A/N: Hello, again. I know this has been a while in coming. In fact, it wasn't something I even planned to do. Given my work commitments and the volume crossing my desk these days, I had pretty much decided to abandon fan fiction as a fun exercise that didn't pay any bills. But enough people asked for another story that I decided to give it a go. I had to do it during little seams in my schedule. I just hope it doesn't read that way. J
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Chapter One
God, it was hot!
The rider pulled one of the plastic water bottles off the titanium frame of his new mountain bike. He pulled up the stopper with his teeth and tipped his head back to let liquid run down his throat. It was horrible. About the temperature of bathwater and tinged with a taste of the plastic in which it had spent the last five hours. The image of a cold beer crossed his mind, and he thought he might be capable of committing murder right now to get his hands on one.
He had no idea what possessed him to drive all the way down to Pyramid Canyon for his long ride of the week. He remembered he thought it would be pleasant to see the Colorado River where it widened out above Davis Dam, and maybe ride across the dam and into Arizona, his first-ever interstate bike ride. He hadn't checked the weather, which was a ridiculous mistake. It was late May. The heat shouldn't have been unbearable. But the thermometer back at the rest stop said it was 108 degrees in the shade, a temperature more indicative of a heat wave in July. It had been 66 when he left his house at 7 a.m. But during the two-hour drive deep into the southern tip of Nevada, and then on the outbound leg of his ride over a very challenging route, the thermometer had soared. He eased back on his speed. His thighs were beyond the burn. He was dripping wet, even in the ten percent humidity. Perspiration streaked the shatter-proof lenses of the dark goggles he wore to protect his eyes from blowing sand and flying pebbles. And he felt slightly light-headed. Planning a 40-mile ride in this weather might have been a touch ambitious. He was in the best shape of his life, but Lance Armstrong he wasn't.
He hated admitting defeat, but it was the Memorial Day weekend, which hadn't occurred to him, and the solitude he sought for the ride just wasn't happening. He and his bicycle shared the road with too much traffic and too much sun. It wasn't yet noon, so it was only going to get hotter. Common sense prevailed. Reluctantly, Gil Grissom turned the bike around and headed back toward the cove where he'd parked his Tahoe. The return would be about 14 miles, he figured from his trip odometer. He would take it more slowly than the ride out. The last thing he wanted was to die of heat stroke.
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Sara Sidle returned home from the Crime Lab a few hours earlier than she had expected. Sara didn't work there any more, not since her ordeal in the desert and her hiatus to San Francisco. She now held the position of Assistant Professor of Forensic Sciences at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and was working on her PhD in forensic medicine. But when needed she consulted at the lab, always happy to be back among her old friends and colleagues. She had been working a particularly dumbfounding rape/murder case with Nick Stokes and had found the blood evidence that seemed to have broken things open. Nick and Jim Brass were conducting the suspect interviews when she left the lab to come home. She tossed her car keys on the kitchen counter and pulled a bottle of water out of the refrigerator. She couldn't believe how hot it was outside for this early in the year.
She hoped to find Grissom at home waiting to take a shower with her. Not only did they revel in their shower sex, Sara loved the warm-up exercises too. Grissom would walk in the door, his soggy Castelli cycling jersey and shorts adhering tightly to his frame and emphasizing the growing bulge below his abdomen where his anticipation dwelled. She found the look of his newly toned body and his sweaty man-odor absolutely intoxicating. The boyish shit-eating grin that split his face below eyes radiating with desire only torqued up his appeal. It took no effort on her part to take full advantage of his situation.
It always started with a deep, passionate kiss to which she would add an ever-changing variety of sexual teases: a new touch, a new sound, a new pressure, a new look in her eyes, a combination, all of the above. As his anticipation grew, so did the bulge, until Grissom could no longer tolerate the pressure of confinement within his own shorts and begged to be allowed to strip. He would trail Sara into their bathroom then, standing close behind her. She would always reach back and grab him gently, massaging him softly until she coaxed a tortured groan from his throat. Then she would turn on the shower. While it ran from cold to hot, she would turn to face Grissom, drop to her knees, slide the shorts and jock strap down and release him. Then, using her hands and her mouth, she would keep him interested until the shower was ready. Once they stepped inside, he returned her favors and then some.
On these occasions, they never failed to run through the house's supply of hot water.
Sara had been particularly looking forward to their game this morning, so she was a little disappointed to find the house empty and a note on the kitchen counter:
"Gone riding. I might be a little later than usual. Make sure the shower's working. Love you. G."
Oh well, the game would be there when he got home.
Sara hoped he remembered they had dinner plans with friends from UNLV, though she wasn't really worried. Grissom returned from these rides fully energized for hours. He had started taking his physical conditioning seriously the previous October. He told Sara it was because he didn't want to get old on his young wife. That realization came to him the same day his doctor put him on blood-pressure medication to combat the effects of stress at work. Whatever the real reason, he was at their gym three times a week doing cardio and weights. A spinning class had launched him into his biking craze. He started with a used bike, not willing to invest a lot of money until he was sure he liked it. But he loved it. And Sara convinced him if he was going to take the sport seriously, he should invest in a bike that was custom-made to match him perfectly. He had grumbled about paying almost 9,000 for a top model made with a Lynskey titanium frame, but she convinced him to make the investment.
