Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

Comprehension struck me a physical blow, nearly driving me to my knees. I had been wrong about everything. This wasn’t a stylized smiley face. It didn’t incorporate any native symbology. This was something else entirely and I had absolutely no clue what it meant.

Sshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuuhrr.

As I stood there, dumbly staring at the design presumably painted in the blood of a man I both liked and respected, my mind rationalized the sound. It wasn’t waves or the wind or a shushing sound. It was a voice. A man’s voice repeating the same words over and over in a continuous loop.

‘Bout time you got here.

‘Bout time you got here.

‘Bout time you got here.

‘Bout time you got here.

THIRTY-ONE

I remember a time when I was maybe eight or nine. We were living in family housing on some base or other. Maybe Travis AFB in California. They all looked alike. Anyway, we had mice, and anything that entered our home uninvited was treated like an invading army. My father took it as a personal challenge to eradicate whatever pest dare violate the sanctity of his domain. My mother and I were happy enough to be party to the utter annihilation of spiders and earwigs and roaches and ants. My mother never really had a problem with his war on rats, either. I think it was because of their strangely fleshy tails, but it could just as easily have been their sordid history of spreading diseases like the black plague. But mice were a different story. Maybe it was their size or the fact that they had such cute, fuzzy little faces. I don’t know. All I remember was walking into the kitchen one day in my pajamas and Spider-Man slippers to find her kneeling on the floor in front of the open cupboard beneath the sink where we kept the trash can.

She didn’t hear me until I was right behind her. When she turned, she had tears in her eyes and I couldn’t quite understand why, until she pulled me close and hugged me and I saw the little gray mouse snared in the trap. The wire rim had snapped down squarely on its face, all but separating the body from the whiskered snout and hooked yellow teeth that pointed in an entirely different direction than they were supposed to. The rear legs were stiff and held the hind quarters upright, as though it had tried to find the leverage to yank its head out. There was a puddle of urine underneath it, dotted with two small black pellets. A third poked halfway out of its rear end beneath its tail.

At the time, I didn’t comprehend why it bothered her so much unless she was just grossed out by the fact the she was going to have to touch it. I mean, I had been watching my father set and bait the traps every night and this kind of felt like a respectable victory in an ongoing war. I remember asking her what was wrong, or maybe why she was crying.

“Because I’m sad.”

“You wanted to keep the mouse?”

“No, honey, but I didn’t want it to go out like that.”

“You mean in the trash?”

She smiled despite the tears and ruffled my hair.

“Silly boy. In a trap like…that.”

I remember looking at the mechanism, at the point where the metal had snapped nearly clean through its skull, at the gob of peanut butter that had flipped off of the pressure lever.

“It must have really wanted that peanut butter. It knew it was a trap and it still stuck its head right in. Why would it do that?”

I wish I could recall her answer, because right about now I felt a whole lot like that mouse must have as I stared down into the hole in the earth with the digital recording playing over and over in front of me.

‘Bout time you got here.

‘Bout time you got here.

‘Bout time you got here.

It was the same model of recorder the Coyote had used before. There was blood smeared on the casing. The digital readout indicated there was only one recording and the two arrows forming a circle confirmed it had been looped.

Five words. Five ordinarily innocuous words delivered in a mocking tone by a man I hadn’t even known existed three days ago, but one who had kindled the fires of hatred for me every day of his life. Why didn’t he just come at me and be done with it? What could he possibly hope to gain? To prove he’s better than me? To show me up in the media on a national stage? Those are some stupid reasons for so much death. There had to be more to it than that, something that was staring me right in the face.

And that damn painting on the wall below me…what the hell was that supposed to be anyway?

I grabbed the recorder and hurled it out across the desert. Probably not the smartest move from an investigative standpoint, but it did make me feel a little better hearing his voice plummeting into the valley below.

The opening itself was natural and had obviously been here since these mountains first reared up from the sea. There were scuff marks where a large rock had been repeatedly dragged in front of and away from the orifice. I assumed it was somewhere down the mountainside now that it was no longer needed. I clicked on the Maglite and directed the beam into the darkness. A series of irregular ledges led down to a point where the light diffused into the shadows.

I thought of the mouse again, with its skull snapped in half and its jaw askew, as I ducked my head and crawled inside.

Don’t let anyone tell you I’m not paying attention to life’s little lessons.

