Dead men’s hearts

Chapter Twenty-three

“Not a chance,” Julie said, squinting up at him from the umbrellaed folding table where she sat sorting potsherds under the flat, dazzling sky of the Western Valley. “I’m going with you.”

“I’m just going back to the House to get Red Land, Black Land and a couple of other things before I go on camera. I’ll be back by noon.” He smiled and put a finger on the bridge of her nose. “Your nose crinkles when you squint, did anybody ever tell you that? It’s that sexy little pyramidalis nasi of yours that does it.”

She shook her head, unmoved by these blandishments. “You’re not going anywhere by yourself, pal. You’re on probation.” She reached under the table, slung her bag over her shoulder, and stood up. “All right, let’s go.”

Gideon laughed. It had been this way since he’d returned to Horizon House the previous night after his meeting with Ali Hassan. He had come back to their room after a blindfolded ride to Luxor to find her standing there with Phil, pale with worry and close to tears. Phil, also concerned about him, had just used the telephone downstairs to call police headquarters, hoping that Gabra, with traditional Egyptian disdain for normal working hours, might still be at his desk.

He was, and Phil had been about to leave for his office when Gideon appeared.

Instead, all three of them had taken a taxi to the police station, Julie asserting her determination not to give them a chance to get into any more trouble on their own. She had pressed herself close to Gideon’s side during the ten-minute drive, mute and fragile, and he had kept his arm around her, brimming with contrition and with love. “I’m fine,” he murmured into her ear again and again. “I’m fine, Julie.”

By the time they pulled up at the station she was herself again.

“One suggestion,” she said as they walked up the steps.

Gideon looked at her.

“You might do better in there without the beard.”

“The-?” He snatched it off his face.

Gabra had been in a bad mood to begin with, and he had been stonily unamused by their story, but eventually Phil’s enthusiasm-he was back to thinking it had been a jolly adventure-had swayed him, and he had begun to see the good side. A simple plan quickly evolved. Undercover law enforcement people in sufficiently disreputable-looking galabiyas would begin drifting into the cafe at 5 p.m., an hour before the meeting with Ali Hassan, and station themselves at several tables. Gabra would be in a car a block away. As soon as Gideon came in and sat down with Hassan, the police would quietly appear at the table and it would be over before it began. No complicated sting operation, no money changing hands, nothing dangerous at all. Even Julie’s mind had been put at ease.

But not so much that she had let him get out of her sight since. At first he’d grumbled about it, but the truth was that he loved it when she fussed over him and she knew it, so there wasn’t much point in grumbling.

They had breakfasted at Horizon House with the dig crew at 5 a.m., then joined them on the public ferry to the west bank, where they’d been picked up by the two Horizon vans stationed there and taken the eight desolate miles to WV-29. He had spent a peaceful, lovely two hours helping her with the sorting until TJ had come up and offered him a tour of the dig.

Reserved at first, she soon became a spirited guide, leading him through the maze of tumbled mud blocks and square pits that made up the Eighteenth Dynasty workers’ settlement. Around them diggers both Egyptian and American scraped away with everything from hoes to teaspoons under the sharp eyes of the site supervisors. Students wandered self-consciously around with clipboards or fiddled endlessly with surveyors’ tools and tripod-mounted cameras.

Gideon found it hard to pay attention. His thoughts about TJ, and to a lesser extent Jerry Baroff, had been uneasy since Gabra had told him about the four-year-old theft of the statuette body. That had happened on TJ’s watch; she had been the dig supervisor then as now. Yet in all the past week, with everything that had occurred, she had never mentioned it. Why not? How could the possible connection between the body and the head have escaped her of all people? Gabra had seen it in a flash. So had Gideon. So would anybody.

And why had she so readily-so adamantly-accepted as fact Stacey’s determination that there had never been such a head in the collection? It hadn’t taken Gideon very long to find sizable room for doubt. He had no good answers for these questions, and he didn’t like the direction they had taken him. Somebody at Horizon House was a murderer, but he preferred that it not be TJ, thanks all the same.

“This building here was shown in Lambert’s records as a brewery, but actually it was a butcher shop,” she was saying. “You know how we know? It’s fascinating: the-”

“Wasn’t there a theft here a few years ago?” It had come blurting out on its own.

TJ stopped, her arm still extended, her finger still pointing at whatever she’d been pointing at.

