Dante watched them tee up, then set out to explore a little of Death Valley. He wouldn’t have been there except that in collecting data on Kosta Gounaris he’d found out about the single-engine Mooney 250 turbo Gounaris had bought for over a quarter million cash in Los Angeles two years before.
The Mooney was tied down at Marin Ranch Airport, a private airfield off Smith Ranch Road just north of San Rafael. Dante had spent a couple of hours poking around the little field with its tin-sided hangars and tiny office. With a twenty-dollar bill he’d recruited the skinny, engaging youth who pumped aviation gas into the planes. At seventeen, he had braces still on his teeth and was a chain-smoker. He had told Dante that Gounaris wanted his plane serviced and checked out thoroughly because he was planning to fly down to Death Valley midweek.
Dante went to Zabriskie Point. It was only four miles down Highway 190 from the inn, and he’d loved the music in the movie of the same name. He turned right into the parking lot, climbed the short trail to the overlook. It was breathtaking. Soft layers of what looked like mud hills rather than rock stretched in every direction. Below the low wall of the overlook the bare tan dusty earth was crisscrossed with trails. Youthfully energetic hikers of all ages panted their way up them, dwarfed by distance.
A slight sun-blacked man in his seventies, dressed in baggy red shorts and leather sandals and whose black T-shirt read GRATEFUL DEAD-WORLD TOUR came panting up the path leading to the overlook. He stopped to wipe his face with a red bandana and grinned at Dante. His skull showed beneath his leathery lizard’s skin like the Dead’s logo skull on his T-shirt.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Breathtaking-if I knew what I was seeing.”
“You’re seeing ancient lakebeds that have been upended and eroded into sandhills.” He flung out a long skinny arm. “Those yellows and tans and browns are mostly from iron minerals that have been weathered by exposure to the air.” He pivoted to jab a forefinger to their left, where the softly serrated hills ranged from gray-green to dark gray. “Those, the color comes from volcanic ash and ancient lava flows sometime between 9 and 3 million years ago.”
“You seem to have spent a lot of time here.”
“My favorite spot in the world. I’m a retired geologist. In Death Valley Mother Nature lifts her skirts and shows you everything she’s got.”
The little sun-dried raisin of a man headed down for the parking lot; Dante followed shortly. On his way back to the inn, he was surprised to see the old geologist walking along the shoulder of the two-lane blacktop. He stopped and opened a door.
“Hop in. It’s too hot out here to walk.”
The man slid gratefully into the car. “You’re right, it’s that afternoon sun. I parked at the foot of Golden Canyon, hiked up past Manley Beacon to the Point. Only about a mile and a half but mostly uphill. I do it every year. I tell myself that when I can’t make it any more, I’ll quit coming to the Valley.” He stuck out a hand. “Charles Thornton. Everybody calls me Chuck.”
They shook. “Dante Stagnaro. Tell me, what’s the best thing to see if you’ve maybe only got one day?”
“The sand dunes, just before dusk. I’ll show you.”
The vast sloping floor of the valley was smudged with cloud shadow. Harsh dark mountains rimmed it to the west, stretching up a mile or more into the stunning blue sky and reaching great hands of denser shadow out across the sunken valley floor.
“The Panamints,” said Chuck. “Death Valley isn’t the result of erosion, it’s what geologists call ‘basin and range’ huckcountry. The same forces that cause the California earthquakes are pushing the Black Mountains higher in the air and tilting the Panamint Range higher up on its side.”
“Dropping Death Valley down lower and lower in between?”
“Admirably put. Less than two inches of rain a year, evaporation a hundred times that, mean summer temperature readings the highest on earth. It’s a true desert. Lowest point in the United States is Badwater, south down the valley a ways-two hundred eighty feet below sea level. Dante’s View, straight above Badwater, is more than a mile above sea level.”
“Dante’s View because you’re looking down into hell?”
Chuck grinned at him. “A minority opinion, I assure you.”
They drove twenty miles north through the clear late afternoon light, with Chuck pointing out things they were passing.
“Gravel road to the left leads to the Harmony Borax Works. That’s where the twenty-mule teams left from-eighteen mules and two horses, actually. Round trip to Mojave and the railhead was three hundred miles and took three weeks. The teams pulled two wagons and a water tank, total weight close to forty tons.”
The road led across the lower slopes of alluvial fans spreading out from valleys in the Funeral Mountains to the east. The fans were dotted with desert holly, creosote bushes spaced out by massive ground-surface root systems stretching forty feet in every direction, and turtleback-great spreading bushes that looked much like their namesakes.
At Sand Dune Junction they went north. Here the Cottonwood and Grapevine mountains forced the winds to switch direction, swirl and slow enough to drop the load of sand they were carrying from their sweep across the valley floor.
“Hence, the Sand Dunes,” exclaimed Chuck. “Fourteen square miles of moving, billowing sand that look like ocean waves-but aren’t going anywhere. Oh, they shift around constantly, but because the winds turn on themselves here, the dunes never move far before getting pushed back.”
