Carnosaur Crimes by Christine Gentry Page A

arching point.
    Flynn sensed someone behind him. Too late. The comforting weight of the gun against his hip disappeared as it was yanked from his holster. He spun around, remembering with self-anger that he’d unclipped the safety strap when he’d seen the rat. Cyrus stood a few feet away with the police issue .357 pistol in his left hand and a double gauge shotgun pointed at him with the other.
    â€œDamn, Cyrus. Have you lost your mind?” Flynn asked as calmly as he could though his heart was pitching against his rib cage.
    Cyrus watched him with unblinking eyes as hard and cold as yellow-green stones. Snake eyes. A moonbeam haloed his red locks as he gave Flynn an angelic smile. He pulled the shotgun trigger without saying a word.
    An explosion of sound expanded to fill the world as Flynn knew it, then punched through his chest like a Jack mule’s kick. Cordite and the odor of burning meat filled his nostrils. Still his body remained standing, which surprised him immensely considering the large, ragged-edge hole in his torso. He knew he was full of buckshot, but where was the pain, Flynn wondered as he stood rooted like a statue, only one step in any direction from death’s door.
    Flynn opened his mouth but no words came out. With lungs too damaged to push air past his vocal cords, his pleas for help retreated inward as he silently prayed a Catholic Psalm.
    God, by Your Name save me, and by Your might defend my cause...for haughty men have risen up against me and fierce men seek my life.
    When Flynn heard the small fossil in his hand drop, he fully understood his predicament. Technically speaking, he was already dead. His stubborn Irish brain just wouldn’t admit it.
    Cyrus stared as gravity finally pulled Flynn’s moribund weight to the ground. He hit the dirt like a sack of potatoes, sending juices, dust, and dirt flying. His police hat flew off, rolled on its brim, and fell over with a crown-wobbling spin near the driver’s door of his Jeep.
    The last thing Flynn saw before he fell into a dark abyss was Cyrus lowering the hot-barreled shotgun to his side and shivering violently against a non-existent cold.
    The last thing he thought about was Ansel Phoenix.

Chapter 9
    â€œTake only what you need and leave the land as you found it.”
    Arapaho
    Ansel carefully placed one boot and then the other upon the crumbly, pebble-strewn incline as she followed the jean-clad rump of Doctor Dixie LaPierre up the east face of the bluff. Behind her walked the stern-faced Agent Walthers, a non-smiling, bear of a man in his late forties whose towering stature overshadowed her every move. Outerbridge, a quartz halogen lamp in hand walked point and led them single file up the fifteen-degree switchback trail. Standback remained in camp as guard, armed with radio, handgun, and night-scope rifle.
    What had started as a winding foot trail through an outwash fan near the bottom quickly turned into a wide, machine-rutted roadway. They now followed a bulldozed ledge made by shearing off bluff walls and pushing debris off the edges. Where the bulldozer bucket had cut into the cliff, colored bands of rock strata were revealed like a baker’s slice through a birthday cake. Using a loaned battery powered lantern light, Ansel noted the white sandstone layers and brown mudstone stripes, actually Paleosoil, with her geologist’s eye.
    She also recognized the single darkest band of the famous K-T clay layer located halfway between the others. This was the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary deposit comprised of clay and iridium, which some experts asserted had come from an impacting meteorite ten kilometers across colliding with earth. It was possible that a devastating environmental change had occurred when the large impact crater vaporized sea water and horizontally ejected dust and grit that led to the extinction of dinosaurs.
    Raking her flashlight beam over the intersecting slopes of sediment bands discarded