The Shroud Key Page 12

  “I’ve forever lost the collar. And I’ve heard rumors about you leaving the order, sister. How shocking.”

  Whiskey pint in hand, I climb into her bag, feet first, feel myself rubbing up against her soft but somehow hard body, feel the heat from the fire on the back of my head and neck, feel the wind that’s blowing and whispering its way across the endless dunes.

  “This isn’t the writer collecting new material for a new Chase Baker mystery novel is it?” Anya begs.

  “Promise,” I say, crossing my heart. “I find it sexy that you’ve read my books, teacher.”

  Pursing her lips.

  “Maybe one or two. Not exactly the stuff I would recommend to college advisory board as required reading for English lit majors.”

  “Now that hurts.”

  “But not bad. You have a terrific sense of economy of language and you are a pile driving plotter. How’s that for kind critiquing?”

  “Keep spreading it,” I say. “If you’ll pardon my pun.”

  She kicks me inside the sleeping bag.

  “You’re a devil, Ren Man,” she giggles. “But in all seriousness, I can tell you write the way you live, which is not entirely without danger.”

  “Our world expands or shrinks in direct proportion to our courage,” I say, stealing another sip from the bottle.

  “No truer words. But then, you are not a very domestic character, Mr. Baker. Not the nine-to-five, hearth-and-kettle kind of dad and husband.”

  I shake my head.

  “Suburbia is a prison. I get cabin fever too easily.”

  “But that’s no excuse not to go back to your wife and daughter.”

  “It’s far too late for that, Anya…What I mean is, I miss my daughter. Part of why I’m doing this is so I can go back to New York to see her again. But as far as my ex goes, it’s long over.”

  “Has she remarried?”

  I’m not sure why, but the mere mention of my ex being remarried feels like a punch in the gut.

  “She hooked up with an investment banker who owns a townhouse on Gramercy Park in the city. He’s a great provider. A great stepdad to my daughter. Home seven nights a week and always available for PTA meetings.”

  “But that’s not your cup of whiskey.”

  I stare into the fire for a bit as if it’s possible to see my past and all the mistakes of my past inside the flickering flames. I swallow another drink from the pint knowing that the booze will help me forget.

  “I have a confession to make, sister,” I say after a time. “I had always thought that I would marry the love of my life, and together we’d see the world, have a child along the way, share adventures, never staying in the same place for too long.”

  She’s already biting down on her lip before I’m done talking.

  “Women don’t want that, Chase. Most women anyway. Women want stability. Security.” She steals a moment for the thought to sink in. “You know what? I can bet your ex-wife still loves you very much. Kind of like I still love Andre. Only she knows she can’t be with you.”

  “How’s that?”

  “A man like you, Chase, you’re never satisfied. You’re never comfortable in one place at one time. You can be sipping coffee outside the Eiffel Tower on a beautiful sunny day in April with not a worry in the world, but you will be consumed with nagging thoughts on where to go next before too much life runs out. Am I right?”

  “No comment.”

  She giggles.

  “You know I’m right. This might hurt, but the best thing for your wife is to have this new man in her life. A man like you, Chase…You’re handsome, full of energy, talented at many things. You’re the true Renaissance man…You see life as this great adventure. But when it comes to being a good husband and a good dad, you are a perfect poison.”

  The fire flares up in the wind gusts.

  “Is that what I am? Poison?” Raising my head up. “But I love them. With all my heart.”

  “And they know that you love them. They can feel it from afar. Perhaps they even prefer to feel your love from afar. It’s like feeling the sun on your face after a long winter, but don’t look directly into it.”

  We watch the flickering fire for a while longer. Then, after a time, Anya shifts herself closer to me. Or, as close as she can come without being on top of me.

  “Kiss me, Ren Man,” she says. “Forget about the past, just for a little while, and be here now.”

