"I can do it," Anna said.

"Somehow I knew you'd say that," Paul said. In the thickening dusk Anna couldn't tell if he was smiling or not.

No matter, she had a plan.

"Let's jury-rig whatever we've got for line. Even a few feet might help."

Steve gave up a belt. After some modest twisting and contortion, Cyril offered up a spandex sports bra, and together with Paul's belt and the linen Anna had torn for Helena's hammock, they cobbled together a line close to seven feet long and fairly st.u.r.dy.

There wasn't enough that it could be tied off or wrapped around something to create a decent belay, and Paul was the only one with the strength to hold it or use it to pull anyone up. He made no argument as Anna made preparations for the climb down.

Anna was relieved. The arguments had already been made in her head and, evidently, that of her husband. On the slim chance Carmen was alive, a wait till morning could well kill her. Should the shooter be waiting to make another kill, waiting till morning would give him light to aim by. Without water Chrissie and possibly the twins would be too weak to finish the ascent in the morning. Weighed against those, the dangers of Anna making a low light climb seemed paltry.

Paul held the makeshift line and Anna sc.r.a.ped, belly down, feetfirst over the edge of the ledge. With the line to hold on to, the seven feet was an easy descent. Steve handed the baby to Chrissie and he and Cyril took the line to hold it so Paul could follow but Chrissie huffed to life.

"Take this baby," she said as she thrust Helena into Cyril's arms. "I'm going to do it with Steve. I weigh more than you."

Cyril was either too tired or too shocked to protest. Anna watched as the girls changed places and Chrissie and Steve knelt and braced themselves to take Paul's weight. In the end, he didn't use the line. Afraid, probably, that the two college students couldn't hold it. He got most of himself off the ledge, hung on for a moment then dropped with a thud and an oof! to the platform where Anna waited.

"You sure you can do this?" he asked, hands on hips, staring down the crack Anna had chosen to descend.

Close up, it looked wider and deeper.

"It is Carmen," Anna said. Crouching, she could see the pale outline of an arm and part of the guide's face, mere smudges of paleness in the gloom but definitely human in shape. "Carmen!" she called, hoping for a twitch or a moan signifying life.

"I'm pretty sure I can," she answered Paul's question.

"The drop doesn't look as far from here," he said.

Easy to say when he wasn't the one about to go down it.

"No time like the present," Anna said.

She took one end of the line and put it between her teeth. It wasn't long enough to do any good but it served the purpose of Dumbo's white feather: it gave her courage to begin. The top of one of the boulders had been sheared off, forming a steep ramp that funneled down into the s.p.a.ce between the two leaning rectangles of rock. More blood was smeared where Carmen had hit, then slid down and fallen after being shot. Anna sat at the top of the slide. Paul lay on his stomach on the flat. She took one of his hands then turned over on her stomach as well, facing him.

Panic gripped her as she felt the pull of the black hole she was being funneled into, a pit like the pit in her soul.

"You don't have to do this," Paul said softly.

"Yes I do," Anna mumbled around the spandex bra strap clamped between her teeth. The phrase blind panic was not a metaphor, it was a description. She could see almost nothing. Black tunneled her vision till only Paul's hands remained. Gripping them so tightly she would have broken finger bones had he been one of the twins, Anna loosed the grip her feet had on the funnel's side and let herself slip down the length of her and Paul's extended arms. When she could slide no farther, she forced herself to let go of Paul's left hand, took the line from her teeth and held on to it. Paul closed his fingers around the line.

"Got you," he said.

With a feeling she was letting go of life and sanity, Anna let go of his right hand and gripped the line tightly in her fists. The added couple of yards brought her easily to where the funnel ended and the rocks met. The s.p.a.ce between them was no more than a yard wide for the most part, no wider than the average doorway.

Holding tightly to the bra and belts, Anna knelt on the slope and looked down. It was not as far as gloom and fear had suggested. No more than fifteen feet. Carmen, now the merest outline in the growing dark, lay at the bottom.

"It's doable," she said to Paul.

"Be careful."

There wasn't any more line but Anna didn't think she would need it. Lowering her legs into the crack, she pushed hands and feet out to the sides and, braced between the rocks, began to spider-walk down. She made it nearly halfway before she lost purchase on the smooth shale and fell. The chute she was shinnying down flared out near the bottom, and she struck the slanting base of the rock and rolled down.

