Tyrannosaur Canyon by Douglas Preston Read Free Book Online Page A

sold the arrowheads and pots I found. Nowadays a nice Chaco
    black-on-white bowl might fetch five, ten thousand. That's worth troubling about. And then there's the
Lost
City
of the Padres."
    "What's that?"
    "Tom, my boy, I've told you that story."
    "No you haven't."
    Peek sucked on his pipe, with a gurgle. "Back around the turn of the century, a French padre named Eusebio Bernard got lost up there somewhere on Mesa de los Viejos on his way from Santa Fe to Chama. While wandering around trying to find his way out, he spied a huge Anasazi cliff dwelling, big as Mesa Verde, hidden in an alcove in the rock below him. It had four towers, hundreds of room blocks, a real lost city. No one ever found it again."
    "A true story?"
    Peek smiled. "Probably not."
    "What about oil or gas? Could he have been looking for that?"
    "Doubt it. It's true that the Chama wilderness lies right on the edge of the
San Juan
Basin
, one of the richest natural gas fields in the Southwest. Trouble is, you need a whole team of roughnecks with seismic probes for that game. A lone prospector doesn't stand a chance." Peek stirred the ashes of his pipe with a tool, tamped it down, relit it. "If he was looking for ghosts, well, they say they're quite a few up there. The Apaches claim they've heard the T. Rex roar."
    "We're getting off the subject, Ben."
    "You said you wanted stories."
    Tom held up a hand. "I draw the line at ghost dinosaurs."
    "I suppose it's possible this unknown prospector of yours found the El Capitan hoard. Ten thousand ounces of gold would be worth ..." Peek screwed up his face, "almost four million dollars. But you have to consider the numismatic value of those old Spanish bars stamped with the Lion and Castle. Hell, you'd get at least twenty, thirty times the bullion value. Now we're talking money . . . Anyway, you come back and tell me more about this murder. And I'll tell you about the ghost of La Llorona, the Wailing Woman."
       “Deal”.
     
     
    9
     
     
    IN THE FIRST-CLASS cabin of Continental Bight 450 from LaGuardia to Albuquerque, Weed Maddox stretched out. Easing his leather chair back, he cracked his laptop and sipped a Pellegrino while waiting for it to boot up. Funny, he thought, how he was just like the other men around him, wearing expensive suits and tapping away at their laptops. It would be rich, really rich, if the executive vice president or managing partner next to him could see what it was he was working on.
    Maddox began sorting through the batch of handwritten letters-illiterate letters laboriously written out on cheap lined paper in blunt pencil, many with grease stains and fingerprints. Clipped to each letter was a snapshot of the ugly bastard who had written it. What a bunch of losers.
    He pulled the first letter out, smoothed it down on his tray table next to the computer, and began to read.
     
    Dere Mr. Madocks,
    Im Londell Franklin James A 34 year old White Aryan Man from Arun-dell, Ark. my dick is 9 inchs rock hard all the way and Im lookenfor a blond lady no fat ass back talking bitches please just a lady who likes 9 inchs right up to the hilt plus im 6foot two pure pumped up rock hard mussle with a tatoo of a deaths head on my right deltoid and a dragon on my chest Im looken for a slim lady from the Deep South no niggers quadroons or New York femminatzi bitches just an oldfashoned White Aryan Southern Girl who knows how to please a man and cook chicken and grits Im doing five to fifteen armed robbery the DA lied about the plea bargin but I got a parole hearing in two yeares 8 months I want a hot lady waitenfor me on the outside reddy to take it right up to the hilt.
    Maddox grinned. Now there was a mother who was going to spend the rest of his life in prison-parole or no parole. Some people were just naturally born to it. He started typing into his laptop:
     
    My name is Lonnie F. James and I'm a thirty-four-year-old Caucasian male from Arundell ,
Arkansas
, doing five to fifteen years for armed