The first thing that hit me was the smell. Or the lack of the nauseating stench of death, to be precise. Not that it smelled wonderful, mind you. It smelled pretty much like any other cave: dank, earthy, and maybe a little like body odor, but, believe you me, I wasn’t complaining. It allowed me to focus my senses on the main goal of keeping myself alive. I couldn’t afford to work under the assumption that there was no one inside, despite what all of my instincts told me. That didn’t preclude the possibility of springing some kind of trap, though. For all I knew, the entire cave could be slithering with diamondbacks without rattles or worse, although I had a hard time imagining anything worse than that. Not to jinx myself, anyway.

Maneuvering myself into a position where I could lower myself from one ledge to the next while still keeping the flashlight trained below me took some doing. The temperature dropped rapidly as I descended. I could feel the sweat cooling on my skin, raising goose bumps. It was both an uncomfortable and divine sensation.

When I finally reached the bottom, I was relieved to find nothing nasty already coiled and waiting to strike me. I stood in place for several minutes without moving, turning my beam and gun in unison from one side of the cave to the other. It reminded me a lot of Carlsbad Caverns just across the state line from here in New Mexico, only on a much smaller scale. The ground and the walls were smooth, seemingly polished by the great ocean as it receded millennia ago. Stalactites pointed down from the low ceiling like fangs, while stalagmites with the texture of melted wax rose against them. Petroglyphs had been carved into just about every available surface so long ago that minerals had accreted over them, preserving them behind a layer of semi-opaque limestone. I could hear condensation dripping from somewhere ahead of me beyond the light’s reach.

I advanced slowly, placing each footfall carefully and silently, listening for even the slightest sound that might betray whatever trap awaited me. My pulse thundered in my ears and I had to consciously regulate my breathing. The conical features cast long shadows that moved in the opposite direction, as though trying to sneak around behind me, toying with my peripheral vision. The cave terminated ahead of me and I was forced to pause to evaluate my situation. I turned in a complete circle. Nothing. The only sounds were my breathing and the occasional plinking sound of leached minerals dripping from the ceiling. I smelled damp earth and an almost electrical scent I associated with the aftermath of a rainstorm, but that was—

Wait.

I inhaled slowly through my nose. It was faint, sure, but once I latched onto it, there was no mistaking it.

Kerosene.

I switched off my flashlight and the darkness swarmed around me. It was so dense it was almost suffocating, all except for a wan glow coming from a circular hole in the wall to my right, near the ground. I approached cautiously and lowered myself to all fours in order to see through the opening. It was a chute, maybe a dozen feet long. At the far end I could see the hint of the floor and the far wall flickering in the lantern light.

I was getting accustomed to squeezing through tight places like this. I couldn’t help but make a Freudian connection to childbirth, which definitely seemed to fit with the whole scenario based on the way Roman reacted every time I asked about Ban’s mother. There was something of importance there that I would eventually have to figure out, if only for myself and after the fact. I was closing in on him now and we both knew it. This was the start of whatever endgame the Coyote had in store for me.

It was a game I would not lose.

I squirmed through the smooth chute and into the smaller adjoining cave. While the framework had been nature’s doing, the renovations had mankind written all over them. The stalactites and stalagmites had been shattered to jagged nubs by what I assumed to be a sledgehammer and swept somewhere outside of this chamber. A fine coating of the grainy residue glittered on the floor and prodded my hands and knees when I pushed myself up to my feet. I clicked on my flashlight to augment the kerosene lantern sitting on the ground to my right and used it to survey my surroundings.

I cleared the room down the barrel of my Beretta as fast as I possibly could.

There was a sleeping bag against the rounded wall to my left on top of what looked like a makeshift mattress made of a bed sheet stuffed with straw. Both were filthy. There was a small electric stove that had obviously seen better days beside a compact portable generator reminiscent of a lawn mower engine. Lights in little silver domes dangled from the ceiling by eye-hooks, their cords run around the stalactite nubs to an extension cord that trailed down the wall to the generator. There was an old HP inkjet printer behind it. I assumed that must have also been where he plugged in his laptop and police-band scanner and whatever else he used to monitor his tripwire beacons and the comings and goings of law enforcement agents and whatever various details I hadn’t even uncovered yet.

