a losing battle trying to maintain body temperature as it dropped towards 95 degrees and the onset of mild hypothermia.

Alice felt confused and disoriented. Despairing. Then a thought bolted into her mind from one of her college classes. Hypothermia! These were symptoms of the onset of hypothermia. Both she and Tom were dangerously chilled. Their matches were soaked and they couldn't build a fire even if they could find a dry place to build one. The survival imperative kicked in with both of them. Finally, both understood. They had to find shelter. Under the light of the flashlight they studied the sodden Forest Service map. Alice spotted it first. Three miles to the north, at the foot of one of the canyons, was an old ranch house. With the rain beating steadily on them, both still oozing blood from wounds inflicted by the raging black bear, the two young people grimly set off trudging through the muddy ground towards the north and the hope of shelter and salvation in a rundown abandoned ranch house.

Hardly a half hour passed. A solitary spectral figure emerged from the mountain foothills above where the two youngsters had made their camp. He came out of the rain and gloom bloody eyed and ready to kill, but found his prey gone. He cursed and kicked angrily at the muddy ground. Diablo had decided to move into the final stages of his raid, knowing his movements would be shielded by the rain and mists of the storm. He slipped down from the mountains to kill the young hikers. The bear had saved their lives. But not for long.

With a cold, angry determination, Diablo began to follow their tracks. At first slowly and carefully. Then quicker. And quicker yet. His Raid had begun and Diablo was not a man to be denied. A half mile behind him the black bear found cover from the storm under the dripping boughs of a huge seventy year old Arizona cypress. A cotton tailed rabbit fleeing the storm came tearing into the same little clearing beneath the cypress the bear was huddled in. Good luck for the bear.

Bad luck for the rabbit.

The first raindrops fell while Nub Riley and Jim Garret were still sitting by the fire. Garret had been too agitated to sleep and went back outside to rejoin Nub by the dying fire, throwing more wood onto the waning blaze and shaking Nub out of the pensive reverie that had captured and held him for the past hour. Jim held out his hand to catch a drop or two that made it through the trees.

"Aha! The rain." Riley looked up from the fire to glance at his old friend.

"That's right. You said it was goin' to rain, didn't you?"

"Sure did, old buddy", Garret replied with a grin. Riley was puzzled.

"Then why are you smiling? Rain will just screw up the diggin', won't it?"

"So why do you think I insisted we bring all those tarps along, Nub?" Garret answered. "We'll set up a shelter over the dig and keep right at it. Fact is, the rain will make things even better." Nub looked at him.

"Nobody will be out in the rain and happen on us, that the idea?" Garret nodded.

"Yep. Who the hell would be crazy enough to be out wandering in the mountains during a rain storm?"

The raging squalls and the turbid night made it impossible to see more than a few feet. Possessed by an inner dread that urged them to speed up and hurry, Tom Bohach and Alice Wong felt their way forward, stumbling and tripping down a slick hillside peppered with ankle twisting loose rocks and spiny prickly pear cactus. They stopped to rest just as the squall backed off to recharge its meteorological energies and dropped to a short lived respite of light rain. They peered into the murky night. What? What was that? They caught a sudden glimpse of the sheltered campfire at the Mimbres dig a half mile off. They stared in semi-disbelief at it for a few moments until they were sure it was a campfire. It was real! _Salvation._ No words were necessary. Just as the hard rain resumed its pummeling of the saturated mountainside, they set off plodding up the canyon, scraping the bottom of their last reserves of strength as they pushed their bone weary bodies towards the promise of the warmth and safety that beckoned from that distant flickering point of light.

Garret was on his feet, slapping off the bits of twigs and leaves from his trousers from sitting on the ground by the fire. The rain had been coming down hard for almost an hour and, though the fire was sheltered by thick overhanging foliage, the night air had grown steadily chillier. He was about ready to go inside and settle into his sleeping bag for the night when the two sodden, muddy figures stumbled in from the gloom. At first he could hardly believe his eyes. He gaped at them in astonishment. Then Alice Wong ran at him and grasped at his shoulders with her thin icy fingers.

"Please _,_ mister", she pleaded in a thin, weary voice. "We need help _bad_." One look was all Jim Garret needed. The girl sure as hell wasn't exaggerating. The two kids were in bad shape. He hollered to the others and one by one they rolled out of their strange dreams and their sleeping bags and, as soon as they saw the battered, bloody pair, quickly set to tending the injured, exhausted young people. The two were in such a miserable condition that no one thought of anything but helping them. Only later did Nub Riley whisper sardonically to Garret as he passed him by the fire.

"Now we know who in the hell would be crazy enough to be out wandering in the mountains in a rain storm." They both laughed, despite the chaotic mess that was piling up around them and a once promising dig that was instead fast turning into a fiasco.

The outliers of the first wave of the big storm broke over the seemingly endless succession of towering Arizona mountain ranges marching off to beyond the eastern horizon. The tempest looked to be subsiding. A few stars even came provisionally peeking through the clouds. The wind stopped. Not for long. A half hour later it started to freshen with redoubled intensity. To the west the center of the storm had roared ashore, climbed the mountains on the California coast and piled up on the Sierras, slowing down and pouring so much more rain on the already drenched countryside that it at times seemed there were no distinct boundaries between water and land. Small creeks and rivers that almost never flooded were spilling over their banks and giving nasty sodden surprises to nearby residents.

Worse than the flooding and the beachfront destruction was what was happening on the mountainsides. The scant vegetation was overwhelmed and couldn't hold the water. In hundreds of places the saturated ground began to liquefy and masses of mud started to slowly slide downhill. Even as the skies were clearing over the Huachucas and the first wave of the storm was moving into New Mexico, the leading edge of the main part of the storm was moving over the Colorado River Valley on the sunbaked western Arizona border. Almost instantly the rain fell in such an intense deluge that it dumbfounded the overwhelmed residents, washes filled up and roads were closed as the violent storm water boiled down the desert arroyos. In southeastern Arizona the flash flood watches went out and the residents were told to hunker at home and not even think about traveling. Just about everyone heeded the warnings and stayed inside their homes.

But not everyone was lucky enough to be indoors.

The rain and the dark night were little hindrance to Diablo as he followed Tom Bohach and Alice Wong's meandering panicky trail in the muddy ground. He wasn't far behind them when they reached the safety of the Dancer Canyon camp. At first he balled his fists and scowled in angry frustration. Then his irritation at missing them vanished as quickly as it had come when it dawned on him where they were. A spine chilling smirk crossed a face hidden inside his drooping poncho hood. Yes. This was good. The enemy was making it easier for him by clustering together in one place. Even better--it wasn't far from his own camp in the thickly forested little canyon above. The eerie smirk remained on Diablo's rain stung macabre face as he stealthily slogged past the camp and climbed back to his lair in the blind canyon above the Mimbres dig. If he had any doubt before, it was gone now. He knew in his bones that the Power was with him and would remain with him up to the final ending of Diablo's Raid. There could be no doubt.

The raid would be a success.

Sleep? It was an alien concept to Colonel Redding that night. He was wide awake with all his senses alert and probing when the lull came in the storm towards midnight. He went outside into his yard and stared at the mountains for a long while. The feeling of something menacing hidden in the mountains was growing stronger. He'd had these feelings before. Once, in the central highlands of Viet Nam at his battalion's headquarters near An Khe, only a few clicks from where Nub Riley had pulled his own First Cav Viet Nam tour, Redding had experienced almost exactly the same feeling. Still a junior officer in those turbulent nation sundering days, Redding had forced himself to ignore the feelings. Voicing something like that was hardly a career enhancer for a young officer. Feelings? You are having _feelings?_ He'd look like a damn fool _._ And who would have taken him seriously, anyhow? The next night an entire regiment of North Vietnamese regulars overran an isolated fire base under his battalion's command and exterminated the company sized American led unit of Nungs defending it. Redding never told anyone about his premonitions.

But he never forgot it, either.

The little band of pothunters made room in the camp for the two battered young bear attack fugitives, draping them in blankets while their drenched clothing dried out by the fire and feeding them warm liquids--a cup of Peg Riley's homemade tomato onion soup and a mug of sweet green tea. As the two young people sat by the fire warming their chilled bodies, Peg Riley and Heather Sosa both hovering in gentle solicitude over them, Goman slipped to Jim Garret's side and spoke in a very low voice.

"Garret", he whispered. "I'll handle these foolish children." Goman quietly continued on to say that he would dazzle them with archaeological jargon to make them think they were on a legitimate dig. In the morning Reiser would come and the ranger could transport them out of the mountains. Sounded simple enough, the way Goman explained it. But Jim Garret had his doubts.

After the uproar created by the arrival of Wong and Bohach subsided, the camp tried again to settle in for what remained of the night. The skies had partially cleared overhead. It seemed the rain had stopped. It was illusion. The people at the Dancer Canyon dig site were deaf to the outside world. The meteorological and geological witch's brew of the huge storm and the isolated mountain location left their radios mute beyond an unintelligible gabbling static. They were unaware that at that very moment western Arizona was being drowned under the heaviest rains the barren country had seen since many centuries earlier in the distant time blurred days long before the arrival of the Europeans and their scratching pens that left written records of nature's raging angers.

Stopping outside the hidden cave, Diablo searched for signs of smoke from the fire inside. There were none. The heavy multi-canopied forest of shrubs, bushes and trees diffused the smoke from the small opening at the rear of the cave. Nor could he notice much odor from the fire inside his lair. Rain dripping off his poncho, Diablo went into the cave and found Maria Alarcon asleep, still firmly tied hand and foot as he'd left her. The fire was down to embers. He bent to add slivers of pine and chunks of oak to the low fire and as he warmed himself by the fire the urgings in his bollocks gradually washed over him again. He slid over to her side to untie her and began to roughly stroke her awake. Or so he thought. Maria was faking sleep to avoid contact with him. As he touched her Maria's eyes snapped wide open. The anger and fear flashed only a fractional moment before her rigid control of self preservation took hold. She satisfied his desires with the same feigned passion as before. It was thankfully quick and soon over. Diablo rolled over to sit by the fire. Maria sat up and leaned toward the fire's warmth, keeping her face and the sheer hatred and loathing on it turned from him until she was able to compose herself.

"What do you do when you go out in the rain at night?" She asked in a voice she was trying hard to make sound--very unlike Maria--soft and pliable. Diablo grunted and threw her a quick suspicious look, awkwardly shifting his body closer to the fire pit. The fragrant slab of juniper Diablo added to the fire flared into darting foot high flames.

"Watch", he said brusquely.

"Watch what?" He snapped her another suspicious look, a longer one. "Just watch", he said, less brusquely, returning his eyes to the fire. For the first time Maria noticed a faint touch of something other than the usual harsh roughness in the tone of his voice.

"Who are you, Diablo?" She continued, trying to find some little scrap of information that would help her know how to work the man. He glanced over at her again, quickly, but said nothing. She shuffled her body closer to his and reached out to lightly touch his forearm.

"I would like to know who this man is who has come into my life", she persisted in her best feigned attempt at a soft, subservient voice. "Is that so strange?" She pulled it off, though anyone who knew Maria and her strong and determined personality would have been stupefied by her soft and subservient act. Diablo glowered and spit into the fire. The woman complicated things. He knew he should kill her like the others. But he liked her female presence and her willing ways of pleasing him. It had been many years since a woman had made any kind of attempt at trying to please him. He seemed lost in thought for a few moments, then looked at her again. His face was alive with excitement. Maria thought his eyes matched the hot coals in the fire that flickered between them.

"I am Diablo!" He said. Maria had found a finger hold in his stoic armor.

"And who is Diablo?" She asked. The intrigue in her voice was more genuine this time. Just who was this bloody maniac? Diablo's eyes flared again, making him look wild and dangerous in the light of the fire, and he reached up to violently thump on his chest.

"l am Diablo!" He said arrogantly. "Last of the Apaches!" Maria Alarcon nodded as though what he said made sense. In fact it did make sense. It explained his behavior. The man was insane, and in his psychotic delusion fancied that he really was Diablo, last of the Apaches. Despite her miserable condition, Maria almost smiled. Now she had at least an idea of how to deal with this crazy murderous bastard. The primeval urge of revenge was already playing at the edges of her consciousness. She reached over and grabbed another chunk of juniper and tossed it into the fire, fantasizing as the fire embraced the dry wood and it combusted into hot flames that it was Diablo burning in Hell.

Max Reiser flicked on the TV and turned it to a weather report on Tucson's KOLD-TV, a station founded years earlier by a guy Max used to watch in the movies as a kid, cowboy singer and multimillionaire Gene Autry. Reiser hadn't noticed a radio at the Mimbres camp and suspected that they might not know that a really big storm was moving in. They actually did have a radio in the camp--the ever-meticulous Goman hadn't neglected bringing a battery operated one--and others in the Jeep and Land Rover, but the sheer looming cliffs of the narrow canyon and the towering mountains behind them blocked most of the radio signals. The camp knew that something big was brewing, but remained unaware of the immense Biblical intensity of the storm that was about to howl down on them.

Reiser set his alarm for the wee hours before the next morning's dawn. The direness of the normally jovial TV weatherman's report convinced the ranger that he'd better hop into his Forest Service pickup and head into Dancer Canyon to warn the pothunters' camp about the huge storm. It seemed likely they'd have to call off the digging. How could they possibly dig in the sticky muck of the canyon in a hard rain? Max didn't much care for that thought. Would he be willing to cooperate again if the dig were stopped and then started again at a later time? Maybe not. Probably not. Too risky. That would be spreading it over too long a time period, with too great a chance of being discovered. Max never gambled at the Arizona or Nevada casinos. He didn't like the odds. And he didn't like the way the odds were starting to stack up here, either. How long could they hope to keep the dig secret? Reiser was anxious to get to the dig early and talk it over with Garret. So anxious that he hardly slept at all that night. The few times he did slip into sleep he had disturbing dreams of flooding rivers and obscure trails that wound endlessly through towering dark forested mountains.

Tony Parelli saw the weather reports, too, but his thoughts were of a whole different species than Reiser's. Parelli was crossing his mental fingers that the rain would force them to call off the dig. After they left he'd sneak in and find out what they were digging for. It might end up meaning some money for him. And Tony Parelli could always use some extra bucks. Some men needed extra money for toys. Others for their personal passions. Tony needed extra cash for his own particular passion. Gambling. His was a familiar face at the Arizona Indian casinos and in Loughlin and even a faded casino or two in Las Vegas.

### The Ranger

A cloud muted angry red dawn rose behind him as Max Reiser drove his Forest Service truck over the winding and rutted access road into the illegal dig the next morning. Reiser's mood matched the ominous crimson dawn. A steady rain had been falling for hours and the road was slathered with slick mud that made steering the pickup difficult and tricky as he drove towards Dancer canyon.

"Max", he muttered to himself, glancing at his reflection in the truck's rear view mirror. "Just what the hell have you gotten yourself into?" Reiser had left the TV on after watching the weather report the night before and up popped a typically sensationalized network special, this one about prison life. It was brutal and ugly. Reiser was shaken. The thought of himself being in prison set off a very unpleasant chain of thoughts. The TV program triggered Max into having serious reservations about getting mixed up with the pot hunters. His career might not have amounted to much, but it sure as hell beat public disgrace and going to the slammer and coming face to face with some gang-tattooed hulking menace in the shower room. Max didn't much like the idea of his rear end being a bull's-eye for bubba and his bathroom buddies.

He pulled around the last curve in the bumpy dirt access road and squinted through the tiny blurry windows of vision opened by the laboring wind shield wipers. There it was. The dig. Concealed under the live oaks and pinyons of the lower canyon. Not easy to spot. That, at least, was a positive. Then he saw Garret and Riley, with that sinister tough looking character Skarp helping them, swathed in rain gear and already finishing up with the erection of a series of tarps over the dig and other parts of the campsite. _Whoa!_ The rain wasn't going to stop or even much slow down the progress of the dig. Relief washed over Max's worried face. Damn, if these people hadn't thought enough ahead to bring tarps. They were gonna charge ahead with the dig despite the crummy weather. Jim Garret was sure as hell nobody's fool. Or that rancher buddy of his, either.

Max started to reshuffle his thoughts. The rainstorm would have the opposite effect of what he had dreaded. The pothunters would finish up with the digging in miserable weather that would keep everybody else huddled cozily indoors and out of the mountains. The chances of being discovered were plummeting towards the remote. He looked up at the western sky. A solid leaden overcast was building fast, with a heavy charcoal bellied pile of clouds already covering the mountain peaks and spilling downslope towards the canyon. It was unlikely anyone would be in the mountains for the next few days. Who'd be foolish enough to risk the flash flooding this huge Pacific spawned storm was going to bring? Especially with the grave warnings of the extreme dangerousness of the storm being repeatedly broadcast over the radio and TV?

Reiser's booted foot had hardly hit the ground outside his pickup when Garret quietly took him aside in the steady rain and in a low voice told him about the kids, still asleep in one of the tents, who had stumbled into the camp during the night. Then he told him about the bear attack. Reiser's confident mood crumbled. The color washed out of his face. A bear attack? Good God. What next? Seeing the stunned look on Reiser's face, Garret quickly added that the two kids' injuries were only superficial and had already been adequately treated. Before sliding towards the edge of the chemical abyss with her drug habit, Heather Sosa had been an LPN. And a competent one. She'd seen to the two kids' injuries and, Nub Riley was surprised to see, handled it with cool professionalism. That calmed Reiser down some. But he remained visibly upset.

"Same kids I talked to yesterday evening", Reiser said, kicking at the ground with a toe of his boot and with a hard edge of irritation in his voice, after Garret finished telling him the details. "They're clueless about hiking in the mountains. They probably did something stupid to draw the bear. Bear attacks are just about unheard of around here." Reiser stopped to look uneasily at Skarp, who was lurking nearby listening to the conversation. The man made him jumpy.

"Just as well they came in here", Reiser went on with a shade less agitation, slowly starting to decompress and calm down from his initial flare up at the unexpected complication of the two young hikers. "If they'd gotten out and reported a marauding bear?" He said with a ominous tone to his voice. "Then we would have had problems." He paused to look at the others. " _Big_ problems. There would have been search parties out here looking for the bear, storm or not." He paused again.

"And _that_ is something we sure as hell wouldn't want to see happen."

Reiser told Garret he'd go check into the ranger station and then come back for the kids. After their harrowing escape from the bear, and with the big storm looming on the horizon, he was pretty sure he'd have no trouble convincing the two to end their hiking trip and head back to the safety and security of their cozy Tucson student apartment. The only real complication he could see was keeping the kids from telling any of the locals about the bear attack or the dig in the mountains. He'd just have to figure out a way how to do it. Max might have to seal their local lips by taking them back to Tucson himself. He was fairly certain the main road to Tucson would remain open, despite the storm. Garret and the others would just have to do without his help for the few hours it'd take to drive to Tucson and back.

Max Reiser looked almost comical as he bounced inside the pickup's cab as the truck lurched down the bumpy road while he drove in dyspeptic temper back on the rough canyon faster than he should have. But not so fast that his weather wise ranger's eye missed noting that the normally dry creek bed was wet in the few slippery locations where the road crossed it. When the rain started coming down by the bucketful the meteorologists were so direly predicting, with the accumulating storm water plunging down the stream bed, it was a good bet that he wouldn't be able to get back into the dig. That wasn't all bad. If the lethal wall of rushing water cut him off from the dig, it would also keep out any busybodies who might come snooping around.

Reiser knew that the pothunters had enough supplies to last several days. They could finish the dig, pack up their gear and be out of the canyon as soon as the back end of the storm passed and the water level dropped in the creek bed enough for them to cross and make good their getaway unseen. Things might work out after all. This wild scheme he had managed to bumble into looked like it could actually succeed. He was in too deep to get out now, anyhow. Let it ride, Max. Let it ride. He began to whistle an old Cajun tune he recalled his Louisiana born college roommate singing as he bounced his way out of the canyon to report in to the ranger station. He couldn't remember the name of the tune, but he did recall part of the lyrics, as he began softly singing.

Laissez les bon temps rouler.

Max did remember what the lyrics meant. Let the good times roll...

But first he had to get those damn kids out of the dig site and back to Tucson.

Maria thought she was hallucinating. It had to be the despair and awful tension of being trapped in this lunatic's lethal web. During the night, while that crazy bastard Diablo was sleeping and when the howling wind let up for a spell, she could have sworn that she heard a guitar playing and people singing somewhere not far away. But it had to be a delusion brought on by her intense anxiety, and she had warred with herself until she pushed the foolish notion of a dramatic rescue out of her mind. If you're going to survive this, Maria Teresa de los Santos Alarcon, she sternly told herself, you're going to have to do it yourself.

Diablo fell into a torpid wheezing sleep after he had used her again, and Maria stayed awake trying to drain some meaning out what she had learned. The psychotic killer really believed he was the last of the Apaches, and her mind was probing all the distant synaptic byways of her brain for every bit of information she had ever heard or read about the Apaches. The one thought that stuck in her mind above everything else was the ancient complicated relationship between the Apaches and the Mexicans. For centuries those two bitterly antagonistic peoples had carried on a peculiar trade and intercourse with each other even as they were intermittently warring with each other in a merciless blood feud of mutual extermination. Trade today. Murder tomorrow.

Many Apaches were captured through treachery and enslaved by the Mexicans, the women raped and made gravid by the captors and giving birth to children that would be raised as Mexicans and a life as a servant or a slave. Untold numbers of Mexicans were snatched in raids. Many children were brought up as Apaches and younger women taken as wives. Mexican men unfortunate enough to be captured could only hope for a quick death. Mexican blood flowed in many Apaches, and Apache blood coursed the veins of many a Mexican. Maria Alarcon was certain that in some way she could use this ancient relationship in a way that would help to save her life. And then she had a lightning bolt of a memory from the Women's Studies class she took at Pima Community College the previous winter. The class focused on strong women in the historical southwest. One of them was the warrior sibling of the Apache chief, Vittorio, who was with Geronimo at the final surrender. Lozen was this warrior's name.

And Lozen was a woman.

Reiser dropped only a single thought on Tony Parelli in his otherwise stolid silence during the ride out of the canyon from the Mimbres dig site the evening before. Reiser was adamant in telling Parelli not to leave his car out on the open road where it was certain to draw notice. He should either park his car in at the dig, or somewhere out of sight of the road. "But don't, for chrissake," Reiser doggedly persisted, "park it on the damn road where local passersby would see it." Parelli listened and kept his mouth shut. His tongue remained silent. Not his mind. Who the hell did this asshole think he was? Parelli thought as Reiser lectured him. Tony had been in the Border Patrol and the Marine Corps. And this circle jerk dumpy little ranger thought he could tell Tony Parelli what to do? Not frickin' likely. Yet, despite his pique, Parelli grabbed a nugget of an idea from what Reiser said. He'd just given Tony a dandy excuse to go back into the dig site and snoop around.

He'd park his rental car at the dig site the next day.

The leaden low clouds were leaking the beginnings of the rain that would later burst loose into an historic inundation. Early that morning Parelli came jouncing in the nondescript rented Ford over the rutted road into the dig. He was received with either distrust or disinterest by everyone but Goman, who impatiently listened to his explanation for driving into the dig and then bluntly told him to leave the car and get out into the foothills to keep watch. Parelli procrastinated, asking for a cup of coffee to warm his chilled bones before heading out. He took his time, his eyes roving curiously over the camp's activities as he slowly sipped at an acidic cup of tepid coffee that he pretended to slowly savor. When Goman walked imperiously up to Parelli and was about to berate him for wasting time, Parelli beat him to it. Without a word, he jumped to his feet and headed out into the rain soaked grassland, bent on searching out a sheltered spot in a outlying rock overhang where he could watch the surrounding countryside.

"Wait", Goman yelled as Parelli was trudging off. "Hey! You!" Parelli wheeled around and stomped back to Goman. _Now what?_ The former BP officer wondered to himself, barely concealing his irritation. Goman reached out with one of his little two way hand held radios. "Just in case", he said. With a irked glower on his face, Parelli took the radio without comment and resumed his slog over the rain soaked ground.

The sun rose two more hours higher into the sky, the earth's mother star now but a dull presence behind the solid pewter wall of rain laden storm clouds, before Max Reiser pulled off the paved Coronado highway leading to the Coronado National Monument at the south end of the brooding Huachuca Mountains. He down shifted the Forest Service pickup and headed up the rough track into the dig. Rain had been falling steadily for the better part of an hour. Max had to report into the ranger station before he could bring out the two young people from the Mimbres dig. Otherwise there would be too many questions about why he would be out before dawn in the storm threatened foothills. Though he probably could have explained the pre-dawn trip without too much difficulty, Reiser considered it better not to have the questions come up in the first place. This was one Pandora's Box best left unopened.

Tom Bohach and Alice Wong were warmed and dried and fed when Reiser's Forest Service pickup came driving up the rugged and increasingly muddy canyon road. All of the crossings were under water, the first two with a half foot of runoff in them and, Reiser realized with disquiet, the level was fast rising. He would have to grab the two hikers in a hurry and make a hasty exit out of the canyon. The road would be closed off before long by the rising flood of storm water. Neither the inexorable power of the water nor the elemental force of gravity would be denied.

Max Reiser was now in a race with both of them.

As the morning ticked slowly by things grew awkward for Bohach and Wong. The welcome lavished on them in the bloody hypothermic emergency of the night before had evaporated. The same people so solicitous for their well being just a few hours ago now ignored them outside of an occasional furtive look. Few words were directed at them while they ate a quiet cold breakfast and then waited for the ranger that Garret said was coming. Only the tall gray haired man Goman, who said he was the archaeologist heading the dig team, made an attempt to answer their questions, and his answers were in such obtuse scientific language that they didn't have a clue what he was talking about. They nodded politely and pretended as though he made sense. It wasn't important. Not after what they'd been through. They were grateful to their rescuers and relieved to be safe and soon to be on their way out of this harrowing unexpected misadventure. Their recent interest in backpacking and hiking had taken a nose dive into the neighborhood of absolute zero. The only hiking they were likely to do for a good long while would be between classes at Pima Community College and their nearby rainbow-painted little student apartment. They were growing anxious to get home to their snug little place where they'd wait out the storm sipping sweet tea and listening to the Stones and the Dead and doing some of the righteous bud Alice had scored from a fellow student in Tucson the week before.

### Chapter 8

### Tony Parelli

Grumbling most of the way--which was habitual with him--Parelli slogged back towards the camp through the building storm. Goman had changed his mind that morning and concluded that, with the heavy weather moving in and Reiser already covering them, there was no further need for the man. He was an unnecessary complication. It was time to pack him off to Tucson. He told Skarp to take the Land Rover out to where Parelli could hear him and call him in on the radio. Tony wasted no time in returning. He was cold and wet and it was only mid morning. The idea of sitting out in the rain all day, even with the partial shelter he'd found, had about as much appeal to him as listening to that jerk priest Father Mazero lecturing on the terrible sin of abortion to the congregation at Our Lady Of Sorrows in Tucson. Despite his seedy lifestyle, Parelli remained a serious Catholic who made mass with a regularity that would have made his Turin born mother proud. But that faithful attendance at mass didn't transfer over to going to confession. Tony hadn't been to confession in more than a decade. He told himself there was no conflict in that peculiar dichotomy of faith. Anyhow, at this moment his mind wasn't on religion or mass or confession but on a warm room and a stiff drink and maybe one of those Miracle Mile hookers back home in Tucson. He almost literally took off running when Skarp called him in. The idea of sticking around and sneaking into the dig to check it out later had lost its appeal to him. To hell with whatever it was they were doing at the dig. He'd get his car at the dig and get the hell out of this muddy mess in a hurry. Soon he'd be sitting down to his favorite drink, an Irish Whiskey neat. The first of many.

"Just one more", Reiser mumbled tensely. "One more goddamn crossing." There was a single crossing remaining before the old ranch road cleared the creek bed for the last time and followed higher--if still muddy and a whole lot rockier--ground on the flank of the canyon the rest of the way into the camp. But the last crossing was also the deepest one. Reiser had worked these mountains for twenty years and seen a lifetime's worth of storms. Hard experience taught him the deceptive dangers of fast flowing washes and flash floods. The ranger prudently stopped his truck and climbed out to go over and look at the rising water. He stood in the pelting rain, his Forest Service poncho covering him to his boot tops, and gauged the depth of the water. At least a foot. Then the rain suddenly started to come down in driving sheets and in only a few seconds the water rose another half foot.

The heavy rain that had already started an hour earlier in the upper elevations had plunged with gravitational inevitability as far as the Mimbres camp. The debris clogged water in the streambed was already rising fast, but when a hard rain started pouring in around the lower elevations, the stream bed started to fill up with astounding quickness. So quick that even the veteran ranger Reiser took an involuntary step backwards as the streambed filled precipitately with roiling storm water. Twice he'd been part of a recovery team that had the grim job of pulling drowning victims from flooded washes. Still, the rapidity of the stream's rise caught even him by surprise. If anything, the dire predictions of the meteorologists had been underestimates of the true dimensions of this storm. Reiser grasped at that moment that he was witnessing a weather event of truly historic proportions. This one would have even caught Noah with his Ark down.

Max' boss, the unflappable Superintendent Ralph Murillo, safe and snug in his Sierra Vista town home with its faintly cheesy Southwestern decor, looked out his kitchen window and mused that it looked like a substantial chunk of the Pacific Ocean was relocating to his backyard. Murillo popped the top on a Schlitz and went back into his living room to watch a video of a classic Vikings/Cowboys playoff game. He didn't give much thought to Max Reiser or how he might be dealing with the storm. Except that maybe they'd all get lucky and the little prick would get himself drowned. Murillo plunked himself down in his Lazy Boy, his eyes riveted on the TV. The game was almost to the play where Tarkenton tossed that famous Hail Mary pass. Outside, the rain, already mercilessly pounding the soggy ground, redoubled in strength. Murillo shivered involuntarily, grateful he was inside safe from the raging tempest beating menacingly on his town house windows. Then came the crash. A diseased limb off a neighbor's sugar maple tore off and the wind hurtled it through Murillo's living room window and narrowly missed planting itself in his balding cranium. His mouth flopped open and his eyes snapped so wide he thought he could almost see at right angles.

And Ralph Murillo promptly wet himself.

Reiser wasn't alone in the pelting rain. Jim Garret was there, too, anxiously awaiting the ranger's return. Garret had slogged out to the opposite side of the crossing and was staring uneasily at the debris filled churning water, stunned by the sight of a raging mountain torrent that hardly an hour ago wasn't much more than a gentle trickle. The wind was howling towards gale force and tearing at his poncho, the driving rain stinging his face. He wasn't surprised at what Reiser yelled from only a few away across the roiling water.

"Too high, Jim, The truck won't make it through now", Reiser hollered in the howling wind. He turned to look nervously behind him, knowing the water would be rising fast in the crossings between him and the Coronado access road. "I'd better haul ass and damn quick. Otherwise I'm not going to get out of here." He pivoted to return to his truck, calling over his shoulder. "I'll just have to come back for the kids when the water drops."

Reiser started for his pickup, slipped on the slick earth and stumbled, but kept his balance and made it back to his truck, just managed to get it turned around in the narrow road hemmed in by dense thicket of velvet mesquites and slammed the accelerator to the floor as he raced back down the canyon. The water was up to nearly two feet at the crossing behind him and he was fearing the worst in the crossings ahead. The dread of the next crossing was full in his mind and he was totally unprepared for what suddenly appeared ahead of him in the hard rain. A poncho-engulfed figure was trudging towards him on the muddy road.

"Jesus!" Reiser uttered. "Now who the hell is this?" Reiser braked, too hard, went into a skid but caught it, then pulled up next to the shrouded figure, jerking the truck out of gear as he rolled the window down to yell at whoever it was. A familiar face stared impudently back at him from within the drooping folds of his poncho's rain hood. It was Tony Parelli.

"You better be damn careful if you go in there", Reiser yelled through the pelting rain. "Water's getting dangerous. Maybe it'd be best if I drove you back to town where you're staying." Parelli shook his head, water flying off his poncho and dripping from his nose. It was tempting. But what about his rental car at the dig site?

"Nah. I'll go back to the camp. It wouldn't do no good to be stuck back in town without my car." He paused to glance at the canyon ahead.

"How do I get across the water?" Reiser stared incredulously at Parelli. Just how clueless was this guy? Dumb enough to cross that flooding wash? Didn't he watch the news? Every year at least one person in this part of Arizona did something stupid like that and paid for it with a silent trip to the mortuary.

"Don't even try it!" Reiser admonished Parelli, leaning out the pickup's window, hollering over the roar of the wind and rain. "There's only one safe way to get across. Follow the side of the canyon all the way to the end. You'll find a waterfall maybe thirty, thirty-five feet tall there. The water comes out of a little blind canyon above and falls into Dancer Canyon. There's a rock ledge along the face of the canyon wall behind the waterfall. You can walk across it real easy, especially when the stream is running this hard. Water shoots straight out from the canyon above and leaves plenty of room for a man to walk." He put the truck back into gear and started to drive away. There were still two more crossings to make before the water got too high. "For God's sake, be careful, man! These flash floods are goddamned dangerous." Parelli nodded and watched as Reiser gunned the Forest Service pickup and raced off down the road to beat the higher water to the next crossing. The jumpiness of the veteran ranger should have made Parelli more cautious. It didn't. What the hell. He was a former Marine and Border Patrol officer. Tony Parelli might have been a flawed man with plenty of character defects. But being chickenshit wasn't one of them.

"Sure, sure", Parelli said as Reiser disappeared down the road. "After all I been through, Tony Parelli ain't about to be done in by no freakin' rainstorm."

Parelli stood behind him in the mud and rain watching as Reiser crammed the accelerator to the floor and roared off, fishtailing the pickup, in his haste to beat the flash flood. He hit the next crossing and was surprised that it had only a few inches of water in it, much less than when he'd crossed it a few minutes earlier on his way into the dig. That puzzled him. But he still thought he was just ahead of a plunging wall of water and raced on with his heart pounding in anxious syncopation with the thumping pistons on the pickup to the last crossing. When he rumbled across the streambed at the final crossing Reiser was so stunned that he plunged down on the brakes, jammed the gearshift into neutral, slammed on the parking brake with his booted foot and jumped out into the rain to go back and look at what should have been a raging stream in full flood. What the hell? The stream bed was nearly empty of water. What?......

Then the surprise on his rain flecked face yielded to a dawning recognition. He'd seen it three, maybe four, times before over his years rangering in the Huachucas. In the real big flash floods the raging waters sometimes cut new channels in the meandering stream beds when the water was higher than the natural slope of the land in the old streambed. Simple environmental and geographical math. The path of least resistance. A big flood hit. A new stream bed was sliced through by the plunging water. The old stream channel was left abandoned and dry. There were a bunch of them around, mostly in the valley along the San Pedro River. Folks generally called them oxbows. Reiser was sure that the stream flow in this granddaddy of a storm must be so intense that the flooding water had cut a new channel somewhere downstream from the last crossing into the dig. Reiser stood in the pounding rain studying on a whole new wrinkle to this environmental puzzle of a storm. There was only a single stream crossing he'd have to manage to get the kids out.

And he knew just how to do it.

Julius Meyer put the word out quietly into his flagitious subterranean world, starting with a half dozen judiciously placed phone calls. Anyone who could give him definite information concerning Benning Goman and the location of an illegal archaeological dig would land a hefty chunk of cash as a reward. Meyer spread the word into those murky extralegal circles where he had contacts, knowing that whatever information he would get would come from the underworld anyway. Whatever the specifics were of Goman's Mimbres source, it sure as hell was on the dark underbelly of the legal. The very least that Meyer hoped for was to get some information that would serve as a bargaining tool when Goman next contacted him. Who knew better than a devious denizen of the shadowy fringes like Julius Meyer that there was nothing like incriminating evidence to loosen a man's tongue and facilitate his cooperation? Lucius Meyer was a master of manipulative persuasion. Nice guys, Meyer liked to say, not only finished dead last, they'd sure as hell never make it into the dining room at the country club except to wait tables or bus dishes. Meyer belonged to three of the pricey clubs, despite deliberately flaunting his flagrant crudity. Money overcame all kind of barriers. Including social ones. A nice donation to the club's managing board opened the doors wide enough even for Julius Meyer to enter. He actually detested the clubs and the club members. But he did enjoy screwing with them every chance he got.

Two days later the private phone line Meyer reserved for his shadier business and personal dealings rang. He was expecting a return call from Sandy Martinez, the manager of _Elegant Escorts_ , the high dollar escort service he often used. Meyer picked up the phone. And frowned. It wasn't Sandy. The voice was male.

"This Mr. Lucius Meyer?" A rich baritone voice asked.

"Meyer it is", he replied, brusquely, irritated that it wasn't Martinez on the phone with arrangements for a promised date with one of _Elegant Escort's_ hot new eastern European girls. "And what is it that you want?" He said in the same irritated brusque tone.

"I hear you're looking for some information on Benning Goman and a certain activity he's involved in." Lucius Meyer's eyebrows raised. This might be it. _Might_ be. The world was full of scam artists. Meyer ought to know. He was one of the best. His voice was curious. But cautious.

"What do you have?" Meyer asked. The voice on the line replied with a confidence that Meyer instantly sensed. Either the guy was a world class scammer, or he was the real deal.

"Hard information", the voice replied. "The place and the time." Meyer's eyes narrowed and took on the unblinking stare of the urban predator that he was.

"How do I know its accurate?" He said. Dominic Zachary laughed into the phone.

"It's my job to see that my information is accurate. There's no repeat business if it isn't. You can be certain its 100% accurate."

"And if it isn't?" Zachary laughed again.

"I've heard of you, Mr. Meyer. You have a reputation for doing unpleasant things to those so unwise as to attempt to cheat you." Meyer laughed, too. It was not a pleasant laugh. "Well", Meyer said, "that much information you have correct so far." Meyer was sitting bolt upright, intense, riveted to the voice on the phone. "So what's the rest of it?" The irritation in his voice was gone. Whoever this guy was, he'd grabbed Julius' interest. Meyer could hook up with one of Sandy Martinez' sizzling hookers any time he wanted. But finding a Mimbres site? That was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

A Mimbres pot of gold.

Zachary went on to describe in his mannered baritone voice how he had been hired by Goman to find the dig. He'd started out by having Jim Garret followed until he went to the dig. Then, Zachary said with an amused chuckle, he gave Goman the information and Goman had himself lit out for the site. One of Zachary's men was still nearby, watching the dig site. That was all. Zachary wouldn't tell Meyer any more until he wired him one half of the agreed price of his information. $10,000. When the money arrived in his Wells Fargo Zachary Investigations business account later that morning Zachary made his second call to Julius Meyer. They agreed Meyer would bring the rest of the money with him and meet him at the Tucson airport. The money was inconsequential to Meyer. $10,000 wasn't much more than chump change to him and Lucius Meyer spent the next hour fantasizing what he would do with a roomful of rare and precious Mimbres pots. He might even give one or two of them to a charitable organization. Like a museum.

Or maybe an Indian school.

Two of the most solid foundation bricks in Maria Alarcon's feminine construction were keeping her from crumbling. Her iron will, which would rarely yielded to anything. And her athletic lithe beauty, which was keeping her alive, Maria being fully away that Diablo would almost certainly have already killed an unattractive woman. Despite her ordeal, Maria still was fetching, the shifting light of the fire playing on her handsome features and bringing out the highlights in her raven hair, giving it a lustrous sheen attractive even in its rumbled and unkempt condition. Relying on the twin strengths of her implacable determination and her striking beauty to both open the door into Diablo's bizarre world and to keep it open, Maria slyly continued to patiently--albeit very cautiously--work at the crack she'd pried in Diablo's stolid armor.

"Una Pregunta", she began. "A question. Tell me, Señor Diablo, what brings you, a warrior of that great nation, the Apaches, to this place? What are you doing?" Diablo at first didn't answer. His menacing glare caused her to back off and change her approach. "You know", she said, "in the old days Apaches often took Mexican women for wives. Many Apaches were captured and raised among the Mexicans." She caught the way Diablo's eyes narrowed with interest and deftly arrowed in on her target, mixing together Spanish and English in her eagerness to capture Diablo's attention. "Mi abuelita--my own grandmother--had Apache blood. She came from Arizpe in Sonora. _Her_ abuelita, my great-great grandmother--was captured as a child in a raid on an Apache camp near la Ciudad Janos in Chihuahua. I can still remember her talking about her Abuelita's insisting that she was a close pariente--a relative--of Geronimo." Diablo turned to look directly at her. When he spoke Maria's heart lifted just a little with a glimmering of hope.

"Your eyes", he said, "I thought you had Apache eyes." Maria smiled inwardly. She had found her opening.

"Geronimo himself had Mexican wives", she continued. "Did you know...."

And then she told Diablo about the Apache woman warriors, first about a married women who fought as a warrior. Daheste. And the other. A woman seemingly taken whole cloth from a Greek tragedy.

### Lozen

Lozen was the younger sister of the great Chihenne Chiricahua leader, Bidu-ya, who was, like Geronimo, far better known by the Spanish name the Mexicans gave him. Vittorio. Early on in her young Nde life Lozen knew she would be a woman warrior. She never married. Lozen proved herself more than capable to stand with the men. She also was widely known among the Nde as having the Power to discern when enemies were near and even where they were. Vittorio considered her his strong right arm.

In 1880, as Vittorio's band was evading the dogged pursuit of soldiers in northern Mexico, Lozen stayed behind with a young Mescalero Apache woman who was giving birth and unable to travel. The soldiers didn't discover them and Lozen--who was also renowned among her people as a healer--helped the Mescalero woman with her new born infant. Then Lozen began an odyssey that rivaled any of the many stunning feats the Nde accomplished in their last free ranging years. She set out to guide the woman and infant to the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico. The Apaches would later tell the story of how Lozen deftly evaded the Mexican and American soldiers and the bloody-minded civilians searching for Apaches, stole horses for the fugitives to ride under the very noses of the owners, killed animals--using only a knife because of the fear of a gunshot revealing their presence--for the fugitives to eat and even was said to have taken weapons and gear from unwary Mexicans and Americans. There were those who said she killed men with her knife during her intrepid journey.

