Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

TWENTY-SIX

I heard a creaking sound behind me, spun around, and nearly shot Roman right in the chest.

He shielded his eyes from the flashlight beam and I read it on his face. He knew what I had found. There was no surprise or alarm, merely a blank expression that told me everything I needed to know. This was a man whose worst fears had just been realized.

“You knew about this but did nothing to stop it?”

Roman shook his head.

“I didn’t know. I just always suspected that there was something…wrong with him. Something broken inside of him that I couldn’t fix. I tried to be his father, tried to love him like a father is supposed to…”

“He led you to the scene of the first crime, didn’t he? No one had found it, so he led you there. His own father. He led you there so you could discover his work and report it.”

“We were hunting, same as always. He didn’t lead me anywhere. I just walked up on it. Saw it there…on my own…”

“What could you possibly have been hunting out there in this godforsaken desert?”

“Anything. Everything. Doves. Rattlesnakes. Coyotes. Jackrab—”

“What about people? You ever hunt human beings out there?”

“Never, God damn it!”

“What’s the difference between actually doing it and turning a blind eye and allowing it to happen?”

“I told you! I didn’t know!”

“You’re his father! You should have known! You should have been able to stop him!”

The expression on his face was one of sheer and unadulterated hatred.

“What gives you the right?”

He stormed back down the hallway, his footsteps pounding on the hollow floor all the way into the main room and out onto the porch.

I turned my attention back to the hole in the closet floor. The wood was aged where it had been cut. I didn’t know enough about the aging process of wood to estimate how long ago it had been sawed. Not that it really mattered in the grand scheme of things. I think I was just looking for any little thing I could find to postpone the inevitable. I’d never really had much direct interaction with scorpions, but it still wasn’t something I looked forward to experiencing. I could have happily lived my entire life without ever seeing one in person, let alone braving the living carpet of them crawling around beneath me in the darkness. At least they didn’t like my light. I was going to have to buy something nice for the agent from whom I had borrowed it. Right now, it was just about my favorite thing in the whole world.

Don’t let anyone tell you I’m not hopelessly sentimental.

I leaned over the edge and shined my light under the house once more. Only a few scorpions had crawled back out into the open, where I had hit them with my beam before, and they scuttled out of sight pretty much immediately. The desiccated carcasses of their brethren were scattered everywhere.

I was really not looking forward to this.

I sat on the precipice and let my legs dangle. The heat and humidity wrapped around my ankles and feet like a wet blanket. It had been a while since anyone had opened this hatch to let it breathe, which definitely worked against me. The smell could have at least had the opportunity to dissipate a little. I pointed the beam directly beneath me, waited to make sure that nothing was going to come crawling or slithering out, then dropped down onto the dirt in a crouch. I shined the light in a circle around me as fast as I could to prevent being overrun. I could hear clicking and grinding sounds all around me in the darkness. Fortunately, whatever was making them seemed content enough to leave me be. That didn’t necessarily mean that I was comfortable crawling deeper under the house and away from the lone egress, but there was no other way I could examine what I had seen at the edge of the flashlight’s reach from above without actual physical proximity.

Flies buzzed at the periphery of the beam above a dark hole in the ground. There were only a few of them. After all, there wasn’t much left for them to eat. The scorpions appeared to have consumed all of the flesh before turning on each other. The bones protruding from the pit were old. They’d been absolved of flesh long ago. All that remained now was a rust-colored discoloration and the black knots where the tendons had rotted from the inside out. If I were to wager a guess, those at the very top had to be at least six months old. Maybe more. I didn’t have any desire to dig down there through the remains to see how many there were or how old the ones at the bottom were. It was enough for me to know that there were so many, the majority still mostly articulated. By all appearances, the bodies seemed to have just been hauled down here in one piece and hurled into the hole. I saw no obvious signs of either acute or prolonged violence, no fractures that had yet to begin the process of healing. Nor did I see any rumpled plastic like I had in the bedroom above me. Only a sheet of warped plywood he must have used as a cover until the deep pit, which must have once seemed ambitious, started to overflow.

