Shadows of Death Read online

  “What’s the matter with the timing?” Ellis snapped. Following up on the Web site challenge from the Brotherhood of American Sportsmen had been Ellis’s idea. So far the Brotherhood hadn’t shown up on the FBI’s radar, but the country was sprouting self-proclaimed patriotic groups at a geometric rate, all full of self-righteousness. Most were harmless, but some were eager for something more substantial, like guarding the borders and taking potshots at illegals—brown illegals. No vigilantes on the Canadian border so far, but hell, you never know, and there were all those anti-American Frenchies who didn’t like our foreign policy. The Web posting by the Brotherhood of American Sportsmen had an ominous ring to it. Frank considered the possibility of a free-for-all shootout, and he didn’t like it much.

  “There’s an annual turkey vulture migration that will probably peak this weekend. There’ll be lots of birders coming into the valley to help with the count, take pictures, love the vultures, that sort of thing. So we’ll be having company. I imagine that’s why the Sandman picked this coming weekend.”

  “Shit.” Ellis snapped his notebook shut. “Why’d you wait till now to tell us?”

  “Nobody asked me, Drew. I wasn’t in on the planning.” He met Ellis’s eyes. “It’s a pretty good plan, might even bring the Sandman out and give us a chance to catch him. Maybe you, Jesse, Pete, and Greg can pose as birders. That way you won’t be designated targets.” He paused. “We’ll just have to hope this Sandman character knows the difference between a birder and a poacher,” he added softly.

  “I can’t believe it. Birders!” Ellis muttered.

  “Well, maybe they’ll help us out, be extra eyes,” Sierra suggested. “Besides, Frank there talks to ravens. Maybe he can chat up the buzzards.” Sierra grinned over at Frank. “You talk buzzard, Frank?”

  Frank shook his head. “Nope, just raven.” He looked down at the table. “Buzzard talk is too difficult.” He gave Sierra a time-to-cool-it look.

  “What in God’s name are you guys talking about?” Ellis glared at the two rangers.

  “Don’t let them yank your chain, Drew.” Meecham cut in. “They’ve been out here too long. Not important.” He took a deep breath. “If there are birders, then they’ll just be an additional source of information.” Meecham looked around the room again, making eye contact with each member of the task force. “How about you, Pete, anything to add?”

  Novak grinned. “Be careful out there.”

  “Okay, then. That’s it. Saturday morning at six in the parking lot, four days from now, which should give us time to have everything in order,” Meecham said.

  As they shuffled out of the room, Meecham gave Frank the high sign. “Frank, stick around a minute.” He bent over the table, pretending to study the map until the room was empty except for the two of them, then straightened up and asked, “So what else don’t you like?”

  “Too many people, Dave. All good officers—”

  “All?” Meecham raised his eyebrows. “What about Ellis?”

  “Absolutely. Including Ellis. He’s a pain in the ass, or to be fair, not the guy I’d pick for a roommate, but he knows his stuff.”

  “That’s what I think, too.”

  Frank gave a half-smile. “He’ll get even better when it isn’t so hard for him to listen, like me learning to keep coyote quiet.” The smile broadened.

  “So go on, all good officers, but?”

  “I think this Sandman guy would have to be pretty slow not to suspect a trap. He thinks ahead, makes careful plans.”

  Meecham nodded. “Yeah, but even if he does suspect something, he might respond to the challenge.”

  “That’s what worries me. If he comes, he’ll be gunning for the Brotherhood of American Sportsmen, for whoever called him a back shooter. I don’t think he thinks of himself in that way. I’m damned glad the covert teams will be posing as birders instead of hunters. The Sandman has made his bones, so to speak, so he’s probably feeling like he’s not getting due respect. Maybe someone who calls himself the Sandman thinks he has a reputation to maintain.”

  Meecham rubbed his jaw, looking thoughtful. “Maybe so. Truth is, we know very little about him.”

  “Except that he’s smart. I think he’s been trained, too. That’s what bothers me. He has the earmarks of a professional, and we have no idea how he’ll react except for the response he posted on the MDG Web site, and he sounds pissed. That line about ‘I’ll be seeing you through a scope’ gives me pause, Dave. The guy kills people, and he thinks he’s doing the right thing, the definition of a fanatic.”