Then, after weeks of furtive travel and many a hard and dangerous mile, she delivered the woman and child to the Mescalero reservation. Her triumph was short lived. A Mescalero warrior who had survived the massacre gave her the bitter news that her brother Vittorio and most of her people had been killed in a Mexican ambush at Tres Castillos in northern Chihuahua. Lozen turned and made the long ride back to Mexico to search out and help organize survivors. From then on the bitterly vengeful Lozen joined every hostile raid she could. She was among the last holdouts who surrendered with Geronimo in 1887 at Skeleton Canyon in far southeast Arizona. And she was with them when the Americans sent them to a prisoner of war camp in the alien world of the damp eastern United States where many of the Nde prisoners would die from tuberculosis. Lozen among them.

Maria had honed her story telling skills working at a summer camp for inner city youth in the high mountains of the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff. She'd left many an urban kid from Phoenix or Tucson in wide eyed wonder with her tales. She related the saga of Vittorio and Lozen to Diablo with telling effect. He grew angry as she finished telling the story. A thick branch of wet Mexican oak Diablo absently threw on the fire caused the cave to become smoky from the damp wood. His angular figure almost opaque behind the veil of smoke rising from the fire, Diablo solemnly said in a muted voice that the treacherous deaths of Vittorio's band and Lozen's demise in an American prison camp cried out for--no, _demanded_ \--vengeance. Maria blanched. What had she done in her calculated fervor to save her life? Sent this wild lunatic out to kill more people? z She rocked back on her haunches. Dark brooding thoughts of guilt silenced her tongue. The thought repeated over and over in her head like a scratch on an old LP record.

_¡Dios mío! My God!_ What had she done?

The day dawned gray and threatening. From his front yard Colonel Redding watched the murky break of day. The gray menace of the morning refracted in his intuitive gut, compacting and intensifying the dire feelings already closing in the colonel. All the neighbors were buttoning down their places and retreating indoors to wait out the incoming storm. Not Colonel Redding. He was doing an about face from everyone else. As the squalls began with hard pellets of sleet that turned to cold rain, the square built retired Army officer marched back inside his home to collect his foul weather camping gear from where it was put away in a cedar paneled storage closet in an unused back bedroom.

Two hours later Redding walked out of the house and away from the sheltering trees of his secluded neighborhood and headed up the canyon in the rain and mist. There was no one to see him leave. His children were all grown and long gone and his beloved wife of thirty one years had died of ovarian cancer the year before. Nor were any of his few neighbors looking out their windows. They had their eyes glued to their televisions or their ears to their radios at the news of the approaching torrential storm. Redding began the climb up into the mountains unseen. Tucked carefully inside a waterproof case strapped to his pack was something which would have certainly got the attention of the handful of battle tested Viet Nam vets among his neighbors. Redding was taking along one of his most prized possessions. A scoped Remington Model 700 30.06 Springfield bolt action hunting rifle, one of the finest production hunting rifles ever made.

And Colonel Redding damn well knew how to use it.

Nub Riley fired up the rugged Bobcat and the muted engine dropped to a throaty growl as Riley expertly worked the levers and the blade and began to scrape away the upper levels of dirt over what Garret and Goman figured were the outer boundaries of the Mimbres site. Everyone joined in with the muscle work of putting the tarps up over the uncovered earth as soon as Riley had cleared it. There wasn't much mud below the surface. Typical of violent rain storms on forested mountain slopes, the hard packed rocky ground resisted the rain and shed most of it downstream. The water hadn't penetrated more than a few inches. The entire face of the exposed excavated site was dry. Moist here and there, but mostly dry hard packed layers of clay and silt laid down by the mountain stream over hundreds of years of storms and floods. By 10:00 in the morning the upper layers of dirt were cleared, the site covered with tarps and trenched around the outside to prevent runoff water from seeping in. Everyone was in the excavation working the last few inches with shovels and picks until they again reached the Mimbres level where meticulous and laborious hand work would have to begin.

Both Alice Wong and Tom Bohach had taken beginning level anthropology and archaeology classes. The lightbulb of memory blinked on in their student craniums and they had a fair notion of what was going on. When they figured out that they might be stranded in the camp for a while, the pair went with a tentative hesitant curiosity to look at the work. Some of the others at the camp were unhappy when they stepped under the tarps covering the dig site. But no one chased them away. Both of them gradually grew more interested when the lightbulbs blinked on again with the realization that this was a rare chance to look in on a genuine archaeological dig. Just like in the textbooks. But real _._ Even the indifferent popular culture junkie Tom Bohach had his imagination jump-started by the thought.

In the work and the excitement no one noticed that Tony Parelli hadn't showed up yet.

"Even the last of the Apaches needs a woman, like in the old days", Maria kept on. "I have Apache blood, I am young and strong and pretty. I can move through the mountains silently and quickly. I can carry as much as most men. I am like Daheste. I am like Lozen. I won't slow you down at all." Diablo grunted but said nothing. "And I know how to please you", she added. Diablo grunted again and this time stared at her with his cold emotionless eyes. Maria had to fight hard to not avert her own eyes from Diablo's glare. She had to show strength as well as subservience.

"You do please Diablo. That is true." Then he rose and walked to the entrance of the cave before she could say anything. "I must think about this", he said. And then like a wraith he disappeared through the cave entrance. He was gone. But the menace of his presence lingered on.

Tony Parelli was a stubborn man. Stubborn to a fault. He was a macho former Marine who was arrogant about his own self reliance. He fully intended to ignore Reiser's advice and find a place where he could ford the stream. But as he entered the canyon and saw the wild, turbulent waters that were even starting to nudge small boulders down the stream bed, he understood with an instant flash of clarity the reality of the ranger's warning. Jesus! This was like nothing he'd ever seen before. This was one Big Mother of a storm.

The roiling water looked dangerous as hell. He bent down on the muddy ground next to the stream, slipped his hand into the rushing water and instantly felt the raw power of the current. It grabbed his hand in an unyielding liquid embrace and jerked the hand–and the rest of a very scared Tony along with it–violently downstream and very nearly made him lose his balance and tumble into the water. Parelli pulled his hand free and wildly crabbed backwards away from the wash, his bravado gone and feeling really afraid of the water. "No way", he muttered as he stood up and swatted away some of the creek side mud that had slathered him in his hasty scrabbling retreat from the hurtling mass of water. "No goddamn way I'm going to cross that sucker." He backed even farther away from the water. OK, he grumbled to himself, so the prick ranger had been right about this one. He backed off some more, turned upstream and began to grouchily trudge up the canyon towards the waterfall crossing Reiser had told him about. "Goddamn rain", he kept repeating as he marched off into the murk.

"Goddamn frickin' rain."

The heavens opened wide and water scooped up from the Pacific Ocean a few days earlier came plummeting ferociously out of the sky, but very little of it was making its liquid way into the trenched and tarped Mimbres site. The pothunters were hard at work, drenched in sweat, their hands and shoes stained with the reds and browns of the iron pigments and the organics in the ancient soil. By noon they were beginning to uncover the Mimbres layer all over the extent of the excavation. Goman suddenly stopped, dramatically held up his hands miming a _stop!_ gesture and peremptorily ordered everyone out of the pit, rubbing more than one ego the wrong way. Especially Nub Riley, who had taken a very active unhidden dislike to the strutting patrician. But, Riley had to grudgingly admit, the pompous jerk did know what he was doing and was pretty efficient about the way he was doing it. And that stilled both Riley's tongue and his active resistance. Nub wanted to get the dig done and get the hell out of there as soon as he could and Goman looked to be doing just that.

Then Goman, Garret and, much to Garret's surprise, Heather Sosa, began to carefully dig into the Mimbres layer with the small hand tools of the archaeologist, trowels and brushes and sieves, Goman had brought along. The others did most of the hand work while Garret carefully worked a flat edged shovel to scrape away the layers of dirt. The remainder of the pothunters brushed off the dirt and detritus from the dig as best they could and dashed through the rain to the cramped kitchen and sleeping tent they had jury-rigged adjacent to the dig tent. The dig plummeted to a distant second in their minds as their senses locked in on the lunch and coffee Skarp was preparing. When it was ready Skarp went to get the trio still working in the excavation. He lumbered into the tarp shrouded excavation and called down to Goman in the pit.

"Food's ready", he said. "Say, Mr. Goman. That man Parelli. He ain't show'd up yet." Goman looked up at Skarp in puzzlement. He had completely forgotten about Parelli. "You want I should go look for him?" Goman really did not care, but then he didn't want Parelli blundering through the countryside. God only knew what kinds of stupid things the seedy lummox was capable of.

"Yes", he replied distractedly to Skarp. "It might be best if you go find the man and bring him in." Skarp mumbled something, unintelligible to the others, which was just as well, and went to put on his rain gear.

Diablo clambered out the cave entrance and climbed down the rain slick slopes to watch the camp in the canyon below. He found a sheltered spot in the eroded limestone under a quartz veined granite overhang and jammed his body into it while he stared down at the dimly visible camp in the wind whipped trees of Dancer Canyon, the junipers and cedars swaying and shaking and the big leaves of the cottonwoods and sycamores flapping and breaking loose to soar fluttering through the air. As he sat there watching and pondering what he was going to do with the girl, he saw a storm battered figure slowly trudging up the edge of the canyon between the swaying trees. Tony Parelli was headed directly towards him. The former Border Patrolman was oblivious to anything beyond his muddy labored trudge up the canyon. That would soon change.

Suddenly.

Maria Alarcon sat motionless in the smoky cave, pushing from her mind the horrors that she'd gone through, and grimly debated with herself whether she should take the chance now. Diablo left her untied when he left. But she felt in her intuitive bones that the bastard would be lurking somewhere nearby, watching, and that if she tried to escape he would catch her and would probably kill her on the spot. She would have made up his mind for him whether he should let her live or not. No. This was not the time to try to escape. Pushing the tempting thought out of her mind, Maria found a filthy rag and dabbed it a bucket of water Diablo had brought from the tiny perennial spring just outside the cave and, with waves of disgust washing over her, did her best to clean herself of the remnant traces of Diablo's rapine. Then she pulled on her rumpled dirty clothes, stoked the fire and began to rummage through the stacks of food in the cave. When Diablo returned she would have a surprise for him. She was going to scrape together whatever she could find and cook him a homemade meal. This could well be the final nudge to convince Diablo to spare her. Later, when he had grown careless, she would make her escape.

But not yet.

Skarp plodded off the opposite direction from Parelli, who had already tramped by the camp towards the waterfall at the canyon's head. Goman's hired man set out down the canyon instead of up it. And on the opposite side of the stream from Parelli. Like everyone at the dig site, Skarp was unaware that there was a passage around the water at the head of the canyon. He reckoned that Parelli was very likely standing at the edge of the water somewhere downstream, trying to find a way across. Either that, Skarp thought, or the damn fool had tried to cross the wild raging water and managed to drown himself. The thought make Skarp stop in his tracks.

"And just what the goddamn hell are we gonna do with a dead man up here?" He growled in irritation. Skarp could care less whether Parelli lived or died. But he did care about the big pain in the ass that dealing with a dead guy would mean. He was sure the others would dump the job on him. None of them had the guts for it.

While Skarp was out in the rain slogging through the muddy ground looking for Parelli, the others had all stopped their work at the dig to gather in the kitchen tent to grab a bite to eat and something to drink. Alice Wong figured this was a chance to try to learn more about the dig. In the back of her mind that lightbulb was still blinking and she was considering that somehow she might be able to wheedle some kind of extra credit in college out of her being at the dig. Everyone but Skarp was sitting around the tent, some sipping coffee, others tea, chewing on Skarp's sandwiches and the English tea biscuits that Peg Riley had brought along.

"Sir?" Alice began hesitantly, her hopeful eyes on Goman. The tall patrician looked over at her with an expression of displeasure. He had gradually become impatient with the uninvited presence of this dreary pair of post-pubescents. "Sir", she continued. "You never did say just what kind of dig this is? Hohokam? Mogollon? Andazdizi?" Goman's expression darkened. His scorn was obvious. Alice was getting on his nerves. Goman never had liked young people. The only young person he had ever liked was himself back in his youth and even then it was nowhere near whole hearted.

"That's Anazasi, young woman. An-a-za-si. Not Andazdzi." Alice was almost intimidated enough to stop her questioning. Almost. The notion of getting some extra credit out of this crazy mess overruled the intimidation and kept her mouth going.

"Then it _is_ Anazasi?" She asked. Goman glowered at the ground, growing increasingly impatient and irritated at the girl's questions.

"Not bloody likely. Those were northern people, beyond the Mogollon Rim." Goman said with finality, the tone of his voice indicating that was the end of the discussion. But then Tom Bohach joined in.

"This is Hohokam then?", he said, trying to remember what little he could from his smattering of knowledge about Southwestern prehistory. "This would have been their country, wouldn't it?" Goman was grumbling to himself and darkly thinking that a little bit of knowledge was inevitably dangerous. "I was thinking about a career in archaeology", Bohach said, thinking to butter Goman up and keep him talking. Goman shot him a look that could have withered the corn crop of an entire Kansas county.

" _Forget it!_ " He said acidly. "The field is already oversaturated with the pampered darlings of the leisure classes." Garret, who had more than a little knowledge about prehistory, and who had a great deal more knowledge and ability than Goman in tactfully dealing with people, knew it was time to break in. He put down his coffee cup and took an unthreatening step towards them.

"You young people must understand that any archaeologist is reluctant to discuss his find until after it has been published. A rival might hear of it and beat him to it." Garret smiled in a friendly way, intending to disarm them. "You weren't invited on this dig. We have been gracious enough to help you when you needed it. Now please return the favor by not asking questions that are not wanted."

The two young people swallowed hard and were still. But the guy had a point. This group of people, strange as they might seem, had saved their lives. That was absolute fact. The least they could do was respect their wishes and their privacy. There were no more questions. But the notion kept nagging at Alice Wong that there was something not quite right about the dig. The people didn't seem to fit, the techniques weren't quite what she imagined they should be. For one thing, the preparation of a roped grid was something even she knew was elementary. Yet there wasn't one here. And why all the effort to get the dig over with even in the rain? Alice kept her mouth shut after that. But her eyes were wide open and paying close attention.

The first thing Maria made was coffee. She hadn't had any since she and Troy had broken their day camp and walked through an invisible curtain of reality into the alternative universe of an insane man and smack into Diablo's lethal ambush. The smell of fresh coffee filled the cave, marginally leavening the grimness of the dank fetid hole in the mountainside that was Diablo's camp and Maria's prison, as she searched for food, cleaned a few rusty pans and began to cook a big meal. She had cooked many a meal over campfires and the lack of conveniences didn't faze her. Though the place stank from a clashing plenty of odors, of campfires, dirty clothing, rotting bits of leftover food and the sour olfactory remnants of recent sex, it had a rough sense of order and place. No one living in the wild survived without ordering their daily world and Diablo was no exception. Maria easily found everything she needed for the meal.

Diablo smelled the coffee from where he was hidden and smiled. The woman was making coffee for him! But he didn't head back to his den. Not yet. There was something he had to do first. He uncoiled his tall, lanky body from his narrow rocky shelter and began to make his way down the treacherous rocks to the canyon beneath him. Forty feet below Tony Parelli was struggling uphill a few safe feet from the raging stream in Dancer Canyon, the wind and rain beating on his face and nearly blinding him, cursing loudly when a windblown low lying juniper branch slapped him and just missed whacking his face. He could barely see anything more than an arm's length away. Diablo climbed down from the hidden blind canyon without any chance of being seen.

Skarp made his way through the mud back to the camp and grumpily announced that he couldn't find Parelli. He had a couple cups of the camp's coffee to warm his innards, ate one of the salami and cheese sandwiches he'd made himself at Goman's ranch the day before, and then plodded back out through the tent flap into the storm. He didn't really give a damn about Parelli's fate beyond the hassle of dealing with the man's body if the idiot had drowned himself. Skarp didn't mind being out in the wind and the rain. In fact he liked the raw feeling of it. Though the camp was at times interesting, he had grown away from being able to spend much time among people. The fact was he welcomed the lonely vigil in the rain waiting for Parelli. Skarp needed solitude to maintain his stolid equilibrium.

Lucius Meyer arrived at the Tucson airport to the ominous company of the first black bellied heavy clouds that were the harbingers of the coming monster storm. Zachary was waiting for him at the gate. Dressed in an expensive suit custom tailored in Hermosillo, the slender and dapper Zachary was a startlingly stark contrast to the dumpy and tastelessly dressed Meyer. So much so that several people actually momentarily stopped and stared at them. Zachary hardly noticed. Who the devil cared what the pay master looked like as long as he came up with the money? Zachary discretely took his final payment in a thick manilla envelope and slipped it into his briefcase, then handed over detailed written directions to the Mimbres dig. A quick handshake, pregnant with innuendoes of the violent consequences of deception, and they parted so quickly that it almost seemed they'd never been there.

In a half hour Meyer changed out of his intentionally outrageous L.A. leisure suit and into outdoor clothing better suited for tromping around in the back country. He'd arranged for a couple of tough streetwise Tucson based associates to meet him at the airport. They were soon headed out of the Tucson airport on South Tucson Boulevard, past the typical airport outliers of parking lots and motels, did a right onto Valencia Avenue until they hit Interstate 10 and headed east. Their ride was a brand new four wheel drive Chevy Blazer rented at an off airport Hertz site by the two men who met Meyer at the airport. Meyer had instructed the men to rent the Blazer at an off airport site because it was cheaper and Meyer was invariably penurious in his ordinary business. He saved his extravagances for his favored leisure pursuits: Women. Cars. Boats. And precious antiquities. In ascending order of importance.

He couldn't help it. His waxing exultation was just too damned juicy to try to hide. Meyer grinned often during the trip as his mind extrapolated wryly on what lay ahead, even at times lowly muttering and chuckling out loud to himself and drawing curious glances from the pair of hired toughs. He was more than middlingly amused by imagining the expression on Benning Goman's face when they drove into the arrogant bastard's supposedly secret Mimbres site. Damn! Why hadn't he thought to bring a camera to record the moment? Oh, well. No matter. Too late for that. The only thing that gnawed at his ebullient, expectant mood a little was the repeated warning coming over the Blazer's radio about the huge Pacific storm barreling down on them. The damn storm could complicate things. He was hoping they could get in and out before the storm hit with its full blown wallop. But they could always hole up over in the nearby old copper mining town of Bisbee until the storm passed. Meyer already had the numbers of a couple of high priced hookers who were in an anonymous semi-retirement in the strange little eclectic town of many human flavors. Meyer chuckled to himself again. You just never knew who your neighbors really were.

### Maria

Maria expanded the size of the fire pit by using a sturdy pointed ironwood stick Diablo left leaning against the cave wall for some arcane reason, digging out a depression at its side to serve as a makeshift food warming oven. The bits of charred bone she grubbed out of the hard packed ancient dirt were already old when Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro, who Maria's grandmother Carmen swore was their direct ancestor, landed on the coast of Mexico with the Conquistador's bloody minded triad of God, King and Gold in his hungry eyes. A process that, once begun, and among a near infinity of others, would one day give birth to the physical Spanish/Indian genetic mixture of a hard wired kinetic ball of luminous female humanity known as Maria Alarcon. And descendant or not, this woman shared at least one characteristic with Cortés.

One hell of a dogged tenacity.

As Maria finished each of the simple dishes she was enlivening with improvised seasonings after finding what she needed among the stolen canned goods stored in the cave, she moved them to the earthen side oven to keep them reasonably warm until Diablo returned. She drank a whole pot of coffee as she worked and put on a second one that would be fresh when Diablo returned. She even whistled and sang to herself a little as she worked, from both the rush of so much caffeine and the easing of her jaw-tight anxiety. The intense fear for her life was fading. She was starting to believe she'd survive the ordeal with this crazy murderous bastard. And her mind was also visiting with increasing frequency an entirely different thought. One that brought a ferocious intensity to her sparkling dark eyes. The Spanish word was la Venganza. In English?

Revenge.

The sight of the fastidious citified Heather Sosa blithely grubbing in the dirt of the Mibres site surprised everyone. None more than herself. Who would have thought it? Heather Sosa with a natural talent for archaeology? Yet there it was, blooming out of nowhere as they dug into the earthy unknowns of the Mimbres level. She seemed to have an instinct for when they were near something fragile and invariably stopped the probing shovels and trowels before they damaged anything. Goman's sharp eye soon noticed her facility. When Heather stopped Garret's shovel just before he put it into a buried undamaged plainware Mimbres pot, then dug it out carefully herself, she instantly won an unspoken promotion and became Goman's unofficial primary assistant on the dig. As the afternoon wore on only Goman, Garret and Heather worked the excavation itself.

Sheltered from the rain beating mercilessly on the improvised tarp shelter, and the howling wind constantly slapping its sides, the others took the artifacts the three careful diggers unearthed in the pit, gave them a preliminary cleaning with brushes and put them away into the heavily insulated packing containers that both Garret and Goman had brought. By mid afternoon they had uncovered huge amounts of stone tools and flakes, literally thousands of the finely worked Mimbres beads, more than three dozen necklaces and bracelets and four undamaged pots among a score of partially damaged ones. And that wasn't even counting the huge numbers of shards from the destroyed Mimbres pots that in themselves were of some commercial as well as archaeological value. And to add at least a modicum of provenance to the future possibility of selling the artifacts, Goman was graphing, annotating and photographing everything he could think of. He'd brought along twenty rolls of 35 mm film.

It looked like he would be using all of it.

### The Students

Goman had Peg Riley pack away the pieces of the decorated damaged pots he thought restorable into separate containers. There were hundreds of fragments and it kept her busy most of the day. Garret and Goman were in agreement about at least one detail of the excavation. It was best that the prying eyes of the two student hikers were kept away from the dig altogether. After the morning coffee break Garret had gently but firmly insisted they stay in the detached sleeping tent and kitchen until the ranger came for them. After that Tom Bohach began to get just as suspicious as Alice Wong already was.

"You know what I think, Tom?" Alice said quietly after she was sure they were alone in the common tent. He looked at her with a mixture of curiousity and dread, somehow looking much different now from the scant-bearded youth that he was just a day earlier before the bear attack that sent their ordered lives into chaos. A touch of maturity? A dawning recognition of his own mortality? Maybe both.

"Something real strange about this place", he said. "That what you mean?" Alice shook her head and lowered her voice.

"No, I don't think it's strange. I think I know exactly what it is. I remember seeing pictures of what happened in a lot of the archaeological sites in New Mexico." Tom had never paid much attention to archaeology, and though he had seen the same pictures, the memory of them was gone--if it had ever been there at all. He looked at her blankly.

"Pothunters", she said softly, "That's what these people are. This is an illegal dig and they're after pots." Tom's eyes blinked in surprise. Of course!

"Yeah! That would explain it. They snuck onto a national forest to dig pots and all this rain just helps them. They'll have it done and be out of here before anyone knows what they're doing." Alice put a hand on Tom's arm. Her voice was nervous.

"Tom. That ranger that was out here. He must know about this. He has to be part of it." Tom's face dropped and his gaze unconsciously darted around the room, as though omeone might overhear what they were saying.

"Oh, crap! Then we might just be in _big_ trouble. How far do you think they would go to keep us quiet?" Alice's young face was as solemn as Tom's already was. Everything, the bear attack, the hypothermia, the stumbling nighttime flight in the rain and mud, the strange ominous people at the dig, all combined to make them look much older than they were. And they felt older, too. Older and maybe a little bit wiser. But mostly they were just plain scared.

"I don't think we want to find that out. Maybe we should just slip out of here while they're all out in the dig working. It'd probably be hours before they noticed we were gone. By then we could be hidden somewhere and they'd never find us even if they tried."

"I wish the hell you'd never taken archaeology", Tom said sourly. "Or else slept through it like I did. Then we could have blundered in here and never known the difference."

"But we _do_ know the difference", Alice said determinedly. "And it'll only be a matter of time before they realize that we know what they're doing." Tom threw up his arms in exasperation and stomped his feet on the ground in helpless frustration.

"All right. All right. Then let's pack up and get the hell out of here." He stood up, looking surly and querulous. "But I'm getting awful goddamn sick of all this plowing around in the mud and rain." Alice looked at him and realized that although he looked haggard and older, Tom was still just a kid even if he did have a man's body and an overactive libido. A kid who'd blundered into one hell of a mess. And not just him. Her, too. _Two_ kids who'd blundered into one hell of a mess. The two of them started to quietly pack up their gear, keeping an eye out for the pothunters at the dig while they got ready to sneak away into the rain. And mud. And fate.

Skarp lumbered along the cliff face until he found a overhang where he could shelter against the storm and jammed his thick fireplug of a body into it. He'd had enough of plowing through the muck. He could see some distance up and down the wildly plunging stream, when the rain let up enough for him to see anything, and he crouched in his rocky hide hole watching for a sign of Parelli. He still thought the jerk was somewhere on the far bank looking for a way across. But now the thought that perhaps Parelli had tried to cross and not made it was lingering in his mind. It was beginning to look, he thought, as though Parelli really might have drowned his dumb ass. Skarp began to wonder what it must be like to drown. Was it true your whole life would go rushing by in your mind while you dying? Skarp didn't know. But he did know he wasn't ready to find out. Not yet. Not for a long time. There was too much tequila, too much dope, too many randy whores still left for him to sample and savor over the border in good ol' anything-goes Old Mexico. The tawdry cat houses of the coloreds and the white trash back in his Arkansas boyhood couldn't even begin to compare. Those Mexican girls sure knew how to do a man right.

### Colonel Redding

Many of the foothill canyon dwellers in the Huachucas made their homes there because of the superb vistas. Others were there because they didn't like the summer heat of the open grasslands of the valley and preferred to live under the dappled cool shade of the oaks and junipers. Other canyon dwellers lived in the foothills because of the abundance of wildlife. And more than a few of the canyon people lived there for the hiking. There were marked Forest Service trails all over the Huachucas. One of them began just two hundred yards down the road from Colonel Redding's canyon home, but he avoided it for another path that was little more than a game trail. It was more circuitous and often steeper, and most of the ascent on the narrow path was strewn with pebbles and loose bits of forest detritus from the oaks and pinyons and cedars. Difficult walking in dry weather, but far more sure footed in a heavy rain--unlike the Forest Service trail that turned to mud soup in a heavy rain and was next to impossible to climb in a storm.

When he reached the main Forest Service hikers' trail running north-south amidst the towering ponderosa and Apache pines of the ridge crests he began to work his way south. Often there was water sluicing the path, but not so much that he couldn't get through it. And there was little of the slick earth that certainly would have slowed him down and might even have stopped him had there been much of it on the trail. Redding had camped out in environments ranging from the artic to the tropical and was prepared to take on Mother Nature on her home turf on something close to equal terms. His Viet Nam days and a tour in Alaska had honed his all weather outdoor skills. His gear was weather protected, he remained dry beneath his rain wear, and the only real difficulty he had was seeing for any distance in the stinging wind blown rain. Redding continued to move south along the mountain trail, pausing to look and to open his senses to the strange feelings that had plagued him for the last two days. As he went farther south he grew certain that something strange was in the mountains. The feelings grew ever stronger. And something else. Something that seemed even stranger to him. As he moved deeper in the mountains he began to feel more and more like the Native American that dwelled in his soul as well as his genes.

### Reiser

Bantner won a single grudging concession from Superintendent Murillo when he went to privately excoriate the detested Max Reiser. Murillo agreed to confine Reiser to working the southern Huachucas alone and assigned Bantner to take the northern end. That way, at least, Murillo reasoned, the friction would be lessened. Reiser would have seethed with anger if he had known about the reason for Murillo's separation of him from Bantner. But he didn't know, and it turned out to be a serendipitous stroke of good luck. The arrogant asshole Bantner wasn't around to screw things up with his abrasive nosiness. With Bantner now safely stuck miles away at the north substation, Reiser sat alone in his Forest Service substation that morning, waiting for Superintendent Murillo's regular morning phone call with instructions for the day,

As he waited, Reiser's thoughts worked over how he would get the two kids out of the Mimbres camp. How in the hell could he keep them from telling anyone of the dig? So far as he knew they didn't know it was an illegal dig, but they still might mention it to someone and start a chain of events that would mean big trouble for little Max Reiser. He had to reluctantly accept that his earlier idea about driving them to Tucson was his only real option. Did he have a choice? No. He had to drive them back to Tucson himself. That way they wouldn't get a chance to talk to any of the locals who would immediately run up the red flag of suspicion if a dig in the Huachucas were mentioned. It probably was feasible enough. Probably. Things were starting to get too dicey for Max' taste. His mind climbed back up onto the edge of regret. _You damn fool, Max. Why did you get your dumb ass into this mess in the first place?_

The phone rang while Reiser was lost in an acerbic recrimination.

"Max?" Superintendent Murillo's voice said, his voice still shaky from his recent way too close encounter with a hurtling limb off his neighbor's sugar maple. He said nothing to Max about it. Nor would he ever say anything to anyone about it. How could he? Murillo was both humiliated and disgusted with himself for being so damn scared he lost control of his bladder. He spoke again. "Max? You there?"

"Yeah", Max replied tersely. Reiser hadn't forgotten the overheard conversation at the ranger station a few days earlier.

"Listen, Max", Murillo said. "I want you to close off the roads. Anybody still in there?"

"Nobody I know of", Reiser lied without a bit of guilt. Murillo deserved it.

"Good. There's one hell of a monster weather system that is going to pound us but good for the next few days. We think it's best if people are kept out of the mountains. I'd hate to think of having to mount a rescue operation in this weather."

"So would I", Reiser said. But he was thinking that was exactly what he was going to have to do. He still had to get those damn kids out of the Mimbres camp before they found out what was really going on. The longer they were there the more the chance was that they would find out something that would burn Reiser's hairy ranger ass but good.

Murillo told him to close off the mountains, then stick around to make sure that nobody was in the interior. He could forget his regular duties for the next few days. About all any of them would be doing was waiting out the storm and be ready in case an emergency rescue became necessary. Murillo even told him that he could stay at his home in the valley if he wanted, as long as he was available by telephone within a reasonable period of time. Reiser realized with no little relief that Murillo had unwittingly given him just what he needed. The time and the freedom to get done what he damn well knew had to be done--and done quick.

Reiser disconnected from Murillo, cynically thinking that the disconnect with his boss had levels of meaning a lot deeper than the simple end of a phone call, and hurried back to the storage rooms at the rear of the station and rummaged around until he found was he was looking for. He knew the storage rooms as well as those in his own home, having organized and put away all the equipment himself. It took him only a handful of minutes to gather up the gear and tools he'd need to rig up a line over the flooded wash in Dancer Canyon. Then he started to head back to the dig. If nothing else, he'd get the kids out with a heavy line, a come along winch and a bosun's chair and then drive them back to Tucson. Then he would have at least one loose end out of his hair. _Christ!,_ he thought to himself, this is getting way too damned complicated.

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

### Chato

Chato was the blood nephew of the great Mangas Coloradas. His personal life was shattered into unrestorable fragments when a band of Tarahumara Indians from Chihuahua raided his camp, killed a score of his people and took many more prisoner to be sold into a dismal existence as slaves in the interior of Mexico. Among the prisoners were his wife and children. He would never see them again. Enraged and embittered, Chato led a raid into southern New Mexico in 1883 that had the local population cringing in terror. Though Tarahumaras had taken his family, the Americans and the Mexicans were surrogate enough for Chato. In a week long lightning raid Chato's band of two dozen killed a score or more of Americans and Mexicans and stole whole herds of horses, which were both transportation and food to the Nde. It was a well executed raid bordering on the brilliant, but he would be most remembered for one of the white Americans he killed. A man by the name H.C. McCormas.

McCormas was a United States federal judge.

Chato was another of Diablo's most revered Nde heroes. Diablo had a visceral hatred of judges ever since that bastard dago judge Antonini in Chicago ordered him sent to the Cook County Mental Health Center for psychological evaluation. Diablo would like nothing better than to get his hands on a judge. Any judge. Even someone who looked and acted like a judge. Like that man he had seen at the old ruin where the pothunters were digging and defiling the Native American past. Yes. The tall, thin man who strutted self importantly and barked orders to the others. He would do. Diablo never would know the man's name. Names were of no interest to him. Unlike the man he had singled out. A man who attached a great deal of self importance to his name.

Benning Goman.

### Parelli

Maybe that jerk ranger thought the waterfall was easy to pass under. Not Tony Parelli. The deluge of water shooting out from the rocks twenty five or thirty feet above didn't look that goddamn safe to cross under to Tony. He didn't like it. Not one freaking bit. But there was no other way. Finally, Parelli built up nerve enough to cross the wet rocks under the waterfall. He went on his hands and knees, clutching at the rocks at the side of the canyon as he inched his way across. Halfway through he slipped, but Tony Parelli had powerful hands and a firm hold on the rocks and nothing more happened than to put a big dent in his composure and make him move even slower and more cautiously.

It seemed to take forever. But he made it. Relief washed over his face when he reached the far side and stood up at the edge of the rocks. At first he cried out in surprise when the figure appeared out of nowhere in the driving rain hardly six feet from him. He started to backpedal away from the shadowy figure. But then he caught himself, realizing that it must be someone from the camp who'd come to look for him.

"Hey, man! Thanks for coming", he said. "For a while there I thought I might not make it." He held out his hand and peered at the face hidden within the folds of a rain splattered poncho. The figure moved closer and when he was only three feet away Parelli caught a glimpse of a face he did not recognize. That in itself would not have scared him. But he also saw the man's wild eyes. Parelli started to involuntarily jump back, but the man's extended hand grabbed his arm. At the same moment a knife in his other hand flashed up from inside the folds of Diablo's poncho. It drove into Tony Parelli's stomach and as Parelli gasped and cried out, Diablo pushed hard with his free arm. Parelli fell over backwards and tumbled into the raging waters of the creek. His screams went unheard in the noisy tumult of the waterfall as the storm water violently carried him downstream, dashing his body against the jagged rocks of the wash as it hurtled him to his doom. Diablo watched Parelli disappear down the raging stream, then turned to begin his climb back up into the blind canyon. He was looking forward to returning to his cave. He even smiled. A spooky humorless parody of a smile to anyone else. But, for him at least, it passed for a genuine smile. Maria would be there waiting for him. He could use a cup of hot coffee and some food. And then maybe another roll with Maria for dessert. It had been a good day so far. And it wasn't over yet. Oh, no.

Not anywhere near over.

In Los Angeles a little known hot new rock band destined to soon blast off to national fame and fortune, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, had to back off a performance because of the wild Pacific storm battering the hell out of California. The breathtakingly scenic coast highway California Route 1 was buried in a half dozen places by mud and rocks sliding down the slopes above the cliff hugging highway. Sheets of runoff water cascading down the mountain slopes of Interstate 80 between Sacramento and Reno made the interstate treacherously dangerous to drive. It was much the same throughout California. Storm driven havoc blanketed much of the state. And that was just in California. Arizona was worse.

Much worse.

Her tawny fur soaked, and rain dripping from her nose, the sleek young puma took cover from the rain and the wind in a shallow cave that was almost impossible for a human eye in the valley below to pick out on the boulder strewn steep mountainside. As she slipped into it she smelled the odor of human blood, now faint after the rain had washed most of it away. Inside the shelter the human smells were still strong. People had been there, and they had cooked and eaten. That was not so unusual in mountains that hikers often traveled through. But then the puma picked up the dead man smell again. She padded outside the rock shelter into the rain and followed the faint odor to another crevasse where rocks had been piled over the dead human below. There was also a plant smell and a strong vinegary odor she did not recognize. Troy Andrews, and his pack of heroin, lay under four feet of piled rocks. The puma tried to dig down to him, but finally gave up. Too many rocks. Too much rain. She backed off, sniffing and snarling, surprised at finding dead humans in her territory. She was puzzled. There was something alien and deadly lurking in her mountains. She did not howl in outrage. Not at this. This was something beyond her feline experience and instinct.

The puma, so often bold and fearless, was frightened.

### Skarp

Skarp crammed his thick body into the scant shelter of the rock overhang, head tucked into his hooded rain gear to keep out most of the wind and rain, and was watching the tumultuous waters of the wash. He almost missed it, his attention distracted by a sudden gust of wind that blew rain and a tiny fragment of an ash leaf into his eye. But he did catch the movement out of the corner of the same eye. What? What was it? Something large and dark brown rushed past in the current and he squinted to see what if could make out what it was. A branch off one of the huge trees that lined the creek bed? Then the brown mass caught on a big sycamore root jutting out into the creek bed. The brown mass rolled over in the rushing current and Skarp caught a glimpse of a pallid lifeless face. _Parelli!_ Skarp leaped to his feet, hollering.

"Motherfucker!" Skarp yelled out. He scrambled out of his shelter and ran to the creek just as the body broke loose from the sycamore's roots and was instantly grabbed by the plunging current and swept away. He watched in angry frustration as Parelli's corpse tumbled out of view down the debris strewn raging stream. "Son of a bitch!" Skarp spit out in utter disgust. "The stupid bastard really did drown hisself." Then he grudgingly set off downstream. He knew he'd have to go after the damn fool's body, rainstorm or no.

"Good God Almighty!" Goman yelled, his sudden excitement catching everyone by surprise. "I'll be damned!" Heads swiveled to stare quizzically at him. "Here! Come look at this!" Garret and Heather Sosa edged next to where he stood in the excavation, and Nub and Peg Riley leaned over from above to peer down at them. Goman was animatedly pointing at what he'd just found. When Garret saw what it was he leaped straight up in the excavation pit and thrust his clenched fists into the air in a fervid triumph that would have passed muster in a Roman gladiatorial arena. Below him was an entire cache of Mimbres pots. The telluric equivalent of finding a long sunken Spanish treasure galleon or a buried hoard of Saxon gold long hidden under a ancient flooded seashore. There was yelling, laughing, high fiving, then high fiving a second and even a third time. Excitement crackled through the small knot of pothunters while they tried to wrap their minds around the personal and financial permutations of an entire cache of the hugely valuable Mimbres pots. It was like winning the Arizona lottery's fattest jackpot.

At the same time that the storm was growing in intensity outside the tent, the adrenalin rush began to subside among the people inside. Calm gradually returned. Celebration would come later. Now it was time to set to very carefully digging the pots out of the tomb of hard compacted heavy clayey earth. Like some of the earlier pots, there were a few rotted remnant fibers of some kind of packing material the Mimbres had wrapped the pots in. "Now I'm sure of it", Goman said as the sixth complete pot was pulled from the earth. "This is an organized cache of pots. The place must have been some kind of trading center. The Mimbres had to abandon it for some reason and the pottery has been here, undisturbed, all these years."

"Apaches?" Garret asked, wondering why the Mimbres would have abandoned so many valuable pots never to return. Goman shrugged, stopping for a moment as the wind whistled under the fringes of the dig's tarp and blew bits of dead grass and cottonwood leaves into the air above the human dug hole in the ground. They seemed to hang in the air, motionless, as though frozen in time as well as space. Goman reached out and grabbed a bit of floating cottonwood leaf and crumbled it in his hand before answering.

"An outside possibility, maybe. But not likely. This was almost certainly before Apaches came into this country. But I'll wager that it was some kind of external danger, probably outsiders coming in with less than friendly intentions."

"Imagine that", Peg Riley whispered to her husband. "In this very place, hundreds of years ago, the fear that they must have felt." Her husband nodded.

"Its hard to imagine, Peg. Nowadays we live pretty safe and secure lives."

At that exact moment only a few hundred yards away Diablo was climbing the rocks at the head of Dancer Canyon on his way back to his cave after murdering Tony Parelli.

Alice Wong and Tom Bohach hastily packed up what was left of their gear and stuffed some of the camp's provisions--packages of crackers and cheese and a handful of Hershey candy bars--into their pockets. They knew Skarp was somewhere downstream in the narrow canyon, so they slipped stealthily out of the camp and headed in the opposite direction. The thick mist rising off the ground in the pounding rain enveloped them and in just a few steps they were invisible from eyes in the pothunters' camp. Faces peppered by driven drops of rain that stung like grains of wind blown sand, they labored determinedly upstream, eyes anxiously straining in the gloom for a passage in the rocks that would lead them out of the canyon and to safety. They could have no idea of the menace that lay ahead in the little blind canyon thirty feet above them.

Diablo's lair.

The bed of the green painted Forest Service pickup truck loaded with the equipment he figured he'd need, Max Reiser climbed into the pickup and drove out of the substation parking lot onto the paved road that led to the turnoff into Dancer Canyon. Water was spilling over onto the slick pavement everywhere. Whatever the specious details were of how the builders got the contract to build the road, or whether maybe it was just another example of low bidders cutting too many corners, the road ended up being a long way from an expertly engineered one. There were too many places where the highway builders had miscalculated the roadway crown and the road pooled water rather than shed it. Twice on uphill grades the pickup started to hydroplane on sheets of water, but Reiser kept his head and managed to keep the truck on the road. When he got to the turnoff and pulled into it, he went slowly and cautiously down the muddy track, knowing that flash flooding storm water was as unpredictable as it was dangerous and that the crossings ahead could be under water again. They weren't. He was right about the raging runoff breaking out into a new channel. He drove easily over the muddy old stream crossings. There was water in them. But not much.

So far, at least, he was in luck.

Interstate 10 and Highway 90, the main highways that Lucius Meyer and his pair of hulking thugs took east and south of Tucson, remained open. Unlike the back roads in rural Arizona and many of the urban streets in Tucson and Phoenix, the main highways had bridges spanning the major washes. Even so, at a dozen different places there was water on the highway, at one low lying dip on Interstate 10 at Davidson Canyon, nearly a half foot of it. Not enough to deter Meyer and his hired muscle. "No fucking storm is gonna stop Julius Meyer", he snapped as they plowed through the half foot of water. In a few more miles they pulled onto Highway 92 and into a long downgrade towards the dig site in the round topped foothills at the south end of the Huachuca Mountains. Old Mexico was so close a veteran NFL quarterback could toss a bullet from the southern hump of the Huachucas in Arizona and hit a receiver inside Sonora. But most of the bullets flying around in the border country around the Huachucas were made of shiny metal and not pigskin.