I tried to picture the Coyote living a single floorboard away, while scorpions and snakes feasted on the decomposing flesh, while generations of flies lived and bred and died, only to be replaced by the maggots that picked up where they left off. Falling asleep on that stained mattress listening to the buzzing and clicking. Plotting how to get his next victim to hurl down into the stinking pit with the others. Why even bring them back here when he could simply leave them in the desert for the carrion birds? It was the only part of the act that felt even remotely intimate. There almost seemed to be a disconnect between Ban and his victims that I couldn’t quite explain, as though he hadn’t known them in life and had no desire to make the effort in death. Their bodies were refuse. He lived exclusively for the hunt. That was the only thing that mattered. So why was he now trying to send a message? What could he possibly have to say that would justify so much senseless killing?

If he had kept trophies, he had obviously taken them with him to wherever he was now. There was nothing here; no mementos of any sort. This was now just an abandoned trailer in the middle of nowhere he had once used for the disposal of bodies. And he had obviously found a new home now, someplace where there were now the bodies of at least four victims to keep him company.

All I had accomplished here was proving what I already suspected. He had been killing people out here for a long time and no one had been the wiser. How many other pits like this were out there? How many smiley faces had we already missed? For all I knew, the desert could be painted with them and the Coyote could be sitting around a pit the size of the Grand Canyon already nearly filled with corpses.

I looked down at the tangled mass of bones, at the lives stripped of their humanity. Somewhere out there mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters were lighting candles and saying prayers for the safe return of these poor souls, hoping that wherever they were they were happy and alive. Soon enough the truth would set in, if it hadn’t already. These were the lost and never-to-be-found. These were the forever unidentified. Even after this discovery was turned over to the locals, these remains would just be shuttled off to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office/Forensics Science Center to wait for eternity with the hundreds of others that were found in this very desert every year. Maybe a few of them would be identified from photographs loved ones sent to their various consulates, pictures of missing persons smiling their biggest smiles in hopes that such precious captured moments would suffice in lieu of dental records. This was the closing of the circle of life, down here in the darkness, where their ribcages now provided shelter for the very animals that had consumed their hearts.

These people meant something to someone, whether or not they did to their killer. They had mattered. They still mattered.

If only to me.

I was the one upon whom they counted to bring their murderer to justice, or, failing at that, to avenge them.

There was nothing more to be learned down here. I crawled toward the hole in the bedroom closet and climbed back up into the trailer. The front door was still standing open as I had left it. I stepped out under the blazing sun, for once grateful for the dryness of the heat.

I stood on the decrepit porch and used my cell phone to anonymously report the trailer to the ME’s office directly to keep the call from being traced back to me too quickly. Between the Border Patrol and the FBI, there would be agents crawling all over this desert like ants at a picnic, but I still couldn’t fathom why that would be a positive development for the Coyote.

I watched my father’s elder brother through the windshield of my car as I spoke. He had his face buried in his hands. I had to admit there was a part of me that wanted him to look up so I could see an expression of shame or remorse, maybe even regret, something to let me know that he recognized the evil he had brought into the world. Something other than the emotional distance he had already shown me, the same emotional distance I felt toward his son and him.

My blood.

My family.

It frightened me how very much alike we were.

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Where’s his mother?”

Neither of us had spoken since we left the trailer. I’d imagine both of us wanted to burn it down, but for different reasons.

“None of your business.”

I recognized his tone. It was the one he used to end a conversation. I truthfully didn’t care whether he wanted to talk or not, nor did I care if I pissed him off in the process. He wasn’t the only one who was in a vile mood.

“She leave you? Is that it?”

“You’re walking a thin line. Blood or not, you’re still an outsider here.”

His cheeks flushed with anger, but he kept his eyes straight ahead, on the road. He was trying his best to keep his expression studiously neutral. I’d been doing this for so long that I could see the cracks forming before he even realized there was the possibility that they might. And the more he protested, the more I started to think that whatever happened to her had some bearing on what was happening here now.

“Was that her in your bedroom? The pictures on the dresser?”

His lips whitened as he tightened them against his teeth. I didn’t have to see his hands to know they were balled into fists.

“There are some things that aren’t any of your business. Things that were never meant to be your business. You can run all over this reservation, saying and doing whatever you want, but this subject is off limits. Especially to you.” I slowed the car as we neared the turnoff for his driveway. The tactic was transparent. “Just let me out anywhere through here.”

“Was it another man? Did she run off and leave you with the kid?”

“Stop the car. Let me out.”

“Did she recognize the fact that her own son was a monster, is that it?”

