A Serpent In Turquoise

Behind her, Señor Skinny leaned halfway out the passenger window to jeer and hoot as he pumped his bony arm.

Okay, forget about passing. She supposed she could simply follow the pickup till her lunatic lumberjacks grew bored with the chase. “Hey!” she yelped as the truck made a roaring charge at her back bumper. She stepped on the gas and surged ahead, till the goats could have leaped out onto her hood.

“What is with you guys?” Harassing a lone foreign female seemed just their style, but instigating a three-way pileup was downright suicide.

If they knocked her off the road, she had to respond at maximum intensity. She hadn’t brought a gun this trip; flying made it impossible. And her usual weapons, her blowpipe and her knife, she’d stowed with the rest of her gear beneath a tarp in the back, before she’d strolled into Magdalena’s.

There’d be no time to put her pipe together, but maybe she could get to her knife in time. Meanwhile, she leaned toward the glove compartment, fished out a heavy flashlight and laid it in her lap as, up ahead, the road took a rising bend to the right. And there at last, beyond a screen of wind-tortured pines, the rim of the canyon yawned, a dark slash in the ground, falling away out of sight.

If she remembered correctly, the road snaked back to the east just beyond that promontory, while a side road cut away to her right and down. At this speed it lay maybe a minute ahead.

Just then the truck crunched her bumper, and Raine’s teeth clicked together as her head slammed back against her headrest.

“So be that way!” She grabbed the flashlight, flipped it up and over her shoulder.

In her rearview mirror, she saw the truck’s windshield glitter in a crazy spiderweb of cracks. Above the cab, the logs groaned against their chains. An outraged bellow sounded over the engine’s roar.

Up ahead, the goat chauffeur was finally realizing he was traveling in bad company. The pickup belched smoke and squeezed out a few more miles per hour, but Raine didn’t close the gap. She’d gut it out, ride the lumber truck’s front bumper for another quarter mile, then hang a last-second hairpin right down the canyon trail. The truck’s greater momentum should carry it well past the turn.

The engine behind her revved, roared. She gritted her teeth and eased ahead, hoping to soften the oncoming crash.

“Ooff!” Another blow like that and she’d be riding with the goats. She kept her eyes trained for her turn. Couldn’t be more than a hundred yards to go…then fifty, then… “Where the hell is it?”

McCord was driving up the last switchback on the trail out of the canyon, when the coyote popped up on his right. “No way!” He braked the ancient Land Rover, raising a wave of sandy gravel, as the dusky form flashed past his front bumper then flowed over the drop-off to his left. “Jorge?” McCord cut the ignition and leaned out of his doorless vehicle to whistle, then call, “George-boy? C’mere, fella.” He scanned the brush that edged the track, the top branches of a pine jutting up from below.

“No way that coulda been George.” He’d left the mangy beggar back at camp, forty miles down the gorge. The coyote liked to tag his tracks, but he’d never have followed him this far. Besides, he couldn’t have gotten ahead of him, if he had followed.

“Jorgito? If that’s you, go home. Take it from one who knows, city life’s not what it’s cracked up to be.” Magdalena kept a shotgun behind the bar, and the only varmints she tolerated walked on two legs. “Follow me there and she’ll chop you up for chili.”

No answer but a breeze, sighing through the pine needles.

McCord engaged the parking brake, then reached for the canteen on the seat beside him. He swung around to watch the sun flaming on a purple peak, far beyond the far rim of the canyon. He took a cool swallow while the light faded from copper to blue, sighing happily at the thought of the cold beers to follow, with a plate of tamales and mole on the side. Definitely a slice of real bread; he was sick of campfire biscuits and hush puppies. His stomach rumbled at the thought.

It had been complaining ever since he’d declined an invitation to supper when he’d stopped by the doc’s place, an hour back down the trail. But McCord had his first-night rituals for whenever he straggled out of the canyons. It was best to ease back into civilization like a bather into a hot tub, and Magdalena’s made a good halfway stop on the road to polite society. His first night out from camp, he didn’t need stimulating conversation or a fight for his life on the doc’s treacherous chessboard. He’d rather kick back, let a warm, curvaceous woman swaddle him in comfort and admiration.

Whilst he’d sat there anticipating, the sun had sunk itself, curving off toward the Gulf of California, and Baja beyond. “The Blue Hour,” he mused aloud, then frowned at the noise coming from just above—a big roaring diesel rasping at the quiet, rumbling down the road from Mipopo. One of those damned lumber trucks, carting off pine trees that had struggled a thousand years or more to attain their rightful growth, cherishing every drop of rain, standing fast against landslides and winter gale—only to fall to some greedy little guy with a rusty chainsaw.