“Did I miss something? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I understand it was an Amarna statuette.”

“That’s right. Just the body.” She looked at him quizzically, then took him a few dozen yards to the left, to the neatly excavated remains of a rectangular hut where two Egyptian workmen were protecting the eroded tops of the mud-brick foundations, using paintbrushes to lay on a cementlike goop out of a bucket.

“It came from here,” TJ said. “This was a sculptor’s studio. It was probably something he was working on. The bastards were on it like vultures the very same night we found it. Why? What’s the sudden interest?”

He hesitated. “Oh, I was just thinking about the head that Haddon saw and wondering if the two of them-”

She flung up her hands with a laugh. “Christ, you never give up, do you? Gideon, believe me-truly-there was no head. Haddon was just doing his usual number, trying to cover his poor old rear end. What does it take to satisfy you?”

More than that, he thought, and yet he was marginally reassured. Conceivably, it was as simple as that-that TJ really, sincerely believed that Haddon had never seen the head, that there wasn’t any head to see, that it was first a delusion and then an invention. She hadn’t made a connection between the body and the head because she had never for a moment believed the head existed. It was possible, he supposed. He hoped it was true.

“Come on, I’ll show you the rest of the place,” she said when he didn’t answer, and led him off. She was polite and enthusiastic and Gideon asked intelligent questions, but an edge had come between them again, and he was glad when she looked at her watch, mumbled apologies, and went back to her clipboard and her graduate students.

On his way back to the sorting area he passed the camera crew on its next-to-last day of shooting. They were taping activities at one of the more interesting excavations, a building that had been a well-equipped bakery, and Kermit was arguing sourly with the local site supervisor because the young man wouldn’t let him set up directly on the excavated clay floor. Nearby, restless as a chained bear, Forrest shambled back and forth wearing an oversized Panama hat with a jaunty red band, trying to bite what was left of his nails.

“Hi, Forrest, how’s it going?” Gideon said without thinking.

He should have known better. “Don’t ask,” Forrest mumbled and then told him: Half of yesterday’s taping was going to have to be reshot because some bozo on the ferry had knocked a box of cassettes into the river the previous evening. Cy was being sulky because Kermit had overruled him on a complex shot that Cy had spent an hour setting up, and Kermit was acting sulky because Forrest had overruled him. Patsy wasn’t acting any sulkier than usual but she had diarrhea, which meant they had to stop for ten minutes between every shot while she made a run for the can. The whole thing was coming apart in their faces.

And Haddon had screwed things up beyond redemption, not to speak ill of the goddamned dead, by picking a hell of a time to fall into the Nile. Corners were going to have to be cut, interviews were going to have to be scratched “Sounds really tough, Forrest. Um, am I still on at noon?” Hope had stirred. Had the director been hinting that Gideon’s session would have to be dropped?

No such luck. “God, yes,” Forrest said, shocked, “We need you more than ever. What are you supposed to be talking about?”

“Racial composition in ancient Egypt,” Gideon said reluctantly. “We were going to reshoot the session I was doing with Kermit the other-”

“No, screw it,” Forrest said, scanning his wilting and dog-eared shooting schedule and making a few more smudgy pencil marks on it, “we don’t need that, let’s forget that one.”

That was something, anyway.

“How about if instead you do the hour on village life you were going to do tomorrow? That’ll give me tomorrow to-”

“I don’t think so, Forrest. I’m not ready. There were some things I was going to look up in the library.”

Forrest gnawed his two-inch-long, much-gnawed stub of yellow pencil. “I could probably switch you from noon to two o’clock. Would that give you enough time? Kermit will have a fit, but, what the hell, screw Kermit too.”

“You mean you wouldn’t need me at all tomorrow?”

“Right, finish it off today.”

Gideon considered. It would rush him, but it would also mean a day with Julie tomorrow, an entire free day on theirown, the only one they’d had since coming to Egypt and the only one they were going to get.

“You’re on,” he said.

Which was why he and Julie were now climbing into one of the white Horizon vans to be taken to the ferry dock. The driver, a smiling new hire named Gawdat, slid the side door closed with a clunk, ran around to the front, climbed into the driver’s seat, turned the key, and started them up the steeply inclined road.