And nobody was trying to catch them.

In ominous stentorian tones--and, on TV, punctuated with studied dramatic flourish--the media weather wizards declared that heavy rain would continue to pummel central and eastern Arizona for the next 48 to 72 hours. The number of roads still open to passage tumbled steeply. One after another all of the back country roads were cut off by flooding washes. By the end of the day, reports, some of them panicky and frantic, were coming in from all over the state that even some of the major highways were blocked by high water and mudslides. Lucius Meyer and his associates were only fractionally aware of it. Whether from freak climactic conditions or some piddling electrical gremlin in the receiver itself, the radio in the rented Blazer began to sputter with static. They heard only bits and pieces of what was broadcast.

As they drove south past the upthrust bluffs of the Whetstone Mountains towards the border country and the illegal dig site, the weather gods were winding up to deliver one hell of a Biblical scale meteorological punch. The churning thunderous tumult of the leading edge of the immensely powerful center of the storm was relentlessly approaching and about to pile up and stall almost directly overhead. By the time the next morning dawned to a gloomy gun metal gray torrential rain, every road in southeastern Arizona and northern Sonora would be closed. Lucius Meyer's chances of escaping the storm in a Bisbee motel with a compliant brace of high priced veteran hookers began to grow as dim as the cloud hidden mountain peaks that were filling up the horizon before their eyes. Meyer and his two rent-a-thugs slowed down as they went through the rambling strip city of Sierra Vista in a steady downpour that slicked the blacktop roads, then on past the soaring foothill flanks of the Huachuca Mountains through a rambling handful of time battered buildings called Nicksville. From there they headed off through gusts of slashing rain on the last leg of the journey to the Mimbres site. Meyer was starting to chuckle again at the thought of walking in on Goman in the middle of the dig. The arrogant bastard would crap in his shorts.

Behind them the waters of a wash raging out of the mountains rose and cut off the road.

Diablo smelled the coffee before he reached the cave and then caught the aroma of the food. Surprised and pleased, so far as it was possible for anything to please him, he stooped to enter the narrow opening, the water dripping off his poncho immediately sucked up and gone into the bone dry ground of the cave. He slipped inside with an unconscious parody of a smile on his permanently funereal face. Maria looked up as he came in.

"I've been waiting for you", she said in a voice she was doing her damnedest to make sound sweet.

Skarp ran after the body. Too fast. He slipped on a fat clump of rotting cottonwood leaves in the mud and almost tumbled into the stream himself. After that he slowed down and went much more carefully, searching the sides of the boiling wash for Parelli. The damn fool, Skarp thought to himself, really did go and drown himself.

"You dumb ass", Skarp kept muttering as he searched the wash. "You goddamn frickin' stupid dumb ass."

The crossings were easy. Too easy. Max Reiser drove through the muddy stream crossings until he reached the main stream channel near the mouth of the canyon. Here was the chaotic answer to the puzzle of all the missing water from the other crossings. A raging flood ran bank to bank boiling through a single channel with the implacable momentum of a runaway train on a plunging downgrade. The runoff was roaring down from the mountains full of flood detritus, chunks of wood and tree branches and even small willows and young sycamores ripped from the banks upstream. It was a treacherous roiling mass of turbulence that would put a fright to the stoutest heart.

"Holy Fucking Christ!", Reiser burted out at the sight of the boiling stream. It was enough to scare the hell out of anybody. Despite his ranger's experience with flash flooding, or maybe because of it, Reiser was no exception. He recoiled from the sight of the hurtling stream as he sat behind the wheel of his Forest Service pickup. He jammed the pickup into reverse gear and stomped on the acccelerator. The truck lurched back several more cautionary feet before he hit the brakes, then shut off the engine. Muttering to himself over the mess he'd gotten himself into, he jerked open the door, climbed out onto the waterlogged ground and began to unpack the equipment he'd loaded into the truck bed. Helping people across turgid rain swollen mountain streams was hardly an unusual occurrence for the US Forest Service and the substation had been well equipped. And if the lines and bosun's chair turned out not to work, Max could always get the hikers out going around under the waterfall. That would take much longer and he wanted to get this over as quickly as he could. Still grumbling to himself, the ranger gathered up the equipment he thought he'd need and began to trudge along the roaring debris clogged stream up the south edge of the canyon towards the illegal dig site. The sound of his muddy passage was completely drowned out by the roaring stream.

Diablo belched loudly when he finished eating. He looked over at Maria and nodded satisfaction. "Good", he said. _"Good!"_

"A man needs a woman", Maria replied with a wicked glint in her eye that Diablo didn't catch. Nor, if he did catch it, would he have understood what it meant. Maria knew what it meant well enough. The shoe was about to go on the other foot.

And that other foot was going to kick this rotten bastard's ass all the way to Hell.

Skarp made his soggy way to the narrow mouth of the canyon where the flooding water had burst its banks and was beating furiously against the north wall of the canyon. It was so wildly violent that it even scared Skarp. And, after surviving more hair raising bar and prison fights than he could remember, Skarp was not a man to scare easily. _Shit_. That's it. Dead end. The water had his path blocked. Impassable. He turned to head back up the canyon, still grumbling to himself over the stupidity of Parelli's getting himself drowned.

" _Stupid bastard!",_ he muttered. "What in the goddamn hell am I going to do now?

"Hey!" voice yelled from across the water below the mouth of the canyon. Skarp was startled. He jerked around to peer downstream. Parelli was alive? Could it be possible? A figure appeared in the gloom, heavily laden with some kind of gear. Skarp watched with a mixture of uncertainty and suspicion until Reiser came near and he recognized him. "I brought a line and bosun's chair to get those damn kids out", Reiser yelled across the roar of the water. "Help me set it up between a couple of trees."

"Did you see the body?" Skarp yelled back. Skarp couldn't see Reiser's reaction, but their was no mistaking it in the ranger's voice. Reiser was completely unnerved.

" _Body?_ What....what body?"

"That guy Parelli. He went and got hisself drowned in the damn crick. I just seen his body go by a few minutes ago." Reiser's small form slumped disconsolately. He felt like one of the piñatas at his beloved first wife's family birthday parties. Battered by one blow after another until finally burst asunder. How much longer could he hold together before he fell to pieces, too? Things were going from bad to worse. First the wandering college kids, now this. What in the hell was he going to do with a dead body? Oh, God! Why, oh why, had he let himself get involved in this mess in the first place?

"I'll go look", he yelled in a flat emotionless voice through the noise of the rushing water. Reiser disconsolately put down the equipment and started downstream, his face ashen and glum, his mind flooding with dark thoughts of a very personal Armageddon. An image flashed through his mind of himself soaring exultantly through the air, then abruptly crashing to the ground into oblivion. Maybe life in the Forest Service hadn't been so bad after all, despite his unpopularity. He was pretty sure that it was all over now. About the most he could hope for was to stay out of prison.

Tom Bohach and Alice Wong twice tried to scrabble their frantic way up the rocks and out of the canyon. They couldn't. The ascent was steep, but they still might have made it were the rocks not so slippery with mud and leaves washing down from the bluff above. On the second try Tom slipped, lost his footing and tumbled ten feet onto a good sized angular granite boulder bordering the cliff's bottom, getting a nasty bruise on his leg. After that the scared pair of kids gave up on climbing the rocks and started a desperate search for an easier escape route. Though they hadn't yet found a way out of the canyon, at least there were no signs of anyone searching for them.

Not yet, anyhow.

One sunny March Los Angeles morning three years earlier Julius Meyer was in a fatal car crash. A drunk driver, a 19 year old Guatemalan illegal with a felony warrant out for his arrest, was blitzed from a day long binge on meth and tequila. He stole a Chevy pickup and was running from a trio of pursuing LAPD squads. The kid ran a red light and T-boned Meyer's year old Lincoln Town Car. The tweaker kid from Guatemala died instantly in an explosion of hurtling metal and glass and plastic. Meyer would have died too, if the other car hadn't plowed into his Lincoln's passenger side and stopped less than half a foot from him. Meyer faintly remembered the Jaws of Life chewing up his Lincoln's door before he passed out to wake up in traction in an L.A. hospital. He was a month there and another six months in physical therapy. After that, Meyer might have looked like he was back to normal, walking without a limp and with no visible scars. But his spine never got back to normal after being pretzled in the car wreck and tormented him from then on. Meyer's pill bottles were always empty when the time came to renew his prescriptions for the powerful pain killers that kept the pain monster at bay. But now the monster had raised its ugly head again, roused by the long, bumpy drive in the not-so-smooth riding Blazer.

Meyer carefully slid off the Blazer's seat onto the drenched, slippery earth, trying to cushion the shock on his whacked out spine when his feet hit the ground and not wanting his hired thugs to see him grimace in pain. His protesting spine telegraphed a few sharp needles of pain and he gave himself a mental slap on the head for not taking a pain pill earlier. First chance he got he'd pop a couple of them. The pain in his spine easing off, Meyer tried a tentative step. Not much pain. So he set off, walking slowly, to look at the streambed where the dirt track made its first crossing just off the paved road.

"You think we oughta try this?" He asked of the driver. The thick-bodied younger man called Silenski grunted noncommittally.

"I dunno, Mr. Meyer. It looks kinda dangerous." The second man, a tall, muscular black in his early thirties, nicknamed Sierra after his hulking size, shot an irritated look at Silenski and interrupted.

"It's only mud, Mr. Meyer. Ain't hardly no water", he said. "I done some four wheeling before. Been through lots worse stuff than this." Meyer threw a gauging look at Sierra.

"You gonna drive, then?" Sierra thought for a moment, then returned Meyer's look. He ignored the dour expression on Silenski's face.

"Yeah. I'll do it", Sierra said. The three men climbed back into the Blazer with Sierra at the wheel. Meyer grabbed a bottle of water and swallowed a pair of pain pills as the big man hunched over the wheel, gunned the engine and blasted through the crossing. The engine didn't miss a stroke and was humming strong and powerful when Sierra went through the second crossing with the Blazer's spinning wheels flinging creek bottom mud in a fantailed spray behind them as they plowed along the muddy track towards the camp. Meyer was nodding approvingly, both at Sierra's driving and also at the warm glow that was already massaging his complaining back. Silenski still had his dour expression. He was a vindictive man who took a very dim view of anyone who made him look bad.

"I got a feeling that this ain't right", Meyer said after the second crossing. "Shouldn't there be water in the stream bed with all this rain?" Sierra glanced at him for a moment. He looked puzzled. Not apprehensive. Not yet. But he was concerned. He frowned.

"Yeah", he said. "That might mean there is something nasty ahead. All this water? It's got to go someplace." He was right. It did. And the someplace it went to was just around the next bend in the slippery old ranch road. A road that was an Indian track before it was a ranch road. An Indian track that a century earlier Geronimo himself had ridden on during more than one of his many bloody raids. Just a few feet off the road where the Blazer crossed the streambed was a copse of velvet mesquites where in the spring of 1881 Geronimo's men caught and killed a ranch cowboy out hunting mule deer.

His grave was still there. Unmarked. Unknown. His was not the first lonely lost grave in the canyon.

Nor the last.

"Where did you come from, Diablo?" Maria asked, struggling mightily with herself to hide her venomous anger after he had taken his rough pleasure with her again. He was back squatting by the fire, sipping at a cup of coffee. Diablo glanced up from his fireside vigil.

"I came from the reservation", he said. Reservation? Maria was puzzled. She thought better of asking him what he meant by that and instead asked another question.

"And this is a raid? Just like in the old days?" Diablo grunted, smiling thinly to himself.

"Just like in the old days", he said, turning to cast a penetrating stare at her. "This is Diablo's Raid."

"Where do you go after the raid?" She persisted, adding "Where do _we_ go after the raid?" Diablo turned to look at her again, this time keeping his eyes locked with hers. Again a misfired attempt at a smile momentarily flickered across his face.

"There are many mountains in this country. Diablo knows them all."

"But never back to the reservation?" She asked slyly. A hard look and then his face was suddenly afire with passion.

"Never! Diablo dies as he lives." He again locked her eyes with his. "Free!" The cold look in his eyes was so unearthly that Maria's soul cringed in fear.

In the mountains above the puma snarled and snapped over the limp body of a yearling fawn it had killed with a single lethal bite to the poor creature's neck.

Colonel Redding moved along the rocky tree studded spine of the mountain range far south of the leafy canyon where he made his home. He paused often, not so much to recoup his strength as to let his senses soak in the feelings that were bombarding him with increasing strength and frequency. Each time they came from the south. As he made his probing way that direction, alive to every sight and sound, without his being consciously aware of it his thoughts slid gradually from English into Cherokee.

A hundred yards out from the mouth of the canyon Reiser found the torn and bruised body of what less than hour ago had been the irascible and vainglorious Tony Parelli. Parelli's corpse was snagged on the sharp rocks where the stream made an abrupt bend. Reiser reached down and tried to pull Parelli's heavy body out of the water. The dead weight of the corpse, and the awkward angle of pulling from above, caused the ranger to shuffle his tenuous footing on the stream bank for better leverage. In a lightning moment of sheer horror he tripped on a loose chunk of ancient limestone, slipped on the muddy bank and slid down over a jagged rock that tore his jacket and gashed his forearm and slipped into the stream next to Parelli's body. The rushing water grabbed him in its frigid lethal embrace and pinned him against the wall of rocks where the stream made a dramatically tumultous foamy sharp turn to the north.

The bend in the stream bed saved Max Reiser from a certain watery doom. Had it not been for that sharp bend, and the outcrop of underlying hard granite that refused the driving power of the water and deflected it obliquely north, he would have been swept screaming downstream, flung against the rocks and debris and either battered to death or drowned. For what was in real time a mere ten minutes but seemed to Max Reiser an agonized eternity, he struggled with failing strength but stubborn grit trying to pull himself out of the grip of the plunging water onto the slippery rocks peppering the side of the steambed. He was only able to finally extricate himself by using Parelli's pallid corpse as a finger and foothold. He grabbed at Parelli, at his clothes, his limbs, even the dead man's head, as he fought his way free of the implacable force of the thundering water and scrambled over the corpse to safety. Parelli's body was so entangled among the rocks and dangling tree roots that it hardly moved even in the hurtling current. Except for one arm flung limply over his head with a hand that flopped obscenely in the wind and the rushing water. It almost looked as though Tony Parelli was making one last bitter statement about life by giving it the final middle finger salute.

And maybe he was.

Cold and miserable and more scared than he had ever been in his whole life, Max was able to drag himself over the edge of the slippery stream bank away from the water. Reiser stayed on his knees, offering up a fervent mumbled prayer of gratitude to a God he rarely visited. Then he began to stumble back upstream to where Skarp was waiting. Skarp was in the same muddy spot, sheltered under a huge sycamore, rain water dripping off the tree onto his poncho and then onto the ground, nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He was worried. Not a common Skarp emotion.

"Where the hell you been, man?" Skarp yelled at him. "I thought you'd gone and drowned yerself, too."

"Damn near did, buddy", Reiser yelled back. "It was close." He couldn't make out the shocked surprise on Skarp's face in the rain. v"Too close." Then Reiser pointed at the rescue gear he'd left by the side of the stream. "Let's get started", he yelled across the roar of the water. Max tossed the lines over the surging froth of the unfordable stream to Skarp and both men fastened the lines and pulleys to thick trunked sycamores on their respective sides of the stream. Then Reiser, working swiftly and expertly with his long years of outdoors experience, rigged up the bosun's chair on the lines strung over the water between the two huge trees.

Skarp didn't like the thought of going over the water in the bosun's chair. He looked up. Fifteen feet over the water the slender upper branches of the trees embraced each other. Another way to cross? No. The branches of the huge trees were too fragile, too thin, in their aerial arboreal meeting to allow any chance of human passage that way. Squirrels? Yeah. People? Not a chance. Unhappily, though the lines were taut and secure, Skarp came across, reluctantly, cautiously, to help the ranger get Parelli's body out of the stream. vNeither man said anything as they labored to pull the battered, bloody corpse from the flooding wash. What was there to say? The man was dead. The dig was going to hell. It seemed there was nowhere to go but down. And it was a rotten, miserable rainswept mud besieged day. The only communications they exchanged were mutual glowers at the mess they were in. vEven the stoic and stolid Skarp was sunk in a deep gloom.

"We're screwed", he grumbled as they labored along with Parelli's body. "But good."

Alice Wong and Tom Bohach lost their caution as they hastily made their way over the soaked ground, even at times jogging, fearful of pursuit, to the head of the canyon. vAnd stopped dead in their tracks. They were blocked by a vertical rock wall twenty-five, maybe thirty or more feet high, with a plume of water jetting out a good yard from the ledge above before noisily plunging down into a misty foam flecked fog of water among the jagged rocks of the turbulent streambed. Tom swallowed hard and stepped back, thinking that he sure as hell wouldn't want to fall into that confused welter of wild water, when he spotted the ledge under the waterfall and pointed at it. Alice's sharp eye followed his gaze to the ledge. They edged closer and saw that the ledge was wide enough to walk on. Their young voices were mute. Their predicament spoke for itself. There was no need for words. They _had_ to cross. And soon. They hesitated. Briefly. Hardly more than a minute. Indecision. They were terrified. And petrified, their feet mentally cemented to the muddy earth. They were also frantic. There was the very real likelihood of somebody chasing after them. The two were desperate enough to take risks they would have unceremoniously booted out of their minds in their comfortable and orderly Tucson students' world. But they were no longer in that world. It was hard to even remember that it ever existed.

With hands clutching at the face of the rock wall, hearts beating so wildly Alice actually thought she could hear hers, and adrenalin pounding the walls of their stress dilated arteries, they inched across the ledge. Thank God! It was surprisingly easily. Relief filled their panicky young hearts. Though they still were deep in the canyon, at least they were on the far side of the water from the others. The wild rushing stream was impassable. There was no way anyone could cross it to get at them. The two young hikers began to work their way downstream, searching for some way out of the canyon. They didn't want to pass the camp and the man Skarp, even though the raging water would be between them. But as they moved down the canyon and the south walls proved to be even more steep and forbidding than the north side, they realized that the only way out was past the pothunter's camp. Tom Bohach wondered if they had any guns in the camp.

And if they were willing to use them.

Since the smug, annoying blueblood Goman and his bulldozer built menacing hired hand Skarp exploded out of nowhere onto the dig site, the pothunters coexisted in an uneasy tense limbo. A Dancer Canyon version of a Mexican standoff. A pothunters' standoff. Who was in charge? Who was going to take the artifacts when they left the site? The imperious Goman intended to do just that and was confident that Skarp would see to it that anybody who tried to interfere would be immediate candidates for the nearest emergency room. Jim Garret saw it otherwise, and Nub Riley was shoulder to shoulder with his old buddy. They had no doubt they could take Goman down easily, though in fact the dapper Goman was tougher than he looked. He'd boxed in college and was the conference champion runner-up in his weight class. Skarp would be more difficult, Riley and Garret thought, but they were pretty sure they could handle him, too.

It was irrelevant. The hard nut of reality that Garret couldn't crack was that he needed the imperious jerk Goman and his wide ranging web of gray market archaeological contacts. How else could he sell the Mimbres stuff? Garret wasn't familiar enough with that opaque underground world to move in it with much hope of success. More likely he'd stumble into a ripoff or a hijacking or the all too real possibility of an undercover police sting. They all knew that the Feds were already snooping into artifact looting in the southwest. So, much as Garret didn't like it, and much as the patrician snob frayed on his friend Nub Riley's nerves, Jim Garret was stuck with Goman.

But that still left mutely unresolved exactly what his relationship with the arrogant asshole was. They were in limbo. Illegal pot hunting limbo. They sure as hell couldn't go the cops about any of it. There was no legal recourse for any of them. About the only option Garret could come up with was to threaten to anonymously tip off the Feds that Goman had done an illegal dig and had the Mimbres pots. That idea didn't set well with Garret. Duplicity went against his nature. And, from a directly pragmatic viewpoint, implicating Goman would be like shooting himself in the pothunting foot, since it could well lead to him being identified as one of the illegal ruins diggers. Hardly any kind of solution there. He was in a quandary. A big assed double bind, as his miner father would have put it. But one thing was as clear in Jim Garret's mind as the pellucid well water at his place out by the Dragoons. No way in hell was he going to let Benning Goman walk out of the dig with the Mimbres artifacts and leave him nothing. No. Never. No way. He'd rather skinny dip with the hammerhead sharks in the Gulf of California than let the insufferable tightass Goman walk off with all the Mimbres pots. But he hadn't figured out just how he would go about it. Garret backed off and kept his tongue, biding his time and trying to figure out exactly how to handle this very unwelcome twist in his plans. Garret's only overt reaction was to quietly tell his companions that he'd find a way to deal with Goman and for them to keep their mouths shut until he did.

Riley curmudgeonly kept his silence, his mouth reluctantly zippered shut, when Benning Goman noted the delicate care Peg Riley took in handling the Mimbres artifacts. Goman entrusted her with the diligent task of cleaning the Mimbres pots of the caked detritus from the long centuries of streamside entombment. As she worked her fertile imagination set to pondering. She began wondering about the people who made the pots. What had their lives been like? She began to talk softly of that to Nub, who was sitting next to her helping to clean and pack away the various liberated artifacts being plucked out of the excavation. The tent wall next to them was undulating and flapping loudly in the gusting wind outside, making Nub wonder if the protective tarps were fastened to the ground outside securely enough to withstand such strong winds. He sounded distracted when he answered his wife.

"I don't know, Peg", he answered. "They were pretty primitive people, I suppose." Peg Riley stopped her work to stare at the beautifully made Black and White Classic Mimbres vessel that emerged from the dirty pot she had just cleaned. It bordered on the miraculous. Not unlike a polished gem born from the chrysalis of a raw chunk of diamond.

"Primitive? People who could make something this beautiful? I find that hard to believe. Whoever made this was an artist." She looked over to her husband curiously. "Is there such a thing as a primitive, crude artist?" Nub Riley shrugged, looking exasperated. It always made him uneasy when his wife started to talk about things like this. He was a simple man of the earth and he didn't like to complicate life with a lot of pointless questions.

"Well, how the hell would I know? I'm a rancher, not an archaeologist."

"More than a few ranchers have been archaeologists, too", Jim Garret said from somewhere nearby inside the excavation. He was working close enough to overhear the conversation. "Ranchers found a lot of these digs in the first place, and some of them had the sense to preserve them."

"Not me, old buddy", Nub shot back in irritation. "I'm not a ruins sniffer like some folks are. These people lived an ugly, hard life, and that don't impress me one bit." Peg Riley gently chided her husband.

"Don't go parading your ignorance, Nub Riley. It's not very becoming." Riley threw his wife a hot look, but knew better than to pursue it any further. He was thinking that the sooner they got the hell out of there, the better he'd like it. The place was starting to feel downright spooky to him. It was just at that moment when the Great Horned Owl swooped down over their heads again, unseen above the tarp shrouding the dig, and disappeared into the trees. No one was outside to see it. Including Jim Garret and Heather Sosa. If they had seen the owl they would have been shaken, despite their modern veneer. Their peasant grandmother had taught them the ancient wisdom of the people of the soil. About the omens. And the Stringidae. The owl.

The harbinger of death.

"Oh, My God!" Alice Wong uttered suddenly, her rubicund complexion drained of blood and gone bone white. Tom Bohach looked up in surprise from his hypnotic plodding pace. Alice pulled him by the arm and started for the rocks at the side of the canyon. "There's someone coming on this side of the water", she whispered. "Hide! Quick!" A bolt of survival instinct punched Bohach lucidly alert and he darted to the rocks on the side of the canyon with Alice. They ducked behind the rocks, scratching and scraping themselves in their diving panic for cover, and cautiously peered over a boulder to look down the canyon. Seventy yards away, moving slowly, two men were laboring up the canyon in single file with something that looked very heavy swaying between them,

"Look!" Alice hissed, holding her voice to a shaky whisper. She pointed at the line and bosun's chair strung between two trees over the water hardly fifty feet down the raging stream from their hiding place.

"Oh, God", Bohach moaned softly. "They've got a line across the water." Then Bohach saw what the two men were carrying between them. Whatever color was left in his countenance was washed away and left him as waxen as the unseen face of Tony Parelli's corpse. Sweet Jesus! A body. They were carrying a goddamn body. The two young people pushed themselves as far as they could into the rocks and tried to remain as motionless as it was possible for a frightened, miserable human being to be. A few minutes later Skarp and Reiser reached the line across the water and dropped Parelli's limp form onto the ground. The two young people cowered hidden in the rocks a few feet away, fighting the overpowering urge to start screaming hysterically and trying, in mind if not in deed, to insinuate themselves into the very molecules of the jaggedy rocks biting into their sides and disappear into their granitic innards.

Sitting by the fire, smoke curling up around him and accenting his sepulchral presence, Diablo finished his coffee with a smack of his lips, a satisfied grunt and a loud belch that echoed off the cave walls like a rifle shot, momentarily stunning a drowsy Maria. He rose and stretched out his lanky long legged outdoorsman's frame, ready to resume the lethal stalk outside in the driving rainstorm. But before he left the warmth of the cave's flickering fire to ease himself through the chokecherry bushes hiding the narrow cave opening and return to the mud and the murk outside, he went past the fire pit to a corner of the cave and unlocked a metal case. He looked inside it for a thoughtful minute or two, then made his choice, pulling out a lethal looking shiny black Colt AR-15 rifle and a box of ammunition. Diablo inspected them with the warrior's careful eye, making sure the rifle was functional and the ammunition the right caliber, then relocked the case. In one fluid lithe movement he turned and went swiftly out of the cave without uttering a single word or even looking at Maria. She called after him as he disappeared.

"The coffee will be on", she said. Those were only her words. Not her thoughts. The glowering expression on her face spoke to far less innocuous meanings. As soon as she was sure the bastard was gone she strode over to the weapons case and plunked herself down to sit cross legged in front of it, intensely studying on whether there was a way she could get it unlocked. Behind her the fire crackled and flared and threw shadows on pitted cave walls where more than 10,000 years earlier a shaggy, foul smelling Paleolithic hunter cracked open the bones of a giant ground sloth he'd killed, eager for the nutritious marrow inside.

He neither saw nor heard the Smilodon--sabertooth tiger--creep up behind him.

Skarp and Reiser cursed and struggled over getting themselves and the body across the stream. Skarp went first, then Parelli's corpse strapped in the bosun's chair by Reiser, then Reiser himself. On the far side of the stream the two men picked up the heavy body between them once more and started to plod through the rain and mud under the dripping oaks and sycamores that lined the sloggy path like stoic arboreal mourners at Tony Parelli's final passage, their leaves dripping tears of rain water on the funeral procession below.

As soon as they were out of sight Wong and Bohach emerged from the rocks, their knees as shaky as their voices.

"God, that was close!" Alice said. "Come on, Tommy. Let's get the hell out of here. They're gonna find that we're gone as soon as they get to the camp." The two young people dashed as fast as they dared down the slippery trail next to the turbulent rising waters of Dancer Canyon's wash, a watercourse hardly a faint trickle at most seasons but now become a raging torrent plunging downstream with a primal force far beyond the merely human. Tom Bohach was on the edge of becoming unhinged and repeatedly shot fearful looks over his shoulder in a not-so-unjustified apprehension. Alice's eyes were riveted rigidly ahead. She wouldn't let herself think of what might be behind them.

Heather Sosa hauled herself up out of the excavation covered with bits of dirt and twigs and leaves from grubbing in the Mimbres dig. Jim Garret couldn't remember the last time he'd seen her look even remotely disheveled. He watched her climb out and thought she didn't even look like herself. Heather Sosa? _Dirty?_ The Heather Sosa he'd known since they were kids wouldn't come within a cubic foot of anything that would threaten to mess up her hairdo or her makeup or soil her clothing. Once, years earlier when they were still preteens, she'd pounced on him in a clawed fury when he playfully smeared mud on her face and shirt. But now? Not only was she filthy, she didn't seem to notice it. Jim thought that she looked somehow different. Content? Blissful? Maybe even serene. He couldn't help thinking that this world was sometimes a damned strange place. From prissy and bitchy to filthy and serene. What next? Alongside that thought there was another, coming from the part of him that was a blood relative and childhood friend of Heather Sosa's. A touch of family pride. Faint, maybe. But there. Go, Heather. Damn it, girl. _Go for it!_

"Wow!", Heather said as she came up to Peg Riley's side and kneeled down by the pots Peg was meticulously cleaning of the accumulated tarnish from the long dark centuries of burial. "They are something, aren't they? Can you imagine these people, with no more than they had, making such beautiful things?" Peg nodded agreement without feeling the need to say anything. "I always wanted to do something like that", Heather said. She looked at Peg searchingly. "You think it's too late for someone like me to change?" Peg's voice came out as clear and gentle as a southeast Arizona mountain spring.

"It's _never_ too late, Heather." She looked up from the Mimbres pot she was cleaning. "We could build our own kiln, get a wheel, learn how to do it. I'll bet we could make some damn fine pots." She shot a wry penetrating look at her husband.

"After all, who made these pots?" She said, tapping herself lightly on the chest.

"Women."

"Now we know where the water went", Silenski said sarcastically as they approached the last crossing and Sierra thumped down hard on the brakes of the Blazer 4WD. "This one we ain't gonna make, Mr. Meyer". He cast an uneasy glance at the Forest Service pickup truck left parked near the edge of the crossing. "I think we're gonna have to get out of here." Silenski's mental bulb might not have been the brightest, but he knew better than to mess with the law. Especially the Feds. They'd already busted him once. And once was enough for Silenski. More than enough. Silenski hated being locked up.

Lucius Meyer was silent. He was looking. And thinking. And calculating, his mind seeming to float above his body as the full force of the powerful pain pills coursed through his veins. Everything seemed so.....so...... _lucid._ He didn't like finding the Forest Service pickup truck parked there near the edge of the crossing any more than Silenski did. In fact, he was considerably more agitated by it. It was _his_ profits, not his hired men's, that were threatened by the ominous presence of the truck. But Meyer knew Benning Goman and even if the man was an insufferable asshole of a snob, he was sure as hell not stupid. It'd be very much in character for him to have bribed a Forest Service man to insure his security. It was a good bet. But it was still just that. A bet. Meyer hesitated, not willing to go any farther, but not willing to give up and leave, either.

"Maybe we ought to stay here a while and think this over", he said. The others nodded without saying anything. Sierra shot a hard look at Silenski, knowing his hothead of a friend could well say or do something that could get them fired.

"Sure", Sierra said to Meyer. "You're the boss", shooting another keep-your-mouth shut look at his friend.

"Yeah", Silenski said. "Right. You're the Boss." Silenski's brow darkened.

_Unless you fuck things up,_ he thought.

Silenski had noticed Meyer popping his pain pills.

Bohach and Wong mucked their rain soaked way along the roaring stream. They startled a small flock of brown towhees huddling in the bushes from the storm and the little birds burst out of the branches in winged fright. A moment later a tiny cottontail rabbit ran out onto the trail and dodged and darted in senseless panic in front of them for twenty feet before disappearing into the brush again. "Dumb rabbit", Alice said, but then caught herself. Maybe she and Tom weren't so different from the panicked rabbit.

Big sycamores still towered over the pounding mountain stream, but the canyon walls gradually grew less steep and the live oaks and mountain ash hugging the rocks were not as thickly clustered. The open country around the canyon mouth couldn't be far off. They knew that the highway lay only a few miles away and they broke into a clumsy trot, intent on following the muddy old ranch track that snaked its way to the canyon. Then they saw Reiser's green painted pickup truck with the US Forest Service logo. No surprise. A second vehicle, a Chevy Blazer, puzzled them a little, but they assumed that it belonged to some of the people at the camp. They both jumped in fright when they passed the foggy windows of the Blazer and a door suddenly flew open. Confused, the two scared young people stopped and stared at the Blazer's open door.

"What's going on in there?" Lucius Meyer demanded from inside the Blazer, pointing with a stubby finger across the thundering water at the dig site upstream. Bohach and Wong were scared of Meyer and his men, but not nearly so much as they were of the people at the dig. Especially Skarp, whose mute scowling presence made their insides crawl. They didn't know who these three men were, but what interest could they have in a couple of clueless college kids out hiking in the mountains? Still, the hard look of the three men in the Blazer triggered the survival instinct in them and warned the youngsters that they had best make tracks away from these men, too. And not linger in doing it. They began to inch away from the Blazer and its occupants, noting with growing alarm that the men were climbing out of the Blazer into the rain and mud. Silenski's foot slipped on the wet door jam and he stomped the other foot heavily on the ground to catch himself, sending a spray of muddy earth up onto his trousers. He was only barely able to keep himself from letting go a string of epithets. His voice was silent. Not his thoughts.

Alice saw his ominous expression and was even more scared. She nervously blurted out an answer to Meyer's question about the dig.

"It's some kind of illegal archeological excavation", Alice said, a tight apprehension in her voice. "There's some people in there digging pots out of an old Indian ruin. We just happened to stumble across them. All we want to do is get away and get back home." She started to inch farther away from Meyer. "We've got to go now. You go ahead and go in, if you want. There's a line over the water a ways up the canyon. The camp's on the other side." Tom moved over to Alice's side and grabbed her arm.

"Come on, Alice", Bohach said, pulling at her arm and not at all liking the looks of these new faces that had materialized out of the stinging rain and mist. "Let's get going." Silenski and Sierra were out of the Blazer and moving around behind the young hikers. Alice and Bohach looked at them nervously and began to feel real fear. _Good God_ , they thought. _Not again._

"I think perhaps it would be best if you accompanied us back to the site", Meyer said. "You can explain all this to the ranger that's in there." Alice blurted it out.

"Him! He's one of them! Why...." Meyer grinned in triumph and cast a dark look at his two hired thugs that had only one meaning. The hounds were unleashed. Silenski and Sierra slipped behind the two young hikers and cut them off from escape towards the distant highway.

"That's what I wanted to know", Meyer said in a voice stripped of his former unconvincing attempt at being civil and non-threatening. "You're coming along with us, kiddies." Alice and Tom turned, about to run, but Silenski and Sierra reached out and grabbed them by the arms. Both of the terrified young hikers began to whimper as Meyer and his men roughly forced them to return up the canyon they thought they'd escaped from. _So close_ , they thought in crushed despair _. So goddamn close._ Tom Bohach knew it deep down in his bones. He was going to be a dead man before he even got old enough to take a legal drink. As he trudged back up the canyon trail he felt like a condemned man going to the gallows. The image of the gallows at the historic Tombstone Courthouse they'd visited two days earlier popped into his mind. And stayed there.

Reiser and Skarp staggered into the excavation tent with Parelli's limp body hanging between them, water and blood dripping off the poncho that was Tony Parelli's death shroud. The Rileys and Heather Sosa all jumped to their feet and eyed with mute horror the two men and their grim burden, Riley recognizing the boots and poncho of the limp body as those of the man they called Parelli. Garret and Benning Goman looked up from the excavation, but couldn't see what was going on above.

"Who's that?" Goman acidly called from inside the pit, irritated at being interrupted.

"Its Skarp and Reiser", Riley called back in a tense, cracking voice. "Parelli's with them." His next words brought Goman and Garret scrambling out of the pit on a run.

"He looks to be dead", Riley said in a voice that sounded dead itself.

Parelli's death was the first blow. The second fell a few minutes later when Heather Sosa went into the auxiliary tent and discovered that the two young hikers were gone. A heated argument broke out in the dank excavation tent among the boxes and crates and tools of the Mimbres dig. What in the hell were they going to do with Parelli's body? What were they going to do about the kids who had escaped? Skarp listened to the argument for only a fractional moment. He was not a man to ponderously debate a course of action. At the age of thirteen he permanently departed the world of debate when he cold cocked another kid who wouldn't stop arguing with him. It was perfectly clear to Skarp that they had to find the pair of dumbass kids and hold them until they left the dig.

While the others were embroiled in an argumentative chaos, he went stolidly out of the tent into the thudding raindrops and trudged off to look for Bohach and Wong. He went upstream into the canyon since he'd just come from the opposite direction and was pretty sure they weren't downstream. As the thick-bodied Skarp lumbered off on the slippery path under the oaks and pinyons and cedars of the upper canyon, Diablo was silently approaching from the other direction. His rifle was hidden underneath his poncho to protect it from the rain. It was the shiny black Colt ArmaLite AR-15 he'd stolen from the home of a Cochise County sheriff's deputy a month earlier. Diablo kept it locked and -loaded. He was looking forward to using it for the first time. On the enemy. _This_ enemy. The intruders who were defiling the old ruins from the days of the ancient ones.

Alice and Tom were a morose pair of college kids plumb out of both luck and choices. They were forced by the unveiled threat of imminent violence to lead Meyer and his men to the crossing over the water. Silenski made the point unmistakably clear to them when he looked them in the eyes and proceeded to loudly crack his knuckles, then pound one fist into the open palm of his other hand and growl at them "....now don't do nothing stupid, hear?"

When they reached the line over the thundering water, Sierra went cautiously across first, then Alice, then Tom, all of them keenly eying the rushing turbulence below them. As Meyer began to creep timidly across the wire over the roaring dangerous stream, the two youngsters saw their chance. A few whispered quick words and they lit out running full tilt in opposite directions. Tom threw a punch at Sierra that was about as effective as a mosquito biting an elephant and then blitzed off towards the mouth of the canyon. Sierra ran after him and Alice ran the other way, upstream towards the camp. Meyer scrambled the rest of the way across the stream, yelling, and Silenski came clumsily after him. He came too fast and slipped on the wire, only saving himself from falling into the water by his handhold on the upper of the wire supports between the trees. He caught himself, pulled his way across the stream with dangling legs bent at the knees to keep out of the water, jumped down, spewing muttered blasphemies all the while, and started to run after Alice. Meyer let him go by and then fell in behind him, puffing with the exertion of exercise he did not often get. But then his spine reconnected with his pain synapses and stopped him dead in his tracks.

Tom knew full well he probably couldn't outrun Sierra. He did it intentionally to spring Alice loose. Once free, she'd go for help. There was a least a chance they'd be rescued. Tom ran hard until he reached the dead end where Parelli's body had earlier been caught on the rocks. The athletic Sierra came thundering up to Tom and unleashed a hard punch to his stomach. Bohach felt a perverse satisfaction even as he crumpled under the breathtaking raw force of the blow. He was pretty sure fleet footed little Alice--although certainly not a star runner, she'd twice lettered running cross country and track at Tucson High--had scrambled away from them and evaded capture.

Alice had run and walked up and down the trail enough times to have a rough instinctive feel for the pitfalls and quirks of the muddy track through the trees and bushes and rocks. She moved faster than the bulky Silenski, who repeatedly tripped and slipped on the rocky, slick path. She ran past the camp as silently as she could, unobserved, and disappeared into the growing murk of the dark rain whipped canyon. Silenski stopped when he got to the camp and gave up the chase, catching his breath as he stood in the steadily falling rain, waiting for Meyer to come limping up the trail. A few minutes later Sierra came slogging up, pushing Bohach before him. Sierra was grinning. Bohach's escape attempt had put an edge of excitement to the day. Sierra liked excitement.

They paused for a few moments outside the excavation tent, listening with amusement to the heated arguments inside, tossing silent sarcastic grins at each other over the overheard conversations. Then Meyer pulled open the flap and went inside, the others filing in behind him, and the universe inside the tent did an instantaneous quantum jump. As soon as the new faces popped in through the tent flat, a deathly pall of silence descended over the dig site that could not have been more complete had Mother Earth herself hit the mute button. The only sounds were the gasps of surprise and the faint rumblings of Julius Meyer's gaseous belly. Then the silence was broken. Meyer couldn't hold it. The line up of astonished expressions made him laugh out loud and slap his sides. Even the dour humorless Silenski chuckled at the astounded faces. A grin took up residence on Meyer's face and refused to leave when he laid eyes on Goman's ashen stunned expression and dangling lower jaw. A slack jaw that seemed to have lost the ability to close. An old saying slithered into Meyer's mind-- _to have your cake and eat it, too._ This was it! Score a bunch of valuable pots and also one-up that arrogant fuck head Goman. Damn! Meyer hadn't had this much fun since hooking into a fifteen hundred pound female Atlantic blue marlin in the deep water off the channel islands the year before his back was pretzeled by that frickin' Guatemalan teenaged tweeker's stolen pickup truck.

Meyer even momentarily forgot the needles of pain in his spine.

### Zachary

"Is everything all right, Mr. Zachary? Said a pretty red haired waitress with a shapely set of legs and dancing deep gray eyes the color of the storm tossed North Atlantic of her ancestors. Zachary pretended not to notice her well turned legs as she brought him the Scotch neat he'd ordered. He took the drink and waved amiably with his free hand.

"Yes, Maureen", he said, reveling in his role as an easy going, wealthy bon vivant. "Everything is just fine." And he meant it. Then he handed Maureen a twenty dollar tip and wondered what it would be like to have those dynamite legs of hers wrapped around him. But he gave no inkling of that to Maureen. It didn't fit with the mellow, fatherly image he cultivated in his personal and his public life. There were always pliable women to be found. When he wanted them. And where he wanted them. Which didn't include here.

Though in his economic life he hovered on the sub rosa economic fringes of society, Dominic Zachary presented himself to the world outside his subterranean predacious haunts as a successful businessman and investor. That evening he sat by myself in a private dining room at the Verge, a high dollar restaurant in the foothills of the soaring Santa Catalina mountains on the northern edge of Tucson. Though Dominic Zachary was a literate and social fellow who was almost everyone's choice for an agreeable dinner companion, this was one evening he preferred to be alone.