Her squawk and the forthcoming thump brought Paul {p b"1e's voice down, high and frightened, the warmth gone. "Are you okay?" he shouted.

"Okay," Anna managed, her voice sounding hollow and strange in this dry well. She hadn't fallen and rolled more than a few yards and she had landed on something soft. Carmen. A woman Anna had killed in a similar fashion years before and beneath the surface of the earth in Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico rushed out of the past and the pit and Anna felt again her knee crushing the throat, felt the weight of a mile of limestone on her neck and chest and she could not breathe.

Rolling off Carmen as gently as she could, Anna found herself crying, great fat tears creeping down her dusty cheeks.

"Wasting water," she whispered. Carmen's eyes were open, catching the last dull gleam of evening from the opening above them. Anna didn't bother with a field exam. The exit wound in the middle of the guide's chest was as big as her fist and the blood around it dry. "Sorry I landed on you, Carmen," Anna said, still crying. "I am glad it wasn't me who killed you, though.

"We need your sat phone. Tell me you didn't fling it from you when the b.a.s.t.a.r.d shot you." Anna's tears were stopping. Carmen was a southpaw. Anna felt her way down Carmen's left arm to her hand. The phone wasn't clamped in her fist. "b.u.t.terfingers," Anna said, and began sweeping her hand over the ground around the corpse.

"Anna?" Paul called.

"Carmen's dead," Anna answered, and was relieved there was no sign of her recent weeping in her voice. "I'm trying to find her sat phone."

Anna could see her hands moving like pale spiders over the dirt and gravel. She could feel the muck of blood and dirt commingled and nearly dry. She hoped she would not feel an angry scaly creature or wake up a scorpion or tarantula. It was dark enough she'd never see them till they were getting to know each other far better than either party desired. Finally her hand landed on what she'd been looking for, the smooth small rectangle of plastic that could send signals to objects rotating the earth.

"Got it," she called to Paul.

"Hallelujah!" filtered back down the creva.s.se. "Does it work?"

Anna opened the face of the sat phone. It lit up and displayed the usual options. She chose not to shout the answer to Paul. Knowledge they had a satellite phone might inspire the killer to be more aggressive in his quest. Or it could scare him away. Undecided, Anna slipped it into her pocket.

For reasons rooted in ancient ritual but as necessary now as they'd been then, Anna knelt by Carmen. She straightened the guide's legs, folded her arms on her chest and closed her eyes. That done, she smoothed the hair off her temples and into the braids she wore. This was unquestionably a crime scene and she was messing it up. Since she'd begun the process by dropping eight feet onto the corpse then fondling it and running her hands and scrabbling her feet over every inch of the place, Anna didn't feel any compunction about paying last respects.

< inheight="1em" width="1em" align="justify">"Good-bye, Carmen. The Rio Grande is rising to take you but I doubt even he can climb this high. We'll be back for you.

"I'm coming up," she shouted to Paul. Checking to make sure the sat phone was secure, she crawled up the slanted cut at the bottom of the westernmost rock. The crack narrowed there and she was able to get hands and feet on opposite sides of the chimney without any trouble. Unable to fall up, the ascent was longer and harder than the descent had been. Halfway her arms and legs began the quiver of nearly exhausted muscles.

Another five feet and she knew she was not going to make it.

FOURTEEN.

As children Anna and her sister, Molly, had often "chimneyed up" door frames, their small hands and feet leaving dirty prints all the way up. It wasn't a skill Anna had been called upon to use all that much in her adult life: once in Texas and once in Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico. The idiosyncratic activity called on muscles seldom called upon. Or so Anna told herself. The possibility that it was age and the more sedentary life of a district ranger, that perhaps the leaping tall buildings in a single bound had been left behind in her salad days, didn't appeal to her at the moment. Caught as she was, hands and feet crabbed out to the walls of the stones in crushed cruciform, there was little she could do if her strength gave out but fall. She'd been lucky she'd done herself no more damage than a few bruises and sc.r.a.pes when she dropped the last few yards into Carmen's sarcophagus. Now she was a good fifteen or twenty feet from the bottom of the cut. Enough to break a leg or back or neck.

