Tyrannosaur Canyon Read Online Free PDF

would never shake; it reminded him of his own father's death, that desperate effort to cling to life even during those final seconds of pain and fear when all hope is lost. Some people could not let go of life.
    "I might also go see Ben Peek," Tom said. "He spent years prospecting in those canyons. He might have an idea who the guy was or what this treasure was he was looking for."
    "Now there's an idea. There's nothing in that notebook?"
    "Nothing except numbers. No name or address, just sixty pages of numbers- and a pair of gigantic exclamation marks at the end."
    "You think he really found a treasure?"
    "I could see it in his eyes."
    The man's desperate plea still rang in his ears. It had affected him deeply, perhaps because his father's death was still fresh in his mind. His father, the great and terrible Maxwell Broadbent, had also been a prospector of sorts-a tomb robber, collector, and dealer in artifacts. While he had been a difficult father, his death had left a huge hole in Tom's psyche. The dying prospector, with his beard and piercing blue eyes, had even reminded him of his father. It was crazy to make the association, but for whatever reason he felt the promise he had made to the unknown man was inviolate.
    "Tom?"
    Tom blinked.
    "You've got that lost look again."
    "Sorry."
    Sally finished her coffee, got up, and rinsed her cup in the sink. "Do you realize that we found this place exactly one year ago today?"
    "I'd forgotten."
    "You still like it?"
    "It's everything I always wanted."
    Together, in the wild country of Abiquiu at the foot of
Pedernal
Peak
, they had found the life they had dreamed of: a small ranch with horses, a garden, a riding stable for children, and Tom's vet practice - a rural life without the hassles of the city, pollution, or long commutes in traffic. His vet business was going well. Even the crusty old ranchers had begun calling him. The work was mostly outdoors, the people were great, and he loved horses.
    It was a little quiet, he had to admit.
    He turned his attention back to the treasure hunter. He and his notebook were more interesting than forcing a gallon of mineral oil down the recalcitrant throat of some ewe-necked, rat-tailed bucket of guts down at Gilderhus's Dude Ranch in Espanola, a man legendary for the ugliness of both his horses and his temper. One of the perks of being the boss was delegating the scut work to your employee. He didn't often do it, and so he felt no guilt. Or maybe only a little ...
    He examined the notebook again. It was evidently written in some kind of code, laid out on each page in rows and columns in a fanatically neat hand. There were no erasures or rewrites, no mistakes, no scribbles - as if it had been copied from something else, number by number.
    Sally stood up and put an arm around him. Her hair swung down over his face and he inhaled the fragrance of it, fresh shampoo and her own warm biscuit smell.
    "Promise me one thing," she said.
    "What?"
    "Be careful. Whatever treasure that man found, it was worth killing for."
     
     
    7
     
     
    MELODY CROOKSHANK, TECHNICAL Specialist First Grade, kicked back and
    cracked a Coke. She took a sip, gazing pensively around her basement lab. When she had gone to graduate school at Columbia in geophysical chemistry, she had imagined a very different career path for herself-trekking through the rain forest of Quintana Roo mapping the crater of Chicxulub; or camping at the legendary Flaming Cliffs in the Gobi Desert excavating dinosaur nests; or giving a paper in flawless French before a rapt audience at the Musee d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Instead, she had found herself in this windowless basement lab, doing dull laboratory research for uninspired scientists who couldn't even be bothered to remember her name, many of whom had an I.Q. half of her own. She'd taken the job while still in graduate school, telling herself that it was a temporary stopgap until she finished her dissertation and landed a tenure-track