Zachary wanted no distractions while he savored his musings on what must be happening at the Mimbres dig. First Goman, then Meyer, had popped out of nowhere and showed up at the supposedly secret site. Oh, to have been there! It must have been a wonderful scene of strutting and arguing. Zachary softly laughed out loud at the thought of the pompous bastards at each other's throats. He cocked his head and listened to the faint sound of a jazz trio playing in the Verge's main lounge. Early Coltrane stuff, maybe, before the heroin sent him soaring into abstruse musical dimensions. Zachary nodded agreeably to the distant riffs of the jazz sax, then lifted his glass of Highland single malt Scotch whisky and slowly rolled the rich caramel brown liquid inside the glass before lifting it to his lips. He replaced the glass on his dining table just as a white clad server arrived with his first course, the Verge's signature hazelnut salad with avocados and imported Norwegian cheeses.

And here he was, dining quietly at the Verge, richer by twenty thousand dollars. He hadn't found it necessary to dirty his hands or engage in petty maneuvering to make a tidy profit on their tawdry little schemes. Meyer would not disclose who had informed him, and even if he did, what could Benning Goman do about it? What the insufferable Goman was doing was flatly illegal. Unlike the dangerous and malevolent Meyer, Goman was a self styled country gentleman disinclined to violent retribution and therefore had no viable recourse. That was one of the agreeable corollary benefits that Zachary encountered in dealing with amateurs naively dabbling in illegal activities. There almost invariably was a way for him to make an extra profit out of it. And he also took no little pleasure in outsmarting arrogant smug pufferbellies like that strutting patrician ass Benning Goman. He sipped at the pleasantly aromatic single malt scotch again, not yet ready to begin eating, again cocking his ear to the faint sound of jazz coming from the main lounge. His mind wandered. Did the trio do any Django Rhinehart-style gypsy jazz stuff? He lifted the glass of scotch to his lips again. The spreading, self satisfied smile wouldn't leave his face. His face mirrored his state of mind.

It's a good life, Dominic Zachary.......yes, a good life indeed....

### Chapter 9

### Skarp

Skarp stared at the canyon wall, his jaws unconsciously chewing on a chunk of imaginary gum as he studied the rocks. The rock wall wasn't perpendicular, but still looked pretty damned steep. And slippery as hell, coated with loose rocks and slick with rain and sliding mud. No way those two tenderfoot city kids could have escaped that way. Nor was it likely they knew of the line across the water and used it to get away. They had to be here somewhere. Hidden. But here. Skarp slogged to the head of the canyon and gaped at the waterfall rocketing out from the blind canyon above. He stopped just short of where he would have been able to see the ledge under the waterfall.

"Deadend", he muttered. Convinced the frickin' jerk off kids were trapped in the canyon, Skarp turned and began to work his way carefully back down the rock strewn path between soaked tree trunks and dripping overhead hanging branches, stopping to examine every hulking rock along the canyon wall that looked big enough to offer a hiding place. Behind him, at the far edge of the waterfall, Diablo crouched in the deep shadow of a jagged granite overhang. The ArmaLite rifle slung over his shoulder, Diablo had decided to use his wickedly sharp knife again. As Skarp retreated the way he'd come, Diablo reluctantly withdrew the lethal killing blade he'd held ready in his hand as rock steady as the granite crag looming over his head. The plodding thick bodied man across the turluent stream was not going to cross behind the waterfall. Diablo glowered. There would have to be another time for this one. Then he began to creep down canyon.

In Diablo's fetid den of a cave the edges of Maria Alarcon's rigidly controlled self discipline were starting to fray. For a full half hour she tried with jittery hands and rising frustration to try to pick the lock on Diablo's gun cabinet. First with a fork. Then with the fastening pin from a locket lying by the fire pit that for some obscure reason Diablo had stolen from a canyon home. No luck. The lock held fast. Had she known for a certainty that it held a gun and ammunition, she would have grabbed up a rock and smashed the damn thing open. But she didn't know. And to break the locker open and find it empty would mean a death sentence for Maria when Diablo returned and discovered what she had done. Exasperated, her courage wavering and threatening to give way to a slide towards despair that would be equally as fatal, she beat on the ground with her fists and cursed the cabinet in a gutter Spanish rare for her articulate tongue. Then she slipped back across the cave to the fire pit. When Diablo returned and opened the case again she would make sure she got a good look inside. If there was another gun, then the next time he left she would break the case open. And _then_ that rotten bastard would be in for a very nasty surprise _._ Maria had not even a hint of doubt that she would relish killing the maniacal son of a bitch _._ Fast or slow. Painful or not. It didn't matter.

Just so long as the spooky son of a bitch was permanently 100% stone cold dead.

\

### Alice

Once she flitted through the shadows past the camp, Alice began to move cautiously upstream, using the live oaks, sycamores and jumbled boulders along the narrowing canyon bottom to shield her from view. She knew that they had to be aware in the camp that she and Tom were gone. Someone might already be ahead of her searching for them. There was. Skarp. Her sharp young eye saw him first. He was going slowly along the walls of the canyon, peering in among the rocks. Alice slipped over to the edge of the stream, found a small depression where part of the bank had eroded, and squeezed herself behind a five foot boulder lodged in the bend where the stream detoured around the maze of dangling roots from a huge old gnarled sycamore as thick as a man is tall.

As Skarp came closer she huddled into the stream's bank, the water tugging at her feet, fervently praying with tightly closed eyes to a God the nature of whose existence had always confounded her, that the plodding chunk of menace wouldn't notice her brown poncho against the muddy walls of the stream in the storm muted light. For once, she was in luck. Or, in a thought that flashed vividly through her mind, maybe her prayers really were answered. Whatever the reason, Skarp passed within a few feet of Alice without seeing her. He cast only an occasional glance at the stream, thinking it impossible for anyone to be there because of the lethal threat of the rushing turbulent water. His attention was focused on the canyon wall. He was certain that was where he would find the young hikers. He slogged on past where Alice lay fearfully huddled in the mud and painstakingly worked his way down the canyon wall until he vanished into the squalling gloom.

Skarp plodded away out of sight in the misty dim light of the stormy canyon. Alice Wong pulled herself out of her muddy hide, wiped as much of the mud off her as she could, then, with grim determination on her face, set out upstream in the steady lope she'd honed back in her high school days on the Tucson High cross country team. Alice already knew what she had to do. She would go under the waterfall and come back down the canyon on the other side. When she got to the mouth of the canyon she would take one of the trucks parked there-- _please God let the keys be inside_ \--and drive out to the highway for help. Once she had nimbly darted under the plunging waterfall, she slowed and moved more deliberately. Someone might have crossed the stream at the wire and be looking for her on the other side. Alice hadn't made it this far to blow it now with an incautious haste. As just a few short so very naive years ago she had forced her mind to focus on the race and not the pain and exhaustion, she now did her damndest to focus on escape, trying to keep the gloomy alternatives out of her consciousness with all the psychic power she could muster.

On the far side of the roaring stream a bobcat lay low in the wet grass, its aurulent unblinking eyes fixed on a soggy half grown ring-tailed cat huddling from the storm underneath a barberry bush. Then the bobcat began to slowly, ever so slowly, creep closer. Closer. And closer.

And then he sprang with lightning feline lethality.

Maria Alarcon hovered by the smoky fire pit, feeding the flames with broken bits of oak and pine branches and soaking in the small comfort the fire gave her. Though her insides were churning with apprehension at Diablo's return, Maria's strong willed mind still was able to calm itself enough to puzzle over the man. What would make this devilish bastard think he was an Apache from the wild days? Who was he, anyway? Where did he come from? She doubted very much that he really was an Apache, or even that he had much of any kind of Indian ancestry. He sure as hell didn't look like any Indian she'd ever seen, and there were plenty to be seen in Tucson. The Yaquis and the O'odhams and a host of Mexicans with a strong Native American genetic heritage in their appearance. Then her thoughts grew darker. How many people had this psychotic killer already murdered? He'd killed Troy, and not for the heroin. It was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet it wasn't in the cave, so she figured that he must have left it with Troy's body. That triggered another thought. Troy's body. Was he the only victim of this crazy bastard? How many other bodies were there hidden in these mountains? Or other mountains, other places? Her muscled athlete's body shuddered with involuntary muscle contractions that were the physical punctuation to another sudden thought. How many more bodies would there be before somebody finally stopped this murderous lunatic?

And that was when a sense of mission began to form in her mind.

### Unwelcome Visitors

Only a handful of minutes earlier, with the shattering knowledge of Tony Parelli's death, the pothunters' little world was teetering towards chaos. And then chaos came rushing through the door and their world, like so many of the broken Mimbres pots, fell into fragments. The others had seen it instantly, though Goman had refused to recognize the obvious. Sierra and Silenski came in with hard looks, handguns menacingly drawn, and the hulking pair looking very much ready to use them. Garret had been the first to put it into words, hissed words, his hands flexing into angry balled fists.

"It's a goddamn hijacking", he muttered to Riley, his face as sullen and angry as Riley had ever seen it. "Damnit!" Garret said bitterly. "I should have gotten all the pots out first and then contacted buyers. This would never have happened." Nub moved close to Garret.

"Or it might just have happened at a different place", Riley replied, his deft mind grabbing hold of the situation with the life-or–death reactive alacrity of the combat veteran. He put a restraining hand on Garret's shoulder. "Just don't do anything stupid", he whispered. "We don't want anybody to get hurt." Garret nodded darkly. He had been outmaneuvered. Twice. _Twice!_ Garret thought. Not just once, but twice. Jim Garret, you goddamn dumbass. He'd been blindsided. That was sure as hell obvious. But that didn't mean he accepted it. He was a human volcano. Fuming on the surface. Underneath about to blow.

It happened so quickly everyone was surprised. Hijackers and hijacked alike. Good God! Jim Garret could hardly believe his eyes. His kissing cousin Heather Sosa was the volcano that blew. In a visceral outburst she couldn't begin to understand herself, she exploded out of her initial stupefaction, charged at a dumbfounded Julius Meyer and began beating on his chest and screaming at him. At first Meyer was amused by it, but then she hauled off and hit him with an uppercut that split his lip and sent him reeling backwards. Silenski moved with surprising agility for such a hulking man, quickly stepping over to punch her once straight to the jaw. Heather collapsed in a heap, knocked cold. Silenski stood over her mute form, looking menacingly at the others, but privately laughing to himself at the sight of Meyer getting whacked by a broad.

"Broad's got spunk", Silenski snarled at the others. "More than the rest of you pussies."

Garret stiffened and immediately began to think of finding a way to do just what Riley was afraid he would do--lose his cool and do something wildly impetuous. Riley grabbed Garret by the shoulders and held him in an iron grip before he could lunge at Silenski and probably get himself shot. Garret struggled but Riley wrapped his arms around Jim and held him fast until he calmed down. His hotly defiant eyes were still on Silenski.

"You wanna try somethin', pussy?" Silenski growled. "Then try it!" He put the pistol back into his belt and beckoned at Garret to come at him. Garret began to struggle with Riley again to break his grip. Meyer dabbed at his bleeding lip, cursed, then stepped forward to stop the argument. This was not the time. Nor the place.

"Can the bullshit, Silenski!" He yelled. "We got more important things to do than have you fuck around with this prick. You wanna stay on the payroll, you do what you're told. And nothing else!" Silenski glowered and moved back, taking his eyes off Garret. Working for Lucius Meyer was too good a job to lose over beating up some jerk. But he was already looking ahead to the day when he no longer was under Meyer's control. He'd make hamburger out of the little creep.

"Yes, Mr. Meyer", he said, averting his eyes and trying his best to sound subservient.

" _Yes, Mr. Meyer_ ", Garret instantly snapped back at him sarcastically. "I'll be a good little thug as long as you throw me a few crumbs now and then. Please, Mr. Meyer. Drop your pants and let me kiss your ass." That did it. Silenski's short fuse was lit. Every synapse in his nervous system hit adrenalin mode and his face seemed drained of color. He let loose a wild primal roar and lurched with clubbed fists towards Garret, but his hulking buddy Sierra reacted with catlike facility, grabbed him and wrestled him to the edge of the tent and to the wind battered tarp that covered the entrance.

"Ski, you goddamn fool, cut it out!" He hissed into his friend's ear. Then he shoved him out the door and wheeled around, gun in hand, suddenly realizing he'd better be ready in case somebody was going to try something stupid. He was right. Garret was already headed for Meyer when he saw the gun pointed at him and stopped in his tracks.

"No harm intended", he said, feigning an innocuous expression. "Just thought I could talk Mr. Meyer into changing his mind." Then Garret said something to Meyer that maybe wasn't altogether tongue-in-cheek.

"You wouldn't happen to need another good man, would you?" He pointed at the cases of pots that were about to depart his ephemeral possession. "Looks like I just suffered a real big financial setback." Meyer looked over at Goman.

"Who the fuck is this guy? He said, genuinely puzzled.

"A small time hustler", Goman retorted. "The two of you deserve each other." Meyer frowned at Goman, decided against fucking with the asshole blueblood, then waved Garret off.

"O.K., clown, enough is enough. Get back with the others." Then he turned to Goman again.

"You really did find a nice little bonanza here, didn't you?" Meyer said in an amused, mocking voice to Goman, a gloating smirk revealing his gleaming teeth with their near fortune in restorative dental work. Goman stood rigid as a Civil War statue in a courthouse park, his fists clenched so tightly that the fingernails dug into the palms of his hands, the tips of his fingers gorged red with trapped blood and the knuckles turned white. His eyes flared wide with seething anger.

"You son of a bitch!", Goman muttered. "You goddamn slippery little gauche son of a bitch!" Sierra moved menacingly towards Goman, but Meyer waved him off. This was way too damned much fun to cut it short.

"Well, Goman", Meyer replied with the same insufferable smug smirk. "It would seem that I am a slippery little gauche son of a bitch with a whole bunch of Mimbres pots worth a whole lot of money." Goman's eyes bugged.

"You _wouldn't._ You just....wouldn't." But he knew the answer to that already. Meyer very definitely would. Goman's rigid posture melted. His fists unclenched. Blood rushed back into his white knuckles and despair battered his ruptured ego. He was seized by an emotion that he had rarely felt in his salad days as a champion boxer in college.

_Goddamnit_ , he thought bitterly, _the son of a bitch beat me_.

"I figure there's a good half million dollars worth of pots here, Goman, maybe more", Meyer continued in the same mocking tone, imitating the nasal patrician inflection and studied cadence of Benning Goman's voice. "And I would like to offer my very deeply heartfelt thanks for your conveniently locating this stuff for me." Goman was so livid that the arteries in his forehead were pumping furiously. Sierra saw it and thought the guy looked like he had little worms writhing in his skull. But then Sierra was usually at least partially blitzed on something. Today it was speed. Meth. Sierra's drug du jour.

"Stuff? _Stuff_? You call this stuff? Why these are invaluable Mimbres...." Sierra reached over and slapped Goman hard on the shoulder.

"Ah, just shut up, you creep. You're getting on my nerves." Meyer shot Sierra an angry look, irritated that his man had interjected the crude inevitability of violence too soon into his little game. But then he thought better of it. The storm. They were racing the frickin' goddamn storm. There was no more time to screw with Goman. It was time to haul ass. His irritation at Sierra faded.

"Count yourself lucky things didn't get any worse, Goman", he snapped. "You were over your head from the beginning. We're gonna take the pots and get the hell out of this mud hole. With that little girl out running loose and a dead guy on your hands, you got a big fucking mess on your hands. _Your_ mess. Not mine." Meyer paused, chuckled at a thought, and couldn't resist one last shot at Goman's patrician ego. "And by the way, _Mister_ Goman. If you ever wanna buy a nice Mimbres pot, I might be able to spare one." He motioned at the crates of pots stacked up near the excavation. "Looks like I got a few on hand." The smirk revisited his face. "But it'll cost you some bucks. A fucking _lot_ a bucks."

Goman grew so red in the face that Garret half expected the man was going to keel over with a heart attack. He kept repeating a single phrase over and over. It's not fair", he moaned, almost sobbing. "It's just not fair."

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

### Fun

He had the improbable name of 'Fun', which has about as much relation to the reality of the man as a circus clown has to an Army ranger. Fun was among the last of the wild Chiricahaus to come in, being with Geronimo at Skeleton Canyon at the last surrender in 1886. He was among the tiny final band of Chiricahau hostiles herded onto a prison train and sent far off to a diseased sultry imprisonment in Florida. A few miserable emasculating years later he would take his own life far from the historic land of the Chiricahua. And when he did he probably regretted that his death did not come in battle while still a free man in the ancient hills of home. But _in_ those days he was a fearsome brave soldier fighting for the Nde people's right to remain who they were--and where they were. In the mountains of southeast Arizona, southwest New Mexico, northern Chihuahua and Sonora in Old Mexico.

It was a hopeless fight, and many of the Nde realized it, the leaders better than most. David might have beaten the odds and whipped Goliath, but that was an even match compared to a few hundred Nde against the huge combined might of the United States and Mexico. Yet many of them fought on, despite the impossible odds. And among these stalwart Native Americans staring stolidly into the face of their own inexorable extinction, Fun was respected by his peers as being the bravest of the brave and a superior warrior among a race of superb warriors. And it was from a venerable descendant of one of those very warriors that Bennie Dewclaw first heard of Fun.

### Bennie Dewclaw

It was only a few weeks before Bennie Dewclaw made the final slide down the slope of insanity into the lethal corpus of the lunatic Diablo. But he was still Bennie Dewclaw, fugitive from the weather as well as the law, and he lingered a few sunny days in the gentle Tucson winter. Looming just over his horizon was his monumental trek into the rugged borderlands of Arizona and Sonora and what he already sensed would be his destiny--the nature of which remained undiscovered in the gestating folds of his convoluted brain. Bennie was confused. Uncertain. He didn't know what to do next, yet he sensed something in the psychic wind that seemed to come from the south. In his indecision he followed a well traveled personal proclivity. He set out to find an unpretentious quiet tavern frequented by mind-your-own-business private people where he could nurse a beer from cold to warm while the meandering deranged pathways in his mind tried to sort things out. Sometimes he talked to people. People who looked interesting. Like they had something to say. Especially older people who at the very least had the experience of survival. But most people, even then, shied away from him. Bennie had a spooky air of unspoken menace about him that had many an uneasy bar squatter grab their beer and try to look polite as they skedaddled to another stool or table in the bar.

He found the tavern in a seedy barrio in heavily Hispanic South Tucson. The sign on the place was in Spanish, La Taverna India. The Indian Tavern. The Indian Tavern? In Hispanic South Tucson? The name of the nondescript pub grabbed his interest and dragged him inside as surely as if the steel grip of a giant hand had pulled him in. At first he could barely see anything. But then his eyeballs did their corneal magic and recalibrated themselves from the bright afternoon sun to the low light of the place that called itself the Indian Tavern. Bennie scanned the place. It didn't take long for him to spy an aged man who looked to be Native American quietly husbanding a beer at a corner table. The man looked reflective, but sober. Bennie intuited he was not a drunk, just as he intuited that this was a man he should talk to.

Bennie, who was still Benny Dewclaw both in his own mind and to other people, bought a bottle of Double X--Dos Equis-- moved to the elderly man's side and attempted to start up a casual conversation. The older man, eyeing the young stranger suspiciously and at first reluctant to talk, warmed to the conversation when he looked into Bennie's face and realized that this peculiar young man showed genuine interest in him. An interest that went beyond the trivialities and banalities of what usually passed for conversation. They began to softly talk in the dim alcoholic light as a scratchy sound system played hoary Waila and Chicken Scratch and Norteño tunes in the background. Two chunky O'odham couples got up and started to dance on the small scarred wooden dance floor in a corner of the pub bordering a six foot wide bandstand. A bandstand far from disused. It was crammed with gear--instrument stands, amps and monitors, mics and speakers. La Taverna India was no stranger to either live music or dancers. And, as Bennie would soon learn, nor was the tavern a stranger to richly told ancient Indian legends.

As they settled in to talk, Bennie casually mentioned to the old man his interest in Apache history. The response left Bennie wide eyed and speechless. The old man, who was on the sunset side of ninety years of age, said in a soft, resonant voice that he was descended from Apaches who were with Geronimo in the final days before surrender. He had heard tales passed down from the survivors ever since he was a small child on the San Carlos Reservation where his parents settled before he was born. In those days, at the dawn of the 20th Century, there were a number of Nde from the old free-ranging days still alive. He had known several and heard their stories first hand. Bennie's lips quivered in excitement as the old man began to weave his beguiling fabric of legend and lore and campfire memories.

Many was the tale the old man told in that humble pub in South Tucson. The old man, who the Mexicans called Carlos and the gringos called Carl, referred to himself by a Nde name that roughly translated as "He Who Knows". Bennie chose to address him simply as Old Man, but he did it with reverential Native American respect that was the antithesis of the mainstream American disdain for the elderly. To Bennie this aged man, indeed, was "He Who Knows." He told Old Man his name was Bennie Dewclaw. And it was. Diablo still lay in the opaque unknowable future.

For five days Bennie went every evening to the little pub, La Taverna India, in a rundown neighborhood in a largely Hispanic neighborhood, where the clientele was mostly--as the name itself promised--Indian. Native American. They were O'odham. And Yaqui. Except for the Old Man and a handful of others who sometimes joined in the conversation with the Old Man. Like Bennie, these others treated him with a reverential respect and spoke little as they listened to Old Man relate tales from the grand old days of freedom before what he called the Conquest.

Many and grand they were indeed and Bennie Dewclaw listened in rapture to this living voice from the past. At first he wondered. Was he a fraud? But he spoke Apache, sometimes lapsing into that language with one or two others who spoke it. And those others listened to the Old Man raptly, hanging on his every word. If they took the man to be genuine, Bennie thought, then he must do the same. And so he listened. And sank deeper and deeper into the vanished world the Old Man was bringing back to life with his eloquent weaving of the past into the present.

He spoke with awe of the heroes of the Nde's final days during the Conquest. Mangas Coloradas. Geronimo. Cochise and his sons Taza and Naiche. Juh. Nana. Lozen. Chihuahua. Ulzana. And others. Many others. But the one who stuck in Bennie's mind was the fabled warrior called Fun.

Fun, Old Man said, using descriptive language that would have been trite or even laughable coming from almost anyone else, had the courage of a bull, the cunning of a fox, the stealth of the cougar, the wisdom of the raven and the swift lethality of the black-tailed rattlesnake. But Fun was more than a warrior of mystical abilities. He also had a sense of drama and of the whimsical. Fun, Old Man said, was wont to silently sneak into an enemy's camp, play some kind of trick and then slip away again undetected. Sometimes his sense of whimsy prevailed and he would tie an arrow around a sleeping enemy's foot or around the neck of a horse. More than once he defecated on a man's personal gear. Other times he was single mindedly lethal, slipping into an enemy's camp, slitting the throat of a fatally unlucky sleeper and silently slipping away again. Fun was a man feared far and wide, as unpredictable as he was lethal.

The Old Man's favorite tale about Fun happened in the early 1880's in the mountain spine of northern Chihuahua. A place where a half century earlier ethnic cleansing by Mexican soldiers and paramilitaries had exterminated a big chunk of the indigenous population. On this evening in 1881, a patrol of Mexican cavalry had ranged too far on their daily patrol and were slowly--and amusingly clumsy to Fun's watching eye--making their way back to their camp in near total darkness. It was a cloudy night. No moon. No stars. But the horses knew the way and the men stolidly sat their mounts and plodded on.

As the dozen man Mexican patrol wound slowly along a serpentine trail that looped down between sweet smelling tall pines and tumbled boulders onto the desert grassland below, Fun, moving stealthily on foot, began stalking them. It soon started to rain and the Mexican cavalrymen huddled inside the heavy American gutta percha ponchos purchased as war surplus by the Chihuahua government after the Civil War, pulled their hats down over their faces and plodded wearily on, unable to see much beyond their horses' muzzles in the dark rainy night. Fun stole up behind the last in the file of Mexicans and nimbly leaped up onto the hindquarters of the trooper's horse. One hand in split second quickness over the man's mouth to stifle any cries, Fun deftly slit the man's throat with a razor sharp steel knife made in the foundry of a German immigrant in the mountains of far off Pennsylvania. Then the Nde warrior pushed the dead soldier's body off the horse and followed the line of Mexican cavalrymen through the dim mist of the rainy night. Fun killed four more of them, silently, stealthily, then dropped off the last horse. The riderless mounts dutifully followed the line of horses while Fun disappeared into the rainy night, laughing grimly to himself at the thought of what would happen when the survivors in the Mexican patrol discovered the riderless horses behind them.

He was to find out a few hard months later. The source was a trader. A fat Mexican with bad teeth and slicked back greasy hair that Fun personally detested but tolerated because the sleazy man covertly traded guns, ammunition and whiskey to the Nde. The fat Mexican told Fun that the leader of the Mexican patrol, Sergeant Maclovio Garcia, was court martialed by the military authorities in Chihuahua. He was found guilty of gross dereliction of duty and the very next morning executed in a excrement filled barnyard by a firing squad made up of survivors from the ill fated patrol. Fun had no empathy for the man. No Apache leader would have allowed such a thing to happen to his followers. He spat in disgust. The man deserved his dishonorable fate.

Months later, remembering the days in Tucson with Old Man in La Taverna India when he was still Bennie Dewclaw, Diablo was certain that the Mexican sergeant deserved his fate. But not Fun. It was much different with Fun. He was a hero to his people, not a failure like the incompetent Mexican was. Fun did not deserve his bitter fate, dead by his own broken spirited hand many hundreds of miles from his mountain homeland. Diablo was angry about it. Fun never should have surrendered. Far better to die a violent death in battle as a free man. Especially a great warrior like Fun. It would never happen to him. To Diablo. They would never take him. Never. Diablo would die a free man. But before he died he would avenge Fun. Fun and all of the others. The others.

So _many_ others.....

### Silenski

The force of the powerful Sierra's violent shove sent Silenski staggering out the excavation tent's entrance. He thumped into a rough barked low lying branch of a walnut tree, slipped on the muddy ground and struggled awkwardly to retain his balance. He was self righteously livid, but even in his boiling anger he knew Sierra was right. He never should have let the jerk get under his skin like that. Silenski began to pace back and forth outside the excavation tent entrance, stomping heavily on the ground despite the sloppy mud and slashing rain, trying hard to cool himself down before he dared head back into the tent. As he passed the dig's community tent a shrouded figure lunged out from inside the tent. A wicked looking knife honed to lethal sharpness drove into Silenski's back three times so quickly that the big man had little chance to react. Then the specter was swallowed into the rainy night and Silenski turned to stumble drunkenly back towards the excavation tent.

His life's blood poured out in a thick trail behind him.

Every nerve in Alice's body was on a hair trigger and ready to fire. With a crazily jumbled up combination of fear and caution, haste and desperation, she warily approached the place where Reiser had put lines across the water. What? They weren't there. The lines across the water were down. They were still fastened to the tree on her side, but on the other side where the camp was they'd come loose. Reiser's lines were in the water and out of reach from the camp side of the wash. She worried over that for a moment. What did it mean? Did the wires come loose by themselves? Or, and this was what worried her, did someone unfasten them intentionally? But then she decided that, no matter the cause, it was a stroke of good luck for her. The wires were down on the other side of the roaring stream, not the side she was on. If there was anybody on the other side looking for her, they wouldn't be able to get across. Not unless they went all the way up to the cascading plume of the waterfall, and that would give her a huge head start. Still very wary, but feeling the first glimmerings of real hope since her miserable waking nightmare began, she accelerated into her practiced lope as she made her wary way down the stream towards where the trucks were.

She could not have known that the wires were down because Diablo had crossed ahead of her, unfastened them on the far bank and thrown them down into the rushing water.

Diablo came puffing into the cave looking wild and excited. Maria at first thought he had come to kill her and was instantly ready to fight him for her life. But Diablo didn't approach her, hardly even looked at her, and excitedly paced back and forth in the smoky muted light of his fetid cave. Maria didn't dare ask why he was so visibly agitated. Whatever he was up to out in the stormy night, she knew it had to be the work of the Devil. _This_ Devil. Diablo. Worried that he might turn his agitated attention to her with another vicious rape--or worse--she tried to deflect him away from her. She pointed a hopeful finger at the firepit and the coffee pot sitting next to it.

"The coffee's ready", she said with a faint quiver to her voice, still unnverved by his wild look. He looked at her in a scary puzzlement, then slowly stumbled his mental way back from whatever dark distant place his mind had been. He shook his head, almost violently, shook it a second time, then made his way over to sit down by the fire, rubbing his chilled hands over it before he took the coffee she offered him. The stoneware coffee cup was one Diablo had stolen from a canyon home two weeks earlier. It belonged to an Arizona highway patrol officer. "Goddamn illegal aliens", the highway patrolman said then--despite his name being Manny Rodriguez and whose grandparents slipped illegally over from Old Mexico fifty years earlier--when he discovered his place had been burgled. "Goddamn illegal alien bastards!" But it wasn't illegal aliens. t was something worse. Far worse.

Diablo.

"The enemy's camp", Diablo suddenly said without being asked. "It's cut off now." He turned to look at her with such a raw, brutal expression that Maria knew in her bones that the bastard must have just killed somebody. She fought off the shudders of disgust that threatened to engulf her and reveal her real feelings to Diablo--with consequences that would be fatal to her, too. Water dripped off Diablo's poncho into the fire, instantly vaporizing into steam that rose over the fire and partially obscured his face.

"Is the raid over, then?" She said, trying to control the emotions in her voice. Diablo grunted with wild savagery, jabbing viciously with a stick at the fire. His voice was so menacing and dangerous that her stomach churned in cold fear.

"Not until the camp is dead", he said. Maria swallowed hard, but could say nothing.

She averted her eyes so that he could not see the fear in them.

Silenski stumbled into the tent, looking strangely pale and ill. The people in the dig tent at first hardly noticed him. They were still hotly embroiled in verbal confrontation and a blizzard of emotions. But one by one they turned their eyes to Silenski. He looked so....so....unwell? No one fathomed what had happened. They all stared at him in surprise. As he lurched past Meyer and Sierra and each saw the blood on Silenski's back, they exploded into action. Sierra dropped to an agile crouch like a big cat, pointing his pistol at the tent entrance with his finger tight on the trigger, and an obviously stunned Meyer started towards Silenski. Before he could get to him the big man staggered drunkenly forward to the edge of the Mimbres excavation pit and tottered for a moment at the edge. Then it was over. With a single last anguished moan, Silenski toppled heavily over into the pit. He lay motionless where he fell, face down, the last thing his dying eyes saw the very same chunk of ground where hundreds of years earlier the long vanished Mimbres folk had buried their cache of pots in frightened precaution. Nub Riley jumped into the pit and pulled the man's poncho up to look at his wounds. Memories long surpressed of dark days in the Vietnamese highlands a generation earlier flushed out of his subconscious and made him feel momentarily woozy.

This poor bastard was done.

"Looks like he's been stabbed!" He yelled at the others. Garret was in the pit a moment later, followed by Meyer. Lucius Meyer's bravado was gone, replaced by a malignant fear blossoming in his gut. Not only was the bravado-stripped Meyer mentally shrinking as his structured and carefully manipulated world crumbled before his eyes, he almost seemed to be physically shrinking as well. The quietly astute and well read Peg Riley noticed it and a single word jumped to her mind. Homunculus.

"Fer Chrissake, stop the bleeding, will ya. Get somethin'. Do somethin'. The man's gonna bleed to death. The...." Garret looked up from Silenski and spoke in a hollow voice.

"He's gone, Meyer. The man is dead."

Alice Wong continued her loping, anxiety drenched way down the canyon. Driven by desperation she was, if not oblivious to the difficulty, at least physically able to manage the arduous going through the omnipresent rain and the mud. Was there any choice? There was no pursuit she could see. Then she saw them. Just ahead. The trucks! She stopped, ears and eyes alert that there might be people in the trucks. Nothing. She eased closer and looked first in the Forest Service pickup. _Damnit._ No keys. Then she ran to the Blazer. Keys! The keys were in it. With shaking fingers she tried to start it, failed, tried again. It took two minutes that seemed like hours, and the battery was starting to lose its power as she ground it without letup in her panic, but she finally got the Blazer started. The engine sputtered to life. She slammed the Blazer into gear and drove off down the muddy road, fearful to the last minute that someone was going to materialize out of the dark and grab at the door. Something did appear and grab at the door, at first scaring the hell out of her. A scream died on her lips when she realized it was only a branch on a mesquite tree hugging the roadbed.

"Man, that was _close_ ", she muttered to herself as she ground through the gears in her panicky haste to get free of the Canyon. "I'll _never_ come back to this place."

And she never did.

Colonel Redding kept struggling through the squalls of the late afternoon and on into the gloom of the stormy night, the rain pelting the mountain trail so hard that a dirty mist rose over the path, squeezing the colonel's visual horizon to a few opaque feet. The poor visibility didn't matter. Not yet. An intuitive inner beacon was guiding him, beckoning the colonel south, towards some malevolent presence that already was metastasizing. Even for a fit man like Redding it was tough going in the rain and slippery mud, thorny bushes tearing at him from the edges of the trail in the dark when he tried to avoid the slick middle of the trail. It wore Redding down until the hard going finally was too much for him. He had to find a place to set up a camp, have something to eat, rest himself. He searched out an old hikers' lean-to he knew of snuggled beneath the dripping branches of a brace of tall telephone-pole-straight ponderosa pines, crammed himself into a dry corner and settled in for the night. Sleep came easily to his weary body, but it was one full of strange and vivid dreams.

They were in Cherokee.

"That little girl couldn't a done this, could she?" Sierra asked after he had calmed down. "You don't think that little girl could'a killed Ski?" Sierra looked at Meyer helplessly. Things were going beyond his understanding, beyond his world. Mean streets he could handle. But this? On the surface, he wasn't so sure. Underneath the surface his lurking subconscious knew damn well that he couldn't.

"Maybe", Meyer said. "Maybe the little bitch got him from behind and he never seen it coming. Hell, I don't know. All I know is that the guy is frickin' dead and that makes two dead guys and I sure as fuck don't want to be number three."

A pallid shroud of silence drooped over the benumbed little band of pothunters as they stared at the bloody ponchos covering Tony Parelli and Silenski. Each of the would-be pothunters was lost in private dark thoughts. Those thoughts were mostly revolving around a single man. Skarp. Except for the two surviving hijackers, every one of them concluded in their various meandering avenues of deduction that Skarp was somewhere out there in the storm, had seen the hijacking, and was killing off the hijackers one by one. No one doubted for a moment that the stolidly menacing Skarp was capable of it. Still, much as the thought of killing might have theoretically repelled them, nobody said a thing to Meyer and Sierra about Skarp. Every one of them, each in their own peculiar way, felt deep down that the goddamn hijackers were getting just what they deserved. A sentiment which, in their former normal ordinary reality lives, they would not have believed themselves capable of. Most of them, anyhow.

### Escape

Silenski's death was a visceral car bomb. Emotional shock waves caromed within the consciousness of everyone in the clammy claustrophobic dig tent. In the shocked confusion Tom Bohach saw his chance. No one noticed him sidling close to the tent entrance. Not until he suddenly darted out the door and bolted downstream with his legs driven by the twin engines of youth and life-or-death survival, feet noisily slapping the wet ground with the fervor of an Olympic sprinter going for the gold. He was gone before anyone even thought about trying to stop him. Sierra shook off his surprise, his powerful body ready to charge off after Bohach, but Meyer motioned at him to stop.

"Forget it", he said nervously. "Let the asshole kid go. We're gonna get the fuck out of here while we still can." Meyer turned to glare at the others, nervously shifting his weight from foot to foot and looking confused and indecisive despite his words.

"OK, all of you. Lissen up. Each of you grab up a crate of them pots. We're going to carry the goddamn pots down to the water and take 'em across it." Sierra gestured menacingly with his weapon and took an ominous step forward, the combination of his fierce expression, hulking size and waving weapon castrating any thought of resistance.

"Move it!" He snarled. It was no empty threat. Sierra was jumpy, his unease physically reflected in awkward and jerky movements, making him look to Peg Riley like one of those sputtering old moving pictures from the earliest days of films. Meyer wasn't alone in wanting to get the hell out of this canyon. Sierra could handle himself in any physical confrontation he could imagine. That didn't scare him at all. But this was different. This wasn't somebody you could look in the eye and then put down with a punch or a kick or a head butt or a silenced bullet in the brain pan. This was fighting a shadow. A phantom. Like trying to grab smoke. He wanted out. And quick. While Sierra was waving his pistol at the group of pothunters, Meyer slipped behind him and unobtrusively stuck another pair of pain pills in his mouth and gulped them down, without even a drop of saliva from his cottony dry mouth to ease the pills' passage a the beginning of their chemical mission to blitz Lucius Meyer's brain and ease Lucius Meyer's pain.

The catholic band of pothunters shot somber sour looks at each other and at Meyer and Sierra. Their spirits were as deflated as a blown car tire on a lonely highway and their faces mirrored it. Peg thought Meyer's face looked like a shriveled Halloween pumpkin. In a different time and place it might have been amusing. But now it was just grotesque. There was no choice for them but to obey, wrenchingly grating though it was. Into Garret's head popped the odd surreal thought that this was like some classic old film noir movie. Maybe kind of like that 40's flick _The Treasure of the Sierra Madre_ and that surly looking guy Humphrey Bogart. But this was sure as hell no movie. This was _real._ Altogether too goddamned real. _Jesus_! How in the hell had he managed to get himself in such a mess? And how in the hell would he ever get himself out of it? Gloomy thoughts flooded Jim Garret's brain. Like oil floating on water, one thought rose above the others and stayed there. No way out, he kept thinking. There's just no way out of this one _._

They were screwed.

With a dejected shuffling slowness they went over, one by one, each in reluctant turn, to bend down and hoist up a crate of the Mimbres pots. Sierra went out of the tent first, cautiously, crouching low, tensely brandishing his pistol, as the line of people staggered out of the shelter under the excavation tent into the howling wind, slashing rain and slimy earth of the trail. Meyer, the pistol he'd taken from Silenski's corpse clutched tightly in a shaking hand and eyes darting nervously in all directions, came out last. He was already starting to tweak on the extra pain pills. The file of people, struggling under the weight of the crates of pots and slipping and sliding on the muddy path between the towering sycamores and nasty-thorned bushes and dwarf mesquites of this part of the canyon, was almost to the crossing when Sierra suddenly stopped and stared in astonishment into the rain-driven murk. One by one the others stopped, some slipping in the mud at the suddenness of the halt, and then saw what Sierra was looking at. Tom Bohach was running at them like an apparition bursting out of the gloom, puffing hard and looking terrified. He didn't try to avoid or escape them. Something had scared the kid a lot more than the hijackers did. And that frightened the hell out of every single of the people in the sodden file of people, hijackers and hijacked alike.

" _The bridge_!" He gasped. "It's down!" While the others tried to digest the meaning of that, Bohach turned and motioned at the file of people to follow him to the spot at the wash where Reiser had rigged up the wire bridge bosun's chair. As they reached it, the knot of drenched dispirited pothunters saw what the frightened youth had seen moments earlier. The wire was down, all right. Reiser exploded out of his plodding dejected lethargy, plunked down the heavy crate he was carrying and pushed to the front of the ragged line of people in their muddy dark rain-slashed ponchos

"Somebody did this", he said after staring at the wires lying just out of reach in the water. "Sure as hell. Those fasteners didn't come undone by themselves." He turned to face the others. "Somebody did this _intentionally_." The fear that had been paying increasingly frequent visits on Lucius Meyer's face now took up a permanent residency. He was really tweaking now. A few feet behind him, Benning Goman's eye commenced the uncontrollable twitching that beset him when he was very agitated. But it was Meyer who was vocal.

"Then how the fuck are we gonna get out of here?" Meyer said in a wavering voice, his body movements increasingly spasmodic, talking to no one in particular and not really expecting anyone to have an answer for him. Tom Bohach shuffled forward, his face looking sallow even in the rain and darkness.

"The waterfall", he said timidly. Meyer turned to stare dumbly at the youth.

"The waterfall?" He repeated, confused. Reiser soughed and shrugged. He'd kept the knowledge of the waterfall to himself. It was a trump card. A hedge against the unforeseen. No more. They needed to get the hell out of this place. He stepped forward between the two, his face turned towards Meyer, his expression determined and unapologetic.

"Yes", Reiser said in a low voice. "The waterfall." Then he very quickly and concisely told Meyer and the stunned others about the hidden rocky ledge beneath the waterfall at the head of the canyon. Before he finished a lynch mob mentality was brewing and it wouldn't have taken much for them to jump over the edge into action. _Why had this son of a bitch kept this a secret?_ Reiser deftly defused the ugly mood. He plucked up his crate of pots, wheeled and headed back upstream towards the waterfall.

"Let's go", he said, his voice trailing behind him as trudged away. "There's no time to waste." The others exchanged expressions ranging from angry to confused to a beaten down indifference. One by one they fell in behind him. Sierra suddenly surged into movement and trotted to get in the front of the bedraggled column, his pistol still pointed menacingly straight ahead. His hand was shaking. Just a little. At first.

Reiser, Nub and Peg Riley, Garret, Heather Sosa, Goman, all plodded along through the mud with their crates of ancient pots as precious as the coveted element of pure gold, Sierra creeping warily in front and Meyer in the rear constantly chiding them for not moving fast enough. Though in a jittery hurry to get past the waterfall and safely to the trucks, and starting to tweak heavily on a borderline overdose of pain pills, the rapacious Meyer still didn't forget to order a halt at the excavation tent and tell Tom Bohach to pick up one of the heavy Mimbres crates and lug it along with the others. Then they continued laboring through the muck. They had plodded wearily halfway to the beckoning escape path beneath the waterfall when Sierra came to another sudden stop, so abrupt that the person right behind, Max Reiser, ran into him with his burdensome crate of Mimbres pots. Sierra stood frozen in place, as immobile as the rock face next to them. Less than ten feet ahead of the big man a still dark form lay supine in the mud along the edge of the canyon wall. Each crate burdened pothunter, in turn when they spotted what Sierra saw, stopped dead in their tracks. The wind screamed in mounting fury.