  “And?”

  “Something’s ringing a bell. Ellis might be right. Why’d the shooter leave the note? He must have figured someone would find it.”

  “Someone did.”

  Frank met Meecham’s eyes. “Me, at least the casing, if not the note itself. Someone trained in small arms combat, someone who would know where to look. Ellis wanted to know why me. I’m beginning to wonder about the same thing.”

  Meecham paused. “What’re you thinking?”

  “Maybe he does know me from the army.”

  “One foot in front of the other. Let’s see if we can get this vulture-watch, trap-the-shooter operation completed without anyone getting hurt.”

  Frank nodded. “I just hope all that anger doesn’t get directed at anyone who’s in his way. I hope he isn’t crazy enough to think he can shoot someone in law enforcement and get away with it.”

  “Me, too, Frank; me, too. We’ll all of us just have to be very careful. I’m too close to retirement to be taking extra chances.”

  Frank didn’t like to think about Meecham retiring. He liked things the way they were. The idea of working under someone else set his teeth on edge. He made no move to leave Meecham’s office.

  “Spill it,” Meecham said.

  “I badged a couple of guys shooting pinyon jays from Hunter Mountain Road. The rounds went over our heads. Linda was with me. Anyhow, I almost lost it.”

  “How so?”

  “What I wanted to do was take away the guy’s rifle and smash it up.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “One of them had a T-shirt with a praying cowboy. One of those soppy sentimental pieces of crap, and all I could think about was how I wanted to punch him out.”

  “But you didn’t,” Meecham repeated.

  “The long and the short of it was that I gave the guy a ration of shit. Then I turned badge-heavy and told him it was illegal to shoot from the road and near people.”

  “That it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Frank. He was breaking the law. You told him not to.”

  “You might get a complaint. I got on his case about being a phony Christian.”

  Meecham smiled without humor. “Think of it as therapy, helping them to get to know the asshole inside. Now it’s off your chest. You can’t worry about offending every dickhead you meet.” He met Frank’s eyes. “If you’re worrying about the Sand Canyon thing, I know you’ll handle it just fine.”

  “Count on it.”

  11

  •

  Before heading out to Sand Canyon, Frank had taken extra pains with his dress. He knew that military types might be there: buzz cuts, knife-edge creases, and shiny black oxfords. So he’d ironed military creases in his shirt, and his khakis were crisp with spray starch. He’d spent close to an hour spit-shining his ankle boots, working the polish into the leather with water and a soft cotton cloth. It was something he hadn’t done since leaving Seventh Army Noncommissioned Officers Academy. There was a comfortable mindlessness to it. Duties—someone else thought them up; all you had to do was carry them out. The simple life. He laughed silently to himself.

  He thought about things too much. That was his problem. Analyzing everything made life too damn difficult. The unexamined life might not be worth living, but the carefully examined one was a definite pain in the ass.

  He could see a distorted version of hims
elf in the toes of his boots. The shine wouldn’t last all that long, but the gleam would be there when he met Duane Marshall and his staff. He was flying the flag and “riding for the brand,” as Ben Shaw was fond of saying. Thinking about Shaw made him smile, a man who skewered his enemies and friends with equal relish. “Hey, Ranger Frank, if you can’t talk about it, you shouldn’t have done it.” Words to live by, Frank thought. He reached up into the caboose’s cupola and brought down his good Stetson. It was going to be too warm for a felt hat, but his best straw hat was fraying at the crown, and the gray Stetson looked right with the khaki uniform.

  “Looking good, Flynnman,” Linda remarked as Frank stepped onto the rear platform of the caboose. She snapped a couple of quick pictures.

  “What are you doing that for?” Frank ducked his head down, blocking the upper half of his face with his hat.

  “Too late. I have photographic proof that you were looking all spit-and-polish when you rode out to meet with the enemy.” She gave a soft chuckle.