They drove past the ruined foundations of what everyone said was the set from an old movie, although no one knew its name, then around the base of Monkey’s Spine, the curious, humpbacked knob that loomed over WV-29, and then onto the long escarpment that led to the main road to the Nile. Once on the escarpment, an enormous panorama spread out on their left. They were at the very edge of the great plateau of the Western Desert, riddled with canyons and dropping away, foothill by tawny foothill to the distant Nile, a dull brown band between two narrow strips of green as sharply defined as if they’d been drawn on a map. Beyond the farther strip the desert began its slow climb again, desolate and sterile, and continued far beyond the range of their sight, for almost three thousand terrible miles, the largest desert in the world, across the whole of Libya and Algeria and Morocco…

“I forgot,” Julie said abruptly.

Gideon turned from the window. “Leave something back there?”

“No. I forgot all about it. In all the fuss. The ledger.” She put her hand on his arm. “Yesterday.”

“Maybe complete sentences would help,” he said.

“I found the chronological ledger,” she told him as if he were being particularly dense. “I went looking for it and I found it.”

He sighed. “I think I missed something.”

“You missed the chronological ledger, is what you missed.”

“That’s not too surprising. What’s a chronological ledger?”

It was a register, she explained excitedly, in which new accessions to a museum were recorded as they came in, as an adjunct to the object cards. It had occurred to her that there might have been such a register in Lambert’s time, that it might still be around, and that a record of the head that Haddon had described, the head that was at the center of every strange thing that had been going on, might be in it.

She squeezed his arm. “And it was.”

Gideon shook his head, still bewildered. “Do you mean a field catalogue, a site notebook? But they wouldn’t have been using one here in 1924. It wasn’t part of the standard archaeological method yet. Cordell Lambert wasn’t Howard Carter.”

“I’m not talking about archaeology, I’m talking about museumology.” She started rummaging in her duffel-sized canvas purse. “I went into the old office in the annex before dinner yesterday and browsed around. There were some dusty old ledgers down on the oversized shelves.”

“I never saw them.”

“You’d have to be looking for them. They were in there with the bound periodicals. Anyway, they were the Lambert Museum’s chronological ledger from 1920 to 1926. Damn, where is that thing? Ah…”

She pulled out the soft leather pocket notebook that was always in her purse, the one that he’d given her on her promotion to supervisor so that she would have her own little black book. “Here it is. ”21 March, 1924. Head of-‘ Here, you read it.“

He snatched it from her. “ ‘Head of young woman or girl, inscribed, made of yellow jasper…’ This is it, Julie!”

“Really?” she said mildly. “You know, I wondered if it might be.”

He laughed and read on. “ ‘Height five and one-eighth inches to base of neck, not including one and one-quarter-inch tenon for insertion into mortise joint in shoulders.” “ This was it, all right. The head Haddon had seen, the head he’d described. Something like an Ali Hassan-type chuckle rumbled around inside Gideon’s chest. ” ’Chipped left ear and some abrasion of tip of nose. Slightly elongated skull shape, possibly for mounting of wig.“ ”

He slapped the notebook against his palm. “Julie, this is great. It confirms everything we-”

He stopped in mid-sentence, scowled, and tore the notebook open again.

“Look at this,” he said wonderingly. “ ‘Head of a young woman or girl, inscribed…’ ” He slapped his forehead. “Where’s my mind been? I should have figured this out days ago, before we ever got back to Luxor!”

“I’m afraid I’ve missed something,” Julie said. “What is it that we’re talking about?”

“Remember my telling you how Ali Hassan was leering at me and muttering about ‘the final element, the last part’?”

“Yes, but-”

“I know what it is, I know what he was talking about!” He sobered. “My God, no wonder this thing was worth killing over. If-”

The van, which had been bobbing timidly along the sandy road the last time they’d noticed, suddenly rocked heavily to the right and went through a jolting series of bumps, throwing Julie against Gideon and knocking the notebook to the floor.

“Hey, take it easy,” Gideon called to the front, “we’re not in any hurry, we-”

Another tooth-rattling set of shocks bounced both of them two inches off the seat. The notebook jumped about on the floor. Everything else on the seats-Julie’s purse, their hats, somebody’s clipboard, somebody’s jacket, a couple of empty soda pop cans-was flung to the floor. In front of them Gawdat hung rigidly on to the wheel with his left hand, fighting to keep his turban from toppling off with his right.