Dante passed a little turnout to the right after Sand Dune Junction, blacktopped and with a single chemical toilet standing in lonely splendor. At Chuck’s direction, a hundred yards further he turned left on a narrow dirt track toward the yellow-white amazement of the sand sea.
“Takes us to the original stovepipe well,” Chuck said as they bounced along the sandy track pursued by their own dust cloud. “It was an important water hole on the old cross-valley trail in the days of the mining towns of Rhyolite and Skidoo, so they set up a way station. Long gone now. Park here.”
Dante pulled up and stopped. Their dust overtook them, gritting between their teeth and in the corners of their eyes. Theirs was the only car in the little parking area. They got out, stretched, started across the level sandy desert floor toward the great sloping dunes that rose up suddenly ahead of them. Chuck stopped at a rusted capped-off pipe.
“Here’s the well-they don’t use it any more.”
“Why stovepipe?”
“Used to be a literal stovepipe stuck down through the sand to the natural spring so they could get at the water. That rusted away many long years ago, of course.” They started out across the billowing desert dunes. “Lucas shot a lot of Star Wars here in Death Valley. Used these dunes a lot.”
Dante could see why. Fifty feet from the edge of the dunes, there seemed to be only sand for miles in any direction. Chuck said most of it was tiny fragments of quartz, buried, uncovered, reburied thousands of times as the sand shifted and flowed under the pressure of the wind.
The dunes themselves had an eerie beauty in the late slanting light. Long smooth sweeps of sand with crests like blunt sword edges, breaking suddenly to fall away in delicate blue-gold shadow toward the ground far below.
As they labored along one of these sword blades, Chuck panted, “They call this the cornice of the drift-it keeps collapsing under the pressure of more sand brought by the wind. That steep slope they call the slip face, with an angle of repose usually somewhere around thirty-five degrees. Come on!”
He started to run down it. Dante followed, sinking in almost to his knees at each stumbling, giant step. Sand whipped and stung his face. Each step splashed out a miniature avalanche of snowlike sand.
They collapsed in the cut between two massive dunes, to share Dante’s canteen and the scraggly shadow of a creosote bush half-buried in drifting sand. Their faces were covered with sand stuck to their drying sweat.
The ground was a flat layer of dried mud, cracked by a summer of sun into patterns and shapes often unlike the usual triangular segments Dante expected. Here were circles and swirls, the edges eroded by wind so each segment looked like a miniature mesa. Other circle patterns looked like the dinosaur hide on the models at Marine World in Vallejo.
Around scraggly clumps of tough dry bunch grasses, poised for a winter rainstorm so they could shoot up, seed, and replenish themselves with dazzling speed, were circular drag marks where the wind had swept them against the sand.
“Tracks and sign,” said Chuck. “Let me show you.”
Both dried mud and sand carried wildlife tracks with great clarity, though Dante didn’t know what he was seeing until Chuck pointed them out.
“Those sort of delicate ones with a pad and four toe marks are bobcat. Don’t get too many in here.”
“How can you tell it’s not a coyote or a dog?”
“Retractable claws.” He pointed. “ These are coyote.”
The tracks were larger but quite similar to Dante’s untrained eye, except they indeed had made distinct claw marks in the sand. Running across them were delicate X-shaped tracks that went up over the lip of a shallow sand drift.
“Roadrunner.”
“Beep-Beep?”
“You got it. And these-‘Quoth the raven.’”
They looked somewhat like the silhouette of a swept-wing jet fighter, except the toes making the winglike marks pointed forward rather than back. Rather confusing spraylike tracks with a line drawn in the sand between them had been made by a lizard dragging his tail.
“Here’s one nobody gets.”
The tiny double row of endless pinpricks in the sand went from nowhere to endless nowhere. Running between the pinpricks was the lightest of pencil lines drawn in the sand.
“Stink beetle,” said Chuck. “The line is drawn by its dragging abdomen.”
Daylight was failing. They started back. Dante was hopelessly lost, turned around, disoriented.
“If the wind doesn’t blow ’em away, you can always follow your own tracks back out in daylight. Or get to the top of a dune to see the mountains and most likely a road.”
“I wouldn’t know which mountains or which road.”
“Don’t matter so long as they get you out of here.”
They crossed a vast stretch of low-lying dune that was rippled by the wind like the bottom of a stream rippled by flowing water. There were other wonders: the energy-filled bounds of leaping kangaroo rats; the delicate mincing trot of a big-eared kit fox; the talon marks of an owl dug into the sand where an unwary rabbit had died, surrounded by the giant brush marks of its wings beating predator and prey aloft again.
Most evocative of all was a series of long parallel scroll marks, each somewhat offset from the mark before it so the scrolls moved across the sand at an angle.
“Sidewinder,” said Chuck. “Desert rattlesnake, you don’t see them very often.”
Not very often was fine with Dante.
They sat for a time in the car with the motor off, watching the sunset over the western mountains. The clouds turned first gray with gold foil edges, then golden, then an incredi ble bloodred herringbone pattern, finally fading off to delicate silver.