  Linda had been doing research about canned hunts, hunting ranches, and especially the importation of exotic animals for trophy hunts. Eighty-three-year-old Daisy Marston, the principal owner of the InyoKern Courier and Linda’s employer for the present, was an upland game hunter and reputed to be a first-class shot with her Ithaca twenty-gauge shotgun. There were old-timers that referred to her as Little Miss Sureshot, the sobriquet given to Annie Oakley in the heyday of competitive shooting. Nevertheless, despite her affection for hunting, or perhaps because of it, she hated the so-called hunting reserves, and Sand Canyon was going to be in her backyard.

  Daisy Marston was from one of the early ranching families, tough, salty of mouth, and possessing a degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley. She had definite views of how things ought to be. When she first heard about the proposed conversion of the Circle Cross ranch into a hunting reserve, she made one of her rare trips down to the Courier’s offices in Ridgecrest to speak with her son, the paper’s general manager, editor, and editorial writer, about the “shameful slaughter of domesticated livestock masquerading as game.” Epithets like “cowardly wretches,” “lacking the proper masculine equipment,” and “wholly without courage,” followed by a general assessment of postmodern society, “not a nickel’s worth of grit in the whole damn country,” were heard issuing forth from George Marston’s office.

  Daisy Marston was swimming upriver. Sand Canyon meant money. Nevertheless, she had not only given Linda the go-ahead to do an investigative piece but also made it a directive: “Find out about that place, and who’s this Duane Marshall?” The Sand Canyon people were being careful, though, refusing interviews to hard-news reporters. They limited interviews and access to their facilities to friendlies who wrote articles extolling the virtues of private game reserves for the many publications devoted to guns and hunting. It was big business. Political business.

  Frank had noticed there were already puff pieces with illustrations of smiley families and their “harvested” animals in the free real estate and tourist publications—but nothing about how the actual hunting was carried out. The brochures and mailers were somewhat more forthcoming:

  NO KILL NO PAY!

  Hunters enjoy the comfort of large enclosed blinds with sliding widows overlooking heavily used corn feeders. Each stand has mineral licks and timer-controlled feeders. We have the daytime cover and water . . . so they MUST come to us to hide and drink. Hunting is done from raised blinds overlooking feeders, which have been operating continuously since August. Any predators seen may be taken as well. We’re going to do everything legally possible to make your hunt a productive, worthwhile experience!

  The text was interspersed with pictures of grinning hunters holding up the heads of dead deer and antelope and the carcasses of “harvested” bobcats, mountain lions, and coyotes. Frank wondered what you did with a “harvested” bobcat or mountain lion. Bobcat stew? Most hunters used dogs with radio collars to tree mountain lions. Then they popped them out of the branches like Christmas tree ornaments. Many of the so-called game reserves tranquilized the bigger cats—African lions and tigers—and the hunters shot them as they wobbled about.

  During a lifetime spent in the desert, Frank had encountered a mountain lion in the wild only once. They were solitary creatures, good at keeping out of sight. As a boy, he and Jimmy Tecopa had been following the drag marks from a recent kill, hoping to catch a glimpse of a real mountain lion. As they moved up the sandy wash, they’d been frozen in place by a deep coughing sound. The lion was crouched above them on the embankment, yellow eyes blazing. The carcass of a recently killed deer lay in the wash directly below. The cough was a warning, as were the blazing yellow eyes. He and Jimmy talked about the eyes lots of times after that. How it felt to be looked at as prey. That was the only time he’d actually encountered a mountain lion, and it had occurred because the lion refused to give up its kill. It was a moment Frank valued more and more with each passing year.

  According to the brochure, Sand Canyon specialized in upland game and exotics: axis deer from the Indian subcontinent, European fallow deer, and African species including zebra and two of the Big Five—African lion and leopard. Because the animals weren’t native, hunting seasons didn’t apply. The so-called sports folk could shoot at animals all year round in unimpeded slaughter.

