Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 1 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

THE COYOTE

A Thriller

Michael McBride

The Coyote copyright © 2012 by Michael McBride

All Rights Reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Michael McBride.

For more information about the author, please visit his website: www.michaelmcbride.net

Also by Michael McBride

NOVELS

Bloodletting

Burial Ground

Innocents Lost

Predatory Instinct

Vector Borne

NOVELLAS

Blindspot

Brood XIX

Remains (from The Mad & The Macabre, with Jeff Strand)

Snowblind

Xibalba

ZERØ

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE COYOTE

THE CALM BEFORE THE SWARM

For Dani

Special Thanks to J.G. Faherty, Gene O’Neill, Norman Prentiss, Gord Rollo, William C. Rasmussen, Jeff Strand, Linda Walter, my family, and all of my loyal friends and readers, without whom none of this would be possible.

THE COYOTE

 

They say your blood flows from the earth, but in my experience they’re wrong. Blood flows to the earth. Whatever gifts it bestows, it always takes back in spades.

DAY 1

tash hema

e:’ed

 

 

There are people who believe that the memories of our ancestors flow through our blood in much the same way animals inherit migratory instincts from theirs. In my opinion, beliefs like that breed victims, for not all of our antecedents figured out how to truly live, but every single one of them found a way to die.

ONE

Hickiwan District

Tohono O’odham Nation

Arizona

September 9th

I was sick of the heat long before I boarded the plane at Denver International Airport. Turns out I had no idea what it truly meant to be hot. They call it an Indian summer, but never in front of me. The same way people probably tiptoe around African-Americans on Black Friday. I’m not that sensitive to the whole politically correct vibe. I didn’t get to choose my bloodline any more than I got to pick my parents. It would have been nice to have known them, though, but that’s neither here nor there. People die all the time. Fact of life. Nothing you can do to stop it. You start dying the moment you’re born. The problem is that from time to time people get a little help along the way. And that’s why I was out here in the middle of this godforsaken desert, roasting alive, wondering if it was possible for my sweat to actually boil.

That, of course, and the color of my skin.

“I don’t like the way they’re looking at me.”

“You get used to it. Don’t take it personally.”

I picked up a rock and hurled it at the nearest buzzard, which merely flapped its massive wings when the stone struck the saguaro cactus beneath it. The others just sat there on their perches with their bald heads and their beady little eyes. They obviously knew the score.

“Shouldn’t they be circling overhead, waiting for us to collapse? This strikes me as sheer laziness.”

“Out here in the desert, you learn in a hurry not to waste your energy. Any physical exertion costs you hydration, and once you start losing water, there’s no way of getting it back.”

I figured the Border Patrol agent was being overly dramatic. After all, that’s what locals do. They get to piss first to mark their territory when the Feds are called in. This guy was just encouraging me to hold mine a while longer, but, believe me, I had no intention of saving mine for drinking down the road. Not once we reached the crime scene. I was going to piss all over it when we got there. Metaphorically, of course. The way those vultures were still eyeing us, I didn’t see any harm in saving my fluids for later use. You know, just in case.

The Sonoran Desert was vastly different than I expected. When I hear the word desert, I think of sand dunes stretching from one horizon to the other. I imagine camels and mirages and women dressed like belly dancers. This, however? Well, this was a lot like the rest of Arizona, only hotter.

We ascended from a wash filled with mesquites—which somehow qualified as trees, despite having more in common with cacti—onto a steep, rocky slope riddled with yuccas and prickly pears and cholla. Fortunately, it was too hot for the snakes to be out basking. At least that’s what the CBP agent told me. His name was Blaine Randall and he looked more like he belonged in a sweater with Greek letters and a plastic cup of keg beer in his hand than out here in his forest-green uniform with a baton on one hip and a Heckler & Koch P2000 .40 caliber semi-automatic holstered on the other, but I wanted to believe him. I really wanted to believe him. I’ve never been a big fan of legless life forms, especially the venomous kind that strike just because they feel like it.