“What is he doing?” Julie said anxiously. “This can’t be the way to the ferry.”

It wasn’t the way to anywhere. Two hundred yards in front of them, so bright it hurt to look at, was a squat, rugged cliff of weathered limestone eighty or a hundred feet high, blocking their way like a dam. On either side of the van, but much closer, similar stone walls closed in, craggy and forbidding.

A box canyon, Gideon thought. He’s driven us into a box canyon. What…

“Gawdat,” he said sharply. “Stop the van. Right now. Turn around and-”

The rest of the sentence was jarred out of his mouth as the van bucketed on. His teeth clicked painfully together. Gawdat turned panicky eyes on him for a moment-Gideon saw white all around the pupils, as in a frightened horse- and stepped on the gas, rigidly clutching the wheel with both hands now while his turban went flying. Julie and Gideon grabbed at whatever they could to keep from being tossed into the air. Limbs flopped, heads knocked against the padded roof.

“Damn it,” Gideon managed to get out, “you’re going to-”

They were thrown forward against the backs of the front seats as the car juddered to a standstill, so that Julie and Gideon wound up falling all over each other in the narrow space, like a pair of Keystone Kops, knees in ribs and elbows in eyes. When they floundered up unhurt, they were in time to see the turbanless Gawdat bolting back across the desert, with the skirts of his robe held high and his brown knees pumping, finally vanishing into a warren of boulders at the entrance to the canyon.

The springs of the van resettled themselves with a last, abused sigh, and then there was utter silence, unnerving after all the tumult. Around them, pale dust slowly settled back to earth and sifted in through the open windows and driver’s door. The odor of gasoline was thick in their nostrils-gasoline and the strange smell of the Egyptian desert; flinty-clean and fusty at the same time, redolent, so it seemed, of ancient tomb chambers, and camel dung, and Bedouin camps that had been set down and pulled up a thousand times over the ages.

“Well, that was certainly exciting,” Julie said, pushing her shirt into her jeans. “What now?”

Gideon considered. “If there was a phone booth we could use it to call the auto club,” he pointed out. “If there was an auto club.”

She gave him the look it deserved and slid to the right end of the seat to scan the barren, silent rock walls through her sunglasses.

He knew what was on her mind-the same thing that was on his: two days before, two English tourists had been shot to death by extremists in a remote canyon near the Valley of the Kings, only a few miles from where they were now. They had been in a hired van. The driver had mysteriously disappeared.

But there was something else on his mind too: a new thought, closer to home but no less nasty. Like Julie he searched the clefts and outcroppings, but without his sunglasses-they were back on the bureau at Horizon House, damn it-it was next to hopeless. The clefts were too many, the shadows too deep, the glare on the sun-bleached rock too blinding. He wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead and pushed the fly-window open as far as it would go. The temperature had dropped to a seasonally normal eighty-five degrees, but under the desert sun the flat-roofed vehicle had begun to heat up the moment they had stopped, even with the driver’s door and all the workable windows wide open. Already he was imagining that his tongue had begun to thicken, the back of his throat to turn gluey.

“What we need,” Julie said, continuing to scan the cliffs methodically, side to side, down one face and up the next, “is a plan.”

He laughed. “My sentiments exactly. What do you say-”

“Look there.” She pointed upward and a little behind them. “On top, you see that formation like a-a long set of organ pipes?”

Gideon squeezed his way past her knees, crouched in the space next to the passenger door, and peered out, shielding his eyes against the blaze of sky and limestone. “Yes…”

“Just to the left of that and down a little, there’s a kind of hollow-”

Near his cheek something pulsed in the air, a vibration, a flutter, as of an invisible bird wing; a queer sensation he knew he’d never felt before. At the same time something thudded into the mess on the floor, and a fraction of a second later there was a crack from outside, followed by a diminishing grumble of echoes. Gideon had been half-expecting it, and still it took a blank, shocked moment to register. They were being shot at. Hurriedly, he pulled a similarly stunned Julie roughly away from the window, to the other side of the van.

“Are you all right?” he asked with his heart in his throat. “It didn’t-?”

She shook her head, her black eyes round. “No… I’m all right. ”I think it went between us.“

And without much room to spare, he thought shakily. Through the open window with about four inches on either side.

She was still staring at him. “I saw him,” she whispered. “I saw his face! I saw the gun-I couldn’t believe he was really going to shoot at us. Gideon, it’s-”

“I know. Forrest Freeman.”