  It wasn’t one-stop shopping—yet. Trophy hunters still had to head for Africa to get the Cape buffalo, rhino, and elephant to round out the Big Five. Of course, as the brochure pointed out, for hunters with limited time it was convenient to take two species stateside and concentrate on the other three in Africa—or in Texas. There were a few ranches in Texas where hunters could “harvest” Cape buffalo and the Bengal tiger. “Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves . . .” Didn’t they sing that old hymn in one of those Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies? Frank figured he was living in the wonderful world of George Orwell.

  Now the marvels of technology made it possible to use a remote-controlled gun on a distant ranch from an apartment in New York or Los Angeles—Internet hunting for those who wanted to hunt without the inconveniences of the great outdoors. The techno-sportsperson could kill a couple of animals while enjoying a croissant and reading USA Today or the National Enquirer. On the killing end, there were people handy to finish off wounded animals, and the hunter didn’t have to put up with all that messy skinning and butchering. The ranch did that for you. Mailed you the cured hide, mounted head, and packaged meat—no problems.

  There had been an uproar when Internet hunting was introduced in Texas. Most states had passed laws against it, including California, but if you had money, almost anything went in Africa. Frank found the whole business of canned hunts disgusting, but his wasn’t to reason why, his was but to do—do his best for Dave Meecham and the Bureau of Land Management, and that’s what he was going to do.

  He leveled the brim of his Stetson, straightened his shoulders, and placed his feet apart. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  Linda wrinkled her nose. “May I help you,” she corrected, “and no, I don’t think so, Officer, you have shifty eyes.”

  “Well, hell”—he pushed his hat back—“so much for the macho approach.”

  She turned her face up and kissed him. “I’ll settle for the Flynnman anytime.”

  As Frank stepped down from the caboose, he was very careful not to scrape his boots. “Wish me luck.”

  “Don’t forget to see if you can get me in for the opening ceremonies. So far, I haven’t been able to set foot on the place. They don’t like reporters.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Frank said as he climbed into the BLM Ford Expedition.

  “Watch the coyote mouth.”

  “ ‘Into the valley of death rode the six hundred,’ less five ninety-nine.”

  Linda watched as the big boxy BLM vehicle pulled onto the pavement and disappeared down the road. Her heart ached at the thought of being separated from this man. T
hat she loved Frank was a given. That she was content to live in social and professional isolation was another thing. Her life in the Owens Valley had given her a freedom she had never experienced, yet at the same time it was confining. The life of the city to the south beckoned. Why was it every opportunity seemed to require sacrifice?

  •

  At 14,495 feet, Mount Whitney forms part of the back wall of the Sierra Nevada mountain range that towers above the west side of the Owens Valley. The combined ranges of the White Mountains and the Inyo Mountains rise along the eastern side. White Mountain reaches 14,256 feet, peak to peak with Mount Whitney, which makes the Owens Valley deeper than the Grand Canyon, the deepest canyon on two continents. The valley floor follows the Owens River from Bishop at an elevation of 4,140 feet to Owens (dry as dust) Lake at 3,650 feet. Two active faults run a parallel course down the valley, one along the base of the Sierras, the other tracking the base of the White and Inyo ranges. The land is still in motion, marked by frequent earthquakes, recent lava flows, and a series of hot springs.

  Frank took the Mazurka Canyon road toward the Inyos. The road heads east from Independence, drops down a twenty-foot earthquake escarpment, created by the earthquake of 1872, and runs into the dry bed of the Owens River. The 1872 earthquake leveled most of Lone Pine and prompted the abandonment of Fort Independence. The town was rebuilt and survives because Independence is the Inyo county seat and shelters maintenance facilities for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It’s a place that people drive through but not where they stop.

  Frank brought his vehicle to rest at the crest of the escarpment. It never failed to awe him. Twenty feet of vertical movement and thirty-five feet of lateral shift. The quake occurred before the development of the Richter scale, but geologists estimated that it had been an 8.0 or higher, right up there with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. It was no wonder that Paiute legends were full of mighty creatures performing prodigious deeds, stacking up mountains on mountains, scooping out great valleys, and spewing forth lakes of fire. His mother’s ancestors were witness to these upheavals that left no room for skeptics. Envy them in their innocence, Frank thought.