He actually lived somewhere else, though. Or at least he must have until recently. There was no way he could have maintained the charade of his daily life from here. There were no clothes. No shower or bath. He was maintaining a residence somewhere else and I simply hadn’t found it yet. This was just his den. His lair. I could only speculate as to why he had chosen to reveal it to me.

Until I turned around.

My mouth went dry and I had to remind myself to breathe.

Sociopaths tended to keep trophies or talismans they could return to again and again to remind them of the feeling they experienced in that penultimate moment of ecstasy, when they satiated the bloodthirsty demon inside of them. The kind of thing they could hold in their hands, stroke with their fingertips, caress with their lips. Something they could cling to when the demon started to rise from the depths, to drive it back down temporarily, until they were again in a position to give it what it craved.

This was where he kept his talismans, and judging by the looks of it, he’d been coming here for a long, long time. His was a demon as twisted as any I had encountered, but everything around me suggested that it had been tamed. The man was in control of the demon. There were no signs of dissociation, nothing to imply even a momentary loss of control. This was the lair of a man who had embraced his demon. No…

This was the lair of a man who had become his demon.

And it scared the living hell out of me.

I speak of endgames, but there’s nothing even remotely amusing about this to him. This wasn’t a game.

This was his life’s work.

THIRTY-TWO

There were pictures. Hundreds of them. Pinned to a patchwork wall of plywood sheets. Lined up in floor-to-ceiling rows that had to be a good six feet wide. The ones on the left were faded and yellowed Polaroid instant pictures, which metamorphosed into crisper shots with finer detail to digital photographs printed on photo paper and laminated to preserve them. I couldn’t see the subjects of the photographs. Not immediately, anyway. Not until I brushed aside the tufts of hair connected to the desiccated clumps of scalp that had been pinned to them. The majority of the strands were thick and black. Some still bore the luster of life, while others had dried to the brittle consistency of straw. Some were short, others several feet long. A couple dozen were blonde, mostly bottled, others brown or ginger. Others still were completely bald. The skin had shriveled, tightening the follicles and forcing some of the hairs to stand erect.

I really loathed the prospect of brushing the hair of the deceased away from the pictures in order to see them, but I didn’t have much of a choice. Hair itself is composed of dead skin cells and keratin. Even the most beautiful locks are essentially little different than the skin shed from an old man’s feet. They’re just ropes of dead cells clinging to our heads. Evolutionarily speaking, their function is to keep us warm. In the more practical sense, they’re styled to make us look good and attract the opposite sex. You don’t run your fingers through a woman’s hair and marvel at just how silky she managed to make her ropes of dead cells; you marvel at how it bounces with life when she moves, or how stunning she looks when it falls across her eye or sticks to the lipstick at the corner of her mouth. It is a part of her beauty. Her life. And yet these hairs somehow felt dead, as though whatever magic animated them had been rubbed off between the fingers of a killer who took them down from his trophy wall from time to time to stare into the faces of his victims while he caressed their hair and remembered how he felt while he was robbing the world of the promise of lives unfulfilled.

Faces. That was all the pictures showed. Faces, and maybe a little of the shoulders. Mostly taken at night, which caused the flash to wash out the skin tone. Close-ups of men and women alike, lying on their backs on dirt and rocks, their faces speckled and spattered and smeared with blood. Expressions of surprise and terror and pain were forever memorialized on their faces. Most were young, yet some were old enough to be gray. Some mouths were open. Others closed. Some were handsome or beautiful, others plain or downright homely. Some were fat, others gaunt. There was no one physical trait common to all of them, no pattern other than the fact that every one of these people had walked out into the open desert in search of the American Dream and found only a demon waiting for them. And now they would be forever linked together, thanks to this wall where they all now shared a single common trait. Mexicans and Guatemalans and El Salvadorans and Hondurans and Dominicans and Lord only knew how many others.

They were all dead.

I couldn’t bear to look at the wall anymore. I felt tainted by its mere proximity. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder if we as a species wouldn’t be better off if a good pandemic swept through and purged our inherent darkness from the face of the planet.

I had to move the flashlight away. It momentarily illuminated one picture that had been offset from the others. It was larger; a full sheet of photo paper. Printed so recently that the insane amounts of ink required still made the page curl.