  She unbuttons her shirt, kisses me on the mouth hard and sweet, out tongues touching, playing. Placing her hand on my head, she gently pushes me down onto the sweet spot between her breasts, shifting herself so that her right breast enters into my mouth. I suckle her erect nipple with my tongue, lips and teeth.

  I feel her hand sliding down inside the tight space created by the sleeping bag, until she finds my belt. Almost skillfully she manages to unbuckle it, while proceeding to unbutton and unzip my pants. Reaching inside, I feel the good warm feel of her hand sliding down the length of my hardness before ever so gently pulling all of me out. I find my hand sliding into her pants, then into her silky lace panties, my fingers gliding over a soft tuft of trimmed hair until they find their home inside her soft, warm, wetness.

  She’s breathing hard now, her heart pounding against my own, our tongues and lips connected and never still. In the womb-like fit of the sleeping bag, she manages to spread her legs just enough for me to enter into her. We move steadily, slowly, but hard in the new gusts of wind and the flashing of the flames. Until we gradually go faster and faster and never ending, the wind blowing across the desert and against the orange flames and our hearts beating so rapidly I can hear the pounding in my temples and the tightness in my chest, and her breathing now turned to moans and sighs as we reach that place where we both release at the same time, and she is in me and I am in her.

  The wind picks up yet again, sparks from the fire cascading up into the dark, desert sky. Together we hold each other tightly, sweetly, protectively. It’s as if we will never let go.

  That’s how we fall asleep in the Egyptian desert. In one another’s arms, to the wind, to the fire, to our separate memories and painful recollections. To Sameh’s snores.

  To our beating hearts.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  We wake to the wind. A violent, gale force wind, blowing at us from out of the east. Just like I knew it would when observing the wind ghosts the night before.

  Hard pellets of sand and hot sparks from the dying fire sting my face and eyes. The night has given way to dawn, but the dark cloud-cover blocks almost the entirety of the brilliant sunlight. Anya screams, but the howling wind nearly silences her completely.

  I slide out of the bag and fall flat onto my back from a gust of wind that feels more like the charging tackle of an NFL linebacker. I try and shield my eyes while forcing my feet back into my boots and desperately searching the immediate area for Sameh. That’s when I make out an object coming at me from over my left shoulder. The two headlights piercing the sand-filled wind give the object away. The Land Cruiser comes to a stop, and I see a figure emerge from behind the wheel.

  Sameh.

  He’s got a keffiyeh wrapped around his face and military-style goggles protecting his eyes. He grabs Anya by her jacket collar, begins to pull her up and out of her bag. Understanding what he is trying to do, I grab hold of her boots with one hand and assist him with the other. As soon as we are able to get her back up on her bare feet, the sleeping bag blows away in the wind, as if it bears no more weight than a common plastic grocery bag. Together, we stumble along across the ever-shifting sand pulling on Anya, trying with all our strength to move her to the safety of the Land Cruiser.

  The rushing, jet-like wind pounds our bodies, but we somehow manage to get the back door open on the SUV. Working with one another, we toss Anya into the back seat, head first. Using hand signals, I let Sameh know that I am going around to the shotgun seat. He nods and, pulling open the driver’s side door, shoves himself back b
ehind the wheel.

  Once inside with the doors shut, I swallow a deep breath.

  “The Gods must really be pissed off today,” Anya says, coughing up sand from her lungs.

  “We’re tomb raiders,” I say, fingering the sand out of the corners of both my eyes. “What the hell do you expect?”

  “Thought you were here to save a life?” Anya questions. She’s rapidly lacing up her boots now that she’s got them back on her feet.

  “Goes without saying.”

  “I have water,” Sameh points out, reaching around back to hand Anya a plastic bottle. She takes it in her hand, drinks from it. Coughs and drinks. When she’s got her breathing under control, she hands me the water. I take a deep drink, wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.

  I stare out the windshield of a Toyota Land Cruiser that’s bucking like a bronco in hurricane-like winds. Bucking so badly I’m fearing that we might tip onto our side. But I choose not to bring that possibility up in public. It’s impossible to see even two feet beyond the glass, the wind is so fierce, the sand so thick.