Trying to ease the tension in her muscles while keeping the tension against the rock, she debated whether to try to climb again, try to wedge herself into a position where she could ease and rest for a moment, or holler for help.

"Paul!" she shouted after an exceedingly short deliberation. "I'm stuck."

"Wedged?" he called back.

Getting wedged was funny in the comics. In caves or climbing it wasn't. People wedged between the proverbial rock and hard place often died there.

"No," she rea.s.sured him quickly. "I ran out of steam. I don't think I've got the strength to get myself out."

"How far up are you?"

"Too far."

"How far down are you?"

She knew he was thinking of their paltry lifeline of bra and belts.

"Too far."

"Hang on," he said, then began talking rapidly in tones too low for Anna to catch the drift of the conversation.

She thought about trying to throw the sat phone out so they would be able to make a call-if they could get high enough to get a signal without getting their heads blown off-but knew if she moved a hand from the wall to her pocket she'd likely as not lose her tenuous position and join Carmen in more than just physical proximity. It didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. If she could get at it, she couldn't throw it; if she could throw it, it would slide back down into the crack.

The palms of her hands were growing numb where they were splayed against the shale and the quadriceps muscle in her left thigh shuddered from quivering to cramping. Looking up, she noticed a narrow band of gray light, no more than six feet above her head, vaguely crescent-shaped. Rather like a sinister half smile on an evil mouth viewed from the vantage point of the glottis. Don't swallow, Anna prayed to the Rock G.o.d.

"Paul?" She tried not to sound too desperate. Paul would be doing everything he could, even if it included stripping everybody naked and twisting rope from their clothes. A good plan, but not timely. By the time the rope was done Anna would also be done.

"Hang on," Paul said again. "A minute, no more. You hang on." He wasn't trying not to sound desperate. "We're coming."

The pit yawned.

Anna did not wish to die today. She had one more son of a b.i.t.c.h to kill before she went gently into anybody's good night. Perhaps Dr. James was right and she did have a calling. Certainly the b.a.s.t.a.r.d who shot Carmen and Lori had forfeited his right to a long and happy life.

By force of will she kept the cramp from metastasizing into the rest of the thigh and the calf. "I'll be here," she called back, and was startled to hear the fierceness in her voice.

"You better be. Okay. Ready, Steve?"

Anna's right foot slipped an inch and she ground her teeth trying to find the lock for the bones to hold when the muscles gave out, wedge herself in the Devil's throat like a sharp stick.

Sc.r.a.ping came from above and pebbles rained down on her.

The silhouette of two birds cut the dying gray of her truncated sky; one of them dropped a snake from its beak. The shift of realities was over in the same instant it hit the back of her eyes. Black birds were hands and the snake was the line.

"Heads up," Steve called, and Cyril's bra hit her in the face. After the initial insult, Anna was not displeased. Her teeth were the only bits of her free to do any serious grabbing. The makeshift line was none too long. Anna bit at the fabric till she caught it between her teeth then kept chomping. When she let go, she didn't want the spandex to tear where her teeth perforated the cloth.

"Got it?" Steve called down.

"Unmph," Anna managed, and clamped hard on the wad of bra in her mouth. Choosing what must be done quickly,e d"1e she s.n.a.t.c.hed her right hand off the rock wall and grabbed for the line. The palm had gone numb and the fingers pawed weakly at the belt above Cyril's sports bra.

Anna's feet were slipping. She grabbed at the line with her left hand and was able to close her fingers around the belt, but there was no strength in her grip. She jammed it back against the wall. With a mind-wrenching sc.r.a.pe both feet began to slide. Anna was hanging on by her teeth. The skin of her teeth, she thought absurdly. Through her mind zipped a fragment of material from high school science cla.s.s: the jaw muscles are the strongest muscles in the body. Anna hoped the lecture hadn't been referring to t.i.tmice or voles.

A lucky moment or a kindly G.o.d silhouetted the strap of the bra against the last of the daylight and Anna threaded her hand through it and twisted it until it was tight as a tourniquet. Left on long enough and she'd lose the hand. If she lost her grip the hand wouldn't matter, so Anna didn't dwell on it.

"Whoa!" she heard huffed from over her head.

"Don't do anything," came Paul's voice. "Let me do it. You're just rope."