We must have looked the pair: a WASP in dusty paramilitary fatigues leading a Native-American in L.L. Bean hiking gear and a blue FBI windbreaker slung over his shoulder across uninhabitable land over which their forefathers had long ago fought and died. To be fair, I’m also half white, but tend to be mistaken for Hispanic. Maybe I should incorporate something cool and distinctly native into my name so there’s no confusion, like Lou Diamond Phillips. As far as names go, I could have done a hell of a lot worse than Lukas Walker, but something like Luke Sky Walker would really sing.

By the time we crested the ridge, only to find ourselves at the foot of another, even steeper embankment, Randall’s green and white Ford Explorer was little more than a sparkle on the dirt drag that cut a straight line through the creosotes and palo verdes.

“What were you doing all the way out here?”

“My job.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

“I was cutting sign. You know, tracking? That’s what I do. It’s not like we sit on our asses in air conditioned rooms watching monitors all day. We’re out here in trucks that can’t get to half of the areas we need to reach, so most of the time we’re on foot. Alone. Outnumbered. And in the middle of a goddamn war zone.”

“I hear you. Beirut and Sarajevo don’t have anything on Middle of Nowhere, Arizona.”

The agent stopped on the rugged path in front of me. I meant to push that button; just maybe not as hard as I actually did. I could almost see his quills bristle underneath his uniform. He took one deep breath, then another. When he finally turned around to face me, he was calm and composed. Not impulsive. Not emotional. His hands were open at his sides, not clenched. Randall might have been a man capable of violence, but he was not, by nature, a violent man.

Trust me. I know all about violent men. That’s my job.

“Now seems like a good time to clear up a few common misconceptions,” Randall said. “The media portray us as a kind of Gestapo; racist thugs in green cruising the desert, abusing the illegals, and then dumping them across the border. Here’s a little peek behind the emerald curtain…There are three hundred seventy-six miles of border in Arizona alone. We at Ajo Station are responsible for sixty-four of those, thirty-six of which are completely unfenced and indefensible wilderness areas. We have more than seven thousand of a total of forty-five thousand square miles of desert to patrol, including Organ Pipe National Monument, the Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range, and the entire Tohono O’odham Reservation. This whole section of the state was designated a High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area by the Department of Justice. We estimate an average of three thousand undocumented aliens cross through here every day and we pick up maybe a third of them. That’s a thousand arrests a day. Over the course of a year, that’s more than twice the size of the Allied army that took Normandy on D-Day. That alone qualifies as an invading force.”

I studied his facial expressions and mannerisms through the course of his tirade. That’s kind of my thing. Some people are born with the ability to sing or run fast or throw hard. Me? I was born with a hypersensitive BS meter. The mouth may be capable of deception, but the body is not. For someone trained to detect even the smallest lie, the body is an open book. Micromomentary facial expressions, nervous tendencies, eye movements, voice inflections, speech patterns, diaphoresis. Maybe I can’t precisely read them all, but I can definitely tell when they’re at odds with the words. I’m the guy you don’t invite over for a friendly game of poker or ask to be your wingman at the bar. I catch all the signals. The problem is that there are people out there who don’t give off normal signals like the rest of us. They’re called sociopaths, and so completely do they believe their own lies, the all-encompassing web of deception they weave around their daily lives, that even when they lie, for all intents and purposes, they’re telling the truth. There’s no little cricket chirping in the backs of their skulls to let them know what they’re doing is wrong. Their reality is fluid. It’s whatever they determine it to be from one moment to the next. And they fascinate the hell out of me.

Randall’s face was still red and he was breathing hard, but he appeared to have gotten it out of his system. I had learned everything I needed to from him. Every investigation begins with a seemingly infinite number of suspects. The first person who needs to be crossed off the list is always the person who discovered the crime, which, in this case, was simple enough. I could have done without the lecture, though. At least out here under the blazing sun. Lesson learned. Next time I confront someone, I’ll do so indoors with the AC blasting. Don’t let anyone tell you I can’t adapt.