_"Christ!"_ Sierra uttered when he saw the body. "Not another one!" Pausing only long enough to drop his crate of Mimbres pots lightly onto the soaked ground of the trail, Garret pushed by him and knelt down beside the body, pulling gently at the folds of the poncho's head covering to peer at the face inside. Ice cold fingers of fear wrapped around his spine when he recognized who it was. Garret rose and turned, shaken, to face the others who had bunched up behind Sierra.

"It's Skarp", he gasped, trying to hold off the horror inside him that was fighting to break loose.

"His throat's been cut."

Paralysis gripped the knot of tired pothunters as they stood mutely staring down at Skarp's inert form. He was so still. So very, very still. In the dim mist rising off the ground from the pounding rain he looked like a bag of clothes someone carelessly dumped on the muddy earth. Foreboding surged through their minds in ominous congruency with the debris filled storm water roaring by in the streambed. With baleful faces hidden from view of each other by the swaddling folds of their ponchos, those whose minds weren't paralyzed by fear timorously considered their rapidly vanishing options. Whoever killed Skarp was somewhere ahead. Between them and the waterfall. Or on the other side of the waterfall. Waiting. Even those who hadn't actually seen the narrow ledge behind the waterfall sensed what it meant. Their escape that way was cut off. Even the rock solid veteran ranger Max Reiser was unnerved. He put it in words.

"Gotta go back", he said, trying hard to maintain his calm. "We'll never get past the waterfall. That narrow ledge is a perfect spot for an ambush." The others stood clustered in a tight group, faces pale and drawn, their expressions hidden from each other by the hoods of their rain ponchos. With wildly beating hearts, each and every one of them grasped with final crystalline clarity that they might not make it out of this murderous canyon alive. More than one of them began to silently beseech the God of their understanding--or, more often, lack of understanding--for salvation.

"There's only one way out of here now", Reiser said as they stood, stunned and ashen-faced, in the rain near Skarp's body. "We have to go back. Over the water." The others blinked in confusion. Over the water? Reiser continued. "It's a lot more open, but we'll still have to watch out for an ambush." The others looked at him in silent incredulity. But...but.....how?

"We'll have to fish out the line and reattach it to the trees", Reiser quickly went on, recognizing the confusion on their faces and having to yell so he could be heard over the roaring stream. "It'll be difficult", he added, "but it's doable. He glanced around at the anxious faces all hanging on his words as though he were a somber antediluvian prophet pointing the way to salvation. "Let's get at it." No one said a word. With a glum numbed acceptance they untangled from their tight protective cluster into a jagged semblance of a linear file, did a clumsy about turn, both Heather and Bohach slipping and tumbling onto the muddy ground in their numb, frightened haste, and began to plod back down the canyon in the mist and mud.

As they retraced their steps back towards the Mimbres dig site, fat raindrops that seemed as big and as hard as marbles dripped and dribbled on them incessantly from the big toothed leaves of the towering cottonwoods and sycamores crowding the steam banks. Reiser now took the lead. Sierra followed at the rear, backing down the trail in a hunched crouch with his pistol pointing nervously upstream. The huge hulking man was frightened. An unheard of emotion for a hardened veteran street warrior like him. Until now. Even Sierra himself wouldn't deny it. He was flat out scared stiff. But that also meant his senses were intensely sharpened as his endocrine system geared up to face imminent life-or-death danger. His finger hovered inside the trigger guard of his pistol and then dropped down to settle firmly on the trigger itself. Sierra was ready to kill. And right now he didn't much give a damn who or what.

Most of the pothunters were taken aback when Reiser popped out of his taciturn cocoon on the fringe of events and quietly but authoritatively took charge. It really wasn't so strange. Max Reiser had already dealt with a handful of emergencies in the mountains. The nondescript little gray man transformed before their eyes and took on a whole different face, that of a man of practiced action, of competence and authority. Size was irrelevant. Competence _was_ relevant. His voice came out strong and ominously serious after they got back to the dig tent and sluggishly stopped, dropping down their burdensome crates of Mimbres pots without a second thought. No one noticed that water had started to seep under the untended tent flaps and in places the previously dry ground was growing slick. Nor did they pay much attention to the pots. Not anymore. The pots were already sliding over the far edge of their collective concentration. The pecuniary dream of the Mimbres vessels and the fortune the pots promised was replaced by a far different, monumentally far more important thought. Survival. Reiser directly addressed the imperative that was now residing full blown in the front of everyone's mind. He stood amidst them, hand on his hips, jaws set hard in determination.

"There is a lunatic somewhere out there. He's going to kill us all one by one. I don't know who he is. I don't know why he's doing this. All I know is that we'd goddamn well better drop our squabbles and start cooperating or none of us is going to make it out of here alive." Reiser went on, switching to a practical level and the details of how they could make their escape. He asked if anyone had any heavy rope. Riley answered that he had a couple of hundred foot coils of braided rope among the gear he'd brought along for the dig. Reiser told him to go find it, and he'd damn well better be cautious when he went outside the tent into the unknown. Nub quickly slipped outside and Peg Riley's heart fluttered in apprehension as she watched him disappear under the tent flap into the misty gloom of the canyon.

While Riley was searching out the rope, Reiser spelled out the specifics of his plan. Everyone except Sierra sat down heavily on a crate of pots to listen with solemn faces. Sierra stayed close to the tent entrance, pistol held ready in his meaty hand. On the outside he seemed to have calmed down some, but he was inwardly jumpy. One of his hands was very noticeably shaking. Peg Riley noticed it and concluded with her own unease that if a huge tough guy like Sierra, who had a gun, was afraid, then the rest of them should be downright terrified. Dispirited, she turned to listen to Max Reiser.

There were at least two, maybe three, places where a tree limb reached well out over Dancer Canyon's roiling wash, Reiser explained in a voice much calmer than he really felt inside. The others listened disconsolately as they sat on the most expensive and most improbable seats they would ever have in their entire lives, the clunky crates of priceless old pots from the vanished Mimbres world. Max said that one of the pothunters would have to climb a tree and tie the rope to an overhanging branch. Then someone among them, whoever was athletic and agile enough, would take a running jump and use the rope to swing over the wash to the far bank and pull the wires out of the water. Then they would hook the wire bridge up again and make their way out to the trucks.

"But what about that son of a bitch out there with the knife?" Meyer jumpily interjected. "He ain't just gonna sit around and watch while we do this." Reiser had thought about that, too. The killer was probably still waiting for them to try to make it across under the waterfall, unaware for now that they were going to try to restring the bridge across the water downstream. He put it bluntly. There was no other way.

"Somebody is going to have to go to the waterfall, grab his attention and hold it while the rest of us get across the wash." A stunned silence followed as the full impact of Reiser's words hit them. The blood drained out of their faces. They looked like ghosts. Just a illusory passing image in the dim light? Maybe. Or maybe a precognitive glimpse into the future. They well might be ghosts themselves. And soon. Ghosts to forever haunt Dancer Canyon. Not that they would be the first. Reiser and Jim Garret and Heather Sosa and even Nub Riley knew that there were others already there. Violent death was an ancient and too often retold story in Dancer Canyon. A hundred years earlier, and less than fifty feet from where they stood, a gaggle of drunk vigilantes from Tombstone strung up a young drifter on a fat limb of one of the giant sycamores of the canyon. They thought he was a horse thief. It turned out that he was innocent. Innocent. Exonerated.

But still dead.

"Good God, man! That's suicide!" Goman spit out, speaking for the first time since Skarp's corpse was found outside in the rain and the muck. "Who's going to be foolish enough to volunteer to do that?" He looked around at the others. There was only silence. All gazed fixedly at the ground, avoiding eye contact with Reiser. No one volunteered. Then a voice spoke up. A monotone of a voice. A voice with a fatalistic determination.

"I will." Everyone's head snapped around to look at Jim Garret. "It was me that got everybody in this mess in the first place. I figure it's up to me to get us all out." Not a word was raised in objection, though a couple of minutes later Riley tried to talk Garret out of it when he came back inside the tent lugging the coils of rope Reiser asked him to retrieve. Nub knew it wouldn't do any good. Once Jim Garret made up his mind on something, trying to change it was like trying to break up concrete with your bare hands. Impossible. And Riley ran smack into the same rock of Garret stubbornness when he tried to talk Jim into letting him go along with him. No way. Jim knew the group needed Nub's solid presence a lot more than he did. Nub knew he was right.

Though one or two of them gave it a fleeting moment of deliberation, no one bothered to pick up any of the crates of the so recently coveted Mimbres pottery. They silently filed out of the tent and slogged through the slashing rain downstream to where a towering sycamore's thick limbed branches arched part way over the rushing waters. There was no discussion or argument over who was going to make the athletic leap over the water. With a peculiar mixture of disdain and macho arrogance, Sierra insisted--in fact, _demanded_ \--that he do it. Tom Bohach, with the loose limbed dexterous agility of youth, scrambled up the tree and tied the thick braided rope over a two foot thick sycamore limb. Sierra, who had been a junior college champion hurdler and long jumper before being booted out of school for drug use and allegations of statutory rape, was adamant on making the jump. He was certain he was the only one who could make it. And he probably was.

While Tom Bohach was climbing the big shaggy barked sycamore overhanging the wash, Jim Garret had already left the camp and started up the canyon towards the waterfall. Before he left he gathered up an armful of wet twigs from the forest floor outside the tent and bound them together using twine Goman had brought to tie up his cartons of pots. With Silenski's poncho pulled over the framework of twigs, in the dark and the rain, the killer might be fooled just long enough for Garret to either shoot him or drive him away. It had taken a long and heated argument but he finally wore down Meyer enough to convince him to give Garret Silenski's gun. Meyer was loathe to part with the gun, and the lethal power it conferred on its owner, but Garret finally got through to him.

"Listen, Meyer", Garret snarled in angry finality, patience and diplomacy and logic abandoned as being hopeless with the obdurate Meyer. "You only have two choices. Either give me the goddamn gun or _you_ go up to the waterfall."

Meyer gave him the gun.

Sierra went through the old rituals burned into his muscle memory from his junior college days as a track star. He pranced back and forth, his graceful athletic movements somehow making Goman think of his frisky blue ribbon Arabian stallion, warming up, repeatedly pulling on the rope and testing the strength of the limb. Finally he tried a couple of practice runs, stopping before he got to the edge of the wash. Meyer stood watching him, his fingers unconsciously doing nervous drum rolls in the air.

"Get on with it, fer Chrissake", Meyer yelled peevishly at him. Sierra shot him a hard look that Meyer wasn't used to getting from his employees. The big black man said nothing. The look was enough. Meyer might have fat bank accounts all over southern California, but it was Sierra's strength and agility that was going to save their asses in this isolated canyon. Sierra gave Meyer one more piercing stare, then pulled the rope back and began his running approach to the wash. The big man's muscular legs pushed off with all their coiled strength when he hit the edge of the wash and he pulled with all the raw power in his arms on the rope to swing him over the wash. His body arched over it as the others watched spellbound. Trouble. He didn't make it. The heavy rope didn't swing as easily as Sierra had thought it would. The farthest extent of his arching trajectory over the wash fell short of the far bank by nearly three feet. He swung back over the wash in the opposite direction and continued to swing back and forth, a bulky human pendulum, until his movement gradually slowed and then stopped. The others gaped at him at him in astonishment. Sierra was dangling on the rope just inches above the raging waters of Dancer Canyon wash.

And he was laughing.

Rifle locked into the steel grip of his calloused outdoorsman's hands, Diablo slipped out of the cave without reopening the weapons locker. With his almost noiseless furtive movements, and enshrouded in a dark rain poncho, Maria thought he looked like a demon straight from Hell. And, to her mind at least, that is exactly what he was. As soon as he vanished through the cave entrance Maria plunged into a frantic grim quandary. Of life and death. And not just hers. She was convinced to the deepest core of perceptive being that the crazy bastard had moved into the lethal stage of whatever the lunatic scheme was he'd cooked up in his psychotic delusions. The madman was out stalking and killing people. Killing people! Maria! The crazy bastards is killing people. What could you do to stop him? What should you do to stop him? What _will_ you do to stop him? Her eyes slid around the gloomy interior of the cave, the eerily glowing oak kindled fire, the filthy bedroll beside the fire pit, the stacks of stolen food, the rancid garbage dump in the rear. Then her gaze came to rest on the weapons locker.

And stayed there.

Garret's approach slowed to a timorous half crouch as he approached the waterfall. He was pretty sure Reiser was right in thinking that the mysterious murderous bastard had set up an ambush. The last hundred feet he went painfully on his hands and knees over the pebbly trail, pushing the twig and twine dummy in Silenski's poncho ahead of him. The muck of the trail squished beneath him and coated his lower body with a chocolate brown mud that oddly made him think of the fudge his mother used to make for him on his birthday. _Might not be any more birthdays, Jim._ Garret pushed that thought, along with all the other extraneous mental intruders, out of his mind to singularly concentrate on what lay ahead of him. He could already hear the roar of the waterfall over the howling storm.

Finally. He was almost to the hurtling watery edge of the waterfall and the lip of the thirty inch wide ledge underneath it. He stretched out prostrate, pushing himself in the muck and making himself as flat as he could, and began to push the dummy onto the ledge under the thunderous cascade of spurting storm water.

A rapid fire burst of rifle shots rang out from the far side.

### Sierra

Though both Meyer and Heather Sosa panicked and crumbled into trembling despair, Sierra did not. This was his element. A world where veteran athleticism prevailed. He was a strong man with iron in his biceps, still in his late prime, and he easily climbed the rope to the tree limb and slid onto the thick branch. He grabbed the rope and pulled it behind him as he clambered back to the edge of the wash and dropped down lightly on the bank. Meyer's mouth dropped open in amazement when he looked at Sierra's face. The big man was still grinning.

"Now I know how to do it", he said confidently.

Garret moaned, jerked the dummy back and tipped it over. He lay motionlessly on the narrow path, huddled against the rocks in a tiny niche at the side of the canyon where it entered the ledge, pressing so hard against the sharp rocks that they punctured the skin on his forearm. He ignored it. His right arm was extended, the pistol in his hand pointed at the ledge. If the man showed himself, Garret would have a clean shot at him. He lay in the mud, the wind and rain whipping his face. Waiting. Waiting. And, for the first time in a very, very long while.

Jim Garret was praying.

### Zonus

Harry and Deborah Zonus were one of the few families to live within the boundaries of this chunk of the sprawling Coronado National Forest. Zonus' ancestors had settled the place in the 1880's and Zonus' well connected family managed to get their property grandfathered when the Forest Service took over the land all around them. The Zonuses used the same access road that the Forest Service and Park Service used, and came up to the highway barrier Max Reiser set up earlier. Zonus was driving, faster than he probably should have, in a hurry to get home and out of the rain. He pulled around the Forest Service barrier and sped off onto the dark, rain slick highway. Debbie Zonus was hoping that the winds hadn't knocked out their electricity. Harry Zonus' mind was on something much more directly urgent. He needed to use the bathroom.

And soon.

### Chapter 10

### Sierra

Sierra grasped what wasn't quite so obvious to the others who looked at him and saw a powerful mass of muscles. True. He was very strong. But there still was not enough power in Sierra's muscles to build the momentum he needed to swing over the wash to land on the other side. He couldn't do it by himself. He had to have help, and he hurriedly explained to the others what he thought they had to do. Both Riley and Reiser took lengths of the thick rope they'd cut to fashion the line over the tree limb and tied one end to their waists, the other to a sturdy willow trunk on the stream bank. The next time Sierra tried to hurtle the wash, the two men would add their strength, grabbing his legs and running with him until he pushed off. The hulking former college jock had it right. He might have been a big hulking athlete, but he wasn't a dumb one. Not only could he jump high, he also scored high on IQ tests. It was his personal life, not his intelligence, that got him booted out of college and into the subterranean world inhabited by the likes of Julius Meyer. Sierra calculated that the extra push of the other two men as he jumped was enough for him to arch past the far bank and leap safely to the ground.

Sierra was also right in figuring that in order to get enough strength into the push, the men would come dangerously close to the edge of the wash. As Sierra went soaring over the wash, with the added boost of Reiser and Riley pushing him to the wash's rim, the two men tumbled over the edge and fell into the water. Reiser was able to pull himself out with the rope, but Riley went in deeper and the force of the current was so strong he couldn't pull himself free of it. He was trapped. And every bit as frightened as the wild creatures he'd seen caught in the snares he set along the river in the distant days of his boyhood. The other four people, joined by Reiser after he climbed shivering out of the cold water, grabbed the rope and grunted with the exertion of fighting against the plunging force of the watery avalanche as they struggled to pull a drenched and battered Nub Riley up the muddy bank to safety. Across the wash Sierra stood spread legged on the bank, his hands cockily on his hips.

The grin was back on his face, his fists raised high in hubristic triumph. He'd done it.

By God, he'd done it!

### Garret

Garret lost track of time. Or maybe he slipped through some cosmic membrane into another dimension where the moment was stretched out with an Einstein rubber band of time and slowed down. Even the rain and the wind. Still there. But somehow moving slower even while not losing the fury of their intensity. How long had he been there? He had no idea. God, it seemed an eternity, but he knew it couldn't have been more than a slim handful of minutes. He wasn't so much frightened as he was resigned. There'd been an aura of doom about this goddamn dig from the beginning. An evil presence was in Dancer Canyon and it had transmuted from a vaguely threatening extrasensory inkling to the directly palpable menace in the person of the murdering son of bitch on the far side of the thundering waterfall, whoever---or _whatever_ \--he was. He didn't know what the hell was going on. Not what, not why, not even who. But Garret was convinced, deep down in that part of him who heard ancient voices in the wind and smelled the faint campfire smoke from long vanished peoples, that he would never leave the canyon alive. And, much to his own utter incredulity knew that it was all right. _It's OK, Jim,_ he thought.

He was ready to die.

The noise from the waterfall was deafening . He tried it anyway. Garret moaned loudly and jerked the prostrate dummy. He could barely hear the rifle shot in the din of the falls. But he clearly saw the pinpoint of flame from the weapon just on the other side of the ledge. The ledge under the waterfall was clouded by mist, but the roaring wall of water over the ledge blocked the blinding fury of the storm. A gust of wind blew away the opaque mist and Garret could see all the way across the ledge to the other side. The shot came from less than twenty feet away. Garret emptied his semi automatic pistol at where the spot of light had been, rolled to the side to avoid any return fire, and frantically reached into the folds of his poncho to pull out the spare clip Meyer had grudgingly given up. Hands quivering, Jim Garret fumbled with the clip, slammed it into the automatic and caught a fold of skin in the weapon as he pulled back the slide to chamber a round. His hand started bleeding, but he ignored it. The automatic held in trembling hands pointed across the ledge, he lay and waited. But there was nothing.

Only the roar of the waterfall.

Alice

Alice Wong raced towards the first of the two stream crossings leading to the glistening rain slicked blacktop road that arrowed south through open grasslands from Arizona State Highway 92 towards the Mexican border. Before reaching the border the road turned west and climbed into the beginnings of the montane forest and the Park Service's Coronado National Monument. The road would be her salvation. When their college buddy drove them up to the trailhead at the National Monument two days earlier, she saw houses along the road. There were people living along that road and that meant help. Help for her. And help for poor Tom back in the canyon. She prayed he was all right and help would come in time.

She roared up to the edge of the wash, floored the Blazer and slid through to the other side. There was plenty of mud but very little water. The second and final crossing lay just ahead. Sensing escape just ahead, confident from the easy passage over the first wash, she roared on down the slick ranch road, sideswiping a thorny white thorn acacia bordering the road and hardly noticed the thorny branches loudly scratching the passenger side of the Blazer. Her relief at making it so easily through the first crossing vanished as soon as she plunged into the second one. This one was much different. Lethally different. The raging fickle waters in the canyon above had eroded through the stream bank a second time and burst through into another ancient channel. Storm runoff was surging through the final crossing and filling it up with jaw dropping frightening rapidity. Alice was too late by the merest of margins. One, perhaps two. but certainly less than three hundred of her own rapid heartbeats earlier and she would have made it through. But she didn't make it.

The Blazer stopped as though they'd slammed into a liquid wall of cement when she hit the water in the second crossing. The Chevy sputtered and coughed and then the rising water shorted out the electric system and the Blazer died on her altogether. She tried for a few panicky moments to get it started, but the pull of the current on the truck was already pushing the Chevy downstream. Alice knew she had to get out of the Blazer, and quick. She'd seen plenty of news stories over the years about vehicles being swept away by flash floods in Arizona's tumultuous monsoon season.

She climbed out the window onto the hood and edged her way as close as she could on the Blazer's bonnet to the far side of the tumbling waters of the wash. She wasn't sure she could make the jump. Then the Blazer jerked once, twice, a third time, from the power of the rushing stream, and she could feel it starting to yield to the inexorable twin forces of gravity and the weight of the huge volume of water. In a burst of adrenaline stoked strength far beyond anything she had never felt before, Alice launched herself off the Blazer's hood just as it started to slip downstream. She landed a good two feet beyond the water's edge and hit the ground running. As the truck started to slip down the wash behind her, creaking and scraping eerily like some kind of sapient dying mechanical creature, she ran in her adrenalin fueled desperation for the nearby paved road and the help that she fervently prayed had to be not far away. The road wasn't far. In a few minutes she puffed out of the muddy old ranch road onto the blacktop and stopped to catch her breath as she looked in both directions. Less than a mile down the road the Zonuses were speeding down the dark slick highway in their hurry to get home. Alice saw the car's headlights in the distance.

A glimmering of hope lit up her battered spirit.

Meyer dropped to a crouch on the bank of the wash, Sierra's pistol held stiffly in his hands. Meyer had demanded Sierra hand over the pistol out of fear the man's leap over the plunging waters of the stream might end in fatal disaster and leave the others without a weapon. Sierra looked at him askance. Give this guy his weapon? No way.

"I think we're all safer if I have the pistol, Mr. Meyer", he said, tightroping his way over the line between boss and hired man. Sierra remained unconvinced until Meyer used his invariably successful trump card. Money. He tripled what he had initially agreed to pay Sierra and that bought him temporary custody of a shiny Swiss officer's Sig P220 9mm and a pair of extra magazines. Meyer didn't know enough about guns to remark on the unusual weapon. Reiser did, wondered about it a little, but considered it irrelevant to the urgency of the moment. Reiser stood next to Meyer in the pounding rain, yelling directions over the deafening hurtling stream at the muscular big man on the far bank. Everyone had their eyes on where the unseen ends of the wires were swallowed up by the surging water and watched anxiously as Sierra, under Reiser's hollered directions, worked at getting the bosun's chair wire bridge back up.

With his powerful biceps flexing mightily unseen under his rain poncho, Sierra pulled the loose wires from the water, an effort made much more difficult by the weight of the bosun's chair still attached to the wires and the chair not yielding easily to being resurrected from its watery grave. Once free of the water, again at Reiser's urging, Sierra checked over the fasteners and the chair for damage. There was none that Sierra could see. Then he wrapped the loose ends around a medium sized chunk of rock, as Reiser yelled at him to do over the tumult of the noisy rushing water. Next he would use his powerful muscles again to toss the rock and the wires across the water to where the others could grab them and refasten them either to the thick trunk of the huge-limbed sycamore they'd used to swing over the wash or to the chunky fat willow crowding next to it. The wire bridge would be functioning again in just a few more tense minutes. Like Alice, far off on the Coronado access road, a glimmering of hope rose in their battered spirits.

They just might make it after all.

A few dozen miles west of the illegal dig in Dancer Canyon the monster weather front stalled and came to a screeching meteorological halt smack on top of southeastern Arizona. In movement. Not in intensity. Heavy rain continued to fall. And fall. And fall, making one than one bemused local think the storm gods had pulled the drain plug on the cosmic bathtub. No one could remember such heavy driving rains, nor of them lasting anywhere near so long. Neighborhood after neighborhood, town after town, ranch after ranch, was cut off and isolated by the rising waters. Phone lines and power lines were going down in huge numbers and panic slowly spread its insidious spine-grasping tentacles among much of the population. This, it was now obvious even to the thickest of thick headed skulls, was a heck of a lot more than just a storm. This wasn't just the storm of the century. Probably not even the storm of the last millennium of ten centuries.

This was a genuine bona fide Noah-get-your-Ark waterborne cataclysm.

Garret give it a damn good try. And his ruse nearly succeeded. His bullets barely missed Diablo, one by less than an inch. One of them sprayed Diablo's face with rock chips and opened a gash over his eye. Diablo was momentarily stunned. But his wild survival instinct kicked in and he rebounded almost immediately, becoming as lucidly alert and wary as the hidden puma silently watching them from the crags overhead. He hadn't expected this. A foe worthy of him? He was facing a cunning enemy on the other side of the misty veiled waterfall. Diablo squeezed himself as far as he could into the protective cover of the canyon's rock wall and peered into the gloom. The nerve fibers in his lean athletic body raced from head to toe in tingling excitement.

The cold eyed killer pondered it hardly more than a minute. Always the sly and precautionary warrior, he had prudently thought ahead. He knew how to outwit the unseen man on the other side of the waterfall. Climb the slippery rocks of the canyon to the head of the falls, cross over above and come down the rocks behind whoever was on the far side of the ledge. So long as he was very stealthy in his approach, which he was arrogantly certain he was supremely good at doing, he was sure he would catch the man by surprise. Had he not once crept up on a big eared buck mule deer and got close enough to smack it on the rump before the creature was aware he was there? It was one of the very few times when genuine laughter escaped Diablo's sepulchral lips.

Diablo backed off from the ledge and began to silently scale the rock wall, his hands and feet carefully searching out solid purchases in the fissures and jutting rocks of the slippery canyon wall. A few feet up he suddenly stopped. _Wait!_ This was taking a lot of time. Maybe _too_ much time. Could that be what they wanted? Was this a trick? He reversed his climb, lightly jumped to the canyon floor and stood staring down the canyon at where the camp lay hidden from view in the trees and the pounding storm. If they were clever enough to nearly trap him here, what else might they have planned? Diablo slowly backed away from the ledge under the waterfall. He raised his rifle and fired three quick shots at where he thought the unseen man lay hidden. Then he turned and headed down the canyon. After he had traveled a short distance he stopped to look behind him for signs of any pursuit. Nothing.

He began to run.

### Maria

Diablo had stockpiled a sizeable percentage of a cord of wood, mostly manageable broken chunks of dead limbs from nearby oaks and pines, against just such a contingency as this siege of chilly rain and wind, and Maria kept the fire well stoked. She sat close to the warmth of the fire, unable to keep her eyes from continually staring at the weapons case. The gnawing fear was shredding her viscera. Diablo's raid was nearing its end. Would he really want to take her along with him when he fled? And then she thought of the people in the camp below. She didn't know who they were, why they were there, how many of them there were. She didn't know how many Diablo had killed, how many more he would kill. But maybe she could save at least some of them. She turned her eyes to look at the weapons case in the corner of the cave. Her ordeal had taken its emotional toll. Even a bold and intrepid soul like Maria Alarcon could only take so much. She vacillated. Should she take the chance? Should she break open the locker? She sat cross legged, transfixed, staring over the fire at the dull gray weapons locker. It was only ten feet from her.

It might as well have been ten miles.

Sierra finally fastened the wires around a fat rock twice the size of his huge fist. Max Reiser stood on the far bank, waiting for him to throw it.

"Come on, Sierra!" Meyer yelled at him from his crouching position near Reiser. "Quit foolin' with the frickin' wires and get 'em across here." Sierra growled something in reply from across the water. His words were lost in the roar of the water. And that probably was just as well, Reiser thought. They didn't need any more strutting egos bouncing off each other. Things were far too damned serious for any more of this macho crap.

"Go head and throw it", Reiser called out in a loud, reassuring voice. "We're not going to lose the wires even if the rock comes loose. Come on now, lad. Throw the rock." Sierra stood up and cradled in this big hands the heavy chunk of rhyolite with the wires wrapped around it. He swung his arms back and hopped up to the stream's bank looking just like he did back in his college days when he put the shot and won nearly every conference meet and a goodly percentage of the regional ones. But he didn't throw the rock. As with the swing across the wash earlier, he was testing his stride, psyching himself up. The big man moved back and began the ritual all over again. Meyer stood up and threw his arms into the air in exasperation.

"Why the goddamn hell does he always have to be so goddamn fuckin' dramatic about everything?" He snapped. "Come on, Sierra! Throw the goddamn rock!" Sierra wound up again and began his approach. As he reached the bank the big man's powerful body strained to throw the rock across the wash. Just as he reached the edge of the wash Diablo squeezed the trigger on his stolen Colt ArmaLite rifle from behind a boulder thirty yards away. The rock, with the wires attached and Sierra still holding it tightly in his strong hands, all tumbled into the wild waters of the stream. In a horrific twinkling Sierra was swept away by the raging flood, his voice stilled forever. Diablo's bullet had slammed into the back of Sierra's head and tore into his brain.

He was already dead when he hit the water.

Garret lay still for what seemed a long time after the rifle shots from across the ledge splattered off the rocks over his head. Was the phantom still lurking on the other side? Had he gone? Worse. Was he climbing the rocks to try to come down behind Garret? Then it gradually began to dawn on him that the shots might have been a ploy to hold him in place. Had the man intuited what they were doing and gone down the canyon? Garret had no way of knowing but one. Much as the thought churned his insides, he knew there was no choice.

He had to try crossing the ledge.

"Goddamnit, Harry", Debbie Zonus said in the exasperated waspish tone she used when her husband was really pissing her off. "Will you slow down for Christ's sake! You're going to end up killing us. We're only a few miles from home. Now slow down!"

"I ever kill us yet?" Harry replied testily. "How many times I kill you with my driving? Huh? Huh? Now just shut up and let me do the driving. We'll be home in just a few more minutes."

"Now, listen to me, Harry Zonus", his wife countered just as heatedly. "I...."

Alice Wong was standing at the side of the road, frantically waving her arms. As the car approached closer it didn't slow down at all.

" _Oh, God!_ " She moaned desperately. "Are they going to be paranoid and not stop?" She jumped out into the middle of the road and began to jump up and down, waving her arms wildly. The Zonuses were lost in their habitual bickering, glaring at each other. Their concentration was riveted on their ritual marital combat and not on the road.

They didn't see the slender dark form on the rain splattered blacktop road.

Diablo snapped off two more quick shots at the horrified people on the far bank of the wash as they shook off the shock of Sierra's death and took off running back toward the dig site. He missed. One bullet smacked into a sycamore trunk that probably saved Heather Sosa's life as she ran in terror behind it. The other missed Nub Riley by inches and ricocheted zinging off a granite boulder. No matter. Diablo accomplished what he wanted. To plunge them into the panic that seized them and sent them fleeing up the trail towards the excavation tent. As soon as they were gone from sight, Diablo crept to the place where the wire crossing was, warily watching the far bank on the chance that someone with a weapon might lay hidden there, unfastened the wires on his side of the wash and threw them into the water. The bridge was gone. Permanently. Like Sierra's body a few moments earlier, the wires were instantly swallowed by the raging stream. Diablo turned and began to make his way back up the canyon towards the waterfall. His hurried walk became a trot that became a lope. And then, with a savage grunt, he again broke into a run, one energized by the hunter's glandular rush of the kill just made.

And those soon to come.

The blood was pounding in Jim Garret's head. An ache blossomed behind his eyes that made him feel as though his eyeballs were bulging out of their sockets. Arteries wide open in stress, his face florid, carotids racing, he tensely pushed the dummy ahead of him. His hands wouldn't stop shaking as he crawled out onto the ledge. He was still praying, and he prayed all the way across the ledge under the thundering falling water. Garret was sure he'd never make it. He was surprised when he did. Surprised and stunned and relieved. But also chillingly aware that this was likely was a long goddamn way from being over. It wasn't.

Garret's jangled nerves didn't get a chance to calm down. As he staggered to his feet and was about to head down the path on the opposite bank Diablo came pounding up the trail towards him. Garret dropped to a crouch and fired three rounds. Diablo didn't return the fire. He did an abrupt loose limbed reversal in mid stride and set off running hard back in the direction he'd come from. This time Garret scored a hit. One of the bullets tore through Diablo's poncho and deflected off the outer edge of one of his ribs, putting a hairline crack in it and ripping off a chunk of skin. Garret's dogged persistence sent Diablo into a rage, but not so much that he was going to squander the opportunities of this raid by engaging in singular combat with this one dogged enemy. He would deal with him later.

And when he did it would not be over quickly.

Heedful of the precautionary lessons of the wide ranging Apaches of the old days, Diablo always took care never to get himself cornered in a place where there was no alternate escape route. This was no exception. His precautious sharp eye noticed the rope left hanging over the stream where Sierra had swung himself across to his eventual doom. The lean long legged Diablo set out at a dead run back to the same spot, stopped to study it for only the briefest of calculating moments, then slung the rifle onto his shoulder and moved back far enough to get a running start.

The figure of Diablo a distant blur running in the rainy murk ahead, Jim Garret came doggedly downstream, moving as fast as he dared while still keeping to a wary caution. Killing the son of a bitch was locked into Garret's consciousness with an obsession blocking out everything else, even the molecular-deep imperative of self preservation. Something in Jim Garret changed. A psychic switch in Garret was turned off and another, one he always suspected was there, clicked on. Garret plunged over some inner mystical psychological edge, leaping over the ramparts of civilized behavior in his social persona and landing in the primeval world of the wild hunter that still lurks hidden in all of us. It was something many a combat veteran had experienced and was the source of uncounted acts of what otherwise seemed like foolish bravado. It was also what won many a soldiers' medal–all too many of them posthumously.

Garret's blood was up, his spirit charged with the reborn wild primal energy of the hunt. The world turned inside out and Jim Garret went from being the hunted to being the hunter. He was aflame with that primal ire and was determined to put a bloody permanent end to this murderous lunatic. At that moment he was indistinguishable in his pure hominid essence from the bearskin clad Paleolithic wild men who a dozen millennia earlier hunted shaggy Pleistocene beasts in this same canyon with nothing more than stone pointed spears and the ineffable courage of the hungry predator that we all, deep down, were--and, some say--still are.

Before Garret could get close enough to get a good shot at him Diablo scurried to the edge of the wash and leaped out to catch hold of the rope. He grabbed it and almost lost his grip, slipping down the rope until his feet hit the water and the grasping power of the rushing stream almost jerked him loose. But he held on, then rapidly pulled himself hand over hand up to the tree branch and agilely hefted himself onto it. Just as Garret reached the wash with his pistol pointed across the water ready to blast away at the bastard, Diablo dropped out of the tree onto the far bank and slipped out of sight behind the sheltering trunks of the huge sycamores and cottonwoods lining the stream bank. And then he was gone, swallowed by the mists rising off the ground from the hard driving rain storm.

Garret could hardly believe his eyes when he saw the guy jump into the water. What? Did the son of a bitch just commit suicide? _Goddamnit!_ Garret was bitterly angry. The bastard had eviscerated his revenge. A moment later Garret saw the lanky phantom killer dangling over the raging stream. A rope? Where the hell did the rope come from? Then in a cognitive flash of insight in the unordinary lucid reality of the moment Jim realized that the man must be hanging on the rope Garret's companions used to reattach Reiser's wire bridge. Then, nimble and lithe as the Mexican jaguar that haunted Dancer Canyon a mere half century earlier, the man clambered up the rope, scampered onto a tree limb, dropped to the ground on the far side of the wash and was gone so quickly that it was as though he had never been there.

Garret had no chance at a good shot at the phantom flitting away into the dripping gloom surrounding the thick trunked riparian trees on the other side of the wash. But he still pulled on the trigger of the murdered Silenski's weapon almost to where the three pound trigger pull resistance was about to yield and let loose one of the weapon's copper jacketed 9mm slugs. He stopped at the very last fraction of second when another thought elbowed into his mind. Where were the others? His right index finger slowly relaxed the tension on the weapon's trigger. Not a good idea to snap off a shot into the unknown. But his finger remained hovering over the trigger, the weapon pointed ahead held in a firm two handed shooter's posture, as Garret leerily approached the spot on the stream bank where the phantom had jumped.

With guarded steps he reached the bank of the churning, debris clogged stream and saw that he was right. There was Nub Riley's braided rope, dangling from a thick sycamore branch over the flooding water a dozen feet from the stream bank. Garret shook his head, amazed. That was _some_ jump. Whoever this crazy lunatic was, he had to be one hell of an athlete as well as having the guts of an entire bomb disposal squad, even if he was a murdering son of a bitch. Though in excellent physical condition himself, Garret would never have attempted to make the jump. No way. Shaking his head in a mixture of anger and awe at the man's spectacular escape, Garret moved down to where the wire bridge was. Or, rather, where it had been.

"Sweet Mary, Mother of God", Garret muttered softly in a sudden memory out of the long forgotten religious instruction at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic School. The killer had come down from the waterfall in time to spoil their plans. The bastard had destroyed the bridge. He found the place where the wires had scarred bark on the trees, but no bridge. The wires were completely gone. And no one was anywhere to be seen on either bank. Whoever this lunatic was, he always managed to stay a step ahead of them. This murderous maniac running amok in Dancer Canyon was sure as hell no ordinary human being. The primal adrenaline rush that had fired Garret's soul in his hunter's stalk down the muddy canyon fled as quickly as it had come. As it faded away Garret slowly began to feel subdued and morose. He was starting to feel scared.

Shaken, his gut restarting to churn with brooding feelings of impending doom, Garret began the long trudge back up the canyon to the waterfall. He unconsciously spoke out loud in a muted whisper that was as gloomy as the weather entombing the canyon and the people trapped in it.

_"God help us"_ , Jim Garret whispered. And he damn well meant it.

Nub Riley tried to calm the others after they stumbled, senses clashing, numbed from Sierra's death yet concomitantly jangling with fear, into the scant safety of the excavation tent. As they fled into the tent they slipped and slid, arms flailing as they tried to keep their balance on the unexpected slick ground inside, muddy from water seeping under the untended flaps the wind had whipped loose. The ungraceful thrashings of the people struggling with their footing on the slippery ground inside the tent might have seemed comical in a different time and place. Not now. The expressions on their faces vaporized any hint at mirth. They were ashen masks of pure terror.

_"Everybody_!" He yelled. " _Calm down_! Panic won't get us anywhere." The others dropped to the ground inside the tent entrance, heedless of the muddy earth, and threw darting frightened glances at each other. They shivered and moaned and wept. Meyer sat heavily on an empty crate and held Sierra's pistol pointed at the entrance. His gun hand was shaking so badly that Nub was afraid Meyer would start inadvertently spraying the place with bullets. Heather Sosa was sobbing, her chest heaving. Peg Riley slid over to embrace the terrified Heather in her comforting arms. Nub Riley was still standing.

"Now, look", Riley went on, holding his voice rigidly calm. "If we can't get to the other side of the wash, then he can't get onto this side. And Jim is up guarding the waterfall. We're safe here at least for a while."

"But then what?" Heather Sosa said in a brittle voice between sobs. "Then what are we going to do, Nub Riley?" Meyer threw a quick shaky glance away from the tent entrance back at Riley.

"Yeah", he said acidly. "You dumb ass. Then what the frickin' hell are we gonna do?" Max Reiser, still panting from the panicked run, got to his feet and went over to stand next to Riley.

"It doesn't look like we going to get out of here", he said in a voice hoarse from gasping for air. He hadn't run that hard for that long for nearly twenty years. "We're going to have to hole up someplace where he can't get at us." He paused again for another deep breath. "Eventually the son of a bitch's got to give it up. And we all know before long somebody's going to wonder what happened to all of. A search party's bound to be sent out to look for us." Lucius Meyer shot back another quick look, his voice, despite his fear, still edged with his innate sarcasm.

"You know who's gonna come lookin' for us, don't ya, asshole? The cops. Some plan you got, buddy." Peg Riley broke her tense silence to look with flaring wide eyed disgust at Meyer.

"I'm sick of you, Meyer. All you ever do is bitch and complain. Are you stupid. too? Get your head out, Meyer! Which would you rather do, let the police find you or have this maniac find you instead?" She turned her attention to Reiser.

"Max", she said. "I have this feeling you actually have some place in mind." Reiser nodded, managing a small smile at her pluck and understanding. The small smile was mirrored by Nub Riley, who'd had plenty of first hand experience with the spitfire side of his feisty wife. Reiser took a couple more deep breaths, then resumed talking.

### Chapter 11

### The Mine

"There's an old mine tunnel on this side of the canyon. Must be thirty five, forty feet up the cliff. Didn't amount to much. Took only a small amount of gold and silver out of there about a hundred years back. Used to be obvious until some souvenir hunters carried off some of old equipment and the Forest Service removed the rest. Now you have to look close to see it."

"Get to the goddamn point, will ya?" Meyer yelled without taking his eyes off the entrance flap. Reiser ignored him with a dismissive quick glare. Meyer noticed it. His face grew sullen. If there were any one thing that would set him off, it was being ignored. Meyer stewed in resentful silence. The others joined Reiser in ignoring him.

"How will we get up there, Max?" Riley asked, puzzled. "Those cliff walls look pretty steep."

"Not to anybody with any climbing experience", Reiser replied. "We still have another coil of rope. If we can get one person up to the mine with the rope, then the rest of us can use the rope to make it up to the mine entrance."

"So whadda we do?" Lucius Meyer interjected again. He was grating on everyone nerves. Nub Riley was about ready to grab the guy's gun and lay him out with a patented Nub Riley end-of-fight straight right to the jaw. "Wait until a mountain climber drops in to give us a hand? Or is one'a you shitheads gonna fly up there? Come on, asshole. Use your fucking head." A slender figure rose from among the others and walked to stand with Reiser and Riley.

"I've done some climbing", Tom Bohach said. "l think I can do it."

