Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

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TWENTY-EIGHT

I entered via a kitchen that smelled of black beans and peppers. I backhanded my flashlight, aligned it with the sightline of my Beretta, and examined my surroundings. The dishes in the sink had been rinsed but not washed. The counters were cluttered with random cooking utensils. My flashlight beam reflected from a stainless steel industrial coffee maker that ground the beans, drew the water directly from a tap connected to the sink, and brewed whole pots at a time, on demand. It probably cost more than the bulky old microwave and the avocado-colored refrigerator and stove set combined. There was a table buried under newspapers. Three of the four chairs were heaped with boxes of files.

An arched doorway granted access to the great room. The curtains were not only drawn and blinded, but draped with heavy blankets so as not to admit a single ray of light, or, more likely, to prevent anyone outside from seeing what Antone was doing. The furniture had been shoved against the walls to clear space for a series of folding card tables in the middle of the room. They were plastered with maps. The very same maps I had viewed at the library, only these had been enlarged and laminated and were positively covered with markings from red and black grease pens and ringed with stains from the bottoms of mugs of coffee. There were circles and Xs and arrows and notes scribbled so hurriedly that I couldn’t decipher them. The television was an eighties model and the stereo had a record player. Both were buried under so much dust that I wondered if Antone even knew what they were. A Remington twelve gauge leaned in the corner behind the front door.

I followed the hallway back toward the bedrooms. The walls were lined with framed pictures, just like Roman’s. They featured a much younger, and much thinner, version of Antone. I hardly recognized him. His facial expressions were genuine and transparent, not guarded and indecipherable as they were now. He had been happy; the lines on his face reflected laughter, not worry. And it was readily apparent that he loved both of the women in the pictures with him. One was presumably his wife, the other the daughter who carried parts of both of them in her face. Her mother’s long black hair and slender nose. Her father’s large dark eyes and once-prominent jaw. Her mother’s wide, toothy smile that showcased the upper gums. I watched her age backward as I walked, regressing from a young woman to a teen to a toddler. There was another picture at the end of the row, arranged almost as an afterthought, or perhaps, instead, to be interpreted as separate from the others. It was of the daughter and a child with her eyes, but the smile on her face was forced. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen and her youth conflicted with the weight she carried in the bags beneath her eyes. From there, the pictures metamorphosed into the granddaughter alone, but none of them beyond the age of four or five. If she was now twelve as Antone had said, then there was a good chunk of time missing, a good chunk of her life.

The pictures on the opposite side ranged in age from pastel to manila and bronze to black and white. I recognized a little of Antone in some of the people, who were every bit as serious as my own lineage had been, although they didn’t seem to be featured with the same prominence. I didn’t know what to make of that. There was one picture in particular that caught my eye. It was offset from the others as though it bore some significance to whoever had hung it. There were two children, a boy and a girl, sitting astride a piebald horse on only a saddle blanket. I didn’t recognize Antone at first. He’d been a scrawny thing, even at what appeared to be eleven or twelve. The girl behind him was a few years younger and wore the kind of blissful smile only a young girl who had yet to be touched by the realities of life could wear. I recognized her immediately, even so far back through the prism of time. I had seen her before. With a much older Antone and in the face of her daughter. This was Antone’s wife. They’d been together in some form or fashion since before they were even teenagers. They’d perhaps even lived their entire lives together.

I felt a great sense of sadness at that realization. It was obvious that she didn’t live here, and yet a part of her still haunted this place. The aura of loss seemed to radiate from the house itself.

A wife who wasn’t around anymore. A daughter who no longer sent pictures, even of her child. A man for whom their absence was a palpable entity within his home, a man with a secret that involved the hidden geological world beneath the desert. A man who appeared to be singlehandedly trying to keep Folgers in business.

There was something here. I could feel it. Something that played a role in the chief’s involvement in this case.

I nodded to myself and resumed my search.