“Sorry.” I held up my hands in mock surrender. “I tend to lack diplomacy when I’m on the verge of being cooked alive.”

Randall stared me down for a few seconds, then nodded and mounted the path once more. His posture and the tension in his shoulders suggested that he was suitably placated for the time being, but I wasn’t likely to garner that invitation to dinner I’d been angling for. I supposed I’d survive. After all, I hadn’t been entirely forthcoming with him from the start. I find it’s always best to hold back every last bit of information you can, should you later need something with which to barter. And when it comes to capital, information is king. It also doesn’t hurt to let people think they know more than you do. That way their responses remain unguarded.

Which was why I didn’t tell Randall that I’d been thoroughly briefed on the situation on the way down here. Best to let him keep the upper hand as long as possible. Or at least let him think he had the upper hand. Anything he inadvertently betrayed would only add to what I already knew, and this was definitely a world apart from the one in which I lived.

Down here, drug trafficking organizations, or DTOs, run just about everything. They’ve organized all of the smuggling. Everything from cash to drugs and guns to illegals. Heck, they control immigration better than we do. They have whole networks of human smugglers called coyotes, and their pollero minions, bringing load after load of UDAs across the border every day, charging two to five grand a head and then abandoning their clients in the middle of the desert at the first sign of La Migra, the Border Patrol. They have foreign nationals actually paying for the right to carry fifty-pound bales of marijuana across forty miles of the harshest terrain on earth and more lining up for the chance. There are more than twenty different gangs, often working in conjunction, moving that merchandise in the city of Phoenix alone. They, in turn, bought weapons that they shipped back across the border with the remaining profits to arm the growing narco-insurgency, which already had both the man– and firepower to roll right over the border onto American soil and lay claim to a network of highways that reached into the heart of every city in the country.

While the chief function of the Border Patrol was still to round up and deport UDAs, every time an agent approached a group of migrants in the desert, he ran the risk of being gunned down or overwhelmed by superior numbers. There was no way of knowing whether the agents were walking up on a party of dehydrated illegals dying from the heat and in desperate need of BORSTAR aid, or a pack of bandits whose haul of weed and methamphetamines was stashed off in the mesquites until the guns appeared in their hands. Even the innocents whose lives were saved by the CBP agents wouldn’t rat out their coyote guides because they knew that once they were healthy enough to be bussed back to Nogales or Sasabe, they just needed to save up the money to hire a new coyote to take another crack at the American dream. And if they couldn’t find a way to earn the money, there was always a DTO willing to let them risk their lives hauling drugs bound for our schools.

Needless to say, finding human remains out here wasn’t an entirely unusual experience. Between centuries of pioneers and migrants and bandits, the Sonoran was positively littered with bones. What made this situation unique, and thus necessitated the presence of someone like me, was the nature of the crime. They needed me specifically because this whole area was situated on a political and racial landmine. We were within the borders of the United States and yet on sovereign Tohono O’odham land, and the media were just licking their chops at the prospect of the powers that be tripping over their own largely ineffective policies. If details somehow managed to leak to the press, here I was, a minority of O’odham descent, a federal agent essentially investigating other more publicly loathed federal agents, and I had a face the cameras absolutely loved. That I was exceptional at my job didn’t really factor into the equation.

By the time Randall finally stopped walking, I was starting to think those vultures might have been prescient. I was drowning in my own sweat, yet, at the same time, I was thirstier than I’d ever been in my life. My lungs were made of paper sacks and my skin felt like tanned leather. There were so many cactus needles in my socks that I winced with every step and my shirtsleeves were damp with blood from the stinging lacerations inflicted by the cruel hooks of the mesquite branches. I was seriously debating how thirsty I would have to get before I went for Randall’s throat and sucked his blood, when he turned around and, with a flourish, gestured toward the base of the stratified red rock escarpment, which rose from the crest of the mountain into the cloudless sky.

