Read Tyrannosaur Canyon Online
Authors: Douglas Preston
"Yes."
"I've got a police band radio here and I've got other ways of knowing if you call the cops. And I've got a partner, too."
The man clicked off.
Tom could hardly drive, hardly see the road. Almost immediately, the phone rang again. It was Wilier.
"Mr. Broadbent? We're at your place, in the living room, and I'm afraid we've got a problem."
Tom swallowed, unable to find his voice.
"We got a round in the wall here. The SOC boys are on their way to take it out."
Tom realized he was veering all over the highway, his foot to the metal, the car going almost a hundred and ten. He slowed the car and made an enormous effon to concentrate.
"You there?" came Willer's distant voice.
Tom found his voice. "Detective Wilier, I want to thank you for your trouble, but everything's fine. I just heard from Sally. She's fine."
"She is?"
"Her mom's sick, she had to go to Albuquerque."
"Jeep's still in the garage."
"She took a cab, that car doesn't work."
"What about the F350?"
"That's only for hauling horses."
"I see. About this round-"
Tom managed an easy laugh. "Right. It's... that's an old one."
"Looks fresh to me."
"Couple of days ago. My gun went off accidentally."
"Is that so?" The voice was cold.
Right.
"Mind telling me what make and caliber?"
"Thirty-eight Smith & Wesson revolver." There was a long silence. "As I said, Detective, I'm sorry to have bothered you, I really am. False alarm."
"Got a spot of blood here on the rug, too. That also 'old'?"
Tom didn't quite find an answer to that. He felt a wave a nausea. If those bastards had hurt her ... "A lot of blood?"
"Just a spot. It's still wet."
"I don't know what to tell you about that, Detective. Maybe someone . . . cut himself." He swallowed.
"Who? Your wife?"
"I don't know what to tell you."
He listened to the hissing silence in the phone. He had to make that flight and
he had to deal with the man himself. He never should have left Sally alone. "Mr. Broadbent? Are you familiar with the term 'probable cause'?"
Yes.
"That's what we've got here. We entered the house with your permission, we found probable cause that a crime had been committed-and now we're going to search it. We don't need a warrant under those circumstances."
Tom swallowed. If the kidnapper was watching the house and saw it full of
cops . . .
"Just make it quick."
"You say your plane lands at seven-thirty?" Wilier asked.
"Yes."
"I'd like to see you and your wife-sick mother or not-tonight. At the station.
sharp. You also might want to bring that lawyer you mentioned. I have a feeling you're going to need him."
"I can't. Not at nine. It's impossible. And my wife is in Albuquerque-"
"This is not an optional appointment, Broadbent. You be there at nine or I'll get a warrant for your arrest. Is that clear?"
Tom swallowed. "My wife has nothing to do with this."
"You don't produce her and your problem will get worse. And let me tell you, pal, it's bad already."
The phone went dead.
PART THREE
PERDIZ CREEK
She stood twenty feet at the shoulder and was fifty feet long. She weighed about six tons. Her legs were more than ten feet long and packed with the most powerful muscles that had ever evolved on a vertebrate. When she walked, she carried her tail high and her stride was twelve to fifteen feet. At a run she could attain a speed of thirty miles per hour, but raw speed was less important than agility, flexibility, and lightning reflexes. Her feet were about three and a half feet long, armed with four scimitar like claws, three in the front and a dewclawlike spur in back. She walked on her toes. A single well-aimed kick could disembowel a hundred-foot-long duckbill dinosaur.
Her jaws were three feet long and held sixty teeth. She used the four incisorlike teeth in the front for stripping and peeling meat off bone. Her killing teeth were located in a lethal row on the sides, some as long as twelve inches, root included, and as big around as a child's fist. They were serrated on the backside, so that after biting she could hold her prey while sawing and cutting backward. Her bite could remove more than ten cubic feet of meat at a time, weighing several hundred pounds. A warren of windows, holes, and channels in her skull gave it enormous strength and lightness, as well as flexibility. She had two different biting techniques: an overbite that cut through meat like scissors; and a "nutcracker" bite for crushing armor and bone. Her palate was supported by thin struts that allowed the skull to flatten out sideways with the force of a bite, and then stretch to allow massive chunks of meat to be swallowed whole.
With her overlapping jaw muscles, she could deliver a biting force estimated in excess of one hundred thousand pounds per square inch, enough to cut through steel.
Her two arms were small, no larger than a human's, but many times stronger. They were equipped with two recurved claws set at a ninety-degree angle to maximize their gripping and slashing capability. The back vertebrae, where the ribs attach, were as large as coffee cans, to support her belly, which could be carrying more than a quarter ton of freshly consumed meat.
She stank. Her mouth contained bits and pieces of rotting meat and rancid grease, trapped in special crevices in her teeth, which gave her bite an added lethality. Even if her victim escaped the initial attack, it would likely die in short order of massive infection or blood poisoning. The bones she expelled in herfeces were sometimes almost completely dissolved by the potent hydrochloric acids with which she digested her food.
The occipital condyle bone in her neck was the size of a grapefruit, and it allowed her to turn her head almost 180 degrees so that she could snap and bite in all directions. Like a human being, her eyes looked ahead, giving her stereoscopic vision, and she had an excellent sense of smell and of hearing. Her favored prey were the herds of
duckbill dinosaurs that moved noisily through the great forests, calling and trumpeting to keep the herd together and the young with their mothers. But she was an opportunist, and would take anything that was meat.
She hunted mostly by ambush: a long, stealthy, upwind approach, followed by a short rush. She was well camouflaged, wearing the colors of the forest, a rich pattern of greens and browns.
