Slickrock Paradox Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hanks’s stunt double in Castaway , his clothing was so tattered.
    â€œYou’re going to be okay,” said Carlos. “You’re okay.”
    â€œShe’s dead.” Silas whispered so softly that Carlos had to lean in to hear him better. “She’s dead,” he said, more audibly.
    â€œWho is?”
    â€œBack by Sleepy Hollow. Under a cottonwood. She’s dead.” Silas closed his eyes. Carlos took out his water bottle and pressed it into Silas’s hand. Then he looked up at his companion.
    â€œSilvia, go back to the road and get help.”
    â€œWhat are you going to do?”
    â€œSleepy Hollow is half a mile from here. He’s fine. Just banged up. I’m going to have a look.”
    WITHIN AN HOUR there were two park rangers on the scene. Silvia led them to where Silas lay, and Carlos, his face ashen, took them to where the skeletonized arm protruded from the mud beneath the cottonwood tree. There were the usual questions about disturbing the site of the body, to which Carlos simply answered, “We didn’t touch a thing.”
    Silas refused to be evacuated by the seasonal park rangers, neither of whom he’d met. He wanted to be there when the skeleton was exhumed. “It’s just a sprained ankle,” he told them, feeling better after drinking some of their Gatorade and sucking on a few energy gels. “A few bruises. It can wait.” He asked for Grand County Sheriff Dexter Willis and was assured he was on his way.
    Another hour and the sheriff arrived, along with his chief deputy and two others. Deputy Sheriff Derek Penshaw from San Juan County was acting on behalf of the Medical Examiner for the State of Utah, and Stan Baton was the chief ranger for Arches and Canyonlands National Park.
    â€œSilas, you’re looking well,” said Willis.
    â€œHi Dexter,” acknowledged Silas, leaning against a boulder in the wash while one of the rangers put a splint on his ankle.
    â€œYou’re going to need to go to the hospital, Silas.”
    â€œIt can wait.”
    â€œYou’re going to need X-rays.” The sheriff pointed to Silas’s ribs through the torn shirt. The left side was black and blue.
    â€œI found her.”
    â€œWe’ll see, Silas. We’ll see. Tell me what happened.” Willis squatted on his boots in the sand.
    Silas told him everything except the dream. Willis was silent throughout the telling. The park ranger finished his work on the ankle and then handed Silas a cold pack to hold against his side.
    â€œCan you walk?” Willis asked.
    â€œMaybe.”
    â€œHelp me here, Stan,” Willis said to the chief ranger, and they helped Silas to his feet. With one on either side of him they made their way down the now crowded wash.
    DWIGHT TAYLOR WAS at the beginning of what promised to be a very successful career. He was thirty-four years old and was already Assistant Special Agent in Charge for the FBI field office in Monticello, Utah. He was an ambitious yet practical man. At the age of eighteen he’d enlisted in the Navy and had trained as a Seal, serving mostly in the Gulf. Twelve years later, Taylor had accepted an honorable discharge from the Navy to study criminology, and to begin work with the FBI ’s agent training program in Quantico, Virginia. Born in Harlem, New York, Taylor was beguiled by the desert. He might have been more comfortable with a posting to Los Angeles or Chicago or New Orleans where he wouldn’t be the only six-foot-four black man, but he would never consider complaining about his station. He was a career agent now, and would serve where he was assigned.
    Taylor was driving from Monticello to Moab at seven-thirty in the morning on Tuesday, August 17, to respond to a call from the Park Service that a body had been found in Arches National Park. It was likely, in fact probable, that the body was that of a hiker whose disappearance had never been reported for a