I whistled appreciatively.

“I was really hoping you’d be impressed.”

Randall shook his head as he turned away, but I saw that flush of pride on his face.

Had he been able to read mine, he would have seen that I wasn’t so much impressed by his discovery or the lengths to which the killer had gone to display the blood, but by the sheer volume the miraculous human body was capable of holding.

TWO

At the scene of any murder, the blood told a tale to those who knew how to listen. There were crime scene investigators who could read the various spatters and stains, who could tell you exactly how many blows or shots or slashes a victim had received and from which angle they had been struck and with what velocity they had been delivered. I was not one of those people, nor did I wish to be. I chose to focus on the living and finding a way to hold them accountable for their crimes against the dead. But even I could clearly see that the killer had attacked with great speed and savagery; however, while the victim had obviously suffered, his or her death hadn’t been unnecessarily protracted.

High-velocity spatters climbed the stone wall and streaked the hardscrabble path. They were a seemingly impossible dark red against the rust-colored rock and sand. There were various amoeba shapes where the body had been left to bleed out from at least two distinct wounds, while the unknown subject, or unsub, took his time leaving his calling card on the stone wall.

It had been painted twenty feet tall in the victim’s blood using the paw of a medium-size canine as a brush, as evidenced by the wisps of fur and nail marks around the telltale pad prints, and confirmed by the initial investigatory team.

“Pretty morbid, if you ask me,” Randall said.

I didn’t, but people always let you know when they’re ready to talk and it was generally a good idea to let them.

“Walk me through it.”

“Like I said, I was cutting sign. The coyotes and polleros are essentially just like any other smugglers. When they find a shipping lane that works, they keep using it until we eventually figure out a way to block it off. Traveling through the mountains offers a hell of a lot more cover than wandering across the flat desert and their trails aren’t readily visible from the air. Not to mention the fact that we can’t easily patrol them like we can the drags. But once they’ve been using a route for a while, it starts to get paved with trash. These UDAs just toss off their extra layers of clothing or throw down their food wrappers and water bottles. Thing is, with as little rain and wind as we get through here, all that stuff pretty much stays where they drop it.”

“And you were following one of those trails?”

“Not that day. We’d actually just busted one up on the other side of the mountain, so when word gets back to the coyotes on the other side of the border, they have to alter their shipping lanes on the fly. And considering the risks involved, they generally send their pollero underlings—”

“The wannabe coyotes.”

“Yeah. The chicken wranglers. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy about humanity, doesn’t it?”

“So you were searching for one of these alternate routes.”

“Found one, actually. I couldn’t have been more than four hours behind her, in fact.”

“Her? The crime scene report said it was impossible to conclusively identify the victim without more than a sample of blood. They couldn’t even confirm the sex without the presence of the hCG hormone.”

The CBP agent beamed.

“I was following her tracks. Size six to seven. Canvas Keds knockoffs to be precise.”

“How can you be sure they belonged to the victim and not the killer?”

“Please. I had to have been following them for more than a mile. They led right here and stopped. There’s no way the killer wiped his tracks leading away from the scene but didn’t have the foresight to wash his trail leading up to it.”

“How do you know the killer ‘washed’ his trail?”

“When you’ve been out here for any length of time, these things stand out like neon signs. I could tell the prints I was tracking were roughly four hours old because the soil under the turned gravel was still darker than the ground around it, but not as dark as the stones I turned over myself. That means the walker passed through closer to sunrise than midnight, but before the temperature started to rise again. It was about seven in the morning when I found them and the footprints had been crossed by insect tracks. The bugs only come out right before dawn, before the heat really kicks in. And the generic Keds are a common choice for the female immigrants since they’re cheap, have reasonably durable soles, and they’re available at a huge markup at any of the stores in Altar, where the majority of the UDAs go to hook up with coyotes.

