I glanced at her. “You might do well to keep in mind that every time these types of things have happened to me I’ve been somewhat impaired.”

She sighed. “As in ready to die?”

“Something like that.”

She went back to looking out the windshield. “Yeah, well, I’m not so sure I want a vision if I have to be bleeding to death to get it.”

I watched her as we sped along, her eyelids drooping the way they always did whenever we were on one of our extended county tours. I began wondering how much sleep she was getting given the psychological toll of the last few months.

I was feeling a little unmoored myself and was thinking that even with all the complications, I was looking forward to seeing Cady and Lola. I would have preferred a more quiet time with them, but those seemed to be rarer and rarer these days.

I spotted the gate where we’d gone through the first time, when we’d first seen the dinosaur dig site, and slowed the Bullet, but now three strands of barbed wire blocked our way. I pulled to a stop and climbed out as Dog whined and I shushed him, trying to let my undersheriff grab a few winks. The gate was an old lever type, and I flipped it and dragged the pole and wire wide enough to drive through.

I stood there for a moment wondering if we really had time for this kind of goose chase—the wind was picking up and the storm had eaten the mountains. It was probably less than a half hour away, but seeing as how we were already here, I figured we could take the extra time. I would just make sure I parked far away from any washes, so that we’d be able to make it back to town.

I watched the clouds and remembered something Lucian, the old Doolittle Raider, had told me once, that if we could see what the wind was doing up there, none of us would ever get on a plane again.

Momentarily distracted, I had a feeling I was being watched, and turned on a cowboy heel, floating my gaze over the undulating hills. Maybe that’s what happens when you invest so much of yourself in something; whether it is a person or a place, your soul is loath to leave it. I looked for Danny’s outline on those hills and thought maybe his ghost or spirit was still here, looking over the place that had been his. Maybe you stayed until you realized it wasn’t yours anymore and then you went on your way.

 • • •

Vic studied me as I got back in the truck. “So, what about the daughter?” It was as though she had been reading my mind; maybe she was getting closer to a vision than she thought.

“Cady?”

“Eva.”

Maybe not. “What about her?”

She yawned and covered it with a hand, singing in a fine soprano voice she’d inherited from her mother: “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones . . . A little strange, wouldn’t you say?”

I pulled through the gate, got out and closed it, and drove toward the ridge where Taylor had taken a few potshots at Omar’s armored SUV. “I guess.”

“Don’t you think we should follow up and see who’s prescribing her with Fukitol and why?”

“I would imagine that Free Bird, Danny Lone Elk’s doctor up in Hardin, is prescribing for her, too, and in answer to your next question, no, Isaac didn’t mention having gotten hold of him, so I’d imagine he hasn’t answered his call just yet.”

“Are we going to Hardin?”

“Not unless we have to—it’s not exactly Paris.”

She spoke philosophically: “I haven’t ever been.”

“Paris?”

She punched my shoulder. “Hardin.”

“Well, like I said, don’t get your hopes up.” I eased the truck to a stop and the three of us climbed out, carefully following the two-track up the hillside to Jen, the dinosaur’s next-to-last resting place.

I noticed Vic had left her jacket in the truck. “Are you sure you don’t want to bring your coat?” I gestured toward the dark clouds, strung in front of the Bighorns like a royal curtain, to the purple born. “It might get a little rough before long.”

She kept coming. “I’m not planning on spending the night.”

The afternoon air was cooling rapidly, and I was starting to think that it might not be rain but rather hail that we might be getting, as I stopped by the large wooden box that the paleontologists used to store their tools.

She puffed up behind me and rested an elbow on the crate, which was as big as a refrigerator. “Well, we can use the humidity.”

I started, turned, and looked at her.

“What? You say that all the time . . . I’m trying to get with the western code thing, okay?” She pushed off the box and passed me, and I watched the back of her as she worked her way up the trail toward the dig.

When I caught up with her, she was standing next to a depression in the top of the ridge where the ground and surrounding rock was terraced in all directions. You could see that the majority of the T. rex was still there, somewhat uncovered but very much intact, minus the head, of course.

The great creature was turned in on herself with the massive pelvis at the center and the elongated tail circling up and over the back. There were a few other bones, a large femur and vertebrae, scattered a little away, and I couldn’t help but walk to the overhang where Jen had surprised Jennifer. It was as if the old girl had tucked herself into a modified fetal position. It was difficult to imagine anything that could kill the undisputed seven-ton queen of her time, but life had a way perhaps even then of humbling all of us. From personal experience, I was pretty sure it must’ve had something to do with her offspring, one of the more than a few thoughts I decided to keep from present company.

I called Vic over to a small trail that led toward a narrow gap and the underside of the cliff. She joined me, and I pointed up to where the two-talon claw appeared to be reaching out from within the rock and time and space. “Look.”

“Holy shit.” She stretched out a hand, touching the nearest claw, and it was almost as if some interspecies karma was taking place. It wasn’t a reach to see that DNA strand that might’ve somehow connected them, not hard to see Vic’s most ancient lineage being a tyrannosaur. Evidently, her line of thought was running along the same trail. “So, if I was a T. rex, what were you?”

I played along. “Probably a brontosaurus—they call them apatosaurus these days—means deceptive lizard, by the way.”

“What, they got married and changed their names?”

“Remember Cope and Marsh?”

“Oh, no.”

“Yep, Marsh was in such a hurry to scoop Cope that he classified a smaller, juvenile version of the same creature as a completely different species; he called the juvenile an apatosaurus and then the much larger, eighty-foot adult a brontosaurus.”

“The one that’s on the Sinclair Oil signs?”

“Yep.” I stooped and picked up a few stones as Dog came over and sniffed the area. “To add insult to injury, in 1970, paleontologists discovered that Marsh had taken a skull from another dig and had put it on the skeleton of the apatosaurus at the Peabody Museum at Yale.”

“So, why do we still call it a brontosaurus?”

“Because we are used to calling it that and because this particular specimen is more like a thunder lizard than a deceptive one. I mean, at eighty feet and thirty tons, how deceptive could you be?”

She nodded but seemed restless. “I’m going back up topside. You coming?”

“In a minute.”

She disappeared, and Dog started to follow but then lingered with me.

Thinking about the passage of time and what a blink we were in the history of this planet, I reached up to touch one of Jen’s claws. Dinosaurs walked the face of the earth for approximately 165 million years, whereas we have been here for only two hundred thousand. To put that in context, if the dinosaurs had been here a week, we would have been here for only the last two minutes. And yet for all their longevity, they were gone, and no one really seemed to know why.