"Rope," Steve said, and Anna's mind flew inexplicably to the Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k movie of the same name starring Jimmy Stewart.

The bra was pulling tight, stretching as the line drew upward. Anna had managed to stop slipping down by shoving her heel into the wall and almost sitting on it to keep it in place. She wished she could have gotten her hand caught in a belt. As the spandex expanded and grew thinner and thinner, it wasn't looking quite as stalwart as it had when she and Paul first attached it to the rest of their rope.

Finally it could stretch no farther. Still holding the end in her teeth, she s.n.a.t.c.hed her left hand from the wall and grabbed with what strength remained in the fingers. Without this third point of contact her feet slipped suddenly and completely free of the walls and Anna fell a foot or so but the line held. Then, with painful slowness, it began inching upward. Anna closed her eyes so the infinitesimal progress wouldn't seem so hopeless but, without that dim reality of the darkened stone creeping past, the pit beneath and within her was overwhelming, spinning her brain inside her skull till she was afraid she would pa.s.s out.

"Hang on," she heard Paul say once more, and the line, with her dangling on it like a landed fish, jerked her upward a foot, then another, and she watched her knuckles lift into the twilight above her.

"Hurrah!" she heard Cyril and Chrissie shout and knew they had seen her emerging fists. "Hurrah," she murmured against the spandex that was nearly choking her.

The line pulled her wrists to the edge of the boulder and couldn't move them. The line of her body, nearly perpendicular to the slide that heralded the entrance to the crack, acted as a doorstop. The line sawing against the stone was only serving to cut through the spandex and peel the skin from her hands.

"Can you help us, Anna?" Paul's voice sounded so close it gave helos/dir heart. It didn't give her strength. Scrabbling with her feet on the slate she tried to find purchase, enough so she could boost arms over the lip of rock. Either she lacked the power to push hard enough or the ascent and descent had sanded off what little tread her river shoes had.

"Mmnh, mmnh," she said through her self-imposed gag.

"Stay right there," Paul said. Sc.r.a.ping and pebbles rattled down the slope above her. Then the light winked out and skinny arms reached down. Steve Kessler's face was inches above her, his head and shoulders over the edge of the fall.

"Don't worry," Steve told her. "Paul said he saw this done once in a cartoon."

Steve's thin arms wrapped around her rib cage and he laced together his long-fingered hands-a poet's hands or a surgeon's, Anna thought-till the knuckles locked and she was pulled tightly to him, her face buried in his shoulder and his in hers.

"Okay," his voice came m.u.f.fled from the region of her armpit. "You're supposed to climb me."

It took a moment but Anna saw Paul's plan. "Ready?" she heard her husband shout and the tension on the line tightened. With her unfettered left hand Anna grabbed a handful of one of Steve's elbows and began pulling herself up. She had to be stomping and clawing him with every move, but he did no more than grunt occasionally when the pain got too bad. Then she was above the edge of the rock. With Paul holding tightly to his ankles, Steve's long body was laid out on the slope from head to heel for her to scramble up like a ladder.

She wasted no time. She climbed up his body like a rat up a palm tree and kept right on going till she had climbed nearly into her husband's lap. It had been her intent to help Paul reel in her bony and marvelous savior but she found she could barely lift her arms and her legs were cramping so badly she could hardly keep from screaming.

Steve was pulled up to cheers from his sister. Anna was glad the only light left was that of a rising half-moon so Cyril and Chrissie above and a few yards away couldn't see the cuts and sc.r.a.pes with which she'd marked him on her exodus. Both of his elbows were bleeding freely from abrading against the sandstone, and his shorts were torn from pocket to hem, exposing cobalt blue briefs.

"Thank you," Anna said sincerely.

"A pound of flesh is nothing," Steve replied.

"Can I use the phone?" Chrissie asked.

FIFTEEN.

The phone didn't work. The last swallows of water were consumed. The six of them sat in the dark with their backs against the stone. No one spoke, each lost in their own thoughts. Warmth from Paul's shoulder permeated the tired muscles in Anna's right arm. In her left she held the tiny sc.r.a.p of life she'd cut from the drowned woman's womb. Helena no longer whimpered. She didn't move. Anna knew she lived only by tIn he thready pulse in the miniature wrist she held gently between thumb and forefinger.