Dark Rivers of the Heart

closed it, the pilot of the Jetranger alerted him, by way of the public-address system, that they were one minute from their destination. "Coming up on our right."
        Roy leaned to the window beside his seat. They were paralleling a wide arroyo, heading almost due east across the desert.
        The glare of sun on sand was intense. He took sunglasses from an inner jacket pocket and put them on.
        Ahead, three jeep wagons, all agency hardware, were clustered in the middle of the dry wash. Eight men were waiting around the vehicles, and most of them were watching the approaching helicopter.
        The JetRanger swept over the Jeeps and agents, and suddenly the land below dropped a thousand feet as the chopper soared across the brink of a precipice. Roy's stomach dropped, too, because of the abrupt change in perspective and because of something that he had glimpsed but couldn't quite believe that he had really seen.
        High over the valley floor, the pilot entered a wide starboard turn and brought Roy around for a better look at the place where the arroyo met the edge of the cliff. In fact, using the two towers of rock in the middle three-hundred-sixty-degree circle. Roy had a chance to see the Explorer from every amazing angle.
        He took off his sunglasses. The truck was still there in the full glare of daylight. He put the glasses on as the JetRanger brought him around again and landed in the arroyo, near the Jeeps.
        Disembarking from the chopper, Roy was met by Ted Tavelov, the agent in charge at the site. Tavelov was shorter and twenty years older than Roy, lean and sun browned; he had leathery skin and a dry-as-beefjerky look from having spent too many years outdoors in the desert. He was dressed in cowboy boots, jeans, a blue flatmel shirt, and a Stetson.
        Although the day was cool, Tavelov wore no jacket, as if he had stored up so much Mojave heat in his sun-cured flesh that he would never again be cold.
        As they walked toward the Explorer, the chopper engine fell silent behind them. The rotors wheezed more slowly to a halt.
        Roy said, "There's no sign of either the man or the dog, so I hear."
        "Nothing in there but a dead rat."
        "Was the water really that high when it jammed the truck between those rocks?"
        "Yep. Sometime yesterday afternoon, at the height of the storm."
        "Then maybe he was washed out, went over the falls."
        "Not if he stayed buckled up."
        "Well, farther up the river, maybe he tried to swim for shore."
        "Man would have to be a fool to try swimming in a flash flood, the water moving like an express train. This man a fool?"
        "No."
        "See these tracks here," Tavelov said, pointing to tire marks in the silt of the arroyo bed. "Even what little wind there's been since the storm has worn 'em down some. But you can still see where somebody drove down the south bank, under the Explorer, probably stood on the roof of his vehicle to get up there."
        "When would the arroyo have dried up enough for that?"
        "Water level drops fast when the rain stops. And this ground, deep sand-it dries out quick. Say… seven or eight last night."
        Standing deep inside the rock-walled passage, gazing up at the Explorer, Roy said, "Grant could've climbed down and walked away before the other vehicle got here."
        "Fact is, you'll see some vague footprints that don't belong to the first group of my hopeless asshole assistants who tramped up the scene.
        And judging by 'em, you might make a case that a woman drove in here and took him away. Him and the dog. And his luggage."
        Roy frowned. "A woman?"
        "One set of prints is of a size that you know it's got to be a man. Even big women don't often have feet as big as would be in proportion to the rest of 'em. The second set is small prints, which might be those of a boy, say ten to thirteen. But I doubt any boy was driven' on his own out here.
        Some small men have feet might step into shoes that size. But not many.
        So most likely it was a woman."
        If a woman had come to Grant's rescue, Roy was obliged to wonder if she was the woman, the fugitive. That raised anew the questions that had plagued him since Wednesday night: Who was Spencer Grant, what in the hell did the bastard have to do with the woman, what sort of wild card was he, was he likely to screw up their operations,