Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

sharply with the mutable sand. And divers found them lying on the Gulf floor, their slender points aping roadsigns that might direct their finder to someplace yet unknown. Perhaps they pointed back to their source, the very spot where their makers lived, ate, slept.
    Paleolithic occupation sites were notoriously hard to find, since humans in that era had lived biodegradable lives, leaving behind almost nothing but their stone tools and the bones of their prey. They even burned their own bones, leaving nearly nothing of themselves for their descendants to find.
    Finding artifacts in such quantity and variety suggested that an occupation site was close enough to taste and smell. It might lie under the silty sediments of the Gulf. It might even lie underneath her feet. The island she stood on was thousands of years younger than the looted artifacts in the crate.
    Maybe there was a drowned river bed beneath the silent, sunlit waters surrounding the island. Clovis people would have preferred to live on a bluff above such a river. Perhaps their home had been overtaken by water, then by sediments, waiting for the hurricane that peeled away a slice of the island and left the ancient site exposed to looting by anybody with a SCUBA tank. Maybe the looters had destroyed any chance of ever finding it.
    Not three feet from her right foot, a gasoline-powered pump sat in a puddle of water, waiting for the perpetrators to return. The rainbow-slick of leaking fuel covering the puddle put Faye over the edge. She kicked the pump. She kicked it hard but, still, she was taken aback when it exploded.
    A second ear-splitting noise corrected her misapprehension. The pump had been destroyed by a bullet, and there were other bullets on the way. She flung herself into the muck at the bottom of the nearest drainage ditch and lay there on her belly, listening to the nerves in her right leg scream and listening for another shot that might tell her where her assailant hid.
    Stupid, stupid, stupid. It was stupid to come to a site of criminal activity and not expect to find criminals. Then, when she did find the place temporarily free of criminal activity, it was stupid of her to assume that criminals would leave their valuables unguarded. And that’s what this site was to them: a repository of salable goods with a real dollar value, and nothing more.
    Where was the gun? Faye had no idea of the actual orientation of the trench she was lying in so, for reference sake, she assumed that her head was north. She could tilt her head back ever so slightly and get a good line-of-sight up the trench all the way to its end at the lagoon, but she saw nobody and no tree or rock for anybody to hide behind.
    Everything seemed clear to the north. She would try another direction. There were only three more.
    She rolled carefully onto her back and the motion triggered another shot. Apparently, her nemesis was not worried about conserving ammunition. She lay there for a while, trying to discern motion or a human form in the woods south of her. There was none, but the clear view of the trees atop the lip of the far side of the pit was instructive. If someone were concealed there, he could see her just as well as she could see the trees, and he could shoot her just as easily. She wasn’t dead yet, so he wasn’t there. That left only west and east.
    Faye considered a Hollywood approach, holding up a large object that wasn’t attached to her body—a boot or a rock—and waiting to see which direction the shot came from, but she couldn’t reach her boots without rising up out of the narrow ditch and there wasn’t a rock in the ditch bigger than a grain of sand. Florida just wasn’t a rocky place.
    Then the sound of voices wafted out of the woods to her right. Slowly, she lifted her head, trying to raise an eye over the lip of the ditch without exposing any of the rest of her head. No shot erupted. The sniper was sitting high in an oak tree in a camouflaged deer stand and he had company. It was a tiny venue for a fistfight, but they were managing pretty well.
    The gunman was as distracted as he would ever be, but Faye hesitated. It would take just about forever to heave herself out of the ditch, run across the lagoon and over the dunes, cross the beach, get into her skiff, and get out of range. The moment she cleared the dunes, she would be silhouetted against the sky. It would be a miracle if he didn’t shoot her squarely in the middle of the back.
    When she saw