Even Meyer shut up then.

Diablo leapt from the thick limbed sycamore and dodged among the trees as he ran upstream. A hundred yards up he saw the clawed leafless limbs of the dead Gambel oak landmark he was looking for, slowed and edged over to the canyon's cliff wall, searching along its base until he found the place he had earlier marked in his memory during his incessant exploring of the canyon wombs and rocky catacombs of the Huachuca Mountains. He clambered agilely nearly ten feet up and pushed himself into a shallow depression in the cliff that was barely deep enough to shield him from the wind and the rain. He wedged himself in and began to watch with his merciless cold eyes the canyon below.

The Mimbres excavation tent was less than a hundred feet away.

Even the obnoxious obstructive Lucius Meyer grudgingly had to agree that Reiser's suggestion was the only real option they had left. But when Nub Riley said he was going to go look for Jim Garrett and asked Meyer for the pistol? Meyer started backing into a corner of the excavation tent, almost tripping on the slick ground in his jittery haste, the pistol held wavering in front of him. The weapon wasn't pointed at the tent entrance. It was pointed straight at Nub Riley's chest.

"What?" Meyer said hotly. "No goddamn way. To hell with Garret. If you want to go look for him, then go. But you ain't getting my gun". And that was it. Meyer wasn't giving up his gun, and damn well wasn't about to accompany Riley out in the storm and the jumble of canyon rocks where the lunatic killer was lurking. Meyer was trying hard to maintain his tough guy urban bravado, that mask he had worn in public for so long he no longer even knew it was as mask. But the truth was that Sierra's death, coming so soon after Silenski's, had shaken him far more than anything ever had in his life. Deep inside, Lucius Meyer was more terror stricken than he ever been in his life. Even more than that bloody time long ago when a pair of hard eyed men, recidivist ex-cons with nothing to loose, held him at gunpoint and tried to shake him down for protection money. Meyer managed to survive then. But now?

Despite his frayed nerves and churning insides, Meyer held tightly to the gun, waving it menacingly at anyone who came close. Riley probably could have taken it, but didn't think it worth the risk of someone getting hit if the panicky Meyer started jerking on the trigger. So Nub set out alone, without the gun, to look for Jim Garrett. It was unthinkable for him to leave his lifelong friend at the waterfall alone. Or, if Garret had met the grim fate of the other victims, he couldn't leave Jim's body lying in the bloody mud. Either way, he was damn well going to bring Jim Garret back. Peg watched him go with tears forming at the edges of her worried eyes, the honey hazel color of those eyes dulled by her worry. She said nothing. She knew he had to go, even though his going made her spousal heart sob with anxiety.

Diablo saw Nub leave the tent and head up the canyon. He let him go. Diablo was in far too vulnerable a position to expose himself. He knew they had some guns. If they trapped him in the shallow depression in the cliff face he would have no way to escape. Diablo's cold, emotionless eyes closely followed Riley until he passed out of sight, then returned a lethal appraising gaze to the excavation tent. He didn't know what they were doing, but having seen the way they had screamed and run in panic at the wire bridge he knew that they were terrified. Diablo knew he had them. He need only wait for the right time. Then he would finish them. One by one. Or all at once, if he had to. But he wanted it to be singly--so that each doomed soul would look into the eyes of the author of his or her utter annihilation. _Him_.

Diablo!

Riley moved as fast as he could in his weariness and the slippery footing of the rain soaked trail. He saw no need for extra caution. With the wire bridge gone, he was certain the spectral lunatic couldn't be on his side of the wash. When he got close to the ledge under the waterfall, he would revert to the same lucidly alert borderline paranoia that got him through Viet Nam more or less in one piece. The waterfall and the ledge loomed somewhere ahead, still out of sight and sound. The specter could be paralleling him upstream, hidden within the thick trunked trees of the dense riparian forest, on the other side of the roaring water. That would take time and Riley was pretty sure he still had breathing space before the chance of another encounter with the specter loomed dangerously close.

Then Riley stopped stone cold still in his muddy tracks. There. Just ahead. Skarp's inert form lying crumpled in the mud and water by the trail. A hell of a way to end, yet a violent rough man like Skarp probably would have preferred it that way. Better that than the slow dehumanizing miserable decline in a stinking nursing home or in a soulless prison hospital. Riley had a sudden thought. They had all been stunned when they stumbled on Skarp's bloody corpse. Had anyone thought to search Skarp's body? No. No one had searched him. Skarp was a tough character. Could he have had a weapon? Garret bent down and began to carefully search the man's corpse. Suddenly his glum face came to life with a dark palette of raw emotion that was a flashback to dark days in a dark time in a lush jungle hell.

This wasn't the first time Nub Riley's hands probed the body of a dead man. The memories came back, memories he wished he didn't have, and he saw the dead faces, buddies, strangers, enemies, almost all of them little more than boys who would never grow old. Nub drove the unwanted memories from his mind by force of will as he searched Skarp's body and found what he was looking for behind the dead man's back stuck under a thick leather belt. He was lying supine and the weapon had gone unnoticed in the panicky moments when his body was discovered earlier. It was a black Glock P80 9mm Austrian semi automatic, an inelegant clunky looking weapon new to the U.S. that was in fact at least as sturdy and reliable as the ancient M1911 Colt 45 Nub had securely locked in a drawer back at the ranch.

Nub pulled the Glock free of Skarp's leather belt, instinctively pulling back the receiver part way to see that there was no bullet in the chamber, then stuck the weapon into his own belt. He resumed his search, looking for extra clips in Skarp's pockets, until he found a pair of them, still dry under the twin protections of the pocket and Skarp's enshrouding poncho. Riley straightened up from his crouch over Skarp's body, no longer feeling so alone, Skarp's lethal Glock just about the best companion Riley could have hoped for at that moment. Ready to resume the somber search for Jim Garret, Riley pulled Skarp's Glock out from under his belt, pulled back the receiver far enough so that the clip fed a 9mm round into the chamber, and started walking slowly upstream, the weapon held in the ready position. His earlier anger with himself for not having the goddamn sense to bring along one of his weapons to the dig site evaporated. Skarp's gun filled him with feelings of empowerment and confidence. His dark mood segued into a grim determination. "Damnit, Nub!" He exclaimed to himself. "Wake up! You're a goddamn Viet Nam vet with two goddamn hard earned purple hearts. Let's go get this bastard." And he set out to do just that. Like his buddy Jim Garret a half hour earlier on the other side of the roaring mountain stream, Nub Riley had had enough. He was determined to do his damnedest to fight this maniacal bastard, whoever the hell he was. The shoe was now on the other foot.

Or so he thought.

Well before he got there, Riley was already steeling himself against the passage under the roaring water. Reiser said it was a perfect spot for an ambush and Riley didn't doubt the ranger was dead right. Nub didn't understand why he did it. But, very much like that twilight time long ago in the dim dripping jungle in the central highlands of Viet Nam, when he came to the ledge, instead of approaching it cautiously and carefully, he suddenly screamed out and, in what seemed to him afterwards like an inexplicable burst of absolute insanity, charged headlong across it. When he reached the far side he scanned the rocks at the base of the cliff face for any trace of danger, then looked down the trail. His whole body jolted alert in an eye popping millisecond when he saw a figure loom up on the trail in the rainy gloom. Riley snapped up his pistol and fired at it. The figure leaped out of sight into the rocks and yelled at him.

"Nub! Nub! That you? For Chrissake. It's Jim!" Garret had recognized Riley's distinctive square shouldered shape just before Riley started firing.

"Goddamnit, Jim!" Came the hot answer. "Why did you go and do a damn fool thing like that? Did I hit you?" Garret stepped out onto the trail. Though Riley could not see his face, he knew he was probably grinning.

"You always were a horseshit shot", Garret said, a grin touching his lips for the first time in what seemed a very long while.

Sometime in the somnolent deep bowels of night Colonel Redding was numinously dreaming about his cherished wife in her last days as she lay dying from ovarian cancer. Suddenly the dream fractured into countless broken fragments as he was startled awake by the deafening boom of thunder echoing off the canyon walls like the cannons of doom. Or, out of his own very much unimagined memory, the 105's and the 155's of the artillery battalions attached to the First Air Cav pounding the hell out of the jungle in the Vietnamese highlands and sending every living creature in the jungle capable of moving into headlong flight for somewhere, anywhere, away from the crashing, flashing splintering missiles of metallic death.

Redding shook himself awake and climbed out of his sleeping bag. He peered outside the drafty, leaking hiker's lean-to to see spidery lightning bolts stitching the sky and popcorning the ominous leaden sky with ephemeral bursts of energy that in milliseconds superheated the air beyond that of the surface of the sun. The clouds drooped so low that the soaring mountains looked truncated, the peaks swallowed by the billowing clouds that were as dirty gray as the stormy ocean that gave birth to them. It was like some dark apocalyptic painting, and even the stalwart Redding recoiled involuntarily from the sight. He lay back down in his sleeping bag.

But sleep would not return easily.

Earlier that day, just before dusk descended with a stormy inky blackness, Riley and Garret slogged along on the rain soaked muck of the bank side trail until they spotted the excavation tent huddled amidst the towering junipers and giant sycamores in the gathering dark. A few minutes more of muddy going and they were at the tent flap.

"It's Riley and Garret", they yelled through the closed flap. "We're coming in", Riley hollered from outside the dig tent, thinking that jumpy Lucius Meyer might snap a shot off at them if they came bursting through the tent flat without warning. He probably was right. Meyer was near the tent opening waving his pistol in what seemed to the people inside the tent like a dangerous perpetual agitation. Meyer was tweaking. He'd popped a couple more pain pills and those, coupled with his raw edged terror, had the man bouncing dizzily on the balls of his feet like a boxer waiting to explode into the ring at the sound of the bell. But he wasn't so far gone that he didn't recognize Riley's voice. He was as relieved as any of them, maybe more, that Riley and Garret had made it back. No panicked bullets went flying at the tent's opening. Garret and Riley pulled aside the dripping tent flap and, with broad smiles or relief creasing their dirty faces, stepped soaking wet and spattered with the trail's mud onto the slick ground of the dig site. They interrupted a crazy chaotic scene as the people inside were frantically getting ready for the desperate move to the mine tunnel. In a jittering, clumsy hurry, they were packing up food and water, bedding and fagots of firewood they'd gathered earlier against the dark and the chill. Only Gowan seemed to be holding back and not joining in the frenzied activity. Nobody, in their rattled rush, seemed to notice. Or, if they did, they didn't care. Night was almost upon them and they wanted to make the move into the mine tunnel under cover of darkness. In the light of day, murky and rainswept though it would be, the spectral lunatic could see them and be able to pick them off as they scaled the cliff.

When they saw Riley and Garret come in, everyone stopped and yelled in genuine heartfelt exultation to see them come back alive. Not only was Nub Riley back still in one piece. So was Jim Garret. Life instead of more death. Was their luck turning? Survival now seemed more possible. Peg Riley ran to embrace her husband. And, somewhat to Jim Garret's surprise, his distant cousin and sometimes lover Heather Sosa ran up to hug him with tears of joy. Garret was speechless.

But a surprised smile returned to his mud smeared face.

Tom Bohach saw the two couples embracing and Alice popped into his mind. Had she made it? He had been fairly certain before that she had. Then, when Garret said he'd been all the way around the canyon down to the wire on the far side of the wash and not seen a sign of her, he was sure that she'd made it. He closed his eyes and visualized Alice returning with a whole caravan of cops. A tear came to the edge of his eye.

Then it would be his turn to do the embracing.

The Zonuses were still arguing heatedly when the car hit Alice Wong. She was thrown clear over the car and landed in a ditch by the side of the road.

"Oh, my God!" Debbie Zonus shrieked. "You dumb shit! You stupid son of a bitch! Now you've gone and killed somebody!" Zonus slammed on the brakes and backed the car up to where the girl had landed in the ditch. The Two Zonuses jumped out of the car and rushed over to where Alice Wong lay. She was on her back, her eyes wide open, her mouth frozen in a scream. The incessant rain pummeled her face and water was draining into her nose and open mouth. No matter. It wouldn't bother her any.

Alice Wong was dead.

Maria Alarcon was so mesmerized by the gun locker that she forgot about the fire and let it die down to embers. What was in the locker? Guns? Ammunition? _¡Estúpida!_ Why hadn't she slipped over to look into it when Diablo had opened it up before? Maria was riven with indecision. If she broke open the lock and found guns and ammunition inside, she might be able to stop Diablo before he killed more people. But if she broke it open and found it empty? Diablo would come back to find the shattered lock and Maria Alarcon's promising young life would come to a violent end right there. Maria's only chance at survival would be lost. She hesitated. She ruminated. She procrastinated. A range of emotions rampaged through her consciousness. Anger. Fear. Revenge. Hope. Bitterness. Hatred. And, finally, indecision. Maria did nothing.

The hulking metal locker remained as inviolate as a vestal virgin in ancient Rome.

Diablo peered down at the dark forms laboring through the mist in the stormy night. What were they doing? Carrying bundles and bags from the tent only to drop them by the sheer cliff wall, nowhere near either the waterfall or where the wire bridge had been. He leaned forward from his hide in the hollow in the rocks of the wall, exposing himself more than he cared to, and stared in puzzlement. The dim figures below came singly and in pairs out of the excavation tent laboriously carrying their bundles and bags along the tree shrouded trail, often slipping in the slick footing of the muddy trail, to the foot of the cliffs hardly forty yards away. They trudged directly below him and even at such a close distance he could not fathom what they were up to.

But then he spotted the slender figure of Tom Bohach at the base of the cliff begin his climb up the rocks and he knew in a predatory flash of cunning what the intruders were attempting. The old mine tunnel! They were going to hide in the old tunnel. Diablo watched from his perch in the rock wall--so close that, had he known, it would have scared the hell out of Tom and made him lose his footing--as Bohach inexpertly made his way up the cliff face towards the maw of the tunnel entrance. Once, exhausted, the young climber stopped to gather his strength and stiffen his resolve. He looked directly over at where Diablo lay hidden and even seemed to gaze into his eyes. But the boy did not react in any way. A sudden rain squall swept in and obscured his view and he didn't pick out Diablo's barely visible shape on the dark face of the rock wall. He rested a few moments, then resumed his climb. Twenty feet below Jim Garret stood facing downsteam. Nub Riley faced the other direction. Both had their pistols ready.

Neither thought of looking up.

"That kid sure as hell ain't no mountain goat", Meyer said caustically as they watched Tom Bohach crabwalk up the cliff face. His ascent was painstakingly slow. It took longer than everyone expected for Tom to scrabble his way to the tunnel entrance. He was not an experienced climber, and he was a very long way from being an enthusiastic one. Bohach had only taken up climbing to try to help him overcome his fear of heights. Acrophobia. He still hadn't overcome the fear, but he had at least learned a bit about climbing. No one below would ever know it, but making it up the cliff face to the tunnel entrance was a personal and very private triumph for him. He fought his own rising fear as well as the sharp rocks all the way up.

When he finally pulled himself over the jagged bottom edge of the mine into the tunnel mouth, out of sight of the others, he shot a clenched fist into the air as a physical exclamation point to his triumph over dire–both inner and outer–challenges. Then he looped the thick rope around a chunk of upturned granite and dropped the rope to the anxious people below. A minute later the climbing rope was flying hand over hand and coiling at his feet as he set to single mindedly hauling up the first of the bundles they'd prepared for their hoped for sanctuary in the damp dark innards of the old mine. Blankets, bedrolls, water bottles, packs of food, fagots of wood. Bohach hauled them up with feverish haste as fast as the people below tied them to the rope. Despite the awkwardness of his position crammed into the sharp edged narrow niche in the side of the cliff, Diablo could have picked Bohach off with his rifle. He didn't. A shot would expose his position. Even partially hidden by his muddy dark poncho and crammed into a hollow in the dark face of the cliff wall, he would be too vulnerable. The dynamics of the chase would turn inside out. The hunter would be the hunted. Diablo would be trapped. That could not happen. That _would_ not happen. Diablo's Raid had to end as he planned it to end. He watched in silence with the unblinking eyes of the predatory raptor that he was.

And also with the same infinite patience.

### Goman

Benning Goman made his decision with typical nimble minded lucidity. There was little need for reflection. He knew in his patrician bones what he had to do. The others might feel they had to flee like rats from a sinking ship and climb into that dingy mountain mine shaft to hide their pathetic selves, but not Benning Goman. Not when the Mimbres pots would be left unguarded in the canyon below the tunnel. He knew well enough they wouldn't consent to take the pots along up into the mine tunnel. It would be a huge amount of work to haul them up to the tunnel, and they wouldn't be able to see the sense of it. Nor, he was certain, would their impoverished minds be able to see the sense of his staying behind to guard the pots. They would argue with him. They might even imperiously interfere with his God given right of self determination and physically force him to accompany them into the grimy old tunnel. Goman intuitively grasped that the wise course of action was to keep his mouth shut and quietly go about making his arrangements.

He'd known Skarp had a pistol. Of course. As a precaution against possible intruders on the ranch, he'd given the man the weapon himself, which Skarp only very reluctantly accepted. Goman had told him to bring it to the dig, and Skarp had been so unhappy with the idea that he came within a thick bodied Skarp moment of telling Goman to fuck himself and then walk off the arrogant bastard's ranch without even thinking about looking back. Carrying a weapon was a violation of his probation, and Skarp was always judiciously careful about that. Skarp didn't scare easy. But going back to prison scared the hell out of him. Not the people. He could handle them. Even two or three at a time. They knew to leave him alone.

That wasn't what scared him. It was being locked up like an animal in a zoo that got to him. He hated being locked up. But in the end he calmed down and agreed to bring the weapon. Skarp was in a double bind. It was either carry the goddamn gun or lose the sweet deal he had living on Goman's estate, and he knew he would never come close to finding anything even remotely close to the easy life at Goman's ranch. He was dead certain about that. What he didn't know was that Goman really didn't trust anyone, especially when it came to critically important matters. Goman quietly slipped his own well oiled Smith and Wesson into his knapsack along with a box of ammunition. Had Skarp known that, he would have been so incensed at risking his freedom for essentially no reason that he probably would have quit on the spot. But he didn't know.

And he never would.

The others were clustered in the biting wind of the rainy night by the cliff wall busy with fervently lifting up their hopeful bundles of supplies to the beckoning refuge of the 19th Century mine. Goman waited until he was alone in the dig tent. With one eye on the tent opening he quietly opened his knapsack and slipped the Smith and Wesson inside his shirt, then furtively took a handful of cartridges from the cartridge box and slipped them into his pocket. No one was there to notice. A few moments later Heather and Meyer came through the tent flap dripping wet, seeking shelter from a renewed squall outside. Goman wordlessly nodded at them, pretending to be fussing over one of the crates of pots, unconsciously patting at the S&W wheel gun in his waist pocket and the menacing decisive power it conferred on him, and tried not to think of the sight of his man Skarp lying on his back with his pale dead face swept by the driving rain. Goman had not much liked Skarp. But he had been a reliable enough sort, crude though he was, and, with his vulnerability from his criminal record, easily manipulated. Goman would not miss the man. He would miss the convenience of the man's presence. Now he would have to try to find a replacement. Goman sighed wearily. He detested such mundane matters as having to deal personally with the common people at any but the briefest of moments.

One by one, wrapped tightly in pieces of plastic sheeting Goman had brought to the dig and pieces cut from a spare tarp to keep off the rain, the bundles and packs of supplies bumped their way up the cliff. Bohach built up a hard sweat in his haste to get the bundles up and into the tunnel mouth. Too hastily. Once, then a second time, ascending bundles snagged on projecting chunks of sharp edged granite sticking out of the cliff face. Tom Bohach had to reluctantly climb down to precariously pull the bundles free. That finally done, the supplies all lifted to the tunnel and flung in haste out of the rain just inside the mouth of the mine, it was time to start lifting people up the cliff into the protective maw of the old mine tunnel. A tunnel that had already seen more than one violent death in its century long existence. Max Reiser knew the violent history of the tunnel, of the lethal cave-in, and the turn of the century train robbers who had tried to hide there when the access platforms and machinery were still intact and instead died in a hail of sheriff's posse bullets. Max knew all that. And he also knew it was better to keep his knowledge about the violent precedents of the tunnel to himself. The others had enough to worry about already. More than enough.

A hell of a lot more than enough.

So close that he thought he could smell their sweat and their fear, Diablo watched from his perch in the mountain wall. And that was all. He could only watch.

For now.

Max Reiser tied the rope snugly around Nub Riley's waist, expertly double knotting it, before Nub started the ascent up the jagged rock wall. Riley was certainly no climber, he had rarely given rock climbing a thought or consideration of any kind, but he was the strongest of the men. He would put his ranch hardened muscles to work together with Bohach's wiry youthful strength in pulling up the others. And Bohach needed the help. The dual exertions of making the initial climb and then hauling up the supplies had drained him. But he still had some juice left and, as Riley climbed, Tom took in the slack, looped the rope around the boulder it was secured to and pulled Riley up as much as he could. Nub slipped three times, in his hurry and the dark and his total lack of climbing experience. But, spent as he was, Bohach did a yeoman job of taking in the slack so when Nub slipped all he got were a handful of minor scratches and abrasions and a few uncomfortable moments of dangling in the air before regaining his footing. When he climbed over the lip of the mine entrance he grabbed Bohach's hand and vigorously shook it.

"I'd a busted my ass if it hadn't been for you, Tom", Riley said gratefully. "Thanks."

Bohach sheepishly nodded in understanding, feeling mildly embarrassed at an unexpected compliment. Tom, who'd been glumly miserable ever since the bear attacked him and his comfortable urban existence turned into a real life horror show seething with menace, let a shy fleeting smile cross his face. The thought had drifted into his mind that he just might emerge from this ordeal much more of a man than he'd entered it. Tom decided he liked that idea. Being a kid was OK. Being a man was better. Had a feeling of dignity to it. And veteran competence. Now he finally really had a glimmering of understanding of what his grandfather had meant when he said he came back from the Big War 'a changed man'.

Bohach dropped the rope back down and Reiser tied it around Peg Riley's narrow waist. She wasn't any heavier than a three string bale of Yuma hay back at the ranch and there were two men to pull her up. She seemed to fly up the cliff wall and made it with nothing worse than a couple of scratches on her right hand. Heather Sosa came next, also seeming to fly up the cliff. The last of her fake long nails broke in the ascent. She didn't notice.

Tom Bohach tossed the loose end of the climbing rope down to the canyon bottom again. Up came Lucius Meyer, who was yanked up cursing and complaining the entire way, though he expended zero effort at helping while the others hauled him up. The obstreperous Meyer scampered into the tunnel mouth and instantly crept inside out of sight from below. Max Reiser was next up, clambering up the jagged cliff face quicker than Riley had, partly because he had considerable outdoors experience and also because there were several people now stoutly hauling on the rope from above. Everyone but Meyer, who was hovering a few feet back inside the mine.

When Max reached the lip of the tunnel entrance and climbed inside only Garret and Goman were left below standing in the mud and drizzle on the canyon floor. Earlier, while Reiser firmly fastened the climbing rope with sure ranger's hands around each person before their ascent, Garret had both nervously and aggressively stood guard while the others rose bumpily above him to the mine tunnel, looking to him not so different from shipwrecked sailors being plucked from the sea by a line from a rescue helicopter. Jim's eyes searched the shrouding gloomy night, his pistol held ready against the possibility of a renewed assault by the spectral murderous maniac who was sending them fleeing for their lives into the bowels of the centenarian mine tunnel. He was scared.

But he also knew he damn well wasn't going down without putting up one hell of a fight.

Then Reiser went scrambling nimbly up the cliff wall and only he and Goman were left. Garret stuck his pistol in his belt and turned to Goman, ready to tie the rope around him for Benning's turn to go up the rock face. Jim hadn't failed to notice the man's strangely detached and reticent behavior. How the hell could anyone remain aloof through something as directly lethal as this? Garret was irritated and puzzled, disgusted with this country patrician who had shown himself to be as impotent as an Ottoman eunuch in a genuine crisis. _Jesus_. Still, Jim paid him little heed. He was far more consumed with his intense scrutiny of their surroundings and the possibility of Diablo's murderous return.

"Go ahead, Benning", Garret said, taking the end of the climbing rope. "You go first." Goman stepped back from Garret, reaching inside his poncho as he edged away. He stopped a few feet away under the sheltering branches of a gnarled ancient black oak tree that kept most of the pelting rain off him. His words hit Jim Garret like a verbal kick to the stomach. _What?_ He could hardly believe what he was hearing.

"I'm not going." Goman said in a flinty, unmistakably serious voice.

"Not going!" Garret blurted out, astonishment replaced by angry outrage. "What the hell do you mean you're not going? Get your ass over here and let me get the rope tied. We don't have time to play your stupid games."

"I'm not playing games, Garret", Goman shot back at him, feet set defiantly in place beneath the ancient black oak that had already been witness to a dozen violent encounters, animal and human, in its centuries long arboreal presence in Dancer Canyon. "I have no intention of leaving the Mimbres artifacts. I'm going to stay with them." Garret looked at Goman with open mouthed incredulity.

" _What?_ You're crazy, Goman! Alone down here, with that lunatic loose? It's suicide." Goman pulled out the pistol from inside his poncho.

"I don't think so", he said in a hard edged voice that matched the look on his face. Garret gaped in surprise at the pistol.

"Where the hell did you get that?"

"Planning ahead", Goman replied in a voice so calm and low that Garret had to wonder if the guy had popped some downers to chemically fortify his crazy plan. "Planning ahead. Something you might want to try more often", he said with a ironic sarcasm. Arrogant even now, Garret thought. The bastard would carry it with him to the grave. Then Goman pointed the pistol directly at Garret. He looked willing to use it.

"Put the rope on yourself, Jim. Get on up into the mine." He motioned at the dim rain shrouded eastern horizon. "Dawn's not far off." Garret started to protest, but Goman cut him off. "I know what I'm doing, Jim. Now just tie on the damn rope and get going. We all need to get the hell out of sight and be hidden before dawn." Garret peered uneasily over at the eastern horizon, then at Goman. Then, finally, as the rain squall grew in renewed intensity, he shrugged a reluctant acceptance and turned to face the sheer cliff wall that beckoned to him with the promise of corporeal survival. His, anyhow, if not Benning Goman's. It was Goman's choice and that was that. He fastened the rope securely around his waist, double knotting it as Reiser had done, and yelled at the others in the mine tunnel's entrance overhead to get ready to pull him up. Just before he started rise up the rocks he glanced one last time over his shoulder at the lean, determined figure of Benning Goman standing under the ancient black oak. In the rain slathered gloom of the predawn he looked like a shadow.

"Good luck, Benning", Garret said. Both of them knew he would need it.

And likely very, very soon.

Tom Bohach stood at the entrance of the mine tunnel, thirty-five feet up the cliff wall, and looked down the canyon towards its mouth. They were above most of the canyon's trees, except for a scattering of giant huge limbed sycamores. In a different time the view would have struck him as being breathtaking. Not now. Foolish as the thought might have seemed to others, he was looking to see if he could spot Alice bringing help. It was still dark, the rain was continuing to pelt down, and Tom could barely see a few yards. But it was harmless enough, if futile, and he was feeling enough hope and confidence now that it didn't seem to matter if he let his imagination wander a little. It did wander, and when it did his posture suddenly jerked upright as though he'd just been hit by a jolt of electricity. In a way, he had. The mysterious pathways in his brain suddenly made a connection and fired off a warning. He was standing at the lip of the tunnel in full view of the canyon below and also from the rim on the opposite side of the canyon. And dawn was coming. As nimble as the young puma that sometimes prowled the tunnel, he leaped back inside the dark protecting maul of the old mine and stayed there.

"Where the hell did she come from?" Harry Zonus said in a helpless, frightened, panicky agitation. "Why the hell did she jump in front of the car?"

"Because she wanted us to stop, you old fool", his wife snapped back at him. "The question is, Harry Zonus, why?" She turned to stare out in the rain at the sprawling drenched grasslands and crowding beclouded mountains of the surrounding countryside. "What is it out there that made her take such a reckless chance to get help?" Her husband shook his head.

"I doubt that we'll ever know", he said. "And I'm not sure we'd want to know", he added in a low voice. Then he reached over and took his wife not-very-gently by the arm. "Come on. We'd better get home and call the police."

"But the girl", Debbie Zonus protested. "You just can't leave her here." Harry Zonus threw his wife another irritated look.

"What the hell difference does it make to her now?" Harry wasn't as insensitive as he sounded. He had stumbled way beyond the limits of his ability to cope. Harry was completely at a loss at what he should do or how he should act. Even though he was a WWII veteran and a past president of the Bisbee American Legion, he had never fired a shot in anger and had never even seen a dead body outside a funeral home. His already unhealthily pasty complexion face had turned a ghastly gray. Finally he pulled off his raincoat and spread it over Alice Wong's body.

"There", he said. "Is that better? Now let's get going." They got in the car and drove the last few miles to their home. Harry drove slowly the entire way, despite the desperate situation. He knew it before they got home and tried 911. It wasn't just Alice Wong that was dead.

So were the phone lines.

### In The Mine

The 19th Century mine, grubbed into the cliff face by desperate hopeful men whose faces and names were long forgotten, was dank and dark and stunk of strange unfamiliar odors, but it was far more welcoming to the fugitive pothunters than even the swankest posh hotel in some big city of flashy modern conveniences like New York or San Francisco. The posh big city hotel offered elegant comfort. The dank mine offered genuine salvation. It was an uneven match. The mine won. Hands down.

"What?" Meyer sputtered, his mouth hanging open in stupefaction at the news and once more exposing the small fortune of restorative dental work in his vituperative jaws. Jaws, Peg Riley thought loathingly, like a human piranha. "Goman's staying with the stuff?" Meyer's face held a mixture of incredulity and suspicion while Garret quietly told them of what had happened. "That son of a bitch is gonna sneak outta here with the pots while we're stuck up here." He jumped up and scurried out to the mouth of the tunnel. "Goman!" He yelled down at the canyon. "Hey, Goman! Whadya up to, you bastard!" Goman, if he heard him, didn't bother to answer. Riley walked over to Meyer and roughly grabbed him by the arm.

"Get back in the tunnel!", he said. It was an order. Not a request. Snapping a surly look at Riley, Meyer slunk back into the cave. No one needed to say it. Meyer wasn't bossing anyone any more. Without his thugs he was helpless. He was left with nothing but thoughts of self pity. Self pity and revenge. Especially revenge.

"How safe is this place", Peg Riley asked as they moved away from the tunnel's mouth. She'd seen the ancient timbers momentarily illuminated by the flashlights and was worried by the thought that the tunnel was a hundred years old.

"I wouldn't go pounding on the timbers", Jim Garret said, patting his hand carefully on the mine prop next to him but still getting a couple of splinters in his palm from the decaying wood. Both he and Riley had worked in the mines a couple of summers when they were teenagers. And Garret came from an old mining family. He knew how treacherous the ancient mines were even when they were new. "But I'd guess that if they've lasted this long it's safe enough. So long as we don't do anything stupid." Deep in the rear of the tunnel the puma sniffed and growled. If she'd had young, she might have charged out to violently challenge the human interlopers. But she had no young. The big cat snarled, her yellow eyes glinting unseen in the inky darkness of the mine, and padded to the hole in the rocky slope above that was her entrance into the mine. The sharp edges of the hole tore at her tawny coat, but the skin of a mountain cougar is resilient and tough and the muscle beneath was unscathed. A single drop of glistening red blood was all the damage the rocks could inflict. The puma squeezed through the hole and went silently out into the gloom of the stormy breaking dawn.

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

As the year 1885 slipped into its last sunlit Sonoran Desert days, a dozen rugged Chiricahua warriors set out. Among them was the woman warrior with the Power, Lozen. The tiny band's leader was the battle tested and reliable Ulzana, sturdy older brother and right hand man of the huge and powerful Chihenne chief, Chihuahua. The intrepid band of Chiricahua Chihenne Nde raiders headed north from their stronghold in the wild mountain aeries of the rugged towering Sierra Madre mountains in Old Mexico. They began their raid far to the north with an outrageously bold assault on Fort Apache. For the next two months the raiding party repeatedly struck their enemies, evading pursuit, taking weapons and ammunition, riding over a thousand miles, killing enemies three times their number and stealing hundreds of horses and mules. The raid over, Ulzana's hardy little band of tough Nde warriors safely made the long ride back to their Mexican mountain lair. They lost only a single man, despite having many hundreds of determined pursuers. The raid was instantly legendary.

Ulzana was one of Diablo's most revered heroes. The old time Apache's rousingly successful raid set Diablo's pulse to racing. He wanted his raid to be like Ulzana's. Successful. Famous. bloody. And, most importantly.

Never forgotten.

Diablo huddled for more than an hour in the stormy predawn watching the people in the canyon labor in the driving rain to haul themselves and their supplies into the old mine. It would be harder to get at them in the tunnel. Harder. But not even close to being impossible. And it might even put a dramatic twist to the swiftly approaching denouement of Diablo's Raid. After he chewed it over in his unbalanced psychotic mind, he decided he liked that idea. A dramatic ending in an old mine tunnel. Yes. One that in the chilling details of its legendary retelling would haunt campfires for generations to come. Diablo knew the tunnel. He'd discovered the narrow hole on the top of the cliff weeks earlier, squirmed into it and made his cautious way the length of the dank old tunnel to the lip of the mine's entrance overlooking the canyon. The thickly scattered feces and cracked bones told him that he was not alone in finding the tunnel. A cougar often used it. Did the people know of the second entrance? He doubted it.

But that was all yet to come. The tunnel would have to wait. What Diablo was immediately intent on with his keen raptor's focus was the peculiar and very unexpected sight of a solitary tall figure slogging through the mud back to the excavation tent beneath the wind whipped trees of the canyon. One of these people had stayed below. Diablo was puzzled. Was this bravado? Was this man a fool? Were they setting some kind of trap for him? His eyes flared.

Or was this a personal challenge!

Looking and acting more like homeless refugees that the band of hopeful pothunters they had been a few short hours ago, the small group of weary people set up their fugitives' camp just a few feet inside the entrance of the mine. Out of reach of the tumultous rain and wind still lashing the canyon, but with the meagre light of the tunnel mouth to give a dim illumination to the gloom of the dank old mine with its strange musty odors and memories of sweat and blood. One of them would always hover by the tunnel mouth, to watch the canyon below for signs of either the killer or rescuers. Riley built a low fire and everyone but Bohach, who volunteered to be the sentinel at the tunnel mouth and was still privately clinging to his image of brave Alice bringing help and saving them, huddled around it. The old mine was a protective womb. Much of the tension was gone from the faces touched by the flickering light of the low blaze. They felt relieved and even a modicum of security in the sheltering embrace of the mine. The maniac could not possibly reach them there. Heather Sosa caught Reiser's eye and smiled.

"Thanks, Max", she said softly. Reiser nodded without saying anything. The others wordlessly glanced over at him, their eyes expressing the same thing. The ranger had helped them in ways far beyond what anyone could possibly have imagined when the illegal dig began--in what now seemed a very long time ago and, increasingly, like a foolish, senseless and even stupid undertaking. The relative quiet and sameness of their former lives beckoned sweetly at them from the gloomy damp of the old mine tunnel and the unseen horror lurking somewhere nearby.

"Can you imagine what went on here a century ago?" Peg Riley said, her face relaxed and thoughtful in the light of the fire. "How in the world did they find this place and dig it out, up on the side of the cliff like this?" Outside the rain redoubled and then redoubled again and blew angry stinging pellets of sleet at the tunnel entrance, driving Tom Bohach further back inside the tunnel's mouth.

"They were all over these mountains", Reiser replied, sounding calm, yet still tense and alert beneath the surface calmness. He knew this wasn't over yet. "Still are", he added. "Something about gold that makes men do the damnedest things." Nub Riley joined in.

"l remember hearing how grandpa gave it a try once, a long time ago. Darn near got himself killed in a cave-in. He hotfooted back to the ranch and never left again." His voice grew low, reflective. "The man working right next to him wasn't so lucky."

"That's the way it was, all right", Reiser said. "Lots of them died." He glanced around at the others huddling by the friendly light of the fire. " _Lots",_ he repeated with more emphasis, making most of the others wonder just what that meant. The Forest Service sent him to plenty of schools, and he'd been hearing old timers talk about the mines ever since he'd come to work in the Coronado National Forest. Not many people knew more about the mountains than Max Reiser did.

Then Reiser's eyes seemed to loose their focus, his expression and mind wandering onto an unexpected tangent. A whole new thought came sliding out of his subconscious. That extensive local knowledge. He might be able to use that knowledge to make a living if the Forest Service fired him after this whole mess was over. The ancient relationship of man to nature was changing. The hardscrabble times were long gone. This was the age of the supermarket. People no longer were turning to nature for sustenance. Hunting and fishing were fading as national pastimes. People were looking to nature for recreation. Hiking. Exploring. Bird watching. Even conservation. And who could be better positioned as a guide and advisor than a veteran ranger who knew the country with a fervent reverential intimacy? Max Reiser had a glimmering of a notion that maybe the future wasn't so grim after all. A slow secret smile spread across his mind. He caught a mental glimpse of a possible future. Reiser Mountain Adventures, Inc.

Max already liked the sound of it.

Garrret eased himself down to sit next to where Bohach was hunched against the tunnel wall, just inside the entrance out of the slashing rain. Jim grimaced sourly when his knees resisted going cross legged with the lithe ease of the youthful Bohach. _Damn,_ he thought. _Getting older, Jim_.

"See anything?", he asked.

"Nope", the youth replied. "Not a thing." Bohach didn't take his eyes off the canyon below. He was still searching for a sign of Alice and the help she was going to bring. It'd already been long enough for her to be leading rescuers into the canyon. Soon. She'd be back soon. He was sure of it. Soon.

A half dozen miles away Alice Wong lay in a ditch by the side of the highway, her unseeing eyes wide open to the driving rain. Zonus' raincoat had blown off her inert limp body almost as soon as he left. Fifty feet away a Great Horned Owl sheltered itself from the storm amid the thick boughs of a huge Arizona Cypress and stared unblinkingly through the dripping branches at the still form of the dead human creature below.

Just before the dawn arrived and brought its impotent leaden light to the stormy day, Diablo slipped down from his hiding place in the cliff face and moved swiftly up the canyon. He came into the hidden cave dripping rain and found Maria staring hypnotically at the embers of the fire and the coffee pot sitting cold on the cave floor.

" _No coffee!_ " He spit out, angrily, his fists clenching violently when Maria seemed to hardly notice his arrival. It took a moment for Maria to shake herself out of her semi-conscious reverie. Too late. She couldn't hide the fear that was razoring up her spine and spreading over her face. A face now not so beautiful. A face, like her spirit, that was drawn and faded.

"Oh! I'm sorry. I'll make some right away." Maria said, jumping to her feet and trying to look sweet and subservient as before. But doubt had crept into Diablo's eyes and his sepulchral face grew even surlier. His piercing emotionless eyes told her all she needed to know. Maria was out of both chances and choices. The next time Diablo left the cave, if he didn't kill her or tie her up, she would have to break open the weapons case. In her nervousness she dropped the coffee pot into the fire and water spilled out onto the embers, sending hissing steam rising up in the cave. Through the cloud of steam Maria thought that Diablo not only looked like a devil.

He really _was_ the Devil.

For those fortunate dwellers in the deluged Grand Canyon State who still had electricity, working refrigerators and stoves, running water and functioning toilets, and were not immediately threatened by the flash floods, the biggest storm in history wasn't much more than a blustery environmental titillation. Scary. But safe scary. Like watching a really scary horror flick in the security of the local theater. For many the historic wild tempest was an entertaining meteorological diversion from the usual clear-skied stormless aridity of Arizona. Everyone was advised to stay indoors until the storm passed. No going out. No going to work. That didn't take much convincing in the humdrum work-a-day lives of many. So the lucky ones who still had power stayed indoors, with an occasional uneasy glance out the window at the biblical downpour outside, and watched television or videotapes or played parlor games or settled in with a book. And for more than a few homebound couples it was a dandy time to play catch up with their sagging sex lives.

But for those threatened with flash floods, and those who lost their power, the storm was growing more frightening by the minute. Their number grew larger as the boiling mammoth storm intensified overhead. Arizona's zoning laws, especially outside the bigger cities, might as well have been written in invisible ink. They ranged from faint to nearly non-existent. Desert washes that no one had ever seen run in living memory were now running full and the houses that never should have been built so close to the washes were being undercut and starting to tumble one by one into the wild roaring storm water runoff. And in far too many places the brimful washes were cascading over their banks and flooding neighborhoods that had never flooded before--or at least not since incautious development had crept into ancient flood plains. It scared the hell out of everyone who saw it. Even some of those who watched in on TV from the safety of their own living rooms.

"Nope", Harry Zonus said to his wife as he switched on the hallway light and nothing happened. "Nothing." No power. And no surprise, either. The Zonuses were native born residents of southeastern Arizona and knew that there had never been a storm like this one. A few minutes before his life nosedived and he was plunged into a guilty gloom after plowing into Alice Wong on the highway, the colorful tongued nature loving Harry Zonus told his wife it was "....one beautiful bastard of a storm". Storms far less intense had knocked them off the power grid a half dozen times in the past. They expected the power to be off. It was. And the phone, too. Grumbling to himself, Harry Zonus got back into his car and drove out towards the highway. His wife had stubbornly insisted on it. They just couldn't leave the poor girl's body in the ditch without trying to contact the police. Harry didn't want to go back out into the pounding rain and wind. But he knew deep down in a soul that really wasn't so calloused after all that his wife was damned well right. They had to do something about the poor dead girl. Harry thunked his old car into reverse and backed out onto the rain swept blacktop of the dark Coronado National Monument access road.

"I'm going to get clean", Heather said in a voice so soft it was barely audible. Jim Garret blinked. Both at the gentle timbre in her voice and what he thought she'd said.