“The exit tracks are even easier. After trying to keep up with all of the new trends, like tying carpet or foam blocks or tire treads or fake animal tracks over their shoes, it’s almost amusing to come across the old tried-and-true brush-off.”

“With a tree branch?”

“Mesquite branches specifically.”

“How can you tell that?”

“Look over there. See where it looks almost like someone raked the sand really softly? That’s from the barbs on the mesquite branches. They generally aren’t quite that clearly defined. They only look like that in this case because—”

“He used them like a sled to simultaneously drag the body away and obliterate his tracks.”

Randall tapped his sunburned nose.

“You’re catching on.”

“So what can you tell me about our unsub?”

Randall’s smile faltered.

“He came across some poor migrant girl out here alone in the desert, saw his opportunity, and took full advantage of it. Happens all the time. You’d be surprised how many women we pick up who claim—”

“This wasn’t a crime of opportunity. The unsub was already waiting out here. He knew exactly what he was going to do. He sat right up there on that ledge where he couldn’t been seen until it was too late, then he jumped down behind her. He grabbed her by the hair, pulled back her head, and cut her throat from right to left. Then he laid her body down on the ground right here and used the wound in her neck to paint the pattern on the stone. When he ran out of blood, he had to cut her lower abdomen open over here to get at the last of the unclotted blood.

“The attack was carefully planned and precisely executed. This man was in control the entire time. He demonstrates the classic signs of a sociopath, the Alienated Type specifically. He shows no remorse for the act of killing. His victim was merely a substrate he utilized to deliver his message. Nor did he deliberately inflict more pain than was absolutely necessary. He killed her with the first cut, and in the quickest manner possible, which demonstrates a measure of compassion.”

“How do you know it was a ‘he’ and not a ‘she’?”

“More than ninety percent of all serial killers are male. That aside, it takes a tremendous amount of force to cut through so many layers of skin, cartilage, and muscle to even get to the great vessels. Far more than you might think. And to do so in one swift motion? We’re talking about a person with significant upper body strength, especially to be able to do it with one hand. Besides, women tend to exhibit less emotional restraint, especially when it comes to an act as intimate as murder. No, the evidence here suggests that the murder itself had absolutely nothing to do with the selection of the victim. He didn’t know her personally. She merely served the purpose of helping to create a message to which we have no choice but to sit up and pay attention.”

“A smiley face? Seems kind of like he’s sending a mixed message to me.”

“That? That’s not the message. That’s just him having a little fun at our expense. Thumbing his nose at us, if you will. We haven’t found the real message yet.”

“We had guys all over this place. There’s nothing else out here. We’d have found it if there was.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“I’m very good at what I do. I don’t miss anything.”

“The real message is with the bodies. When we find them, we’ll find the message this guy is going to great lengths to deliver.”

“What do you mean…bodies?”

“Come now, Agent Randall. Tell me you didn’t think this was his first?”

He looked over at the dried blood on the red rocks. I watched the comprehension dawn on his face as the color drained from it.

“Like you said, thousands of undocumented aliens come through here every week. There’s no record of who they are, where they come from, or where they’re going. For all intents and purposes, they don’t exist. There’s no one to immediately miss them and no one to go looking for them. Heck, how many Juan Does are sitting in the cooler at the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office waiting to be ID’d. Most of these people don’t even have dental records. Do you really think he didn’t select them for that very reason? They’re the perfect choice of victim for a sociopath honing his craft. He’s just stepping up his game now, a game he wants to play with us.”

“So you’re saying—”

“You’ve got a hunter on the refuge, warden.” I clapped him on the shoulder and started back down the trail. “Somewhere out here in this forty-five thousand square miles of desert is a serial killer who’s been doing this for a long time now without anyone noticing.”