“I’m warning you. I don’t care what kind of badge you carry.”

“Did she sense the evil in him and decide she’d sooner—”

I didn’t see the punch coming. I heard the crack, tasted copper on the back of my tongue, and the next thing I knew we were barreling through the desert, tearing up creosote and cacti and heading straight toward his house in a cloud of dust. I stomped the brake and the car skidded sideways to a halt. Before we were even fully stopped, Roman was climbing out the door.

“She died,” he shouted through the closing door. I watched him walking away until he turned and pointed at me. I could barely hear him through the car door, but his expression alone would have sufficed. “Don’t you come back here again! Ever!”

And with that, he vanished into the settling cloud of dust.

I stretched my jaw and rubbed at the spot where he had belted me. His fist had connected with the curvature of my mandible, just beneath my right earlobe. I might have seen it coming in time if he’d swung with his right. It didn’t matter. I was man enough to admit that I’d had it coming. I knew I was pushing too hard and I’m sure my words had been barbed, but I was angry and I needed to take it out on someone. I know he wasn’t responsible for murdering those people, nor was he directly to blame for the actions of his son. I wanted to hurt him because he could have stopped Ban. He could have intervened before it ever reached this point. Maybe Ban could have even received help. As it stood now, if he wasn’t killed out here in the desert, he would end up riding a needle. Of course, after murdering a federal agent, he wouldn’t survive his first night in prison.

I sat there a while longer, watching the dust settle like snow onto my windshield and hood. It turned the blazing sun an orangish color while the sky appeared to fill with ash. Finally, I reversed the car and backed toward to road, dragging branches and whole uprooted bushes with me. The scraping sounds that came from under the car made me grateful this was a pool car and not my personal vehicle. I backed right out onto the main road and stared at the trail of destruction I had left in my wake. The branches under the hood had nearly erased the tire tracks. There was a thought on the edge of my consciousness, like a tip-of-the-tongue kind of thing, but I couldn’t quite grasp it. Something about the way the brush marks obscured my trail struck a chord.

It would come to me eventually. When I was ready.

I put the car into drive and headed back toward town. The last shrub had just shaken loose from my undercarriage when the first Crown Vic blew past me in the opposite direction at close to ninety. Two more whipped past right behind it, so fast that the wind from their passage nearly buffeted my car onto the shoulder. The ME’s office must have called the Bureau first. I watched for brake lights in the rearview mirror, but none of them so much as slowed. I guess I should have been thankful for the desert camouflage that now disguised my vehicle.

There was that elusive thought again, but I still couldn’t catch it.

I focused again on the road. I had enjoyed spending time with my uncle so very much that I figured now would be a wonderful time to have a little chat with Chief Antone. Why waste a perfectly rotten mood on myself when I could share it with someone as deserving as the chief? I understood the hypocrisy of being angered by the fact that he was keeping information from me, but, damn it, I was a federal agent. It was in my job description.

The police station looked pretty much the same as it had earlier, although things seemed to have calmed down in the interim. The aura of panic had faded to the more manageable bedlam I associated with most rural station houses. And still the chief’s cruiser was nowhere to be found. Maybe his absence was nothing out of the ordinary. Could have even been his day off for all I knew. Besides, tracking him down might not be such a terrible thing. It gave me the opportunity to see him in his element, or at least his element, whether he was in it at the time or not. There was something about him that still didn’t sit right with me.

Who was I kidding? It was downright maddening.

It took all of about thirty seconds to pull his home address from my computer. I was there in ten minutes flat. He lived in an old adobe home not unlike the one in which my father had been raised. It was the same color as the dust that trailed my car and apparently utilized the same repairman as the police station. The cracks in the adobe showed through the discolored patches from a hundred feet away as I turned down his dirt driveway. Brown juniper shrubs lined the rutted drive. A nopales cactus sagged to my right, the pads black and eroded. Generations of tumbleweeds had aggregated against a ramshackle picket fence enclosing what I assumed passed for a front yard, although it was little more than a rectangular slice of the same desert that stretched away from me to the distant horizon.