"What?", he said, shaking himself out of the shadowy thoughts that had been dancing on the rim of his consciousness ever since he returned to sit by the fire inside the mine tunnel's entrance. "'What's that you said?"

"I said I'm going clean. Out the window with the all the junk. Booze. Dope. Drugs. Pills." She reached over to squeeze her cousin's hand. "And coke, too." Garret's head cleared of the pondering fog his mind was wandering in enough for him to cast a skeptical look at her. He'd known Heather Sosa for a long time and in the sick bellied remorse of a hangover or the gloom edged depression of coming down off a drug she'd said the same thing plenty of times before. But then he looked at her face and somehow it seemed different. Maybe she really did mean it this time.

"What _exactl_ y do you mean, Heather? And why? Why this sudden change?" He said, a little more curious and a little less skeptical. Much to Jim Garret's amazement, Heather was starting to blush, her salmon skin roseate in the glow of the fire. As far back as he could remember, he had never seen Heather Sosa blush. Not even close. He stared at her in surprise.

"You'll laugh at me." Garret had to admit that he probably would have laughed at her a day or two ago. But there was something different about himself now, too. The cobwebs had cleared out of his mind since people started dying in Dancer Canyon. When it came down to the blood and guts reality of survival a whole lot of things went out the window of irrelevance. Heather's window didn't seem so improbable after all.

"I won't laugh", he said gently. And he meant it.

"If I make it through this hell, Jim Garret", she said, looking at him closely for the slightest sign of mockery or scorn, "I'm going to pick up the pieces of my life and put them back together. Finish up my RN. Get a nursing job doing something positive." Then, thinking of her own miserable childhood. "Maybe even work with abused children." Garret didn't quite know what to say. Heather leaned back and shrugged.

"One thing I'm damn sure of, Jim Garret." Garret cocked his head quizzically.

"Which is?" Her answer came back with such verve and intensity that he was finally convinced she was dead serious.

"I'll never find it when I'm stoned", she said, reaching over to squeeze his arm again. "From now on Heather Sosa is going to be one straight lady." And, for the first time in all the years of hearing Heather Sosa say she was going to go straight, Jim Garret believed that maybe she actually would do it this time. He had mixed feelings about it. They'd had some damn good times snorting coke and cavorting in his antique four poster featherbed. She was an energetic and receptive lover. He'd sure miss that. But another part of him hoped she'd make it. She was after all his blood kin as well as his coke sniffing bed buddy. He squeezed her hand and wordlessly smiled at her. She smiled back. And Jim Garret knew for sure she really was dead serious about it.

But then the word 'dead' stuck in his mind and stayed there.

Benning Goman dodged beneath the trees through gusts of slashing rain back into the excavation tent. High above him Jim Garret was just finishing the climb up to the mine tunnel entrance so improbably plunked some thirty five feet up the face of Dancer Canyon's sheer cliff wall. Goman shook his head at the thought. Was there any place the old timers from the 19th Century--and the Spaniards before--wouldn't go or anything they wouldn't do in their single minded quest for gold? A companion thought immediately piggybacked on top of it. Wouldn't Benning Goman do the same in his own quest for his precious Mimbres pots?

That brought a grim smile to his face, despite himself.

He threw a few scraps of wood left behind by the others onto the embers of the fire they'd had in the tent and climbed down into the excavation pit. The tall, graceful man, still, despite being mud splattered, looking like the dapper country gentleman patrician that he was, his silver hair remaining as impeccably iridescent as an AARP magazine model, took one of the long handled spades and began to carve out a man sized hole in the side of the excavation. He worked at it for twenty minutes, then stopped, shoved the spade into the dirt and started to check out how well he'd fit into the hole. He crawled into the musty smelling dirt of his man made hollow, turned and propped his back against the rear of the hole, bits of soil that were deposited when the Aztecs still ruled Mexico dribbling onto his neck and back. No. Not quite big enough yet. The positioning? Perfect! With a clear view of the tent entrance. He was going to need that clear view. And likely damn soon. He uncurled himself from the hole and set to work finishing his hiding place with redoubled urgency and considerably less fastidiousness. His trousers were stained and his hands dirty from the digging. He could accept that. But not his hair. It remained in pristine place. He prided himself as much as anything on his wavy full head of shiny silver hair. He never, ever, let his hair get in the least bit messy.

And he would never in his wildest dreams have imagined that a violently insane man who believed himself to be a fully justified revanchist Apache was at that very moment considering removing Benning Goman's superb head of silver gray hair from his head.

Maybe even while Goman was still alive.

"Tell you what, Heather", Jim Garret whispered to his distant cousin. "Maybe I'll join you in being straight." He stopped and looked at the dull rocky walls and ancient timbers of the old mine when he saw the light of the fire flash gold on a sprinkling of crystals embedded in the nearby rock. He knew right away. Iron pyrite. Fool's gold. The story of his life, he thought. The pursuit of fool's gold. Not so different from those hopeful misguided souls of a century ago who laboriously carved out this mine and in the end had only fool's gold to show for it. Garret let out a soft, ironic laugh of recognition. A reality check of recognition. "Well, maybe not straight. But at least straighter. I have no goddamn idea of just what that means. But I do know I'm going to get rid of that goddamn ugly monstrosity of a house and that stupid fancy car of mine. Beyond that? Well, just gonna have to see what shakes down." Then he paused for a second, and in the dim glow of the campfire his expression looked haunted.

"That is, if I ever get out of here alive", Garret said softly.

Heather stared hard at him. Was she imagining it? He looked waxen, wan, almost like a corpse in the flickering light of the fire. Heather suddenly gasped and her big eyes got even bigger. Not at Garret's words, but at the ominous synchronous accompaniment to his words. A huge moth, with a wing span of half a foot, fluttered out of the darkness and landed softly on Jim Garret's shoulder. The moth was an Ascalapha odorata. The moth out of their grandmother's ancient Mexican peasant folk tales. The Witch Moth. The harbinger of death. Heather blinked her eyes in shock. It was gone. The moth was gone. Had it really been there? Had it just been her overwrought imagination? She didn't know.

She began to pick nervously at the cuticles of her fingernails.

Meyer broke the silence.

"You, too, huh?", Meyer said from across the fire. Garret looked up to see Meyer's eyes reflecting a caustic sarcasm as he stood in the dim light of the fire. "You're gonna turn sentimental, too? What the hell is with all you people? You got a maniac trying to kill you and all you can do is act like you're in some fucking soap opera."

"You're a real hard case, aren't you, Meyer?", Garret replied with a stony coldness that Meyer either missed or chose to ignore.

"You gotta be tough in my world", Meyer answered, trying to sound threatening.

"Sure, sure", Garret said, slowly rising. He moved around the fire to Meyer's side. "Meyer", he began, "I think its time to clear things up. Keep your mouth shut and we'll try and save your life along with ours. But keep on like you have been and I'm going to toss your rat's ass right over the edge of the mine entrance."

"Oh, now you're a tough guy", Meyer said, visibly struggling to maintain the habitual practiced voice and expression of a man used to having his way--and all too often violently. "The country bumpkin is a tough guy now."

"Give me the gun, Meyer", Garret said. Meyer involuntarily shrunk back, startled.

"What?"

"Give me the gun. Things are too damn serious to have a nut job like you holding one of our guns." He held out his hand. "Now give me the gun, Meyer." Meyer moved a step backward, his eyes wide in incredulity. This grease ball jerk dared to talk to Lucius Meyer like that?

"To hell with you, shithead! I'm keeping this for myself." Garret reached over and grabbed him by the shirt.

"You're missing the point, Meyer. Maybe you are a hard case in your world. But you're not _in_ your world. Now give me the gun before I have to get unpleasant."

"Just try it, asshole!" Meyer snarled, reaching inside his shirt to grab his pistol. He started to say something else, but an arm reached around his neck and held him in a choke hold. Nub Riley reached down with his free arm and pulled the pistol out of Meyer's shirt.

"So much for that argument", he said quietly into Meyer's ear before releasing the choke hold and handing the gun to Jim Garret. Meyer sputtered like a fuse about to blow. He did nothing. There was nothing he could do. Not then. But he wouldn't forget it.

### In The Fading Light of A Doomed People

### Eskiminzin

The 1871 massacre of close to one hundred and forty peaceful Aravaipa Nde, almost all women and children, near the U.S. Army's Camp Grant northeast of Tucson, was the bloody work of an ethnically mixed bunch of murderous thugs. Most were ancient enemies, one hundred O'odham from south of Tucson who had long warred with the Apache, with another fifty Hispanics with their centuries old sanguinary hatred of the Apaches. There was but a mere handful of the late comer Anglos to the long history of border genocidal violence, though with their euphemistically named Tucson Committee for Public Safety they did much of the planning and later bathed in public gratitude.

Among the Aravaipa who survived the genocidal mass murder was their chief, Eskiminzin. He had thought his people safe under the protection of the U.S. Army. After the massacre, Eskiminzin took away a bitter lesson about relations between the peoples of the Southwest. Legend held that a month after the massacre Eskiminzin went to the home of an old friend of his, an Anglo rancher named Charles McKinney whose spread was on the nearby San Pedro River. After dining with McKinney he pulled out a pistol and shot McKinney dead. Years later, according to the old legend, Eskiminzin said he killed McKinney "....to teach my people that there must be no friendship between them and the white men", adding.

"Anyone can kill his enemy....but it takes a brave man to kill a friend."

Eskiminzin was another of Diablo's Nde heroes. The old story about Eskiminzin and McKinney insinuated itself into the serpentine convolutions of his psychotic mind when Diablo was carrying on his inner dialogue about killing Maria Alarcon. _Yes._ There it was. He would kill the woman. He _had_ to kill the woman. He was a brave man.

Like Eskiminzin.

"Tell me, Nub Riley", Peg said in a serious low tone as they sat by the fire. "Does losing the ranch and the business seem as all fired important to you as it did before?" Her husband's quick eyes flashed, but not in anger. He actually smiled a little.

"You know damned well it doesn't', he said, sounding a touch closer to his normal good natured self. "I know exactly what's important now." He leaned into her and put his arm around her shoulder. "And that's you and those two little kids back home waitin' for us." He kissed her on the forehead, and she turned her dark eyes up to meet his. "I believe we're gonna make it, honey", he said.

"So do I", she replied in a hopeful whisper. And then her lips parted as he bent to kiss her.

At that same moment a crazy eyed, grunting Diablo was roughly raping Maria Alarcon in the hidden cave in the blind canyon above Dancer Canyon.

### Reiser's Decision

### Diablo's Lethal Hand

He mulled it over that morning, telling no one of his thoughts, then made his decision. After resting, shoring up his strength with some scraps of nourishment, a hunk of rye bread and a fat sliver of hard Colby cheese, and downing a couple cups of camp coffee Peg had made, he announced his decision to the others. And brought looks of stunned surprise to every one of their faces, even the obstreperous Lucius Meyer.

"You're _what_?, Meyer said incredulously. Max was already on his feet.

"I'm going for help", he repeated. A circle of astonished, wordless faces behind him, the Forest Service ranger turned and headed towards the tunnel mouth, standing there half hidden in the tunnel mouth as the early morning faded, using the morning's weak gray light to see by as he stopped to pick up the loose end of the climbing rope and began to fasten the rope around his waist. The others followed him and stood crowded in the mine entrance, anxiously watching him, feet fidgeting, eyes darting nervously from one to another and out to the tunnel's mouth and the unknown dangers beyond.

"You sure you really want to do this, Max?", Jim Garret said. "You're taking a helluva big chance."

"Maybe", Max said, "maybe not. This is my home ground, Jim. I know my way around these mountains as well as anyone." Reiser replied with genuine confidence, knowing full well that was no exaggeration. "I'll take the shortest way over the ridge trail. There's a battery powered emergency shortwave in the unmanned substation over by Coronado Peak. "I'll have help in here in no time."

"That's if you make it", Heather Sosa said, worry plain on both her face and in her voice. "Max, I don't think you should go. It's too dangerous. Besides, that girl Alice escaped. She might be on her way with help right now." Reiser threw her a veiled dubious look and Tom Bohach saw it. Tom blanched and swallowed hard, his mind grasping what his heart refused to admit.

"Nah", Reiser said, letting the subject of Alice drop, not wanting to drive the knife of doubt any deeper into poor Tom Bohach, as he finished securing the thick climbing rope around his waist. "I think I'd better make sure that we get some help in here. I don't like this sitting around waiting for what that goddamn lunatic is going to do next." He stopped talking and paused to look at each of the others one at a time. His words echoed through their minds for a long time after he said them.

"He knows we're up here."

"Make some food!" Diablo ordered after he was done with roughly raping her again, his voice retreated back to the harsh beginning when he first captured Maria. "I'll be back in a few minutes." With that he went out the cave in a dark mood leaving her lying naked and ravished on a sleeping bag by the fire. She did not move. Something in Maria Alarcon's spirit had weakened and finally given way. Her body jerked in arrhythmic convulsions. She was sobbing. Her voice slowly rose to a keening wail totally alien from anything Maria had ever experienced. With one exception.

Her mother wailing over her own dear mother's casket at a Tucson funeral home.

"At least take this", Garret said, holding out his pistol to Reiser. Max looked long at him, understanding the full meaning of what it took for Garret to make the offer and weighing whether or not to take the weapon. Max glanced away, passing his gaze over the gray walls of the mine, the gloomy valley below, the thundering stream, then back to the people in the mine. It was tempting. Very tempting.

"No", he finally said. "You keep it. What's going to save this old ranger's ass is moving fast, not that little gun. I'm sure he's got a rifle. That pistol wouldn't do much good." Reiser probably was right about that, though just having a weapon would have been a hell of a comfort and both he and Garret knew it. Still, he refused the offer, shaking his head in a final slow negative. Garret sighed softly, the pistol slowing dropping to his side. Reiser turned away from him.

"You ready, Tom?", Reiser said to Bohach, who now was also armed, both with renewed confidence that a gun gave him and the gun itself, Riley having given him Meyer's weapon. Tom stood by the rope ready to start playing it out when Reiser went down the cliff. Bohach nodded. Reiser backed over the cliff and made ready to start down over the jagged rocks below the tunnel's edge, some of which that millions of years earlier had erupted out of the earth's core, others laid down in ancient warm shallow seas. Rocks that now were Max Reiser's highway to help. He held the rope firmly in his weathered outdoors hands.

"Oh!" He said, just before his face slipped out of view and he disappeared down the slippery cliff face. "I just remembered. Some of these mines have more than one entrance, usually old vent holes somewhere towards the back. You might want to check it out." His words rolled over the others like an avalanche. Their expressions shaded from disappointment to dismay and, for some, into a welling malignant foreboding that spread through their bodies with the return of the cold icy fingers of fear they thought they had vanquished. Heather voiced everyone's thoughts.

Oh, God, no......not again.....

The wild squalling rain backed off to what would have been considered a nasty bone chilling downpour in an ordinary storm, Max Reiser perched on the lip of the tunnel entrance, nodded at Bohach, then dropped just below the bottom of the mine entrance. As Reiser started threading his way carefully among the sharp edges of granite jutting out of the cliff face, Diablo steadied his rifle on a boulder in the shadow of a double trunked red oak in the canyon bottom. He sighted in, double checked his sight picture, then carefully touched off a shot. The bullet ricocheted off an exposed quartz outcropping inches from Reiser's face and sent rock chips spraying all over him. The calmness that Reiser had been trying to project shattered along with the rock as the hurtling chips cut his face and blood spurted from his cheek and chin.

"Pull me in!" He hollered at the others. "Quick!" In times of great stress, the human body goes into overdrive and can react with amazing speed. The men in the mine nearest to Max did react with lightning speed. Diablo was faster. He fired a second time, zeroed in on his target. "Shit!" Reiser yelled. "Son of a bitch! He hit my leg!" His voice was hoarse and cracking, his nervous system imploding with the primeval imperative of fight or flight. "Get me up, goddamnit! Hurry!" Garret, Riley, Bohach, Peg and Heather, even Lucius Meyer, all grabbed the rope and were jerking and pulling, arms flailing and voices sobbing, in frantic pandemonium. Just as they got Max Reiser to the lip of the mine entrance a third bullet tore into his brain. The side of his head exploded gruesomely before the eyes of the horrified people and sprayed those closest to him with gory bits of bone and flesh. Every one of them dropped the rope in shock and pressed themselves back against the mine's protective walls. Reiser's body plummeted down the cliff face before it hit the end of the tied off line. Diablo smiled grimly, lowered his rifle and turned to go back towards his cave. Behind him Reiser's corpse swayed obscenely on the cliff face. No one else would be trying to leave the tunnel.

He had them trapped.

Maria Alarcon was flat on her back, silently wrestling to beat back the gnawing black fear that had imprisoned her spirit and enfeebled her will. She tumbled into some deep Stygian place within herself where time stood still and demons roamed free. But there were spiritual powers within her that were stronger than the demons and Maria's sore tested resiliency finally won. She fought herself back into control. Shaken. But in control. And thinking ahead. She fully expected Diablo to return soon, as he had said he would, and she quickly set hard at work preparing something for him to eat. She put her on soiled torn clothing and made no attempt to wash her face or brush hair. Maria wanted to look ugly and unattractive. Even with her rigid self control she wasn't sure that she would be able to endure another brutal rape without breaking down. Her eyes were fervent and determined, continually darting over to glance at the weapons locker, as she worked over preparing the food. She was as certain now as she had ever been of anything in her entire life.

The next time the son of a bitch left she would break into the weapons locker.

Colonel Redding rose at a rain streaked dismal dawn that had the washed out color of a worn nickel, heated up a cup of water and dropped in a packet of instant coffee, then ate a simple breakfast of whole grain wafers and string cheese, washed down with sweet well water from his old Army canteen. Before he packed his gear, he took out his Springfield 700 30.06 scoped rifle and carefully checked it over. He broke it down, searched for any hints of dirt or moisture in the action and on the scope, then lightly oiled the working parts of the sturdy venerable Winchester and expertly reassembled the weapon. He had to be certain it was in excellent working order and absolutely reliable. Redding had an overwhelming brooding intuition that he might have to use it before the day was over. That thought in itself didn't bother him much. It wouldn't be the first time he'd shot a human being. There was Viet Nam. And more bodies than he cared to remember. Far more. What bothered him was that he sensed the distant schizophrenic enigma of Viet Nam was revisiting him. It wasn't a question of whether or not to shoot. The question was who to shoot. Who was friend?

And who was foe?

Goman's eyes bugged and his head snapped up with a galloping epinephrine rush when he heard the rifle shots from his hide hole. He understood with gut churning lucidity that the killer was firing at the people in the mine. Goman was relieved that he hadn't gone with them. Doubly relieved. Benning Goman had another reason besides the Mimbres pottery not to join the people hiding in the mine tunnel. Years earlier Goman had found out something embarrassingly unpleasant about himself when he went on one of the underground tours in the quaint old mining town of Bisbee a few miles south of Tombstone. He had been suddenly overwhelmed--frozen in fear and terrified down to the naked barren core of his being--when they descended into the mine tunnels. It was such a wretched and demeaning experience that he demanded in an angry and very uncharacteristic expletive laced panic that the tour guide immediately return him to the surface. From then on Goman knew that he was profoundly claustrophobic. It was as much integral to his person as were his lungs and kidneys, brain and heart. Though he would never admit it to anyone else, Benning Goman knew deep in his bones that he was physically incapable of hiding in the mine tunnel with the others. To have even tried would have torn his carefully cultivated persona into panicked pieces and exposed a demeaning facet of Benning Goman's complex character that would have publicly humiliated him. And that was absolutely unthinkable. He'd had no choice. He had to stay below. With the pots. The precious Mimbres pots.

Better to die with the Mimbres pots than to live with public humiliation.

Only a few minutes earlier Goman completed his preparations. He finished grubbing out his hide hole, spreading the pebbly rust colored dirt he dug out of the hole all around the excavation and treading over it until any hint of freshly dug dirt was gone. That done, he began lifting crates of pots and lugging them into the pit. He stacked them up in front of his hole, and, even in his dire haste, careful of his precious Mimbres pots, plunked down a pair of planks he found in Riley's equipment on top to lessen the weight stressing the bottom crates and the pots within, then piled more crates on the planks. As the capstone to his handiwork--which he considered to be brilliant, given the urgency of time and place--he carefully positioned a pair of half empty crates before his dugout that he could easily move aside from within the hidden den.

He left a thin space at the top of the stack of crates where he had an unobstructed view of the tent entrance. In the dim light of the interior of the tent anybody entering would only see a stack of crates along the interior flank of the pit. And just as important--anyone coming to look more closely at the stack of crates would be an easy target for Goman's pistol. Benning Goman settled into his hidden den with a thermos of cold coffee and a cache of food he'd scrounged in the camp, a bedroll for warmth and a flashlight. He was scared. Plenty scared. But not consumed by fear to the point where he couldn't function. Somehow he thought he was safer than the people in the tunnel.

The shots outside cemented that conviction in his jumpy overwrought brain.

### Chapter 12

### The Locker

Praying it would at least take the edge off Diablo's hostile murderous mood, Maria conjured up a hot meal out of the jumbled pile of canned goods he had stolen and stashed in his cave. As he ate, Diablo was watching the girl out the corner of his eye. He'd been a fool to think he could have a woman. There was no room for a woman in his life. How could there be? Besides, she looked haggard and almost old where she huddled solemnly by the fire. He would have to kill her before he left this camp for the distant mountains beyond this grassy valley bordering Mexico. There was a bitter taste lingering in his mouth. The unfamiliar bile of inner conflict. Maria Alarcon had touched something in Diablo's depths that was still faintly human. He did not like the thought of killing her. Nor could he stand having the necessity to kill her lingering in his mind for long. He had to get it over with. He had to get everything over with. It was time for Diablo's raid to end. Diablo suddenly leaped to his feet and strode heavily over to the weapons cabinet. He unlocked it with rough, muscular movements and threw open the door. Maria's eyes followed him and she rose to slip over and peer inside. He did not notice her. He reached inside, took out more ammunition for his rifle, and also pulled out a heavy sack. Maria had moved close enough to see inside the locker. Her heart fluttered in excitement.

It was full of guns and ammunition.

Just as Diablo seemed to sense her lurking behind him, she backed away and hurriedly sat back down on the dark packed earth near the fire. He closed the locker, slamming the door shut, and snapped the lock together with a disturbing air of finality that Maria glimpsed out the corner of her eye. Then he wheeled and walked to another corner of the limestone cave. Diablo bent down and began to rummage through a chaotic tumble of discards from his weeks of raiding, found what he was looking for, a pack of cheap cigars, and stuck them into a pocket inside his poncho. He stooped to put down the heavy sack near Maria, reached over to her and pulled her hands behind her back. He grabbed one of the strands of rope lying on the earth that he had earlier used to bind her. She looked at him with pleading eyes. There was as much reality as theater in them. Maybe more.

"Diablo. Please, Don't tie me. Let me stay here by the fire. I am so cold." He looked at her frightened face, hesitated and then let her hands drop. There was really no need to tie her. The girl was broken. She would stay by the warmth of the fire, tied or untied. He looked at her once more, knowing in the darkest corner of his tortured crazy brain that without doubt he would return to the cave when he was done, take her one last time and then kill her. She was no Lozen. He remembered now, from the worn out old history book he'd stolen months earlier. The real Lozen was a woman warrior who did not take a man to her. This woman was not like that. Diablo had no choice. He had to kill her. He was a brave man. Like Eskiminzin. Yes. He had to kill her.

He reached down, grabbed the box of matches near the fire in their waterproof case, thrust them into his pocket and left the cave without another word, a malignant glower on his face. As soon as he left the determined hard look leaped back onto Maria Alarcon's face and she picked up a rock and went towards the weapons case. She would not have much liked her expression if she had seen her reflection in a mirror at that moment. Then Maria had a sudden thought that brought a small, cynical smile to her hard set face. A simple meal of canned goods warmed over a fire had probably saved her life. Another humorless smile. It might well end up costing the evil son of a bitch his life. She prayed fervently to the austere, silent God of her strict traditionalist religious childhood that it would happen. And that she, Maria Alarcon, would be the lethal instrument of Diablo's destruction.

_Imminent_ destruction.

Everyone was red eyed and sullen. The grisly spectacle of Max Reiser being killed before their eyes shook them to their roots, especially since they had believed the mine tunnel was their salvation. No more. Not after Reiser. Especially Reiser, who, unlike Parelli or Silenski or Sierra, had been so selflessly helpful. Reiser, dumpy little nondescript man that he was, had emerged from their desperate lethal chaos as the closest thing to a hero they could hope to have in this whole bloody mess.

They would never know that Reiser hadn't been at all sure whether he would bring back help or just make his own escape into Mexico. Most likely he would have split the difference--sent for the help while himself slipping quietly into obscurity in Mexico to hide out until things quieted down and sorted out. His first wife, who broke his heart and sent him into a suicidal despair when she died so young from an obscure cancer with an unpronounceable scientific name, was Mexican and he still had close contacts among her friends and relatives in a pleasant well watered leafy ejido in the foothills of a Sinaloan mountain range. Reiser had always had trouble connecting with Americans. Especially Anglo-Americans. But with the rural Mexicans it was different. He made the human rotary with them into an easy familiarity. Max knew they would welcome him like a long lost brother. That is....

If he made it there.

Harry Zonus hit the brakes just in time. The hurtling force of this tempest was far beyond what anyone had ever seen in the mountains. The raging power of the storm water plummeting downstream overpowered the stream channel, broke clean out of its banks and cut a steep new arroyo that slashed right across the road. Another few feet and Zonus would have driven over the edge and into the raging waters of the wash. And likely a one way trip to the mortuary table of his old high school buddy Charlie Johnson's funeral home in nearby Sierra Vista. Shaken, his hands quivering, he turned the car around and started back home.

Diablo moved with his fluid animal grace along the rim of the broken cliffs above the dripping trees and raging waters of Dancer Canyon. There was no need to make the slippery climb down into the canyon. He crept along the canyon rim until he found the place where, hidden among a jumble of boulders and wind stunted pinyons, there was a narrow opening. Beneath was the old mine tunnel. He stood for a moment outlined against the stormy gray horizon, his linear figure bolt upright, the wind billowing his black poncho, his face hidden from view by the swaddling folds of the poncho's hood. He didn't just look like a specter from another dimension. He _was_ one. And then, like the morning fog shrouding the big cottonwoods and willows in the San Pedro River a dozen miles away in the spreading valley below, he was suddenly gone.

The quick, acidic tongue of Lucius Meyer was stilled. The sly master of the criminal fringes of Los Angeles was uncharacteristically silent and sullen. No one had dared to treat him with disrespect for a very long time. Not since he had been a weak, fat little boy in school. Everybody bullied him. The pretty girls laughed at him. Even the ugly ones shunned him. He had grown so bitter about it that he became consumed with a virulent passion to get vengeance. There would come a day, he vowed with an intense vicious fervor, when men and women would cower before him. No more laughing and mocking Lucius Meyer. And, because he was a quick witted man of extreme cunning, amorality and ruthlessness, that day eventually came. While the others in the old mine talked in soft worried tones of escape, of rescue, of hope, and, in even more subdued tones, of fear, Meyer glowered malevolently and plotted revenge. If they did indeed escape this elusive murdering lunatic, Meyer would find another Sierra, another Silenski, and come back to revisit Jim Garret and Nub Riley.

Then they would know who Lucius Meyer was.

"Oh, damn", Tom Bohach muttered embarrassedly. Despite the extraordinary situation they were in, the ordinary refused to go away. His guts were churning with more than fear. Bohach took one of the flashlights, a wad of paper that someone had prudently thought to pack among their supplies, and padded deep into the mine tunnel. His bowels had refused to stop functioning, Diablo or no Diablo.

### Revenge!

Maria's gaze glazed over. Her lithe athlete's body grew inert and seemed to shut down. Then her eyes flashed open. A second later the emotional dam burst inside her and the firepit-lit dim cave was filled with kinetic energy. Maria Alarcon attacked the gun locker in a furious frenzy, beating the lock with a heavy rock far longer than she had to, reducing it to a shattered wreck, pounding in the top of the locker, screaming angrily as she vented her pent up rage. Finally she threw the rock away, tore open the locker and reached inside to rummage with a revenge fueled hunger through the horde of stolen weapons. Maria was no stranger to firearms. Her dad was a twice purple-hearted Marine veteran of the bitter jungle fighting in Viet Nam's I Corps and had taught her about both rifles and handguns. She knew how to handle a weapon, how to load it, sight it, fire it. And accurately. Like all Marines, her dad was an expert marksman and he passed the skill on to his kids, Maria included. She was good. Her older sister and brother were even better and Maria had honed her shooting skills trying to best them in their usual hotly contested sibling rivalries. Maria took out a Winchester rifle with a scope on it, checked that it was loaded, and also found a loaded .357 S&W handgun. When Diablo returned she would be ready. Maria was absolutely determined with a steel will that would never again be subdued. He might kill her in the fight. But he would never take her again. No. Never. She clenched her fists.

Never!

Diablo lay motionlessly in the dank bowels of the sterile old mine, his breathing low and controlled, watching the figures around the fire. The rifle was cradled in his arms. He cursed himself when he realized that he'd made a foolish tactical mistake. At the last minute, before he'd left his cave lair for the mine, he'd decided to take his bolt action rifle with a powerful scope because of its long distance accuracy. The same rifle he'd used to kill Max Reiser. Now he knew he should have brought the rapid firing semi-automatic Colt ArmaLite. Too late now. He could certainly pick off at least one of them off with the bolt action weapon he had. But then what? They would scatter in the shadows and he would be as vulnerable as they were. He knew they had guns from the too close exchange with Garret at the waterfall.

But, despite the mistake in his choice of rifles, like any veteran Apache warrior he had thought ahead on the tactics and methods of attack. There was still a way he could get at them all at once. The heavy sack he took from his weapons locker was stuffed with a dozen sticks of dynamite he stealthily pilfered from a working mine at the nearby Mexican town of Cananea one moonless night a month earlier. A few sticks of it, wrapped together and thrown into the fire, would catch them all huddled together. But the explosion could very well bring down the rocks of the unstable roof of the mine tunnel on him as well as them. It might kill him, too. That was unacceptable. Not that he feared death. He didn't. He spit in the face of death. Diablo might have been a vicious murderous lunatic, but he was no coward. His death now was unacceptable because, in Diablo's mind, his raid could only be successful if he survived. He had to survive. Perhaps he might die later, when they came to hunt him down after his raid. But not now. He had to survive.

He would have to think of another way.

Benning Goman hovered inside his den like one of the numberless gophers that had once pockmarked the fields of the San Pedro valley with their holes. He was about as secure as he could get. Which maybe wasn't all that much, he had to glumly admit. But a hell of a lot more, and it was pretty sure of it, than what the others were facing. Jesus! The shots. Had more of them died? Were any of them even still alive? And him? Goman? How safe was he? Lurking inside his hacked out den, his back to the solid dry earth, the crates of precious pots in front of him. Was he safe? He was well hidden, he had his pistol, and he had a clear view of the tent entrance. He had enough provisions for two, maybe three days. And he had thought to make his hidden den big enough so that he could deposit any uncooperative body wastes and bury them with the small archaeologist's trowel he had. There was no need to leave his den until either the lunatic left or help arrived. He was uncertain whether he cared about the fate of the others or not. Anyhow, he thought darkly to himself, in the end everyone faced their fate alone. They faced theirs. And he faced his. He was lucidly aware that, despite his precautions, he was still in danger. Grave danger.

His eye was twitching.

Maria Alarcon took her own discovered treasure, her lethal arsenal, dressed herself in smelly and outsized but warm heavy clothes she found crumpled in a corner in the fetid cave, and went to lie in wait by the cave mouth. Diablo would have to approach his den in the open, and there she would have her chance. She'd nail the pendejo bastard. She held the rifle rigidly in her hands and locked her eyes on the approach to the cave. The son of a bitch might think he was a warrior. Maybe he was. But so was she. A woman warrior. The memory of Lozen flashed through her mind. Could it be possible? She really did have Apache blood in her veins. She knew that for a fact. Very likely the same Chiricahau subtribe that Lozen came from. Could she be a distant relative of Lozen? Maria fondly patted the stock of her rifle. An ironic look touched her hardset face. Relative or not....

Lozen would be proud of her.

### Diablo

Suddenly Garret realized that Bohach had been gone a long time. The realization energized him in an instant and he bounded to his feet.

"Reiser!" He exclaimed, remembering. "He said there might be another entrance." He stared at the others in his fear. "The boy. Bohach. He's been gone too long." Faces already worn down from a kaleidoscope of emotions, most of them deathly negative, again drooped even more. In disquiet. And beyond into a creeping dismal numb fear.

"You think he went to look for the other entrance?" Heather said, not at first understanding, not wanting to grasp the significance of the fear on Garret's face.

"Jesus", he said. "I hope it's no more than that." Heather felt the horror creeping into her soul then, recognizing the fear on Garret's face. Her knees began to shake. Garret pulled out his pistol and motioned at Nub Riley with a jerk of the head and his eyes towards the inky darkness beyond the firelight.

"We gonna have to go look, Jim", Riley said in a voice stripped of emotion as he, in turn, rose from the fire and pulled Skarp's Glock from his belt. "There's no choice."

The two men crept cautiously into the forbidding lightless innards of the 19th Century mine tunnel, each sticking close to the little bit of cover the walls of the mine provided, edging their way into the gloom. Both held their pistols pointed in front of them, fingers edging onto the triggers and ever so slightly starting to pull on them. Behind the pair of creeping men, near the entrance to the mine, Heather Sosa and Peg Riley clasped hands and quietly began to pray, ignoring the moans and whimpers of Lucius Meyer where he cowered prone against the wall of the mine as far away from the revealing light of the fire as he could get.

"Jim", Riley whispered a few minutes later when they were lost in the obsidian dark of the old mine, recoiling in surprise against the mine wall when his faint whisper echoed off the opposite wall of the mine. His whisper dropped to become so faint it was almost unhearable to Garret. "Do we dare use a flashlight?" Both he and Garret jumped when a familiar young voice came clearly out of the dark. Garret's finger instinctively pulled down on the Glock's trigger until there was absolutely no slack left in it.

"Thank God! You've come!" It was Tom Bohach, whispering at them in the blackness of the mine. "Don't turn on a light. He'll see us." The whisper resounded like a megaphone in Riley's ears and Viet Nam combat veteran Nub Riley instantly dropped to the floor of the mine like a human stone, Jim Garret an instant behind him. Riley rolled to the side behind the cover of a small rock bulge in the mine wall. Garret stayed in place and tried to make himself a human pancake.

"He was here?" Riley said softly, unnerved, as Bohach crawled to his side. The youth tersely explained in a low, quivering voice how he had been squatting on the mine floor, his mind lost in wondering about Alice, then heard the soft footfalls coming down the mine. He slid to the side of the tunnel, tried to push himself into the rocks, become a rock himself, be invisible, try to make the sound of his breathing become noiseless. Diablo had passed, not seen him, not heard him, and moved towards where the others were clustered around the campfire. Bohach was ashamed. He didn't have the courage to call out a warning or use his pistol. Then he told how the dark specter had returned, moving back into the black recesses of the tunnel until he could no longer hear the careful soft footsteps of the unseen man who had come to kill them.

"Goddamnit!" Garret muttered, desperate. "There _is_ another entrance and he knows where it is. Oh, Goddamnit!" He repeated. Garret's face was drained of color.

"We'll have to look for it", Riley said in a cold, emotionless voice. "We're gonna have to go look for the damn entrance, Jim."

"I know", Garret replied, his voice cracking. The primal blood lust that seized him in the canyon earlier had ebbed away with the hours. And this was different. This goddamn dark hole in the side of the mountain. The midnight darkness of the tunnel was like the womb of death itself. The terror of a nebulous malevolent phantom in the claustrophobic gloom of the tunnel was crumbling their will, even Jim Garret's, who sensed presences, who heard voices, who could smell the pungent wood smoke of campfires and peoples long dead. The evil was palpable to him. He knew it now. The owl was a warning, an omen, maybe even a presentiment of death. His body was shaking. Nub Riley thought it was fear. But it was something else. Something even Jim Garret didn't recognize.

With shaking hands and nervous eyes, baleful glances bouncing off each other, caroming off the walls of the tunnel and then swallowed up in the impenetrable gloom in the bowels of the mine, the three men began to fearfully inch their way deeper into the tunnel. Slowly. So slowly that the very idea of mere caution seemed reckless and hasty. Tom Bohach, who hadn't put a foot inside a church since his confirmation in the crashingly boring upscale Tucson church his parents attended when it didn't interfere with their tee time on the golf course, began to recite the Lord's Prayer in a barely audible mumble that echoed in harmony with his barely audible shuffle along the loose bits of rock cluttering the mine floor. Jim Garret's mind was reciting the same prayer, with the odd thought in mind that Bohach's low mumble sounded like a Gregorian chant. Nub Riley was praying, too, but directly to the loving and compassionate God of his understanding for the safety of his wife and children. None of them really believed they were going to survive the looming violent encounter with the maniac in the mine. Like Benning Goman crammed into his rabbit hole in the dig site, they knew.

In the end you faced your fate alone.

Jammed against the walls of the 19th Century mine that was once a place of hope but sputtered to an ending as a wasted place of utter defeat and despair, they moved slowly, glacially slowly, towards the unknown horror lurking somewhere in the depths of the old tunnel. They hugged the scant protection of the mine wall so intimately that they scraped their bodies on the jagged chunks of projecting rocks and all of them were bleeding from minor abrasions and cuts. None of them even noticed. The cuts and bruises and abrasions were insignificant compared to what may lie just ahead. After a few minutes, Nub motioned at the others to stop. He whispered to them with an idea. Jim and Tom nodded agreement. Then Nub pointed his pistol down the middle of the mine tunnel and touched off four quick shots. The bullets hit the mine's walls less than a hundred feet away where the tunnel bent towards the north, ricocheted, ricocheted again and zinged away out of hearing deeper into the mine. There was no response.

The three grim-faced men resumed their creeping cautious advance into the dank mine.

A heavy thunderstorm raged in a wild flurry of wind and rain under a steel gray sky filled with zigzagging bolts of lightning exploding on the rocks of the mountains. _God's own special effects_ , thought Colonel Redding, who was a spiritual man but not a religious one, at the awesome power of nature on fearsome display all around him. Sparks cascaded off lightning struck peaks. Ponderosa pines struck by the bolts exploded in flame. Colonel Redding was forced to seek shelter under the branches of a pair of low hanging scraggly cedars in the lee of a huge overhanging crag of jagged rock. He had searched the storm battered mountains all morning, trying to find the specific source of the overpowering feelings that were washing over him. It was there, somewhere near, he was certain. But the certainly didn't carry any concomitant extrasensory radar. He couldn't pinpoint it. He still didn't know where. The Colonel scrambled into the driest corner under the drooping drenched branches of the gnarled old cedars. He would wait. For the storm to let up. And for the mystic visceral power to point him the way.

Diablo sat on a flat side of a chunk of tumbled volcanic rock just outside the narrow back exit that had been a ventilation hole for the old mine back when it was a working dig. Years earlier there was a vent hood over it, but the protective hood was long gone, maybe from a tornadic mountain wind storm, or a powerful whack from a curious black bear, or, once so common in the old mining country, to some wandering souvenir hunter. Diablo knew the people would be coming. Bohach's frightened breathing hadn't been as silent as the boy believed. Diablo heard it on his return from the fire, understood that the breathing belonged to a man who either was not armed or didn't have the resolve to use his weapon, and who would pass the news to the other's of Diablo's presence. They would have no choice but to come. As the rain slackened into a short lived drizzling interregnum he took out the package of cigars and the waterproof container of matches and lit up a cigar. With the grimacing distaste of a non smoker, he sourly puffed on the malodorous tube of dried out tobacco leaves enough to set it to smoldering. Satisfied it would stay lit, he sat back with it protected from the rain by the shroud of his drooping poncho. The bag of dynamite was inside his poncho, between his legs. A predator as lethal as any animal that roamed these towering peaks, he perched on the mountainside. And watched. And waited. He knew. It was only a matter of time. They would come.

They had to come.

Now long was it? Not more than a few fleeting minutes in ordinary time. Ordinary time. This time was anything but ordinary. It took a heart squeezing eternity before they reached the thin shaft of cinereal light stabbing into the gloom of the mine. They approached it carefully, fearfully, each man knowing that he could well be at the very doorstep of his mortal fate.

There was only silence among them. Silence and darting questioning glances, veiled by the dim ray of outside light. Then, wordlessly, Bohach shrugged, flashed a pale attempt at bravado, and slender and youthfully agile as he was, wormed his way up through the opening. His head popped up into the open and instantly screamed in sheer terror. Diablo was sitting not three feet away. Bohach scraped and tore his face and arms in his frenzy to get back into the mine.

"He's there!" He yelled in wide eyed horror. "Right outside the goddamn hole." The three stumbled backwards away from the old air vent, frightened. Yet also discordantly excited and even relieved that the specter had finally materialized into palpable human form. Garret's relief was immediate, crazily mixed in with the residual fear still churning his insides. This monster really had human form, was close by, was literally within reach. Garret hurtled off his mental cloak of fear with such abruptness that it left both of his companions momentarily dumbstruck with the sudden change. He jumped forward and fired a bullet through the air shaft.

"Come on, you son of a bitch!" He yelled. "Come on, face us in the open! You don't have the guts for it, do you?" Like Maria Alarcon, a woman he had no idea existed in a connate hell so physically close to theirs, Jim Garret was gone into a genuine rage. An epochal rage. What the ancient Vikings called a Berserker. Or what more recent bloody minded pillagers called a Wilding. There was no more fear. There was only the rage. The boiling ancient primeval rage. A rage identical to that of one a handful of centuries earlier in the very canyon below when improvident Nde raiders reaped the whirlwind when they grabbed the only son of a vengeful Sobaipuri shaman who would ever after be known among his people by the eloquently descriptive name of Bad.