As a juvenile she hunted in packs, but when she matured she worked alone. She did not attack her prey and fight it to the death. Instead, she fell upon her victim and delivered a single, savage bite, her teeth cutting through armor and plate to reach vital organs and pulsing arteries; and at the moment when she had fixed her prey like a worm on a pin, she cocked a leg and gave it a ripping kick. Then she released it and retreated to a safe distance while it futilely roared, slashed, convulsed, and bled to death.
Like many predators, she also scavenged; she would eat anything as long as it was meat. Sinking her teeth into a suppurating, maggot-packed carcass satisfied her as much as swallowing whole a still beating heart.
1
WYFORD FORD PAUSED looking down the great cleft in the earth named
He halted as he saw a slow movement ahead of him and watched a diamond-back with a body as thick as his forearm slither across the sand in front of him, flicking its tongue and making a slow scraping noise. This was the time of evening for snakes, Ford thought, as they came out of their holes as the heat abated to get a head start on their nocturnal hunt.
Ford hiked on, getting back into the rhythm of it, his long legs eating up the ground. It was like a maze, with many side canyons peeling off into nowhere. The miles passed quickly. Toward sunset, as the canyon made yet another turn, he could see the great crowd of rocks up ahead, the ones he had seen from Navajo Rim, which he had whimsically named The Bald Ones. The lower part of the canyon was already in shadow, bathed in a warm orange glow of reflected light from high up on the eastern rim.
Ford felt grateful that the day was over. He had been rationing water since the morning and the cooling of the air brought a welcome lessening of his thirst. When night arrived in the desert, it came fast. He would not have much time to pick out a good campsite. With a jaunty step he continued down the canyon, looking left and right, and soon located what he was looking for: a sheltered spot between a pair of fallen boulders with a soft, level bed of sand. He unshouldered his rucksack and took a swig of water, rolling it about in his mouth to enjoy it as much as possible before swallowing. He still had fifteen, maybe twenty minutes of light left. Why waste it on cooking and unrolling his bedroll? Leaving his gear, he hiked up the canyon to the beginning of the Bald Ones. From the closer vantage point they looked more like gigantic squashed toadstools than skulls; each was about thirty feet in width and maybe twenty feet high, carved from a layer of deep orange sandstone shot through with thinner lenses of wine-colored shale and conglomerate. Some of the large rocks had been undercut and had fallen like Humpty Dumpty, lying in broken pieces.
He walked into the forest of sandstone pillars holding up the round domes of rock. The pillars were formed from a pale pink sandstone and were all about ten feet in height. Ford scrambled between them, intent on seeing how far the formation extended. From his viewpoint none of the rocks looked like the one he was after, but the family resemblance was strong. Once again he had a shiver of excitement, sure that he was getting closer to the dinosaur. He squeezed his way among the rocks, sometimes forced to crawl, uncomfortably aware of the press of stone rising above him. As he reached the far side, he discovered to his surprise that the Bald Ones hid the entrance to another canyon-or what was actually a hidden continuation of
The canyon made turn after turn, each elbow disclosing alcoves and undercuts. Some of the higher alcoves contained small Anasazi cliff dwellings. A quarter mile on, Ford came to a "pour-over," a high shelf of sandstone across the canyon, which must have formed a waterfall in wetter times, with a cracked bed of silt below attesting to a former pool. He climbed up, using the projecting stone layers as hand-and footholds, and hiked on.
The canyon took a twist and suddenly opened into a stupendous valley where three tributary canyons came together like a train wreck of rock, creating a spectacle of erosional ferocity. Ford halted, awestruck by the frozen violence of it. With a smile, he decided to name it the Devil's Graveyard. As he stood, the last
of the sun winked out on the canyon rim and the evening crept across the strange valley cloaking it in purple shadow. It was truly a land lost in time.
Ford turned back. It was too late to explore farther; he had to get back to camp before dark. The stones had waited millions of years, the monk thought. They could wait one more day.
2
TOM DROVE NORTHWARD on Highway 84, making a great effort to keep his
mind focused. The plane had been late, it was eight-thirty, and he was still an hour from the stretch of highway the kidnapper had indicated. On the passenger seat sat a Ziploc bag full of yellow trash with the notebook tucked inside. His cell phone was sitting on the seat, charged up and waiting for the call.
He felt furiously helpless, at the mercy of events-an intolerable sensation. He had to find a way to take charge, to act and not just react. But he couldn't just act: he needed to work out a plan, and for that he had to push his emotions aside and think as coldly and clearly as possible.
The dark expanse of desert rushed by on either side of the road, the stars clear and stationary in the night sky above. The plane ride from Tucson to Santa Fe had been the most difficult hour Tom had ever passed. It had taken a superhuman effort to control his speculations and focus on the problem at hand. That problem was simple: to get Sally back. Nothing else mattered. Once he had Sally back, he would deal with the kidnapper.
Once again he wondered if he shouldn't have gone to the police, or bypass Wilier entirely and go straight to the FBI. But in his heart he knew the kidnapper was right: if he did that, he would lose control. They would take over. No matter what, Wilier would get involved. He believed the kidnapper when he said he would kill Sally if the police became involved. It was too big a risk; he had to do this on his own.
He knew the stretch of Highway 84 the kidnapper wanted him to drive back and forth on. It was one of the loneliest stretches of two-lane highway in the state, with a single gas station and convenience store.
Tom tried to think what he would have done if he were the kidnapper, how he would have set things up, how he would pick up the notebook and avoid being followed. That was what Tom had to figure out-the mans plan.