The bathroom off the hallway smelled of ammonia and the shower curtain was opaque with mildew. I drew it aside to reveal a freestanding tub with a ring of grime and rust. There was a shaving kit and a lone towel that looked like it had already been subjected to several uses. I opened the medicine cabinet and glanced at the contents. A crumpled tube of toothpaste and a flattened brush. Deodorant and cologne. A shelf full of bottles and prescriptions: acetaminophen, ibuprofen, amoxicillin, terbinafine, sertraline, onabotulinumtoxinA, lorazepam, ondansetron, loperamide. There was even a bottle of Anacin, which I didn’t even realize was still on the market. The top shelf was reserved for another toothbrush, a hairbrush, a bottle of perfume, and an ornamental jar of what appeared to be potpourri. It had to be Antone’s wife’s shelf, although a woman utilizing a shelf she would need a ladder to reach seemed more than a little impractical. I closed the cabinet and moved on down the hallway.

I opened the door to the smaller of the two bedrooms, which was a dusty homage of sorts to the daughter. It looked as though she had just walked out of it one day and never returned, but her parents had left it in precisely the same condition in case she decided to return and resume the life she had abandoned. There was a sadness to it that suggested an element of guilt and a desperate kind of hope to which it was almost hard to bear witness. I closed the door again and followed my flashlight beam into the final bedroom.

The master was another shrine, this one to the woman I recognized as Antone’s wife from the pictures in the hallway. Her portrait was framed with dark wood that had been hand-carved into an intricate flowered pattern, which must have taken countless hours to complete, and draped with red velvet sashes. It rested on a small table in the corner in a half-circle of white candles in glass holders. Dried flowers adorned the walls surrounding it, beside which several newspaper articles had been tacked. They were a part of the display, and yet ultimately apart from it. The kind of discordant arrangement one could only associate with a law enforcement officer, and one who bore the weight of the words. The clippings were crumpled and yellowed and at odds with the elegance of the shrine.

I rounded a bed that didn’t appear to have been slept in for quite some time and stepped over a mess of dirty clothes on my way across the room. My light illuminated the face of a woman who hadn’t aged beyond her early fifties. Her eyes were bright and carefree, her smile completely lacking any kind of self-consciousness. The lines on her face suggested that the expression hadn’t been feigned for the camera. That was just who she was. A woman who envisioned a future beyond the horizon, one with a husband with whom she had been in love since she was just a child. Not one that could be summarized in a handful of paragraphs by a woman who had never even known her.

Desert pursuit turns deadly

Sandra Talbot, Arizona Daily Star

TUCSON – A local woman was involved in a collision with a truck being pursued by a Border Patrol vehicle after allegedly running a checkpoint on I-86. Eyewitness accounts suggest the truck, a newer-model Ford F-250, was traveling at great speeds across the open desert when it launched from the shoulder and struck a Nissan Sentra traveling westbound on the interstate. The driver of the Sentra, Eloise Maria Antone, was airlifted to the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson, where she was pronounced dead on arrival.

The driver of the truck, Ignacio Mendez, a Mexican national wanted on trafficking charges in Texas, was also admitted to the UMC with various injuries, purportedly of a non-critical nature.

Following his treatment and release, he will be remanded into the custody of agents from the Department of Homeland Security and transported to the Central Arizona Correctional Facility, where he will await the filing of formal charges and subsequent hearings.

According to a press release issued by the DHS, the truck driven by Mr. Mendez contained more than thirty bricks of marijuana with an estimated street value of nearly three-quarters of a million dollars. The bricks had been welded inside the frame of the vehicle beneath the rear seats of the extended cab.

“This marks another small victory in the war against the cartels,” said Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Neil Rivera of Ajo Station. “Although I think we can all agree that the price we paid in this instance was too high. No loss of American life is acceptable.”

Mrs. Antone, 52, a former tribal councilwoman and professor at the Tohono O’odham Community College, is already the twelfth civilian casualty in the war on drugs this year in Arizona alone. She was a lifelong resident of the former Papago Indian Reservation, a two-term Vice-Chairwoman of the Sells District, and author of scholarly works about the history of the Tohono O’odham and the Hohokam peoples. She is survived by her husband Raymond Antone, an officer with the tribal police, and a daughter and granddaughter.