"Easy, Jim!" Nub said harshly, grabbing Garret by the shoulder. " _Easy!_ " Garret turned on him with wild eyes.

"Don't you see now, Nub? Don't you see? We can take him. Three of us, with guns. Just him with his rifle. We can take him!" But before Garret could begin the wild scramble into the air vent that he was already building up to in his furor, a sputtering light dropped into the hole and clattered onto the mine floor.

"Jesus!" Bohach yelled. "It's dynamite!" He turned and began to run in panic down the tunnel. Garret stepped around him, swooped down, pulled the fuse from the dynamite, cast it aside, then jumped to the air shaft to fire his pistol again. The shot just missed Diablo as he hovered expectantly near over the entrance. A second stick dropped just after Jim's shot. Garret did the same thing as before, pulling the fuse, then yelled into the hole.

"I'm going to get you, you son of a bitch! You're a dead man!" He shot his pistol again, shrieking defiance as he pulled the trigger. Bohach stopped his panicked flight, returned, stared in awed amazement at Garret. With a sudden blindingly clear flash of insight Tom realized that a force--whatever the hell it was--fully equal in power to the madman outside had blossomed in Jim Garret. Victory was not only possible, it was close. Tom began to grow excited, agitated, incautious.

Above, Diablo was doing the opposite, growing more cautious. He must have encountered the same man who had been at the waterfall. This man was dangerous. Diablo's raid, and his life, was in danger of an unsuccessful conclusion just as it was about to end. This could not be. This _would_ not be. His angry eyes hidden by the folds of the poncho's hood, the lean killer tied three sticks of dynamite together, lit them, waited until the fuses had almost burned down, stepped to the hole, dropped the dynamite down into it and dove agilely out of the way, oblivious to the jumble of sharp rocks ready to lacerate his body as he fell.

It was Tom Bohach's turn to blow. There had been too much humiliation, too much intimidation, for way too long. His slowly festering anger was lit by Garret's fire just as Diablo was lighting the fuse of the sticks of dynamite a few feet above him. Bohach burst past Garret and began to wildly clamber up the hole, yelling in an unintelligible babble and wildly firing Meyer's pistol. Had he gained the exit Diablo would have been in deep trouble trying to stop a man gone over into a wild furor with two more coming right behind him.

But the God of Fate dealt Bohach a hopelessly unequal hand. The dynamite and Tom Bohach met in the center of the air shaft and Tom only had time to yell one last time for his companions to run for their lives. Garret and Riley, already tense and wary, reacted instantly, jumping back from the hole and leaping for the safety of a bend in the tunnel just beyond the air shaft, both men tripping over loose rocks in their hurry but still tumbling to safety beyond the bend. The explosion ripped Tom Bohach's body into a half dozen gruesome fragments, broke in the air shaft's walls and tumbled the bloody parts of Bohach and several tons of rock onto the mine's floor. Garret and Riley emerged from their cover into a cloud of dust. Riley switched on his flashlight. A huge pile of rubble lay where the air shaft had been. The shaft of light from the outside, at once a menace and a hope, was gone. The air shaft was closed off by a wall of rock. But far worse than that.

The rubble had closed them off from the people at the mouth of the mine tunnel.

### Trapped

Heather and Peg and Lucius Meyer, already on a shakily nervous edge at the long absence of the men, were overwhelmed by the thunderous noise of the big explosion that reverberated and grew in strength as it moved down the tunnel and bounced off the close walls. It came over them a great overpowering surge of noise and left them shorn of all emotion but bewilderment.

"What in the hell was that?" Meyer was finally able to mutter, his body shaking as it was pounded by wave after wave of fear where he cowered against the wall of the mine near the entrance. "Was it an earthquake? Did the tunnel collapse? What was it?"

"It was an explosion", Heather Sosa said flatly, with the certainty of someone who had grown up in a mining family and had been around mines all her life. "Dynamite."

"Dynamite!" Meyer replied, still shaking. "How could that be? What could it mean?" Peg Riley glanced at him with hollow, frightened eyes. Her voice, so rich and resonant and determined in normal times, came out tiny and frail. These were not normal times.

"We'll have to go see", she said, reluctant to even let the words pass her lips, terrified at the thought of having to go farther into the mine and the face of the unknown. "We have to find out what happened." She was praying with every fervent fiber of her spousal being that the explosion had not meant the death of her husband. _Please, God_ , she pleaded. _Let him be alive_. Heather Sosa was thinking the same thing about Jim Garret. All Lucius Meyer could think of was trying to stay alive. He adamantly refused to leave the dubious security of the murky light at the mine entrance to go with them. He backed away from them snapping and snarling and reminding Peg Riley of a neighbor's mean tempered scared dog.

A tiny fissure remained where the vent hole had been. Enough for sound to trickle through. Ear to the ground over the crack into the tunnel below, Diablo could make out the frantic yells of the men in the tunnel, a few impassable feet beneath him. After a minute or two of listening he understood that they were trapped and cut off from the others. They were yelling women's names, and that had to mean that the women were isolated, helpless, lost to the protection of their men. It probably also meant the women had no guns. The rain returning in stinging gusts, Diablo uncoiled his lanky height and straightened up over where the vent hole had been. He had time. Time to finish Diablo's Raid.

He knew what he had to do next.

Riley and Garret were frantic. Not with fear, or even rage. Garret's rage was blown away with the explosion. Garret was filled with the despair of being trapped and away from Heather, from Peg. For a few bitter moments he beat his fists in frustration against the rough walls of the mine. Then he and Nub, men who knew well enough the old grim tales of mines and cave-ins, immediately set to feverishly working to pull the tumbled rocks down and force a passable hole through the tunnel. After a half hour of pulling at the rocks, fingers bruised and bleeding, supplications to God never far from their lips, they heard Peg and Heather on the other side.

"Nub! Jim! Tom! Are you all right?" Peg Riley yelled. Riley yelled back that he and Jim were, but that Bohach was killed in the explosion and buried in the rubble. Fixing on the sound of Nub and Jim's voices and rocks being roughly jerked free by the men, the two women resolutely set in to pulling away the tumbled jumble of rock on their side of the cave in. Though the mine was cool, even chilly, sweat poured off of all of them as they worked in anguished desperation towards clearing a passage. Somehow, they knew that their salvation lay in clearing the passage. They labored away, sweat pouring off them, blood seeping from wounds from the sharp rocks. There were few words. But plenty of prayers. And more than a few anguished sobs.

Diablo retraced his steps along the scattered scrub pinyons on the sodden rim of the canyon, found the place where he descended near the waterfall and began the careful slippery climb down into Dancer Canyon. Maria Alarcon, laying in ambush inside the mouth of the cave, did not see him until the fleeing moment when he disappeared over the cliff. Cursing, angry at having missed her chance, rain or no rain, she pulled on a heavy poncho and went out to position herself on the rocks where Diablo had gone. When he returned she would be ready for him.

She wouldn't miss her chance again.

Diablo had teased over the puzzle of the man who hadn't climbed with the others into the mine tunnel. He was still somewhere below, in the canyon, hiding. Why had he taken the chance, why had he not remained with the security of numbers? He did not know. But he was sure of one thing. For a man to be so bold, he must certainly be armed.

Diablo crept cautiously into the pothunters' camp.

The wall of broken rock seemed endless. Their muscles ached, their lungs gasped for air, their nerves were screaming in raw fatigue and fear. But they kept on, pulling off one rock after another, cutting and bruising their hands, breaking fingernails, scraping their knuckles, struggling mightily with the big rocks, working their way around those too large to move. A jumbled pile of rubble built up behind them on either side of the barrier, but still they seemed no closer, the voices on the far side just as far, reunion and rescue still out of reach somewhere beyond in the jumbled rocks of the cave-in. They were all poised on the abyss of utter despair as they tore frantically at the rocks. And on all of their minds was the icy apprehension that the madman was still somewhere near.

Maybe very, very near.

Goman saw the lean figure dart into the tent, slip around to the side, disappear out of his view. His eyes bulging with mounting terror, one eye gone into uncontrollable wild twitching, Benning Goman held his breath and listened to the cautious footsteps circling the pit. Goman was certain the man paused just above him, staring down at the pile of crates. Then the tall poncho shrouded figure completed the circling of the pit, opened the entrance flap and vanished noiselessly outside. Goman untensed, breathed deeply the sweet air of life, put his head back and closed his eyes in relief. His heart was still pounding, his hands still quivering. The killer had stood only a few feet away, yet had not discovered his hiding place. He was safe, would be safe, would survive. He was grateful to the power that had spared his life. Not God. Even if there were one, which he very much doubted. Such thoughts were for the pedestrian masses.

Goman's salvation was his own doing, his own ingenuity at fashioning such a clever hiding place. He felt smug even in his fear. He moved his legs, shifting his weight to a more comfortable position after having been frozen in a painfully awkward stillness at the man's arrival, and scraped one of the crates with his toe. It was only a very small noise, but it was enough. Diablo had run around the tent, pulled up the tarp's side and slipped inside above the curious stack of crates. He lay motionless, noiseless, listening. The crates had looked out of place piled against the inside of the pit when everything else, including most of the crates, was stacked along the perimeter of the tent . It would have seemed suspicious to him anyhow, but knowing as he did that somewhere nearby a man was hidden? It was a road sign pointing directly to the man's hiding place.

Diablo lay only three feet above Goman, directly over his head, poised at the edge of the pit and staring down at the tiny gap above the crates that revealed the hole behind. He did not act immediately. Close as he was, if the man inside was pointing a pistol, Diablo would be at the disadvantage. He leaned back and sat up to reach for something. Goman heard the noise of the movement, instantly was tense and alert. What was it? He sat huddled in his hole, the pistol held up before him, paralyzed with fear. At first his mind could not register what the dazzling point of light was that fell attached to a heavy object. It thudded against the top crate where it touched the dirt wall next to him and lay there, emitting its strange light and making an odd sputtering noise. But then he understood and knew what the distant explosions he'd heard earlier had been. His face froze in the thousand yard stare of the doomed. In the most lucid moment of his life he understood that all he had left was a choice of deaths.

Benning Goman chose to die with his Mimbres pots in a searing roar of light and power.

The rain still fell in heavy squalls. Most of the time Maria Alarcon couldn't see far. She was so agitated that, had she been able to see Diablo far down the canyon, she might well have shot at him with the scoped rifle despite the distance. But she could not see him, and she lay in the rain, bits of sharp loose rock biting into her body even through the heavy clothing, the rifle propped on the lip of the canyon wall, and scoured the storm swept valley for signs of his return. A thousand yards behind her Colonel Redding descended the trail that led into the blind canyon from the piney slopes of the higher elevations. He had heard the distant explosions, marked the direction, and knew that his destination lay there. He unslung his rifle and was carrying it like an infantryman going into combat. It was an old and well practiced skill.

It would soon be put to use one last time.

Diablo nimbly climbed the rocks--were not the Apache the greatest of all peoples at mountain climbing?--until he came to the rope where Max Reiser's shattered corpse dangled bloody and lifeless against the cliff wall. He climbed over the body and then grabbed the rope to speed his ascent. Lucius Meyer, who was close to the mine entrance, noticed the rope moving, but ignored it. Reiser's body had been swaying in the wind and the rope had sometimes moved against its anchor around a thick boulder at the mine entrance. Meyer was awash in terror. His companions in the mine had been stripped from him. First the boy, then the two men, finally the two women. All were swallowed in the depths of the mine. None had returned. He heard the distant sound of rocks being moved from deep within the mine, but didn't know what to make of it. He pressed his back hard against the side of the mine tunnel, trying somehow to slow the tremors that were shaking his body in spastic waves.

And then there was another explosion and he was uncertain where it had come from. Was it deep inside the mine? Somewhere outside? He was not sure, and he was confused by it. But he was the most horrified by what might be in the mine, might even now he coming at him. He kept himself on the far side of the fire, moved only to rekindle its embers, and kept his eyes riveted on the gloom beginning at the edge of the fire's pale glow. If the devil came at him, he would go over the rope to the canyon below and run for his life. Then there was another sound. Closer. At first he thought it was just the rain pelting the rocks around the mine entrance. Then he thought it might be Reiser's body brushing against the cliffs. But could he hear that this far away? Meyer slowly turned to look at the mine entrance.

Diablo was just coming over the edge.

They heard Meyer's screams echoing through the mine, even faintly on the far side of the rock wall where Garret and Riley labored with weary persistence at clearing a passage. The women heard them much more clearly and understood with a crushing apprehension what they meant. Though fatigued to the very edge of physical collapse, the sound of Meyer's screaming fed their bodies new reserves of strength as they, and the men on the other side of the wall, tore into the barrier with a final frantic desperation. Garret pulled out a twenty pound rock and reached in behind it to grab another. His hand went into empty space. A second later he felt Heather Sosa's hand touch his. They were through! Despite themselves, they began to yell as they pulled away rocks at the top of the barrier to make the passage big enough for a human to crawl through.

Meyer literally died of fright even before Diablo caught him and drove the knife into his spine. He would not have even thought of trying to warn the others, but his headlong, blind, tripping, stumbling, plummeting and above all noisy screaming flight into the depths of the mine tunnel had carried him deep enough for his screams to reach the people at the barrier. It gave them a warning, a little extra time to throw the last of their reserves of strength and energy into forcing a passage through the rocks. Riley pulled his wife through, then Garret pulled Heather Sosa over the barrier. They collapsed into each other's arms, weeping, sobbing, gasping for air, even laughing. Garret only lingered a few moments with Heather. He pulled himself back to the top of the rock barrier, struggling with the fatigue that was washing over him and commanding him to rest his weary body. He could not. There could be no rest. Not yet. Garret crawled, exhausted, as far into the narrow passage as he could, pulled out his pistol and flashlight and switched the flashlight on. And there. Right before Jim's eyes. A bare ten feet away.

The Devil.

Diablo stood frozen in the light for only a fractional moment. Garret emptied his pistol at him, firing blindly, almost in panic, and the first bullets went wide. The rest didn't, but by that time Diablo had dodged to cover. Not quite quickly enough. One bullet tore into the flesh of Diablo's upper arm and opened a minor artery and convinced him that it was enough. It was time to end Diablo's raid.

He wheeled and retreated towards the mine entrance, in his haste tripping and falling heavily on the scattered fragments of rock on the tunnel floor. When he got to the improvised camp the pothunters had made near the mine's entrance, he grabbed up a blanket and tore a piece from it in the wan light by the dying fire, wrapped it around his wound, and then began to clamber down the rope. The descent was slower and more cautious than he liked. The wound had cost him both strength and agility. He reached the canyon bottom and began a wounded lope for the waterfall. He was not angry or even disappointed that he left some of the enemy alive. What was important was that he had killed many of them and that he had survived. An Apache warrior never fought to the death on a raid unless cornered or protecting the escape of his people. The aim of a raid was to steal and not be caught, to kill and not be killed. He even thought that it was a good thing that he had been wounded. What better souvenir of the raid than his own scar tissue? There was only one more thing to do. Just one last loose end.

The girl.

"l think he's gone", Garret whispered to the others. "I think I hit him and he's gone." No one said anything. They just looked at what they could see of Garret hunched at the top of the barrier, and at each other, and prayed to God that Jim Garret was right.

Outside, in the canyon, the rain was beginning to let up.

Colonel Redding saw the distant figure crouched in the jumble of rocks and shrubs above Dancer Canyon. The colonel edged off to the flank of the canyon where he could see down into it. There was something there. A flash, a blur, of movement. At first he was not certain of what he was seeing. Just movement. But then a loping human figure, bent over as though wounded or injured, materialized out of the lifting haze of the fading storm. Redding turned to peer through his rifle's scope at the figure lurking on the rocks at the canyon's edge. The person had gone prone and Redding saw a rifle pointing towards the hunched figure coming at a slow run up Dancer canyon. The old Viet Nam mantra played over in his mind. Who has friend?

Who was foe?

Maria knew it was the bastard Diablo coming up the canyon by the way he moved. The confident, arrogant swagger that had a savage animal gracefulness to it even when he was wounded. His murderous raid must be over. He was moving in his listing trot out in the open, not at all furtively, seemingly unworried about an ambush or pursuit. Maria glowered. That probably meant he had killed everybody. Maria was angry with herself for not acting sooner. She might have been able to save some of them. Silently cursing herself as bitterly as she did the approaching Diablo, she put the scope's crosshairs on the loping figure in the canyon, grimly waiting for Diablo to get closer where she'd have a better clear shot at him. At least she could stop the bastard before he killed again. Maria's left eye closed and she pressed her shooting eye against the flange of the rifle's scope. Her finger took up most of the slack in the weapon's trigger. She would not miss.

She could not miss.

Diablo stopped for a moment. He looked around him, saw that the rain had almost stopped, that the cloud cover was lightening and beginning to break up. The storm was ending. The water would soon go down, people would be out in the mountains again, somebody would eventually come here looking for the missing people and find the dead camp. Even if he had wanted to, there was no more time to linger in the attempt to finish off the handful of survivors hovering in fear behind the cave-in up in the old mine tunnel. Diablo snorted softly in the grim humorless way he had that was a parody of real laughter. Didn't a raid have to have survivors? Otherwise how would anyone ever know what happened? He resumed his trot up the canyon, exulting in his victory despite his wound. But there was still that one last loose end.

The girl

The evil bastard was close enough. Maria's finger tightened on the trigger. Nothing happened. She scowled angrily at herself. _Good God, Maria!_ , she sputtered. An amateur's mistake. She hadn't switched off the safety. Maria clicked it off with a mixture of irritation and urgency, sighted again, fixed the bastard Diablo cleanly in her sights, steadied the weapon and began to carefully squeeze on the trigger, holding her breath as she slowly, slowly squeezed.

A single rifle shot echoed off the canyon's walls.

Time passed. No one was quite sure how much. Eventually the four survivors, after no little intense discussion, communally agreed to venture out from behind the tumbled rock wall. They wiggled their way through the narrow passage and made their wary way out of the tunnel. They were less cautious when their flashlights picked up Diablo's fresh blood trail going towards the mine's entrance. Jim Garret was right. He'd hit the bastard with his flurry of shots from beyond the cave-in. A few minutes later they came upon Lucius Meyer's sprawled corpse, pausing only to make certain he was dead, not a soul lamenting his passing, then continued to follow Diablo's blood trail towards the mouth of the mine. There was more than one light at the end of this tunnel. They could hear Colonel Redding's voice as they approached the dim light of the tunnel's mouth.

Is anyone alive?" He yelled, over and over. Each time with more urgency and less hope. He'd found Reiser's body dangling from a rope on the cliff face, then Parelli and Silenski and what was left of Goman in the Mimbres camp. A short time later he stumbled on Skarp's lifeless corpse in the mud. The colonel was shocked by the carnage. He couldn't process in that civilized part of his brain that lived in a quiet neighborhood of polite neighbors where violence was rare and loud noise was infrequent, how something like this could happen so close to home. But another part of the colonel's brain had seen it all before in distant times and places far better forgotten. He was shocked. But he was a very long way from being incapable of action.

"Please answer!" Redding hollered as loud as he could. "Is anyone alive?" Inside the mine tunnel not a hundred feet from where Redding stood four pairs of eyes blinked wide. Jim Garret slipped towards the edge of the tunnel.

"Here!" Garret yelled from the mouth of the mine, still cautious, not showing himself clearly to the figure in the canyon. Redding came running up to the base of the cliff below where Reiser dangled obscenely on the rope.

_"I killed the murderer!"_ Redding yelled. "You're safe now." Redding, who had seen more examples than he cared to remember of female guerillas in Viet Nam, didn't think to say that the killer was a woman. Jim Garret remained wary. Another trap? He grabbed a fast snapshot look over the mine's edge and got a quick glimpse at the man below. He saw the square shortish figure of Colonel Redding. Then he knew. Jim had seen the killer and knew he was a tall, lean man. The man below was genuine. A genuine savior. They'd made it! _By God, they'd made it!_

A huge grin spread over Jim Garret's face. He threw back his head and yelled in sheer joy. They were saved! Their ordeal really was over! A great weight tumbled off the shoulders of his sorely tested spirit. He straightened up his tall body, battered and bruised in a score of places from the ordeal in the tunnel, and moved over to the lip of the mine overlooking the valley below. His mouth was open in a wide toothy grin and he was starting to yell a jubilant _Thanks!_ back down at Colonel Redding. Heather Sosa and Nub and Peg Riley started yelling, too, stumbling over the jumble of bundles and blankets by the dead fire and bumping into each other in their joyous rush to run to Jim's side.

Shielded from view by the drooping branches of a century old juniper on the opposite side of the canyon, a hidden scoped rifle tracked Jim as the others emerged into clear view in the mine tunnel's mouth. It would be a moment forever frozen in time and memory. Another single well aimed shot rang out from the canyon rim opposite.

Diablo's Raid was finally over.

### Chapter 13

### Epilogue

### In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

After Geronimo's last surrender and the final end of the Apache wars, the surviving Chiricahua Nde, men women and children, were loaded on trains and sent off to prison camps in the humid southern United States. A quarter of the Chiricahua, Lozen among them, would soon die there of disease and of broken hearts. In one of the American government's most egregious acts of Native American betrayal, all of the Chiricahua were sent, including those who had not been hostile and even the warriors who had served the U.S. as Indian scouts and helped to track down their renegade brethren. Among those so cravenly betrayed was a young warrior named Massai.

Somewhere on that treacherously conceived one way train trip, probably in the empty vastness of 1880's West Texas, Massai managed to slip from the train and vanish into the endless unpeopled plains of the great sprawling West. He walked all the way back to the home territory of his people, the Mimbres Chiricahua, in western New Mexico. Massai remained a free man and was never recaptured.

They say his spirit lives on to this very day.

####

### The Author

Author Jim Whitesell's family came to Minnesota from Indiana during the Great Depression. Growing up in what he called 'the Big Tundra' Jim had his own Great Depression when he watched icicles forming into heroic lengths on the eaves of his family's home during the real, real, real long Minnesota winters. Jim was none too impressed with Minnesota's long winters and to this day can hardly stand the sight of an icicle. Being a democrat (small 'd') he voted with his feet and now lives in a mountain valley desert grassland in far southeastern Arizona less than a half marathon's jog from Old Mexico. Whenever a wandering nostalgic thought for his frozen Minnesota roots pops up he jerks open the freezer door on his refrigerator and sticks his head in it for a couple minutes. That does it. So much for nostalgia.

Jim was in the Army and Jim was in Viet Nam. But Jim was not in Viet Nam in the Army. Which is kind of the story of his life. Mixed up and hard to pin down. Plenty of adventures. Plenty of misadventures. Lots of stuff all jumbled up, some of which he sure ain't talking about even to this day. He did however somehow manage four years of college and a couple of more or less normal careers. One as a newspaperman in frozen-toed Minnesota and the other as a Customs and Border Protection officer on the Mexican border in heat-blasted Arizona. After he retired those two careers mated and out popped a non-fiction book called Border Tales. Following which several literary siblings popped out of Jim's somewhat skewed world view. The Elvis Chronicles. Which are definitely _n_ ot residents of the non-fiction world, though set in the matrix of the real Mexican border law enforcement world where Jim once did the employment boogie.

Jim has a lovely wife, Betsy, who he probably doesn't deserve, and a bunch of kids and grandkids, most of them in Phoenix. Jim and Betsy make lots of trips to Phoenix.

Jim is also working on several more books. Some serious.

Some not so serious.

### Chapter 14

### The Elvis Chronicles

### Book I

### Sample Chapter

### Birds

Pancho sauntered into the secondary lot as he came out of the men's restroom whistling and then segueing into softly mouthing the words of one of his favorite Los Lobos tunes.

In ancient times  
To a place so far away

Across the land  
Where the earth was  
As tough as clay......

That was as far as he got.

" _Pancho_!" Elvis hollered. " _Watch out_!" Pancho's former military situational awareness did a Lazarus move and roared back to life. Quicker than Fast Eddie, the Indian casino black jack dealer, could shuffle a deck of stiff new cards, he dove out of the way. A Toyota Camry came barreling into secondary and just missed adding Pancho's bodily fluids to the various stains on the blotchy secondary blacktop.

Pancho didn't exactly greet this sudden intrusion into the progression of his workday with a whole lot of detachment. He rolled over, leaped to his feet and was looking none too happy as he angrily brushed the bits of pavement grime off his trousers and lasered a baleful Pancho eye at the driver of the Camry. Who, he was about to find out, was a balding and tubby middle aged white guy with bad teeth and an even worse attitude.

"What is with you frickin' border jerks hassling me!" The balding and tubby middle aged white guy, whose name was Milo Rathbone, said with bared bad teeth in a hostile voice. "You got nothin' better to do than harass an honest law abiding citizen?" Elvis, seeing the steam rising off the top of Pancho's head, figured he better step in quick before Pancho really lost it and relocated the smart assed tubby white guy's head to somewhere in his lower abdominal area.

"Well, Mr. honest law abiding citizen," Elvis said as he walked up to the side of the Camry. "You ignored the signs before secondary warning you to go slow and instead came roaring into secondary and almost ran over a federal officer." He paused and bent down to stare into Milo Rathbone's doubled chinned face. "I think we could probably come up a with a few misdemeanor charges out of that." Another short pause, for effect. "Maybe even a felony or two. "Or," Elvis added," you might prefer to have a more cooperative attitude."

"Bully! Border bully!" Came a not at all intimidated female voice from the passenger's side of the Camry. It was Ethyl, Mrs. Rathbone, the tubby middle aged wife of Milo. But not a tubby middle aged white, like Milo. Ethyl was a tubby middle aged black with skin the color of Elvis' boots. When he polished them, that is. Which wasn't real often.

"Why are you peckerwoods jerking with my man! He has done nothing." Elvis stopped to give it a quick mulling over. What was this all about? Why did the car come barreling into secondary in the first place? Then he noticed the referral slip the primary officer had stuck under the windshield wiper. He reached over, plucked it from the wiper's clutches and read what the primary officer had to say.  
_Bird cage in the trunk._

Jeez! Just what they needed. They're looking for sizeable loads of dope and in comes a bird cage instead. Elvis handed the slip to Pancho, who also gave it a quick read. Both men nodded their heads in recognition. Many was the time when they'd seen a bird cage in a vehicle. A cage. No bird. Birds were not admissible to the U.S. without first going through a somewhat difficult process and quarantine period. Which was a big pain in the ass mostly more trouble than it was worth. Bestirring many a bird lover to take a detour around the law. Birdless bird cages on the border usually meant one thing. The bird cage owner was trying to sneak a bird into the U.S. to avoid the time and expense of a quarantine or the high prices of birds at U.S. pet stores. Which therefore meant that somewhere in the vehicle or on the people in it there was a hidden bird.

Bird smugglers. Not exactly something that fired up either Elvis or Pancho. They were looking for drugs. And fugitives. And deported felons. But birds? Bird smugglers were not exactly up the ET--Enforcement Team--inspectional alley. They left that kind of stuff for the regular line inspectors. Except for rare occasions.

Like when a bird smuggler tried to run over Pancho and scatter Pancho bits all over the secondary lot.

Elvis began the way he was supposed to. By the book. Which was not necessarily typical Elvis behavior, Elvis being a good distance from a by the book kind of guy both on and off the job. Don't get Elvis wrong about books. Not that Elvis wasn't a reader. He was an avid reader. He was big into history and science fiction and often dreamed in sci fi, which could sure make for some interesting dreams. But when it came to rules and regulations and that kind of by the book stuff, Elvis was definitely lacking in enthusiasm. Anyhow, he went by the book this time and repeated the questions the primary officer had asked the Tubby Twins before sending them to secondary for further inspection.

"What are you bringing from Mexico?" Elvis asked, then proceeded to reel off the litany of don'ts. No pork, no soil, no animals, no guns or ammunition, money over 10,000 bucks, and so on. Elvis ending the border litany with "are you bringing any birds from Mexico?"

Mr. Tubby went from blanched to red-faced.

"I told that nitwit back at the entry booth that I wasn't bringing anything from Mexico." A hard glare at Elvis. " _Including_ birds!"

"That is correct then, sir?" Elvis continued. "No birds." Now it was Mrs. Tubby's turn to do a face change, going from her usual grayish black to the angry roseate of her tubby hubby.

"No birds, you border knockwurst." She snapped. "Now we have to be on our way. I have a doctor's appointment that I can't be late for." She turned to her husband. "Milo, start up the car and put it in gear. We have to leave right now." Elvis deftly reached inside the Toyota over Mr. Tubby's protruding belly and jerked the keys out of the ignition. Which earned him an even more intense glare from Mrs. Tubby, though Mr. Tubby was caught by surprise and didn't immediately react.

"Didn't you hear me, buster," she snarled. "I have a doctor's appointment. Are you looking for a law suit? How about unlawful detention? Abuse of authority? Reckless endangerment of a sick person?" Mr. Tubby had by now recovered and, if anything, his face was even redder than before.

"I want to see your supervisor. And _now_!"

"OK," Elvis said. "You got it." Both Mr. and Mrs. Tubby looked confused when nothing happened.

" _Well_ ," Mrs. Tubby finally said in an angry voice. " _Where_ is the supervisor?"

"Right here," Elvis said, tapping on his chest. "You're seeing him. I _am_ the supervisor."

"Oh, bullshit!" Snarked Mr. Tubby. "I know the border well enough to know that there is always a supervisor in your office." Elvis leaned towards the irate tubby pair.

"Pancho and I are an independent team. We are our own supervisors. So you are talking to the supervisors right now." He nodded at Pancho. "Now please get out of the car while we perform an inspection." Mr. and Mrs. Tubby were in a dilemma. Once they had been referred to secondary by that suspicious jerk manning the entry booth, they figured the best defense was a vigorous offense. They'd carry on so much and be such a big pain in the ass that the secondary officers couldn't get rid of them quick enough. Which might work. Then, again it might not.

And right now the smart money was betting on the might not.

"I refuse to get out of the car," Mrs. Tubby said firmly. "This is America, you fascist thugs. You can't treat citizens like this." Pancho pointed at the signs posted in secondary that quoted the relevant laws about border inspection. Which basically said anybody and anything crossing the border could be searched. And failure to cooperate could lead to the use of force and possible prosecution. It didn't happen often, but it did sometimes happen, and it was invariably one big circle jerk no sane officer wanted to experience more than once.

"So what?" Mrs. Tubby snapped after reading the signs. "You're gonna grab a woman and jerk her out of a car? In these women's rights times stuff like that'll get you fired, bucko. You'll get your fifteen minutes of fame, bully boy, but sure as hell not in a way you'd want." Elvis leaned in closer and enunciated it very clearly.

"Judy 'Monster Woman' Lafarge is on duty here, today, lady. She is a very large member of the female species who would like nothing better than to jerk a difficult and uncooperative woman out of a car." He leaned closer. "And probably not very gently."

While Pancho was trying not to snicker at Elvis' extemporaneous invention of Judy 'Monster Woman' Lafarge, the only woman actually on duty that day being petite hundred pounds dripping wet Luanne Wong-Garcia, Mr. and Mrs. Tubby very grumpily and reluctantly climbed out of their Toyota. They stood still as statues in the pigeon dung bespattered statues in a Phoenix park and glared as Elvis and Pancho began to search the car. Pancho opened the trunk, reached in and pulled out a bird cage.

"No birds?" He said to the Tubby Twins? "So why do you need a bird cage?"

"For decoration," said Mrs. Tubby at exactly the same moment as her husband blurted out "for the birds we have at home." Both of whom promptly blushed in a variety of colors at their major tactical error.

"Decorative birds at home," Elvis said, trying to keep a straight face. "Must be a new wrinkle on home design we're not aware of." He looked at Pancho. "Right, Pancho?"

"Absolutely." Pancho said. "Being border fascists and ruffians we're not really up on the latest in styles, since we're way too busy being fascist ruffians to find the time to check that stuff out."

By now Elvis and Pancho were as sure as they were that George W. Bush had at least one pair of cowboy boots that they were going to find creatures of the avian persuasion somewhere in the Toyota. Elvis climbed into the front seat of the Toyota and opened the glove box. Inside it was a sock. A lumpy sock. A sock that looked like it had something inside it. He peeked inside. Yep. A lovebird. He climbed out of the Toyota and held up the sock to the Rathbone Tubby Twins.

"Is this one of the birds you don't have?" No comment from either of them. "Are there any other birds you don't have?" Mr. Tubby broke the familial silence.

"No, officer," he said, trying to sound meek and cooperative. I apologize. We did have a bird. Just that one." Elvis believed that as much as he believed that bald eagles sometimes wore toupees. He climbed back into the Toyota and searched some more. In the console between the seats he found another sock. And, snuggled inside, another lovebird. Again he climbed out of the Toyota and held up the bird filled sock to the Tubby Twins.

"OK. You're just making things worse by lying. Any more birds? The truth." Mrs. Tubby, Ethyl, broke her silence. But not meekly.

"No, you border jerk. That's it. I sure hope you're happy. We're just a couple of poor people who can't afford the high prices of love birds in the pet stores. Big frickin' deal. That what they pay you Nazis the big bucks for? Busting ordinary people like us?"

Pancho's neck abruptly swiveled to look at Elvis.

"Big bucks? You seen any of those big bucks, Officer Kretzweiler? I know I sure haven't."

"Not if she is referring to money. I have however seen some pretty large mule deer bucks on the way in to work from time to time. If that is what the lady means."

"Have your fun, Officer Unfriendly," Mrs. Tubby said in a nasty tone. "You won't be laughing when the racial discrimination complaint is filed against you." This was not the first time that Elvis, or Pancho, or any other officer who spent any time at a border port hadn't heard before. Maybe a bunch of befores at busy airport CBP places like JFK or Dulles.

"What exactly does racial discrimination have to do with you smuggling birds?" Elvis said, curious about what kind of off the wall explanation she would come up with.

"You obviously singled us out because we're black," she shot back. Elvis thought, first of all, there was no we in black. Mr. Tubby was as white as Betty Crocker premium grade bleached flour. Elvis looked at the referral slip again. Bobby Washington was the officer who'd referred the Toyota from the primary booth. And Bobby Washington was as black as a nectar feeding bat on a moonless night.

"The guy who sent you back here is a black guy," Elvis said. "He's the one who singled you out, not us." He looked at her curiously. "How do you get racial discrimination out of that?" This temporarily perplexed Ethyl. Then she hit on an answer. Though she hadn't quite thought it through. Which unfortunately only dawned on her after the words escaped her lips and hung in the air, creating no little astonishment all around. She turned to point at Mr. Tubby.

"The black guy sent us to secondary because my husband Milo is white."

That was too much for Elvis. His funny bone was close to the surface even during unfunny times and this was sure not an unfunny time. He started to chuckle. Then the chuckle morphed into a sputtering laugh. Which in turn gave way to a belly laugh that had him gasping for breath and slapping his sides. Even Pancho, who was not an easy man to make laugh, coasted through a giggle into a genuine laugh. None of which made the Tubby Twins any too happy. Mr. spoke first.

"Laugh it up. Have your fun. But get this over with so we can be on our way." A miffed short pause. "My wife does have that doctor's appointment. An _important_ doctor's appointment."

Elvis' first thought was, what is the name of this important doctor? Pancho was thinking it had to be a psychotherapist and she sure as hell needed it. But neither said anything, though they did acknowledge their mutual thoughts with eye contact and a slight raising of the eyebrows. The short form translation of which would be 'fruitcake.'

Just then the second bird wiggled out of the sock in Elvis' hand and beat wings out of there. To the north.  
"Look!" Pancho said in mock excitement. "An illegal alien! A port runner. Heading north."

"More like a port flyer than a port runner," Elvis said, amused but also a little irritated with himself for not holding on tighter to the bird.

"Hah!" Blurted out Mr. Tubby. Now it was his turn to not quite think things through. "There goes the evidence! You can't do anything to us!" Pancho grinned broadly and held up the first birded sock Elvis had discovered and handed to him while Elvis continued to search the Toyota.

"Better think twice on that one, buddy." Pancho said through his grin. Mr. Tubby instantly retreated back to his sullen silence.

Elvis searched the rest of the Toyota and found no more birds.

"OK," he said to the Tubby Twins. "That's it. No more birds?"

"No more birds," said Mr. Tubby.

"Absolutely," Mrs. Tubby added. "No more birds."

Elvis and Pancho then escorted the Rathbones into the secondary office where they would write up the seizure paperwork and figure out what the fine would be. And it would be a relative whopper, considering the aggravating circumstances. As they were filling out the seizure forms Elvis noticed Mrs. Rathbone. Well, not actually Mrs. Rathbone herself. Her purse. It was her purse that caught his eye. She had the purse pulled so tightly against her chest that a toothpick wouldn't be able to slip in the miniscule gap between Ethyl and her purse. Elvis started to get suspicious.

"Mrs. Rathbone," Elvis said in a voice that matched his suspicion. "Is that a real valuable purse?" Ethyl's eyes flashed.

"Not really," she said in an uneasy voice. "Just a cheapie. I got it for five bucks at Lucky Lorraine's Good Deal Thrift Shop on Oracle Avenue in Tucson. Like I said before. We're poor folks and can't afford a lot of things." Were Ethyl a female Pinocchio her nose would have instantly burgeoned into the size of a typical telephone pole. The Rathbones had just the previous week returned from a pricey ten day Mediterranean cruise where both got a dose of salmonella from the cruise ship's potato salad and were in the process of demanding their money back, along with adequate compensation for their pain and suffering.

"Then how come you're holding it so tightly?" Elvis said. "Something valuable inside?"

"Nothing like that," Ethyl answered, her voice almost a stutter. "Just personal stuff. You know, lady things. You wouldn't be interested." But Elvis was interested.

"Let me see your purse, please," Elvis said. Ethyl's eyes flared.

"See my purse? Why?" Elvis moved closer to her.

"I need to see what is inside it," he said.

"My purse is personal and you have no right to look in it," she said in a voice that tried to be firm but came out sounding definitely on the light side of firm.

"But I _do_ have that right," Elvis replied. "Now please hand me the purse."

"No!" Ethyl said in a voice that was almost a shriek. "It is personal!" Elvis was thinking there was all kinds of personal stuff that people didn't want anyone else to see. Like illegal drugs, naughty pictures, maybe sex toys or an undeclared purchase of some kind. But in this case Elvis was more specific.

"Is there a bird in your purse?" He said.

"Absolutely not," Ethyl shot back, pulling the purse even tighter to her chest.

"Let me see the purse, Mrs. Rathbone," Elvis insisted.

"No!" She replied. Elvis reached over and grabbed the purse. Ethyl resisted and tried to hang on. But Elvis was stronger. He wrenched the purse from her hands. Unfortunately, Ethyl was pulling so determinedly on the purse that when Elvis jerked it from her hands she toppled over backwards, her skirt riding up over her thighs and revealing far more than anyone in the room cared to see.

"There it is!" Milo yelled out. "Police brutality. Assault. Assault with intent to commit bodily harm. You're toast, beanpole. Toast!" Pancho pointed at an object on the wall above them.

"See that? That's a video camera. It'll show just what happened. Your wife was violently resisting a reasonable law enforcement command and caused her own downfall."

"Caused her own downfall," Elvis repeated. "Hey, Pancho, that's pretty clever. Considering."

"I do my best." Pancho answered.

"You two are a pair of fucking imbeciles," Ethyl muttered as she struggled to her feet. "Hopeless fucking imbeciles. Now give me my purse back. There's private stuff in there." She reached over to grab the purse again but Pancho stepped between her and Elvis.

"Go ahead, Elvis. Look inside. What do you wanna bet there isn't another cute little birdie in there." Elvis opened up the purse and looked inside. He was standing in poor light and the purse had a dark lining.

"I can't really see," he said. "Looks like something is moving, though." Elvis reached into the purse with his free hand. Not, as it soon turned out, such a hot idea.

"Jesus!" He yelled out. "The frickin' bird has my finger!" He reached in with the other hand to grab the bird and the purse feel helplessly to the floor. Pancho moved over to look. Elvis had the bird by one hand. The bird had Elvis' finger in his other hand. If Elvis let the bird go to pry his finger loose, the bird would get free. And no one wanted to be chasing a bird around the inside of the secondary office. Especially with video cameras recording it. "Pancho," Elvis said. "Quick. Grab the bird. I need a hand here." Pancho, however, was in no shape to help. It was his turn to break into hysterics. As soon as he looked in the purse and saw the parrot attached to Elvis' middle finger, he couldn't control his hilarity. And when the purse tumbled onto the floor and Elvis and the bird were revealed in a definite standoff, Pancho grabbed his head in both hands and began to guffaw, sounding to Elvis like an idling Suzuki 650cc motorcycle.

"Pancho, goddamnit! This is not the time." Pancho grabbed his sides and groaned between guffaws as he fell back into a chair and doubled over in laughter.

"Actually, I couldn't think of a better time, Elvis," he managed to blurt out between guffaws. The Tubby Twins, meanwhile, were having their best moments of the day, watching the goddamn government bully and the parrot in a wrestling match. Milo was wishing the parrot knew judo and would flip Elvis onto his red-headed beanpole back.

"Bite 'im, birdie!" Ethyl snapped. "Bite the goddamn fascist's finger off."

"And the rest of his hand while you're at it," Milo chimed in with no little gusto.

But it was, as the old saying goes, a Pyrrhic victory for the Rathbones. Which hit them with the force of a force five straight line wind gust on the Great Plains a few minutes later when they saw their fine.

Pancho did eventually calm down enough to help Elvis get his finger free from the clutches of Ethyl's parrot. Which was immediately plunked ungently into a cage in the agricultural officer's room. Elvis then very slowly turned to look at the woman with the birdless purse. The distilled spirit of retribution had taken over the central control board in his Elvis inner works. It was as plain on his face as the smile was on Mona Lisa's.

Ethyl's recent jubilation faded away like a wan wintertime Seattle sunset. Her day was about to go from rotten to crummy to flat out bad.

Darn near as bad as getting salmonella from the potato salad on a pricey ten day Mediterranean cruise.

####
