When I finally reached Mark, I found him crumpled against a spine-studded prickly pear cactus on the valley floor. A white bone poked through a tear in his pants, revealing a compound fracture. Compared to that, the rest of the cuts and scrapes he’d sustained while rolling down the slope were relatively minor. As he lay on the ground moaning, I unclipped my cell phone and called 911. Although my conversation with the dispatcher was interrupted several times by static, I managed to convey my message: hiker down on the Peralta Trail approximately a half-mile southeast of Weaver’s Needle.
Send AirEvac.
And cops. The hiker was a suspect in the killing of Erik Ernst, Fay Harris and former Maricopa County Deputy Harry Caulfield.
Help summoned, I left Mark’s side to search for the Beretta and found it ten feet up the slope, nestled underneath the magenta blossoms of a barrel cactus. I couldn’t leave it for hikers to find, so I hauled it out with a stick, trying my best not to superimpose my fingerprints over Mark’s, and clicked the safety on. Prepared for a possible overnight in the Wilderness, I’d carried a large Baggie full of trail mix in my backpack, so I dumped out the mixture for the field mice, turned the Baggie inside out, and slipped the Beretta into the clean side of the Baggie. It wasn’t flawless crime scene technology, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. When I returned to Mark, his eyes were still closed, but the tautness of his body hinted that he’d regained consciousness.
I gave him a poke with the same stick I’d used to retrieve the Beretta. “How’s it going, guy?”
“Bitch.”
I smiled. “How unoriginal.”
There was no point in letting the man suffer more than necessary, so I gave him a sip of water from my canteen, then slid the sheet of waterproofing from my backpack and erected a rough lean-to over his face to keep off the sun. Good deeds thus accomplished, I sat back a few feet away and waited for help.
I had just begun to hear the whupa-whupa-whupa of helicopter rotors over Weaver’s Needle when two young men came around a bend in the trail, headed back down the Peralta Trail from their trip to Weaver’s Needle. Loaded with climbing gear, they were dirty-faced but smiling. When they saw Mark, the smiles faded and they rushed over to help.
“Was geschah hier?” one said. “Ah, sorry! What happened here?”
Germans, about the same age as Gunter and Josef when they followed Das Kapitan into the Wilderness.
I flicked a look at the cave above us, where another German lay awaiting rescue.
“What happened? Oh, it’s a long story. A long, sad story.”