“Yes! You saw him too?”

No, he hadn’t seen him, but he knew. It was Forrest who had the head, Forrest who had killed Haddon, Forrest who was up there now with a rifle-his trusty Anatolian boar-hunting rifle, no doubt-bent on killing them.

“You knew! she said with a flare of exasperation. ”How long have you-“

“About a minute and a half. Julie, I’d say this would be a good time to come up with that plan. We can’t just wait here for him to come and get us.”

“Agreed.”

Their eyes roved over the interior of the van. What they were looking for, Gideon hardly knew, but something -a decoy, a trap, a weapon… In the space behind the rear row of seats he found a jack, the handle of which was an angled tire iron about fifteen inches long. He pulled the iron out of the jack and hefted it. It would make a formidable club but how much help it was going to be against a rifleman shooting at them from behind a rock eighty feet above their heads was “I don’t believe it!” Julie exclaimed. “The key!”

He followed the line of her pointing finger and there- amazingly, wondrously-was the ignition key, trailing a six-inch piece of wood with a red enamel 2 painted on it, fixed firmly in the ignition slot. In his agitation Gawdat had either been unable to get it out or had forgotten about it altogether.

They looked at each other. They had a plan after all: they could drive out of the box canyon.

“Okay, then-” he said.

The small, unopenable window in the passenger door exploded, scattering glass shards. A thread of dust puffed from the seat, exactly where Julie had been sitting moments before. For a couple of seconds they sat wordlessly, not moving, anticipating another bullet, but none came; only the single, desultory shot, as if Forrest merely wanted to let them know that he hadn’t lost interest.

They let out their breath. “Well, the angle’s the same,” Julie observed coolly, looking from the shot-out window to the hole in the seat. “He’s still in the same place.”

Gideon nodded. “It overlooks the entrance to the canyon. He figures he can catch us if we make a run for it.”

“Let’s hope he can’t.”

“At fifty miles an hour, I doubt it.”

The angle of the shots-which would be the same as the shooter’s angle of vision-also made it clear that Forrest couldn’t see them and wouldn’t be able to see the driver’s seat either. But all he had to do to change that was to climb down twenty or thirty feet. And that he would surely do, more likely sooner than later.

So it was time to go. He squeezed her hand and snaked between the front seats, sitting quietly for a moment to make sure he knew how the floor-mounted gear lever worked and just where the clutch and gas pedals were. He didn’t expect to have much use for the brake. He thought about pulling shut the driver’s door, left open by Gawdat, but decided he was better off not sticking his arm out into the open.

“Better get down, Julie. Get on the floor.”

He pressed on the clutch pedal, shifted reasonably smoothly from third gear, where the fleeing Gawdat had left it, to neutral, turned the key in the ignition, and held his breath. The engine hesitated, chittered, and caught. He shifted into first and stepped on the gas pedal. The car pitched forward, stopped, pitched, stopped, pitched “The emergency brake!” Julie shouted.

“Where the hell is it?” he yelled back, bumping his head as they jerked along in a sort of automotive seizure, but before he could find it something beneath the floorboard gave way and the van sprang powerfully forward at last, gathering speed. He shifted to second.

“You okay?” he called over his shoulder.

“Oh, fine,” came Julie’s voice from the floor. “Having a wonderful time.”

He thought he’d heard at least one shot over the start-up commotion but apparently the startled Forrest had missed, and now they were quickly putting distance between themselves and him.

That was the good part. There were several bad parts.

First, they were headed into the canyon, not out. To get out of it he was going to have to get the van turned around and come barreling back through the entrance, right under Forrest’s nose. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t see that there was any choice.

Second, the promised fifty miles an hour was out of the question. They were going to have to do it at no more than twenty. The canyon floor wasn’t made for anything less than a half-track, and he didn’t dare shift above second gear for fear of getting stuck in the loose, rough terrain. And even if he chanced that and got away with it, he’d wind up breaking their necks or cracking their skulls at anything faster. Already they were bouncing crazily along again, the way they’d been when Gawdat had been driving. And they were tipped precariously to one side, hugging the sloping, rocky scree at the base of the cliffs; it was the only way to get enough room to turn the van around without having to slow down even more, or backing up.