The other articles were the standard follow-ups. Human interest pieces featuring Antone’s wife, the agent—whose name was withheld, for obvious reasons, at the request of the DHS– who had been chasing the truck that took her life, the impact on the reservation as a whole, and one article with a quote from Antone himself, then a mere officer yet to assume the mantle of chief.

“This is our daily reality down here. The rest of the country needs to be made aware of the war being fought on American soil. The cartels must be stopped and held accountable for their crimes, whatever the cost. Even if I have to do so by myself.”

They were the words of a man obsessed, or maybe possessed was a better word. Antone had taken on a mission, a crusade against an enemy that washed across his native homeland on a tide of humanity. I knew a thing or two about obsessions. They were the kind of all-consuming passions that could ultimately lead to a downward spiral of self-destruction. A man could become so consumed that he forgets about the things in his life that matter most. He forgets about the grieving daughter in his pursuit of the forces that robbed them both of her mother. He forsakes sleep for caffeine in order to extend the hours of productivity in the day. He allows his property to become a shambles for there’s no time to tend to it, if he even notices its deterioration. He decides to strike at the enemy by searching the underground caves the traffickers use to store their caches of drugs and firearms, which places him in the mountains at night…

Smack-dab in the middle of the Coyote’s hunting grounds.

TWENTY-NINE

I sprinted back into the main room and shined my light on the maps. I needed to figure out where Antone had gone last night. The topographical map appeared to be the central focus of the arrangement. The markings on it were clustered in wavy lines running from north to south, following the course of the mountains. It didn’t take long to figure out Antone’s system. He utilized the various Landsat sonographic maps to find the underground caves, compared them to the three-dimensional elevation models, then charted them on the topographical map. The locations of the caves were marked with black circles. Those he had apparently already investigated were crossed out with large Xs. Some were red, others black. Beside the red ones were numbers and abbreviations scribbled in a hand I couldn’t easily read and didn’t have the time to waste trying. Right now I was of singular purpose.

I needed to find Antone.

There didn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason to his approach. Maybe he was following hunches or tracking the known movement of drugs. Maybe he was evaluating the features based solely on size. I didn’t have the slightest clue. But I did have a very bad feeling about this.

Antone obviously hadn’t come home last night, nor had he gone to work this morning. Based on what I had witnessed at the station, I was also reasonably confident that he hadn’t called in either. I already knew that the Coyote had been in the Baboquivari Mountains last night and I was willing to gamble that he was still somewhere up there. I don’t believe he would have attempted to cross the open desert with the corpse of a Border Patrol agent while his fellow officers were converging from all points on the compass. There simply hadn’t been time. No, he was still up there somewhere, and if Antone had come into contact with him, he had done so up there in the Baboquivaris.

I narrowed my search to the north-south stripe of circles to the east of Sells and the south of I-86, which cut across the reservation from Why to Tucson. There had to be a dozen circles already, seven of them crossed out in black, four of them in red.

And one that had yet to be crossed out one way or the other.

I grabbed the corner of the map, tore the whole thing off the table, and blew through the house. The screen door banged from the back of the house as I burst from the kitchen, hurdled the porch railing, and dashed around the side toward the driveway. I was in the Crown Vic and screaming backward in a cloud of dust toward the main road in a matter of seconds. I nearly shot right across it before cranking the wheel, pinning the gas, and rocketing to the east.

My best guess was that I was about twenty-five minutes out if I really pushed it. From there, it was still going to take time to pick my way up into the hills and find the entrance to the underground cave. I could only hope that the larger features Antone was investigating would be easier to find than the ones the Coyote had been using, which thus far had apparently been too small to warrant Antone’s scrutiny. Regardless, if there was a chance that Antone was still alive somewhere up there, I was going to need any and all of the help I could get, damn the consequences.

I grabbed my cell phone and called the police station. Officer Olivia Benally answered before the second ring in a panicked voice that confirmed my suspicions. I had just identified myself and started to express  my concerns when she interrupted me.

