“Keep digging,” I said. “I could swear there’s one in there.”
“Oh,” he said after a moment. “Yeah. Down here in the Jurassic stratum, I think I’ve discovered a fossilized candy bar.” He fished out a Snickers, the wrapper rumpled and misshapen, and peeled it open. Inside was a cylinder of graying chocolate, misshapen from numerous cycles of melting and resolidifying. Tyler eyed it with distaste. “Oh, did I say candy bar? I meant coprolite.” I had to admit, the lumpy extrusion did look remarkably like fossilized poop. He chomped down on it and wrestled a chunk free. “Mmm,” he mumbled sarcastically. “Tasty.” He took another bite.
The traffic was crawling. The right lane was slowed by a flatbed trailer hauling a bulldozer up the mountain; I had no idea what a bulldozer’s top speed was, but I suspected it couldn’t be much slower than the snail’s pace at which the truck was transporting it. In the left lane, cars were bunched up behind a coal truck, which was creeping past the bulldozer at what appeared to be half a mile an hour faster.
“Wish they’d warned us about the rolling roadblock,” Tyler mumbled through the caramel. “We could’ve zipped in and out of that Hardee’s back at Lake City without losing any time. Forensic anthropology, NASCAR style.”
“If you want to jump out and run back, go for it,” I said. “You could probably catch up with me by the top of the mountain.” He grunted and popped the last lump of the Snickers into his mouth.
Just as we crept over the lip of the mountain, the coal truck eased into the right lane, allowing the long line of cars to begin passing. As we drew nearer, I noticed both trucks turn and lumber down an exit ramp. “Nice,” Tyler fumed at the coal truck. “Cause a bottleneck for dozens of cars, just so you can get to the exit two seconds ahead of the bulldozer.”
“No point getting mad,” I said. “Doesn’t get us there any faster, and it sure doesn’t hurt the truck driver. Just makes you feel worse. Don’t they teach you that kind of stuff in yoga? Ommmm and all that?”
Tyler turned and stared at me. “Where was that laid-back vibe two hours ago, Mr. Mellow, when you were flogging me to get those papers graded?”
“That’s different,” I pointed out. “Those trucks aren’t in my power. You, on the other hand . . .” I didn’t need to finish the sentence; Tyler knew better than anyone that “graduate assistantship” was synonymous with “indentured servitude.”
He tapped his window and pointed. “Classy,” he said. I looked out and saw the coal truck and the bulldozer-hauler both turning into the parking lot of a garish, neon-lit store—XXX Adult World—advertising books, videos, novelties, and Live Girls, Girls, Girls. “Also classy,” he said, now pointing to a corrugated metal building that was overshadowed by a gargantuan corrugated cross. “Not exactly Saint Peter’s, is it?”
“Not exactly,” I agreed. “But I suspect the Vatican’s art and architecture budget was a little bigger than these folks’.” Tyler grunted, glancing down at the directions the sheriff had given me.
A mile or so later, Tyler pointed to a road sign. “That’s our exit,” he said. “Stinking Creek Road. One mile.” I passed another lumbering coal truck, then signaled and eased into the right lane, just in time to catch the exit. “Left onto Stinking Creek.”
As we coasted down the ramp, Tyler leaned forward and looked out my window. “I’d like to build a house like that someday,” he said.
I glanced to the left, and then at the outside mirror. “What, a house filled with rock salt?”
“No, a house made from a Quonset hut. Actually, a house made from two Quonset huts, crossing in the middle, like a big plus sign. Like a cathedral, with a nave and a transept. Earth sheltered, for natural insulation; walls of glass at all four ends; a big skylight above the intersection, for plenty of natural light.”
“So,” I said, making a left at the bottom of the ramp, “the floor plan of a cathedral, the elegance of a drainage culvert? Classy. How does Roxanne feel about the idea of living in a burrow?” He frowned, which might have meant that he hadn’t asked, or might have meant that he had, and that she wasn’t wild about the idea.
Just then we rounded a curve and nearly rear-ended a Campbell County sheriff’s cruiser, which was parked at the edge of the pavement with its rear end angling into the road. In front of it was another cruiser and, ahead of that, an unmarked black sedan—Meffert’s TBI-issued Crown Victoria. Just beyond the Crown Vic was a bridge spanning a narrow gorge—a gorge carved, I assumed, by Stinking Creek. Midway across the bridge, a figure I recognized as Meffert leaned over the railing, looking down.
I tucked the pickup behind the cruisers, trying to feel for the margins of the shoulder through the tires. Tyler opened his door and looked down, frowning. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Did I not leave enough room?”