Ellis heard someone in the background talking to Winston, then Hart said, “I have a meeting now, so I’ll let you get back to work. Keep me informed.”
“I will.” The line went dead. Ellis put his phone down and drove off the hill, knowing now where Hunter was going, because this was the only road to the mine. He checked his Sig Sauer and put it on the seat beside him.
Adan pointed at the foothills and said, “That one to the left, we need to go up it.”
Hunter slipped the Ram into four-wheel and angled the front of the pickup at the long, sloping bench coming off the larger hill behind it. They went up slowly, the vehicle rocking at times side to side, but moving up steadily. Hunter asked Adan, “How did you get from here to the border?”
“I walked.”
“All the way?” She estimated the distance was a good twenty, twenty-five miles.
“It isn’t like I had a choice.”
Hunter nodded. She saw some evidence of recent vehicle traffic and followed it. When they entered the junipers, Adan pointed in the distance, “It’s right up there.” He squirmed, “I know there’s not much chance, but I hope my friend is alive.”
Hunter didn’t hold much hope, either. But she said, “We’ll know soon enough.” She drove over what looked like a spread of talus, and the stones crunched and popped under the tires as she reached the tin shed and parked in front.
Adan was out almost as soon as the Ram stopped rolling. Hunter said, “Wait, help me get some things from the back.” Adan stopped and joined her at the back of the vehicle. They took two, fifty-foot sections of climbing rope, a two-quart, old-style blanket-wrapped aluminum canteen with a shoulder strap, two small, powerful Fenix flashlights, and a military medical kit in a waterproof pack. As they got ready, something caught her eye at the edge of the gravel.
It was a beautiful small arrowhead over two inches long and less than an inch wide, a Folsom, an old one from the end of the Ice Age. She thought about how it wound up here ten thousand years after someone chipped it out of a piece of flint, then shrugged and put it in her pocket. Hunter returned her mind to preparations and tossed Adan a pair of thin gloves and took others for herself, then they entered the shed. Hunter could still make out the tracks in the dust on the floor of three people going in, and two of them coming out. The small tracks of mice and insects also showed their trails across the human imprints, even though the amount of dust on the floor was tissue-paper thin.
“Through the broken door,” Adan said and pointed at the old, splintered wreck beside the opening in the back of the shed. Hunter went first, flicking on the powerful five-inch long Fenix flashlight and sending a bright beam into the darkness. She walked forward with the boy close behind her.
When they approached where the dark shaft abruptly went straight down, Adan said, “He was pushed in there.”
“How deep is it?”
“I don’t know. I ran.”
“Okay.” She felt him trembling as his arm touched hers. She reached for his hand and held it in a firm grim, which seemed to calm him. Hunter said, “Stay a little back, let me look first.”
If Dario was dead, she didn’t want Adan to see the body first. She moved with caution to the edge of the hole and played the beam down the far wall. It showed a number of colors in the rock, and then she saw the rusted point of ladder rail sticking up like a spear.
There was blood on it.
Hunter pushed the bright beam down the wall to a figure hanging on the last rung portion of the iron ladder. Rust and dirt-and blood covered it, and the iron hung over the empty space at a thirty-degree angle.
A pale face turned up to the light and opened large eyes with the whites seeming to emit a ghostly sheen.
“Dario!” Adan yelled and pulled on Hunter’s arm, “It’s Dario! He’s alive!”
Hunter calmed Adan down before he sent them both into the hole in his excitement. She called, “Dario, can you talk?”
A few seconds passed before the boy in the hole said “Yes.” His voice sounded dry and weak. “Kind of hurts, though. He pushed me in, the man, Ellis, he pushed me in.” The emotional hurt came through in his tone. “I hit my face on the rock wall and turned in the air, then something hit me hard in the back. I woke up like this and can’t move. I’m stuck.”
“We’ll get you out, hang tight.” Hunter looked for some place to anchor one of the ropes, and found it, or what was left of it, against the right wall. It was the bottom portion of a metal arm that lifted a small elevator cage to raise and lower men and equipment into the shaft. Hunter turned her light down into the shaft and saw the cage and a portion of the arm in the bottom, crumpled and rusted almost to dust. It sat in a small pool of water tinged red from the rust. Peering from just beneath the water and pinned under the cage was a skull, face up. The bones were tinged by the water and made Hunter think of one of the painted Haitian skulls she had seen during her recent troubles in Miami. It had been painted with human blood by a houngan, a Haitian male high priest and used for vodou rituals. The thought of those terrible events made her shudder, but she shook it off and concentrated on what to do.
Moving carefully along the edge to where the winch had been anchored, she checked it for sturdiness. Two feet of iron left of the winch arm. Solid. She took one rope and tied the end low around the iron, securing it with a rusty bolt in the rock nearby. That way the loop couldn’t slip up and off the tip.
In the other end, she made a lasso, and tossed it over the bloody iron tip above Dario’s head. Pulling it to tighten the loop caused it to slip off because of the angle of the iron. She tried twice more with the same results. Adan said, “Maybe I can put it under my arms and swing across to him.”
“You will have to lift him up, and off the piece in his back. I don’t know if you can do that.”
Adan thought a moment, “I’m not strong enough.”
Dario said in a strained voice, “It feels like I’m hanging by a strip of skin. You can cut it and I’ll be off.”
Hunter looked at Adan, “You want a look, see if that’s it?”