“They found the chief’s cruiser.”

“What? Who did?”

“Ajo Station called maybe twenty minutes ago. One of their agents came across the chief’s car abandoned out off the Malvado Drag near Diaz Peak. There was…there was—” She nearly lost it before blowing out a long exhalation to compose himself. “There was blood inside the car.”

“Diaz Peak? Isn’t that in the Ajo Range? That can’t be right. There’s no way—”

“Look. I told you everything I know. Louis is on his way out there now and I have to coordinate things from my end while running the entire department by myself. If you want anything more, you’re going to have to call Ajo.”

She hung up on me, but there was nothing more to say anyway. Everything about this situation was wrong. I could feel it in my bones. I clicked on my scanner and it exploded with voices, so many I couldn’t immediately pick out a single identifiable thread, but there was no mistaking the rage that crackled from the voices of the agents and the grim determination with which the dispatchers directed them. I imagined the majority of these agents were the same ones who had been up all night scouring the desert and were now running on anger and adrenaline fumes. They wanted the man who killed their brother-in-arms, and they wanted him all to themselves before any outside agency could intervene.

I slowed the car and pulled to the side of the gravel road. The Baboquivari Mountains rose ahead of me through the front windshield. I glanced up at the rearview mirror. Nothing but seamless desert all the way to the horizon, beyond which I could imagine Blackhawks thupping over rugged hills crawling with agents on ATVs and on foot. Two different mountain ranges on totally opposite sides of the reservation.

The engine ticked as the dust washed over the car from behind and settled onto the hood.

The radio chatter was frenetic. Every agent within a hundred miles must have converged upon the area when Antone’s car was discovered with blood in the interior. You could probably drive a convoy of semis bursting with drugs straight through the heart of the reservation and no one would notice or care.

I peered again through the sheen of dust on the windshield, then up at the rearview mirror. There was no sign of movement as far as I could see in either direction.

I had been certain that the Coyote was still in the Baboquivaris and the map on the passenger seat beside me all but confirmed that Antone had gone up there, as well. Curse Antone and his infernal signal jammer or every move he had made during the night would have been documented by the Oscars.

Windshield.

Rearview mirror.

Windshield again.

My left foot tapped restlessly on the floorboard.

Show’em the left and bring the right.

Windshield.

Rearview mirror.

Windshield again.

I looked down at the laminated map beside me, then toward the point where the Baboquivaris merged into the southeastern horizon, not far past the top hat-rock of Baboquivari Peak itself.

The voices from the scanner provided a ruckus that made it nearly impossible to think.

Windshield.

Rearview mirror.

Windshield again.

Coyote is the master of deception.

Before I even realized I had reached a decision, I was speeding straight ahead with the Baboquivari Mountains growing larger in front of me by the second.

THIRTY

It felt like it took me forever to find the right spot. Not because I couldn’t read the topographical map, but rather due to the challenge of selecting the right east-west drag to get me there. I had turned down several that necessitated U-turns while I navigated the desert with my eyes glued to the proper arrangement of peaks and valleys. When I did finally follow the correct route, it led me straight up into the foothills to a rutted road that guided me on a circuitous course even higher, until the terrain became more than the Crown Vic could overcome and I was forced to coast backward to a point where I could park in a copse of ironwood trees. The canopy might have offered shade, but it did little to spare me from the heat. The moment I killed the engine and the AC stopped blowing, the heat closed around me like a fist.

I tucked a bottle of water into either pocket of my windbreaker, rolled up the map, and donned my cap to keep the sun out of my eyes. I was already sweating through my shirt when I climbed out of the car and looked uphill toward the rugged peaks lined with cacti and palo verdes, which grew straight from the scree and steep escarpments that would dictate my path.

I took a long pull from the first bottle and pocketed it again. It had to be well over a hundred, but at least there was a breeze blowing at my back. I debated taking off my jacket. My skin was dark enough that it didn’t immediately burn; however, the lightweight fabric allowed for a small amount of convective cooling from my sweat that I wasn’t ready to sacrifice.

