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DEAD MAN’S JOURNEY x Teaser Excerpt

1.

All right, Welch. Back it up and out you go.”

With a curse, Bob Welch put the excavator into reverse and retreated slowly from the site. He retracted the arm, set the bucket, turned off the machine, and jumped down from the cab. Taking off his hard hat, he wiped a sweaty forehead with an equally sweaty forearm, then set the hat back on.

The backside of the Humper—a big‐ass, ugly ledge of quartzite squatting like a giant toad in front of him—had been exposed, but the rest of the job clearing the dirt from it was too delicate for a machine. It had to be finished by hand, first with shovels, then trowels and whisk brooms. God forbid anyone should scratch the sacred boulder.

He took a breather in the warm sun, his gaze sweeping the high desert landscape of rolling piñon‐juniper hills—now in the midst of being chewed up as rapidly as possible.

Ochiba, the foreman, thrust a shovel into his hand. “Get busy,” he said. “You know the schedule.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Welch said, hefting the shovel and taking his place next to the handful of men already digging in the dark shadow of the Humper. “Jeanne Whitelock can kiss my ass,” he muttered as the head of his shovel bit into the dirt.

“Sure you can’t come up with a better part of your anatomy?” joked somebody down the line, eliciting a few guffaws. Welch merely grumbled.

When he’d heard about this job opening—building a high‐end resort in the foothills northeast of Santa Fe—it sounded like paradise after five years with state road crews. No expense was to be spared: Solara at Esperanza was going to be the most exclusive private club in the state, backed by the star power of Jeanne Whitelock, the high‐powered adventurer, athlete, and Hollywood actress. He remembered the first time he’d leafed through the prospectus. Two stadium courses designed to compete with Troon or Fazio, with signature six‐hundred‐yard holes to challenge low‐handicap golfers and draw interest from the PGA Tour. Tennis and pickleball courts; two Olympic‐size pools; saline lap pools; a ten‐thousand‐square‐foot fitness center; environmentally controlled equestrian stables, dressage arena, and riding trails; three bars, two cafés, and a restaurant with a Michelin‐starred chef brought in from Tuscany. And of course the spa, Whitelock’s vision of a holistic healing paradise on earth, stocking her signature “Musshy” products: crèmes, emollients, Icelandic facial muds, crushed jade yoni empowerment merkins, crystal vest wraps, and other merchandise. The spa would feature hot yoga, massages with live snakes, cryotherapy, vegan baths with hay harvested from high Alpine meadows, and other treatments Welch couldn’t remember. The chance to be on the construction team building the giant geodesic dome that would enclose this wellness center seemed like the job of a lifetime.

What a buzzkill it had been to learn that the job required twelve‐hour workdays, double shifts, and no weekends off. The landscape grading for the spa had all been outside work under an unusually brutal July sun. While the pay was good, it wasn’t that good.

“Hey! Welch!”

Hearing the foreman’s voice, Welch shook away these thoughts. “You mining for gold or something? Be careful. You know what’ll happen if the lady sees so much as a scrape on that thing.” Welch glanced down. Sure enough: The edge of his shovel was touching the Humper. When they’d first come across it, they’d been about to blast it out of the way. Then Whitelock arrived, took one look at it, and pronounced the giant rock to be a locus of healing energy and spiritual grounding. The surrounding land, she’d decreed, was to be dug away and the dome built around its positive aura. Under no circumstances was it to be damaged in any way.

Just looking at the thing pissed Welch off. This was why he’d been forced to get out of his air‐conditioned excavator and dig like he was still back on the road crew. He couldn’t believe that crazy woman found the thing attractive. A fellow worker had said it looked like a pair of dogs screwing—hence the nickname—and now, whenever he looked at it, he could not unsee the disgusting image.

“Hey, Ochiba! Got something here.”

The foreman looked up from his clipboard. It was one of the diggers, a new guy on the job. Warblay.

“What kind of something?”

“Bones.”

Ochiba walked over to take a look. Welch followed with his eyes as the foreman stepped into the shadow of the rock. He squatted, then pawed in the dust, examining the find.

“Deer.” He rolled the fragments in his hand, like dice, then tossed them over his shoulder. “Back to work.”

Welch turned and hefted the shovel. As he began digging again, his thoughts returned to Jeanne Whitelock. He’d seen her last two films when they reached the streamers—Night Swim, a beachfront home‐invasion thriller that wasn’t bad, and then the latest one, a rom‐com about a podcaster and her old college boyfriend. What the hell was it called? Oh, yeah: Second First Date. Or was it First Second Date? That one had bombed—and no wonder, given the clichéd script and her lackluster performance. He had a gut feeling her career had peaked and, like a car on a roller coaster, was about to go down fast. Her notoriety as a daredevil mountain climber—who happened to also sport bodacious good looks—probably had a limited shelf life in Hollywood. Maybe this was why she’d given her name to the resort project: something to carry her along after her career tanked.

The new guy had called Ochiba back to look at something a second time, and Welch took advantage of the distraction to stretch his back. Four o’clock—another two hours and he could go home. Already his back was starting to complain. He consoled himself with the thought that, tomorrow, work on the Humper would be done; the crew would be moving on to trenching the footings; and he would be back in his air‐conditioned excavator, listening to Jason Aldean.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw workers starting to gather around Ochiba and Warblay. He stopped digging once again.

“That doesn’t look like a hoof to me,” said one. “It looks like a foot.”

“I’m telling you, it’s a deer,” said Ochiba, taking the shovel from Warblay and digging the bones loose, scooping them out, and tossing them away. He handed the shovel back. “See how easy it is? Just pull them free and keep going. The rest of you, let’s go—daylight’s a‐wasting.”

The new guy went back to digging, a little uncertainly now, while the others reluctantly picked up their shovels and continued working. Ochiba stood nearby with crossed arms, a look of annoyance on his face. Warblay dug around a bit, prying out a few more bones and tossing them aside—long bones, then some bigger bones, followed by what looked to Welch like half a pelvis. Warblay stopped again. “Um, Mr. Ochiba, that really, really doesn’t look like a deer to me.”

“For God’s sake, Warblay,” said Ochiba, pushing in and taking the guy’s shovel again, stabbing it into the ground, prying out bones and slinging them aside. This time all the workers had stopped and were watching. A hush fell, save for the sound of the single shovel taking bites of earth. The foreman didn’t even bother to shoo the others away, and as they crowded around, more bones came to light: a bunch of ribs and vertebrae, going straight down. The hole deepened, more vertebrae appeared . . . and then the top of a larger bone of some kind. Ochiba put the shovel aside and knelt, taking one of the trowels nearby and loosening the dirt, scraping and pushing it away. Slowly, slowly, the larger thing came into view…until all of a sudden Welch realized it wasn’t the top of something. It was the bottom. The underside of a jawbone, with teeth, attached to an upper jaw— and below that, just exposed to daylight, the unmistakable swell of a skull.

Ochiba’s trowel stopped moving. For a minute, nobody spoke.

“Jesus Christ,” Ochiba said at last in a strange voice. “It’s human, all right—and the fucker was buried upside down.”

Excerpted from DEAD MAN’S JOURNEY. Copyright © 2027 Preston & Child published by Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette Book Group company. All rights reserved.