Even though I could think of nothing I wanted to do less, I again raised the flashlight—

I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as I could, but the damage was already done. I bit my lip to hold back the explosion of anguish that threatened to wrench loose from my chest. My grip tightened to the point I nearly fired an errant shot into the wall. I was certain I could feel my blood boiling in my veins. It took time to compose myself enough to open my eyes again and view the image with the kind of clinical dispassion I needed to properly do my job.

I recognized the face immediately. Despite the rivulets of blood that had dribbled down the picture from the oblong clump of scalp pinned to it. Despite the fact that the pin had been pressed straight through his face with such force that it had torn the paper. Despite the fresh sheen of crimson glistening on his cheek. Despite it all, I recognized Antone and felt a profound sense of sorrow that in no time at all blossomed into anger. The Coyote was going to pay for what he’d done. I was going to avenge Antone, avenge all of them. This was the kind of evil that could not under any circumstances be allowed to walk the earth for a single second longer.

I turned to my right and saw another display, which, in retrospect, I really should have expected, but wasn’t even remotely prepared to encounter.

If I’d thought the collection of pictures my paternal grandmother had collected and displayed in her bedroom was a shrine, this was the freaking Louvre. There had to be more than fifty pictures and images and newspaper clippings pinned to another sheet of plywood, cobbled together from a dozen scraps. Some were so old they had the texture of parchment. Others were much newer. They’d been fitted together like pieces of a puzzle so that there was no space between them, nor any logical order that I could see, not even chronological.

My heart was beating so hard and fast that the edges of my vision pulsated.

There were photographs of me, color copies of old class and yearbook photos, enlarged and highlighted, going all the way back to my early teens, not long after I first came to live with my grandparents, when I first put down roots. Me with braces. Me in my various hockey jerseys. Me at homecoming, the prom. Me at graduations and parties and on vacations and doing the normal things that people do every day, entirely oblivious to the world around me, to the fact that I was being hunted. They had been drawn on with marker and scraped with pins to create horns growing from my forehead in some, threads sewn through my lips in others. Forked tongues. Black teeth. Various bleeding wounds. But there was one trait that each and every one of them had in common.

My eyes had been scratched out.

Every bit as disturbing were the newspaper articles chronicling my career. My involvement with the task forces that had tracked down the Boxcar Killer, the Delivery Man, and the Drifter. Pictures with me in the background in the field and on the front steps of courthouses. Articles with brief quotes and topical mentions. Printed stills captured from news feeds. All of them plucked out of the ether via the internet by a stalker who never even left the reservation.

I needed to get out of there. It felt like the cave was closing in and the weight of the mountain was about to collapse on me. There wasn’t enough oxygen. The stale air was filled with carbon dioxide; the final breaths of the dead. The ground started to tilt from side to side as I staggered back to the hole in the wall and somehow managed to shimmy through into the main cave. The thudding of my pulse in my temples sounded like laughter in my ears. I wanted to vomit, if only to purge myself of the sensation that true evil was seeping through my pores. Ghostly faces flashed across my vision as I stumbled through the cave and hauled myself up the ledges. Faces I never knew, would never know. The faces of the dead. Faces that may have fit over the bleached skulls sinking into the desert sands or heaped in a hole under a trailer home or in some other pitiful resting place we had yet to find, and, in reality, might never find.

I crawled out into the blinding light, grateful for the sun and the heat, which cleansed me of the dankness and the darkness of that horrible cave. I rolled over onto my rear end, dangled my legs over the edge of the escarpment, and stared off across the seamless Sonoran.

I don’t know how long I sat there with sweat covering every inch of my body. The shadow of the mountain behind me eventually started to creep down through the foothills below me. Finally, I stood and picked my way down the cliff and turned to stand before it. The design in Antone’s blood looked like a K without the upper of the two diagonal lines, but that wasn’t what it was, was it? I turned my head one way, then the other. I felt inadequate, enraged, but mostly I simply felt exhausted. Deflated.

Defeated.

There was something I was missing. Something I was too blind to see. Something staring me right in the face.

The eyes.

There was something oddly familiar about him, but I couldn’t quite place it.

He had scratched out my eyes.

You have your father’s eyes.

Scratched out my eyes in every single one of the pictures.

It’s the eyes. You guys have the exact same eyes.

Just my eyes, not those of his victims.

I couldn’t help but see the physical similarities between us, the parallels between our lives.

It wasn’t just the eyes. It was my eyes.

His eyes.

I started to run.