There was still the distinct possibility that my hunch was wrong and I had consigned myself to a wild goose chase. I guess there was only one way to find out for sure. I was only a few feet from my car when I saw fresh tire treads in the dirt. Someone had recently parked here. Someone whose car was limited by a clearance and suspension similar to my own. The vehicle had tires of similar width, too.

I knelt and studied the ground. There was a circular smudge from the toe of a shoe where someone would have stood and pivoted on one foot in the process of sitting down in the driver’s seat. The pressure had rolled over a pebble that revealed a crescent of dirt that was slightly darker than the rest around it. The print had been made before sunrise, but not my much.

And it was the only one.

At least I knew I was in the right place. The rest of the footprints had been erased in a circle around where the vehicle had been parked as though with a leaf blower, just like I had seen at the third crime scene. I didn’t have to look far to find where the air-swept path led upward toward a crest of rock shaped like the bow of a ship breaking through the mountainside.

And now I had a decision to make. I could either call this in and attempt to convince a highly motivated army of Border Patrol agents that they were looking in the wrong place or I could strike off and risk any number of bad outcomes on my own. Regardless, if my assessment of the situation was correct, Antone was already dead.

I stared uphill for a long moment before I finally started walking. I didn’t even glance back at my car, where the scanner still rested in the charger on the console. I was on my own. As I had always been meant to be.

The lack-of-tracks trail guided me only so far before vanishing, although I could still see the occasional signs of recent passage in the slightly matted clumps of wild grasses and in the bent and broken branches of the palo verdes. The only thing I could tell with any kind of certainty was that whoever had returned to the vehicle and driven it away hadn’t been dragging a makeshift travois as he had in the past. The placement of the footsteps was cautious, but not overly so. As though whoever left them had no objection to someone following his trail if they were good enough to find it, and yet at the same time was careful enough not to leave a single track with enough definition that it could later be identified and matched to him. I found this interesting and somewhat unnerving. I could only assume that suggested the killer intended to walk free when all was said and done, which was either a symptom of an overdeveloped ego or implied a different kind of resolution to the endgame than I envisioned.

I paused whenever I found anything resembling shade and drank from the rapidly warming water. It’s amazing how quickly your body temperature rises in response to the environment. I was in good physical shape, but I could barely go a quarter-mile without starting to feel like I was sweating out more fluid than I was retaining. I couldn’t imagine the prospect of attempting to cross forty miles of desert in extremes like this. I think I would have rather taken my chances swimming across the entire Gulf of Mexico.

At least I was working my way up into sharp valleys that appeared to be deep enough to offer some respite from the merciless sun. I did appreciate the fact that the rattlesnakes clung to the cover of the shrubs and were kind enough to warn me when I got too close. I was starting to get used to them, anyway. I didn’t mind them nearly as much when they weren’t striking at my face.

I picked up the trail at the mouth of a red-rock canyon barely eight feet wide before losing it altogether. It was more of a crevice than a canyon really, like the two neighboring mountains were in a constant state of flux, moving apart in increments of inches per century. The uneven ground offered bare stone upon which to tread without leaving a print, at least not one that I could detect. If I was correct, I was nearing the destination Antone had marked on his map. The biggest foreseeable problem was that I was still going to have to find the entrance to the cave. And this arroyo formed a perfect bottleneck, the kind for which the Coyote had already shown a fondness.

I drew my pistol and waited. A hawk cried as it circled over the foothills behind me. A sudden gust of wind caused pebbles to trickle down the rock walls from somewhere above.

I dropped the map on the ground and unrolled it with my foot. Yeah, I was in the right place. Somewhere on the far eastern side of this gully. I nudged a rock onto the map to hold it in place and advanced cautiously in a shooter’s stance.

The air in the arroyo was perfectly still. A feather would have fallen like a lead weight. The sound of my breathing echoed back at me from the narrowing walls. A ribbon of sand navigated the rocks underfoot where seasonal dribbles flowed. I was starting to think that I had chosen the wrong route. The rock walls constricted and it almost looked like the passage terminated in front of me. I was nearly to the terminus when I recognized it for what it was: a sharp bend to the right. Branches and random detritus had accumulated in the junction. I was just about to step over them so I could peek around the corner to my right when I heard a sound.