  I turn to our guide.

  “Give it to me straight, Sameh. We gonna make it out of this shit storm?”

  “Sand storm,” Anya corrects.

  “Shit storm,” I insist.

  The guide cocks his head like, Maybe yes, maybe no…

  Not the answer I want to see.

  “Sameh,” Anya interjects, while wiping sand from her leather jacket with her open hands, “what can we do to save ourselves?”

  He pulls down his keffiyeh, runs his hands down his face.

  “The best … possible move … right now … is to stay right here,” he says in between coughs intended to clear the sand from his throat. “Remain here, in the truck, and pray that it dies down in a few moments rather than three days from now.” He clears his throat once more. “If that should happen, the desert will consume us entirely. Like the wrath of God.”

  Leaning over me, he presses his fingers against the dashboard vent, closes it. He proceeds to close all the vents in rapid succession. With the vents shut, the claustrophobic sensation of suffocating in our own stale air is all the more intense as the truck continues to buck violently, like an airplane caught up in severe turbulence.

  “Chase, I’m scared,” Anya reveals, reaching between the bucket seats for my left hand.

  I hold her hand tight and for a time, all three of us sit helpless while the sand pounds the truck and the wind delivers her blow. It’s then I make out the faint image of a cylinder. It’s not instantly discernable against the blinding sea of brown sand that fills both my immediate line of site and my peripheries. But I know it’s out there, coming towards us. Dancing, churning, destroying.

  “Sameh,” I say. “The binoculars.”

  He pulls his pair off his neck, hands them to me. I put them to my eyes and adjust the auto-focus. That’s when I see the funnel cloud coming directly for us.

  I hand the glasses back to Sameh.

  “Twelve o-clock high,” I say. “Tell me what you see.”

  He presses the binoculars to his eyes.

  “For the love of Allah,” he whispers.

  “Can you drive us out of here?” I ask.

  “Not a chance,” he says, shaking his head. “We’re blind, and even if I could start the engine we’d stall out immediately.”

  “What’s happening?” Anya says, as the violent bucking becomes even more violent with the front end of the vehicle heaving up and down like a rearing and kicking bronco.

  Sameh sets the binoculars down on the console.

  “Anya,” he says. “Lie down across the back seat, horizontally. Buckle your legs in with one seat belt and your torso in with the other. But make sure you face into the seatbacks.”

  “Why? What’s going on? Why are we bouncing up and down?”

  “Just do it,” I shout, tightening my belt as tight as it will go.

  Then comes the scream of the funnel cloud as it breaks through the sea of brown.

  Anya screams as the Toyota lifts up trunk first and, like a stone that’s tossed down steep a mountainside, begins to roll.

  When I come to, the rolling of the truck has stopped. What had been a relentless howling dies down. The sunlight peaks its shining rays from out of the sand-filled clouds and daylight returns to the desert. The truck is back up on all four wheels, and the only visible sign of damage is a jagged crack in the windshield that stretches from the top driver’s side corner all the way down to the passenger-side bottom corner. I’m not sure why but staring at it with my foggy head reminds me of staring at the jagged electronic line on a heart monitor.

  “Allah is great,” Sameh, says. “He has spared us our lives, and graced us with the good fortune of a very short storm.”

  “How long was I out?” I say.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing,” he says, checking his watch. Then, “No more than a minute judging by the time.”

  I unclasp my seatbelt, turn to get a look at Anya.

  “You alive back there?”

  She lifts her head up from where it was still shoved into the ninety-degree, L-shaped space between the seat and the seatback. Looking one way and then the other, “Nothing broken. What about you?”

  I feel a pounding in my head. I can also make out a faint sound of bells ringing. I can recognize the effects of a slight concussion when I hear them. My skull must have slammed against the door panel when we rolled over in the sand. It’s a bit bruised but nothing appears to be fractured which out here can mean death.