“Show’s over,” sighed Chuck at last. Dante started the engine. “Full-moon nights, sometimes I come out here and just sit on the lip of a dune and listen. You can hear everything that goes on, can hear yourself think.” He paused. “Can hear yourself blink ”
Dante’s lights caught a tiny kit fox, great ears standing out in alarm, as he trotted into the sand dunes for the night’s hunt. He looked gray in the headlights. On the way back to Furnace Creek, they saw a coyote loping away from the road into the rock-strewn desert.
A memorable day.
But still Dante couldn’t sleep.
He had a hamburger and fries and berry pie at the Furnace Creek Ranch cafe, on his own time here, feeling a little guilty. He went to the front office and used the pay phone to call Rosa and tell her he was okay and that he loved her.
It should have sent him to bed relaxed and satisfied. But when he walked the dim roadway back to his room, the palm trees tossing and shivering against the full moon in the evening wind woke the familiar restlessness the full moon used to raise in him as a kid in San Francisco. Out his bedroom window he would go, to climb Telegraph Hill in moonlight, or run along the silent wharves of the Embarcadero, or race the night’s final cable car up the California Street hill.
He returned to the little bungalow cabin and went to bed. The cabin was wood frame, built during the depression by the WPA after Death Valley had been made a national monument in 1933. Dante liked this old room with its feel of days gone by, when a motel really had still been a motor hotel. Linoleum floors, no phone or TV, just a clock radio, a desk and chair and twin beds set a prim distance apart. A joint front porch with the sister unit.
Dante tossed and turned like the ferny tamarind leaf patterns the moon laid across the windows. Tried to read a guidebook, put it aside, thought about his case.
Hymie the Handler had told him that Otto Kreiger’s death had been managed. A section of gas line had shown a recent, deliberate rupture. A fragment of door frame had a strip of sandpaper adhesived to it. And a persistent but invisible Ed Farrow the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency had never heard of had phoned to demand a meeting with Kreiger in the condemned building just an hour before the explosion.
Ed Farrow was obviously Raptor. If Raptor was real. Raptor. A thought to murder sleep like who was it-Macbeth? He sat up and looked at the clock. Midnight. Moonlight.
Dante got up and got dressed, got his heavy jacket, found his way to the stovepipe well again. A zillion stars dimmed by an unwinking eye of moon. Back up at the highway, the lights of another car slowed, started the turn into Dante’s dirt road, then disappeared. The wind kept him from hearing any sound of its engine if sound there was to hear.
He lighted his way into the dunes with his flashlight, stumbling and floundering and killing his night vision, a city boy in the open. The wind pulled at his hair, blew sand grit into his eyes, then dropped like a stone.
Sudden, total silence except for the hiss and slither of sand around his shoes, his panting breaths. Thirty feet up the side of a dune from a huge creosote with dozens of crannies between its half-exposed roots, the sand around it covered with tracks, Dante sat down and turned out his light. The sand was cold on his butt through his jeans. He shifted around for a comfortable position, quit moving to listen. And listen. No sound except for the creak of his jacket with his breathing.
Night blindness gone, he could see the creosote bush, see the dark scribbles of the largest tracks beneath it. He could have read his guidebook by the moonlight. Could hear himself breathing. Could hear his eyelashes coming together, the sound of the separate hairs meshing, parting. Chuck had been right. He could hear himself blink.
His head dropped and he slept.
In his dreams a scarred old coyote came trotting in from the flat ground around the stovepipe well, wary and clever and carrying Dante’s upwind scent in its nostrils. It circled him, sidled softly and sideways up to him, stuck a nose close to his face to breathe in his strange scent.
Predawn desert chill awoke him. The moon was low on the horizon; Dante needed the luminous face of his watch to see it was nearly 3:00 a.m. He’d fallen asleep and hadn’t heard, hadn’t seen a damned thing. Nothing at all. Except something in a dream about a coyote.
He groaned and creaked his way to his feet. Something yipped as it ran off from under the creosote bush. He started down the dune, pitched forward on his face and slid down the sand in the half-darkness, flailing and thrashing.
Dante swung around and sat up and turned on his flashlight. His goddam feet had gone to sleep, his…
Somebody had tied his shoelaces together while he slept.
A primitive dread shot through him. He remembered his dad’s tales of the Fiji Scouts in World War II, who would infiltrate the Japanese lines and slit the throat of one soldier in a two-man trench, leaving the other alive. Untying and retying his laces, Dante knew how that survivor must have felt when he awoke to the sight of his dead partner.
Chuck? No, the old geologist might have been capable of moving that silently through the night, but he wouldn’t…
When Dante stood up, something crackled against his chest. He jerked around in a circle, beating at himself, terrified by thoughts of sidewinders slithering under his jacket for warmth. But his spastic hands found only paper. Paper?
A note was fastened to his shirt with a safety pin.
Dante unfastened it carefully, his flesh almost crawling at the knowledge that another human being had been able to get that close to him in the night while he slumbered peacefully.
The note was on Furnace Creek Ranch letterhead. He read the heavy ballpoint printing by the beam of his flashlight:
I DO NOT KILL MY OWN KIND
RAPTOR