I stopped dead in my tracks and listened as hard as I could.

It sounded like waves washing against a beach, a slow repetitive shushing sound, but that obviously couldn’t be the case. Considering the complete absence of airflow, it couldn’t be the wind either. I thought about the rattle-less diamondbacks and ruled them out just as quickly.

Gravel skittered down the stone wall to my left. I glanced up to see a buzzard perched on a pinnacle of rock, staring down at me. It stretched its wings and settled in. I took its presence as a bad sign of what was around the corner, rather than an indication of what Mother Nature thought of my chances.

I wasn’t accomplishing anything by standing still.

I ducked and went around the bend in a crouch. My Beretta preceded me into a widened section that functioned as the junction of two more arroyos.

The shushing sound grew louder, but I still couldn’t identify it any more than I could divine its origin.

It grew louder still as I advanced, alternately scanning the area ahead of me and the canyon walls above for any sign of movement. Another fat black vulture alighted on a cholla skeleton thirty feet up to my right and tracked me with its beady eyes all the way to the fork. The branch to my left led toward the sunlight, where the rock walls petered to sandy hills bristling with cacti and yuccas. The branch to the right led into deeper shadows, at the far end of which I could see a bright sliver of sunlight where it opened onto the eastern slope. The sound was definitely coming from that direction.

I tried to picture Antone walking up here alone under the glow of the moon. A coyote howling in the distance. The faint thupp-thupp-thupp of helicopter blades to the north from the scene of a crime he had no idea had been committed. The scuffing sound of gravel underfoot. A notebook page of scribbled directions in his hand. Or maybe a GPS unit. This wasn’t a blind walk for him. He had some idea where he was going; this was just the most direct route.

Sshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuuhhrr.

I pressed onward, wary of my surroundings. The light of the opening at the far end became larger with each step, limning the rugged rock walls a pale gray. Another buzzard watched me from its perch on a jagged ledge high above me, a black silhouette against the sky.

Sshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuuhrr.

I finally smelled what had drawn the vultures. Faint, but impossible to miss if you were familiar with the scent. Simultaneously biological and metallic. A sickly taste on the back of the tongue as much as a smell, one that told me something terrible had happened here.

It was blood.

Sshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuuhrr.

The world around me lightened by degree. The smell intensified. The air started to flow. Sweat rolled down my neck and back. I had to readjust my grip on my pistol.

The dirt beneath my feet softened several feet from the outlet. I risked a glance down and saw amoeboid splotches of mud that would have already been completely dry were it not for the shadows. To my right, an arterial spatter had ascended the canyon wall nearly to the top. Another led out into the sunlight where it dotted a palo verde like little red berries. It was almost a relief to step out into the open again. Ahead of me, the foothills led downward to the stretch of desert that passed through New Mexico on the way to Texas, beyond the horizon.

Sshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuuhrr.

Louder now.

This was where the Coyote had waited, just out of sight, for Antone to reach the end of the arroyo. I turned around and looked back in the direction from which I had come. He had stood to my right with his back against the escarpment, hidden from view by a thick saguaro. He had listened to Antone’s heavy tread approaching until he was scant feet away and then made his move.

Antone had never stood a chance.

The attack had come directly at him. No time to retreat. No time to draw his sidearm. No time even to raise his arms in his defense. A slash across the throat from right to left, backhanded, by someone with considerable skill with a knife. And considerable strength.

Sshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuuhrr.

I looked up and to my left. The sound was coming from somewhere up there, above where the twenty-foot cliff terminated and the dirt and weeds and cacti resumed. A vulture perched on top of a rock formation shaped like a plow blade, beneath which I could see a dark orifice. Something small and metallic reflected the sun from the opening.

Sshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuuhrr.

It wasn’t until I looked closer at the rock face to determine the best way to scale it that I saw what the Coyote had painted on it.