The canyon, he knew by now, was keyhole-shaped, widening to a two-hundred-yard arc at the rear, and constricting to a narrow bottleneck at the entrance, over which Forrest held sway from his perch. Whatever else you said about him, Gideon thought, you had to admit he knew how to pick his canyons.

The plan, then, was to continue on this arc along the foot of the cliffs, until he had enough of a turning radius available to head back toward the entrance.

And through it, with any luck.

“Uh!” The sound was wrung from him as the right front wheel jounced over a pile of stones and dropped into a foot-deep hollow. The van tipped over so far that the open driver’s door slammed shut on its own. Metal screeched against rock as the undercarriage bottomed, but somehow the van scrabbled its way out. Gideon tasted blood where he’d bitten the inside of his cheek.

But they were still moving.

“Get ready now,” he called back, wrestling the wheel, “I’ve got enough room to make the turn. I’m just going to get it pointed toward the opening, step on the gas, and pray.”

“Amen,” Julie said.

They were about a hundred yards from the entrance; they would be in Forrest’s sights the whole time, head-on, with Gideon himself in plain view. But what else was there to do? They couldn’t stay in the canyon, and if they tried leaving the van and scaling the walls a leisurely Forrest could pick them off in the bright sunlight like moving targets in a carnival shooting gallery. Ping, they’d go, and fall over like growling bears or quacking ducks.

And Forrest would get the prize.

Gideon swung hard toward the right, put just a little more pressure on the gas pedal, and clutched the jerking wheel to keep the van headed straight for the opening. With all the rolling, lurching, and jolting that was going on without any help from him, he didn’t see any need to worry about evasive tactics.

The first shot was fired as he came full around, facing the entrance. There was an inconsequential snick from the front of the vehicle just below the window and a seemingly simultaneous thud as the bullet struck the floor on the passenger side, about three feet from Gideon’s right leg.

Why, those things can go right through metal, Gideon thought indignantly. Like butter. What the hell, it hardly seemed fair. On the other hand, that was the fourth shot Forrest had taken at them now, and they were still in one piece. Crack, there was another; he saw the dust spatter twenty feet in front of the van. Was Forrest panicking, getting less accurate rather than more? He hunched down lower on the seat and pressed as hard as he dared on the pedal. Seventy yards to go… sixty-five… He began to let himself think about Life After the Canyon.

He never heard the next shot strike, didn’t really see it strike. One second he was trying to decide whether or not he could risk taking the van over the rocks rearing up in their path. The next second the windshield was honeycombed by a thousand glittering little fissures that turned the landscape into a kaleidoscope. Immediately the steering wheel fought him harder, pulling at his arms as if it knew that he was blind, that it had the upper hand now.

“Hang on!” he yelled or tried to yell, pawing with his foot for the brake, but a scrunching shock sent him helplessly up in the air still clinging to the wheel, like a kid bounced off a seesaw and hanging on to the handle for dear life. Then, for a breath-stopping moment the entire van was airborne, coming down heavily on its rear wheels and careening on, slowed now but tilted wildly to the right, on two wheels; so much so that Gideon, flung like a bundle of laundry into the passenger seat corner, saw only sky through the driver’s window on the other side.

We’re tipping over, he thought. “Brace yourself!” he called. “We’re-”

And over they went, the van falling sluggishly onto its right side and then, slowly, surprisingly, continuing to roll, as if someone were pushing it down a hill. For an impossibly long moment it hung, balanced and seemingly struggling, before it tumbled onto its top with a terminal, metal-crumping whomp that smashed the remaining windows, popped the crackled windshield out of its mounting, and crumpled the left rear half of the roof like so much tinfoil.

Gideon ended up on his back on the ceiling along with everything else that was loose, including Julie, who was sprawled beside him under a welter of seat cushions, clothes and other junk.

He reached instinctively for her with his hand. “Julie, are you okay?” Years of dirt and sand that had been tramped into the van fell onto their faces like dry rain.

“Ugh. Yes. Phooey.” She was spitting dust. “Nothing that a few weeks in traction won’t fix. What about you?”

“Yes, fine.”

Well, pretty much. The van had tipped slowly enough to let him prop himself against the roof and the back of the front seat before it had turned completely over, but the tire iron- he’d brought it up front with him-had gouged him in the thigh, which had hurt a little, and somewhere along the way he had bitten his cheek again in the same spot, which had hurt like hell but wasn’t anything serious. He realized abruptly that the engine was still running and quickly reached down- reached up, rather-to switch off the ignition, then cautiously peeked through a corner of the space where the windshield had been to check their bearings.

