Free Jackal by Jeff Stone Page B

the ferns and dropped my bike behind it. I scanned the area with my eyes as well as my nose, searching for signs of stinkhorn mushrooms.
    The wind picked up for a second, and I caught a whiff of something rotten. I noted the direction of the breeze and started walking. I hadn’t gone more than fifty yards before the stench became almost unbearable. I was on a hillside, and near the top of the hill was a level section of ground that was noticeably darker than the rest of the earth around it. The dark ground was covered with slender mushrooms. Set into the rocky hillside behind the mushrooms were a bunch of pockets that resembled tiny caves.
    I grinned. This was the place.
    Pulling the collar of my shirt up over my nose, I took the rake from my backpack and headed for the spot where the caves met the stinkhorns. The ground was soft and squishy, and I immediately sank to my ankles. Warm, moist earthoozed into my shoes and seeped through my socks, pooling between my toes.
    I cringed. I hadn’t been expecting this.
    I scanned the line where the flat spot of rich soil met the hillside, but I didn’t see any signs that somebody had been here, so I just started whacking away with the little rake. Bits of pungent, gooey earth went airborne, sticking to my legs and arms despite my best efforts to direct the muck away from me.
    It took me half an hour of clawing at the rotten ground, but I eventually located Phoenix’s hiding spot. He’d blocked off one of the tiny caves with a few rocks and some rancid soil. The blue silk bag appeared to be intact, and I carefully opened it. Inside were several handfuls of gray powder that, even through the mushroom stink, had a strange odor best described as
old
. I remembered Ryan smelling like that whenever he sweated while taking dragon bone. This was it.
    I closed the bag and—
SNAP!
—heard a stick break.
    I looked back the way I’d come.
    A gigantic man was walking toward me. He wore a bicycle helmet and sunglasses and was pushing a huge mountain bike. He stopped at the edge of the mushroom patch, and I noticed that his bare arms were covered with tattoos.
    Tattoos of gorillas.
    I froze.
    “Hello, Jake,” DaXing said. “What’s in the bag?”

I stared at DaXing, my feet frozen ankle-deep in the squishy ground. This was Gorilla, the guy who’d strangled DuSow to death with his gigantic hands.
    I swallowed my urge to scream and asked, “Wh-what’s up, DaXing?”
    “No time for small talk,” he said. “Give me the dragon bone.”
    “Dragon bone?” I asked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I—”
    “Don’t make a fool of yourself, Jake. I respect both you and your friends for the manner in which you handled yourselves in California. I do not wish to hurt you. Hand over the dragon bone and be on your way. Forget you ever saw me, and I won’t tell anyone that I saw you. I imagine your parents would be quite upset if they were to discover that you rented a limousine so that you could dig up a questionable substance.”
    “How did you—”
    “Lin Tan once told me that he spied on Phoenix racing along this very trail, only to abandon the race. He thought Phoenix might have hidden some dragon bone here. The substance is my ticket back home to China without the authorities catching me. Hand it over.”
    “I can’t,” I said, and shoved the blue silk bag into my backpack. I slung the pack onto my back.
    DaXing leaned his bike against a tree and took two quick steps toward me onto the rich, gooey soil. His massive bulk made him sink almost up to his knees.
    “Argh!”
DaXing shouted, and he began to try to pull himself free.
    I grabbed the rake and made a break for it, slogging my way to the edge of the mushroom patch. I was half a step from solid ground when DaXing suddenly lunged at me like a linebacker diving at a running back. His thick arms were impossibly long, and he managed to grab hold of my ankle as he went—
SPLAT!
—face-first into the stinkhorns.
    I