I parked beside the fence and watched the curtains through the front windows while I waited for the dust to settle. I climbed out and walked toward the gate, which was ordinarily held closed by a frayed length of rope, but now clapped open and closed on the gentle breeze that had arisen from the southwest. The rusted hinges squealed when I opened it and passed through. The front porch was a faded wooden number that had been built over a crumbling concrete pad. The planter boxes on it contained potting soil that had dried to a pale gray and spilled through the cracks in the pottery. There was a cholla carcass beneath the window to my right, over which hung the bleached skull of a bull, and a dead row of sage along the fence line. Considering the cacti and shrubs grew naturally around here, it must have taken some doing to kill them off. The entire house gave the same impression of carefully tended decrepitude as the police station.

All except for the upper rim of the satellite dish I could barely see over the corner of the roof.

I understood why the chief cultivated such an image for a police station servicing a largely impoverished tribe, especially when it came to dealing with external agencies, but I couldn’t come up with a single good reason why he would go to such lengths when it came to his personal domain, unless there was something inside that he was trying to hide.

I knocked on the front door, which was about the most solid feature of the entire façade. I didn’t expect anyone to answer and wasn’t surprised when no one did. I peeked through the gaps between the curtains, which revealed nothing but the horizontal blinds behind them.

I knocked again and waited.

Antone had mentioned a twelve year-old granddaughter, but this house showed no indication that she lived here. He hadn’t said a word about a spouse or the child that had spawned the granddaughter or even if he or she had any siblings. I hadn’t thought to ask, primarily because I flat-out hadn’t cared at the time, but that knowledge would have served me well right about now.

I knocked again, harder this time.

It didn’t look like anyone was home; however, the last thing I wanted to do was surprise a terrified housewife or latchkey kid and take a shotgun blast to the gut. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have the time to screw around. I didn’t know where Antone was and I really didn’t want to be inside his house when he returned.

I stepped down from the porch, crossed the yard, and wandered around the side of the house. There were more dead junipers and a couple of dead pines with bark ravaged by beetles. The back of the house looked marginally better than the front. A bent aluminum screen door, without an actual screen, opened onto a small deck that contained a single lawn chair and a half-dozen empty ceramic planters. The chair was the anomaly. The metal still shined and the cushions were in good shape. There was little more than a patina of dust on them, which was easily enough brushed off before I sat down in the chief’s chair. Like the coffee maker at the station and the satellite dish, this was the indulgence that shattered the illusion. I imagined Antone sitting just as I was now, staring off to the west across the rolling desert to where the sun would set behind the distant mountains. A stratified ridge rose from the sand and creosote a couple of miles away. Beyond it, I could see the roofline of an outbuilding. Or at least what looked like the roof of a manmade structure from this distance. Two faint parallel tracks wound around the shrubs and cacti toward it.

I stood again and rapped on the screen door. Thirty seconds later I had it propped against my back and was working the lock with my rakes. I knew what I was doing crossed a line. Anything I found inside—if there was anything to find—would technically be inadmissible in a court of law, but I wasn’t trying to make a case against the chief. Anything he might be doing that he shouldn’t be was surely small potatoes. He wasn’t the Coyote. I was certain of that, but I needed to know why he was investigating the natural underground formations at the same time the Coyote was using them to facilitate his killing spree. Like I said, I don’t believe in coincidence. The chief was definitely keeping something from me and hiding it behind the guise of helpfulness.

A rake pick is about the easiest tool to use when it comes to getting through any standard keyed lock in a hurry. It’s pretty much just a slim metal rod with a snake-shaped curvature at the end. The standard tumbler lock is composed of a series of spring-loaded mechanisms called pin stacks, each of which is made of two pins, one on top of the other, a key pin and a driver pin, respectively. When the properly cut key is inserted into the lock, the teeth create the right amount of tension on the key pins to force them upward until the bases of the driver pins align at what’s called the shear line. That’s the point where the lock disengages and the key can be turned to open the door. A rake essentially takes the place of the teeth of a key. All you have to do is run it back and forth inside the lock until you get all of the pins to “hang” at the shear line, apply a little tension, and…voila.

The back door popped open, just a crack.

I slid the sleeve of my windbreaker over my hand and used it to open the door. I went in fast and low, drawing my flashlight with one hand and my pistol with the other.

No shotguns roared or terrified women screamed. There was no sound at all, save for the metronomic ticking of a clock deeper in the house. I waited for nearly a full minute, listening to the tick…tock…tick…tock while beads of sweat trickled down my spine between my shoulder blades, then started into the house.