  “All good, Anya,” I say. It’s not entirely the truth, but what the hell good will it do to complain. I’m sure Sameh is suffering from the same ringing in the head that I am. He goes to open his door, but there’s so much sand built up on the opposite side, he must force it open with his left shoulder.

  “Get out on my side,” I say to Anya.

  She unbuckles both belts and does it.

  I open the door and slip on out into a desert that has transformed itself in only a few short, but somehow eternally long minutes. Where our camp once existed is now a small, wave-like dune. No trace of our fire is left over. Nor our sleeping bags. Not to worry. We have no plans for spending another night in the desert. That is we can manage to extract Manion from his captors today. This very morning.

  Sameh proceeds to examine the exterior of the Land Cruiser for any further damage that might have occurred. He walks around the vehicle, touching something here, kicking a tire there. When he’s through he shoots me a look, and issues a thumbs up.

  “No damage to speak of,” he observes. “Lucky for us we rolled only two or three times on the soft sand. Allah is looking after us.”

  “You go with that, Sameh,” I say. “Maybe you can ask him to work up a little coffee for us while he’s at it.”

  “How about a Diet Coke instead, Ren Man,” Anya offers, tossing me a luke warm can she’s retrieved from the back of the vehicle.

  “That’ll have to do,” I say. Then to Sameh, while looking at my watch. “How much time you figure it’ll take for us to reach Manion’s dig? That is, the engine still runs?”

  “We will pick up the desert road a few klicks from here,” he says. “If it isn’t too washed out with sand and debris, about one hour. A little more perhaps.”

  I crack open the Coke, take a deep drink, feel the carbonation against my throat, cutting through the layer of sand that seems to have embedded itself there. The caffeine that comes along with it, settles into my system, giving it a kick start.

  “Then let’s do this,” I say.

  We all file back into the Land Cruiser. Sameh crosses the fingers on his left hand while turning the engine over with the other. The engine fires back up.

  “Toyota Land Cruiser 1979” he exhales. “There is no substitute.”

  He toe-taps the gas and pulls us out of a sand bank. After a few minutes we manage to locate a road that is partially covered in drifts of sand. He guns the heav
y eight-cylinder and drives the desert road like the entire God fearing world depends upon it.

  In a very real way, it does.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  After an hour, Sameh takes us by surprise when he once more pulls off the road, begins heading across another seemingly forever stretch of wide open desert. The forever stretch is interrupted by a mountain range way off in the distance and in between it, a valley. I know these mountains to be constructed entirely of sandstone and Swiss-cheesed with thousands of caves, some long and large, others small and barely wide enough to fit a man should he crawl inside one of them on his belly.

  The mountain range is deceiving.

  What appears to be so close you can just about reach around and touch it, is really about fifty kilometers away. But that fifty klicks won’t take us long to traverse with Sameh flooring it, pushing the Land Cruiser as hard as he can without risking a boil over in the ever elevating desert heat.

  Another hour passes before he brings the truck to a stop at the base of a series of foothills that lead to the mountains, and kills the engine.

  “We do the rest on foot in order to avoid a visible dust cloud from our tires,” he says, turning to me. “If your information is correct, Chase, the dig will be one kilometer from here, on the other side of those hills.”

  I shoot Anya a look over my left shoulder.

  “You good with this, boss? A klick is a little more than a half-mile.”

  “So long as you’re good with it,” she says. “And I’m not your boss, Ren Man.”

  “You’re the bank. The bank is always the boss.” I smile when I say it. But she doesn’t.

  We file out of the truck, gather weapons, ammunition, and other essentials including flares, rope, tape, binoculars, water, granola bars, first aid kit, keffiyehs, duct tape, sunglasses, two-way radios, pistols, grenades, two Ak47s with six extra banana clips, and a good old fashioned, Soviet made RPG with three warheads.

  Sameh, guide of guides, comes prepared. But then, I’m certain that Checco had something to do with assisting in our supply of weaponry and survival gear.