With a rueful grunt, McCord glanced back down the long sloping track that clung to the canyon wall. Too late for supper at the doc’s? Maybe he wasn’t in the right mood for the cantina tonight. It was no place to pick a fight. If that crowd ever suspected he was a closet tree hugger…

On the other hand, if he meant to change his mind, he’d have to drive the last little stretch up to the main road, then turn around there. Only a fool would attempt a K-turn on this one-lane ramp that was scarcely wide enough for two burros. And if he got as far as the main road, then he might as well—

He’d swung back around with this resolution and now McCord sat, transfixed. “What the—” A car plunged out of the twilight, heading straight at him, its left flank hugging the mountainside, scraping a shower of sparks as it came. “Shit! Stop, you—”

No time to start his engine, no place to swerve aside if he did. He dove for the passenger door. Jump the other way and next stop was the canyon floor, about a half mile below.

The car clipped his left headlight. Head and shoulders out of the Rover, he clung to the doorframe as it spun counterclockwise.

Tree limbs crackled; the pine tree groaned like a wounded beast. Glass shattered, metal shrieked. His heart was going to burst right out of his chest and run for high ground!

Shaking and swearing, McCord lay, staring at the road only inches below his face. He listened for the sound of the other car striking the canyon floor.

It was a long way down, but still…He blew out a breath. Should have struck by now, and serve the jerk right. Driving at that speed, without his headlights? He struggled to a sitting position. “What the—” Almost afraid to look, he swung slowly around. “Sweet Jeez in the morning.”

The other car—a topless Jeep—hung at his eye level, wedged in the branches of the pine tree that grew up the cliff face.

“Good God.” McCord scrambled out onto the road till his knees gave out, and he landed on his butt, contemplating this miracle. “You’re the luckiest damn fool in the—”

Something cracked. The Jeep settled gradually, rolling toward its left side as it sank. It paused, still cradled by the pine, suspended out there, maybe five feet beyond the edge of the cliff. “Oh, boy.” McCord pulled himself up the Rover’s fender to his feet. That wasn’t a very big tree, and if—

Another branch cracked. The Jeep listed a few more degrees, allowing him to see the driver, who still gripped the wheel as if he meant to drive out of this mess—or straight on to Kingdom Come. “I, uh, think you better get outta there.” McCord limped closer, swallowing hard.

“No kidding!” She reached out the gap where a door would be in a standard car to grope for a hold, only to touch thin air.

It was a woman, he realized, noticing her pale-colored braid now. And what was the matter with her, just sitting there so calm? Was she drunk or stoned?

Or maybe stunned. He swallowed and said casually, “Got your seat belt fastened?” If the Jeep tipped any farther and she didn’t, she’d better have packed a parachute.

“Yeah.” She swung her arm again. “What am I hung up on?”

Another snap of a branch and the Jeep rolled ten more degrees.

“I’m in a…tree?”

She’d hit her head, he decided. Was concussed. Maybe in shock. “That’s about the size of it. Now listen, honey, I want you to just sit tight, while I…” Whatever damn-fool thing he did, it entailed going out there and getting the crazy bitch. Or maybe—“Hang on. Don’t move. I’ll be right back.” He spun, heading for the rear of the Rover.

“What happens if I move?” she called behind him.

“You don’t wanna know.” Returning on the run with a rope, he built a bowline loop. “I’m going to throw you a rope now, okay?”

She grabbed in the wrong direction. It slipped past her fingers and fell away.

“I’ll try again.”

And damned if she didn’t miss again. “Um, by any chance, do you wear glasses?” And she’d lost them in the wreck.

“I’m seeing triple, okay? Now throw me the fricking rope!” An edge of panic laced her husky voice.

“Sorry. Maybe if you—Oh, jeez!” he yelled as, in a crackle-storm of snapping branches, the Jeep rolled toward him—entirely upside-down. With its wheels turned up to the sky, it looked like a dying animal.

“Oh, shoot me,” came her voice, from somewhere down below. “I’m off the edge, aren’t I?”

“I’m afraid so.” He tied the tail end of his rope to the roll bar on the Rover.

Down below the cliff face, she’d started laughing. “Lost the love of your life? Chased by rabid lumberjacks? No problemo! Come to the Copper Canyons and leave your troubles behind!”

“Least it puts ’em all in perspective,” he agreed absently as he twisted the rope over his hip and shoulders in a body rappel. He was a firm believer in equality of the sexes; theoretically there was no reason he should risk his neck for a damned woman driver. Not that reason and women mixed very often, in his experience.

It was her husky laughter that was the clincher. She wasn’t hysterical; she just had a fine black appreciation for life’s little pratfalls, on top of what must be a whopping concussion. Still, if she showed that kind of guts in the face of disaster, what could he do but match her? “Just hang on now.”