"What's your health and happiness worth?" she said.
He had wrapped his arms around her, kissed her and replied, "I'll spend the money for my health. All I need for happiness is you."
It had been that way in the year since she returned from San Francisco. He moved to supervise the day shift. Nick was supervising swing and Catherine took over graveyard. Greg had become a CSI 3 in Denver, Warrick was gone and even the contingent of lab rats had evolved.
Sara and Grissom had gotten married, finally, about three months after she came back to Las Vegas. They had needed some time to rebuild their relationship and get totally comfortable with one another again. If anything, their unanticipated time apart brought them closer together. Sara had come to terms with her past, more or less, and thrived in her new academic environment. She saw her old friends enough to remain close and built a community of new friends, who became Grissom's friends as well. He had begun thinking about a teaching career alongside his wife. It was only a matter of discussion at the moment, because he still loved the adrenaline rush of the lab and the mystery of his cases. But Sara knew he thought a lot about making the move.
She smiled, put his note back on the kitchen counter and went off to shower alone.
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Grissom was about a mile and a quarter into the ride back to his Tahoe, pedaling smoothly along the shoulder of the road, scanning the asphalt ahead of him for stones or litter that could upset his bike. Between scans he allowed himself to enjoy the stark scenery. The Mojave Desert had a beauty all its own, shades of browns and yellows and grays, the sharp delineations between sunlight and shade, the occasional pinion tree or clump of sagebrush.
As much as he loved working in Las Vegas, he often thought it a shame what developers of the city had done to a perfectly decent wasteland. Even here, at the remote southern end of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, in a wilderness that cried out for solitude, it didn't exist. Traffic sped by him at a frenzied clip, tourists too eager to get to their destinations or too eager to get back onto a main highway and head somewhere else. All of them could say they had been to Pyramid Canyon. But could any of them say they had really seen it?
He grimaced a bit when he noticed he was coming up on a curve that would put the fierce canyon winds squarely across the road, making the bike harder to control. Adding to the difficulty was the temporary disappearance of the shoulder. He would have to ride perilously close to the traffic lane. He glanced back and saw only one pickup bearing down on him. After that, there was a long break in the traffic that should give him all the opportunity he needed to get around the curve safely.
As the pickup passed him, Grissom moved the bike onto the edge of the traffic lane and picked up his pace. He would be off the curve and back on the reemerged shoulder before the next vehicle caught up with him.
Whatever hit Grissom in the chest startled him at first. It couldn't have been a bird; he would have seen it coming. He decided it must have been a rock thrown off the tire of the pickup. It stung, and then it burned like a branding iron. The burn morphed into serious, radiating pain.
He glanced down at his jersey and saw the crimson spread of his blood bubbling through a tear in his jersey, rolling down his left breast. It wasn't soaking in because his accumulated sweat left no dry threads to absorb it. And it was flowing too fast, anyway.
He became incredibly dizzy and reached for a water bottle, but his hand never got to the bike's down tube. The wind began hammering him from the left. He was losing sensation in both hands and, with it, the ability to control the bike. It swerved to the right, and he managed to wrestle it back on course. He tried to brake, but he had no strength in his fingers. He felt as if he might lose consciousness. When the wind blasted him again, he had no defense. The bike swerved and rammed low metal barrier to his right, hurling him over the handlebars.
He landed on his back with a bone-breaking thud in the rocks and dust 10 feet below the roadway. His momentum turned into a rolling, tumbling, occasionally airborne slide down the canyon slope. He was moving too fast and was physically too weak to reach out and grab something to retard the fall. His head cracked hard into a boulder, his helmet taking the brunt of the blow. Modern helmets were designed to work once and once only. When subjected to a blow or collision, they shattered, efficiently dissipating the force of the impact. But they were then useless against additional stress. Now he might as well not be wearing the thing at all. If his head hit something a second time, it could kill him.
His body whipsawed as he crashed through isolated sage bundles. His riding clothes and skin were shredded by rocks. His fractured helmet crashed at least twice more into rocks, the impacts transmitted directly to his skull. The second of the impacts actually ripped the helmet off, and the protective goggles went with it.
He came to rest, splayed on his back against a scrub pinion tree. He felt himself pelted by a small avalanche of pebbles and stones, the detritus released to slide downhill by the force of his fall. When they reached their angle of repose, when equilibrium returned to the mountain, he began taking stock of himself. With monumental effort, he turned his head slightly so he could see how far he had fallen. He blinked blood from his eyes. His vision cleared marginally. He scanned the mountainside above him. He couldn't make out the road. He couldn't hear the traffic. He could see nothing of his lost bike. His overriding sensation became the pain in his body and fear.
He realized in a terrified instant that no one knew where he had gone riding this morning. No one would have the vaguest idea where to look for him. His last conscious thought was for Sara and how far they had come only to lose everything to this desert.
The desert she survived.
The desert he wouldn't.