They were in a kind of nook or cul-de-sac, a mini-box canyon off the main box canyon. Apparently the van had swerved into it, then flipped when it rode up onto the sloping talus at the foot of the cliffs, rolling into the troughlike center of the little bay. A good thing too; only twenty or thirty feet ahead of them-all around them, in fact-were truck-sized boulders that had fallen from above, a collision with any one of which would surely have resulted in more to complain about than a bitten cheek.

There was another good thing: the hollow from which Forrest had been firing was out of sight around a spur of rock, and if they couldn’t see where he was, then he couldn’t see where they were either. That, Gideon assured himself, was what the laws of geometrical optics said, and who was he to question the laws of geometrical optics?

Not only that, but geography was cooperating too. They were on the same side that Forrest was on; behind him, so to speak. The perpendicular spur that thrust out from the cliff to create their little bay was a promontory of the same massive organ-pipe formation in one of whose upper hollows Forrest had been crouching to fire. But that was at the other end of it, and to get from there to here, to a place where he could see them again, Forrest would have to go the long way around, behind the sinuous outcropping, because on the canyon side it reared up, sheer and columnar, with no visible path or ledge around it.

The problem for Forrest would be that he had no way of knowing that the van had turned over, since he couldn’t see the bay. As far as he knew, it could come rattling back out at any moment, spewing nuts and bolts like a cartoon car and heading full-tilt for the entrance again. And if he was stuck behind the outcropping when it did, there would be nothing to stop their getting through. On the other hand, he could hardly keep his position at the canyon’s mouth because Gideon and Julie might already be scrambling up the bay’s back wall and out of his grasp.

In other words, Forrest Freeman had himself a predicament. And if Forrest Freeman’s past behavior was any indication, what he would do would be to worry for a while before doing anything else. That meant that they ought to have seven or eight minutes before he showed up above them with his rifle; five minutes while he dithered and another two or three while he worked his way around the promontory, if that was what he decided to do.

Gideon turned back to Julie. “Let’s get out of this thing. We’ll stand a lot better chance out there-there are caves and outcroppings all over the place-than we will waiting in here for him to come pick us off.”

“I won’t argue with that,” she said. “I think the front window’s the easiest way out. Go ahead, I’ll follow you.”

“Right.” He pulled himself through, glanced warily at the deserted cliff top, and reached back in to help her get out.

She was up on her right elbow with a puzzled look on her face, tugging awkwardly at the junk that lay over her extended left foot. “Ow. Damn.”

“Julie, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

“No… I don’t think so. My ankle’s caught… Damn! There’s this stupid bar…”

“I’ll give you a hand.” He clambered back in, hauling himself to her side on his elbows.

“No, it’s not going to work,” she said, straining at her foot. “Damn!”

A glance made the problem clear. When the van had flipped, two of the three passenger seat rows had come loose, and one of them had fallen over Julie’s leg and been wedged firmly into the buckled ceiling. The steel reinforcing bar that ran along its base had come down across her ankle, pinning her hiking-booted foot to the crushed roof.

He tried to maneuver her foot out of its steel-rimmed trap without success-there wasn’t enough room to move it- then tugged fruitlessly at the bar.

“You’re lucky you didn’t lose your foot,” he said.

“That’s me,” she said grimly, “lucky Julie.”

He made her lie back, then managed to get both aims around the seat, pulling from his cramped position and putting all the strength of his legs and back into it. It didn’t budge, didn’t feel as if anything short of a crane could get it to budge.

He fell back. “Can you get your foot out of the boot?”

“I don’t know.” She fumbled at the laces, blocked by the mass of the seat. “No, it’s hard to get hold-”

“Here, let me-”

Her hand came down on his wrist. “Gideon, there’s no time! He could be here any minute. You go!”

“And leave you?” He laughed, but he felt as if something had punched him in the throat. “Forget it.” He went back to her boot laces.

Her fingers dug into his wrist. Her face was very close. “Gideon, go! It’s our only chance.”

“But-”

“I’ll be all right. We’ll be all right. I know you’ll think of something.”

“I-Julie, I-”

“Go, already!”