Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

THIRTY-THREE

It was full-on dark by the time I slewed from the gravel road and rocketed down Roman’s driveway. His house grew larger and larger in my headlights until I stomped the brakes, skidded sideways to a halt, and leapt from the car. I beat the cloud of dust to the porch, lowered my shoulder just as the front door opened a crack, and barreled right through. Roman hit the floor with a loud thump. The door ricocheted from his feet. I swatted it aside and grabbed him by the shirt before his mind caught up with the situation. I hauled him to his feet, whirled, and slammed him against the wall. Framed pictures fell from the walls down the hallway to my right, shattering on the floor with the impact. I didn’t give a damn. This entire godforsaken house could burn to the ground for all I cared.

I stared directly into Roman’s eyes when he opened them. I stared long and hard. I scrutinized everything from the color of the irises to the shape formed by the lids and the pattern of vessels and the color of the sclera. I watched comprehension dawn on his face, followed quickly by panic, then, finally, resignation. I read all of this while staring directly into eyes that may have been similar to mine, but when it came right down to it, were clearly different than my fathers, than mine. Than Ban’s.

I released Roman’s shirt. He slid down the wall and crumpled to the floor. He looked old in a way he hadn’t before, as though it had been the perpetuation of one lie that had formed the foundation for so many others. And now the whole house of cards was falling down on top of him.

The dust snuck through the front door like an unwelcome guest and settled onto the furniture and the floor. I felt the same heaviness and had to collapse onto the arm of the La-Z-Boy. I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. I was exhausted, physically and emotionally drained.

“What was her name?” I asked in little more than a whisper.

“Carmen,” he said. “Carmen Chona.”

When he looked up at me there were tears in his eyes. The expression on his face spoke of sadness and love, and something I couldn’t quite interpret. Something like failure. Or maybe regret.

“Did you tell him?”

“Who? Ban?” He shook his head and looked past me. The dust that had settled on his hair made him look older still. “Pass me that beer, would you?”

I grabbed the bottle of Coors Light from the table behind me and handed it to him. He nodded his thanks, tipped it back, and drank everything but the foam, which he swirled around at the bottom.

I waited him out.

“He’s a smart kid. He figured it out. But that didn’t change the fact that he was my son.” I nodded. There was a fire in his eyes that gave truth to his words. This was a man who loved his son unconditionally, regardless of the nature of their biological bond. “I think he was maybe fourteen when he figured it out. It was a few more years before he said anything to me, but by then I’m pretty sure he already had all the answers he needed.” He sighed and finished off the foam. “Whatever you may think of me…I’ve always tried to do right by him. I don’t expect you to understand. He’s my son and there’s nothing on this earth that I wouldn’t do for him.”

“Even cover up the murders of so many innocent people?”

Roman turned away. He whispered something that sounded like “None of them was innocent.”

“What happened to his mother?”

“She died when he was three. Hit by a car while walking on the side of the road. Driver was doing fifty. The skid marks didn’t even start until after the point of impact. Bumper, windshield, trunk, road. She was pretty much unidentifiable when I was asked to ID her.”

I gleaned the truth from his face.

“She stepped out in front of the car.”

A wistful smile, but there was no happiness in it. Only pain.

“The driver said he never even had a chance to brake. She just walked right out in front of him. Just driving along and then all of a sudden she was right there. Facing him. Eyes closed. A faint smile on her lips. Then shattered glass and blood. So much blood. Police said the evidence supported his story.”

“And what do you think?”

He stared down into his bottle for a long time before he finally spoke.

“He just left her, you know? Just left her like that. Left me…”

“What are you talking about?”

“Rafael. Your father. He just left us both. Up and joined the Air Force and none of us ever heard from him again. Stole off in the middle of the night. Like a coward.”

“My father was no coward.” I could feel the heat rising under my collar, but at the same time, I had seen Ban’s eyes and knew there was truth to the story, if not Roman’s interpretation of it. “He took his responsibilities seriously. He never—never—would have left had he known—”

“That she was pregnant?” Roman stood and walked to the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open and close as I stared blankly at the wall in front of me, now cracked in the shape of the man I had slammed up against it. He handed me a beer before he again sat down on the floor and tipped his back. The bottle was cold in my hand. I just sat there holding it, uncertain exactly what to do with it. I eventually settled on resting it against my aching knuckles. “Of course he didn’t know she was pregnant. And Carmen didn’t tell him. She didn’t want him to abandon his dream and return to her out of some misguided sense of duty. She wanted him to come back because of her.”

“Why didn’t she go with him? You said they were going to get married.”

He stared at me with a genuine expression of confusion.

“You still don’t get it, do you? This isn’t just some housing development out here, some suburb misplaced in the desert. This is our home. Our parents lived here, and theirs before them, going back countless generations. There are traditions to uphold, beliefs that need to be passed on so they aren’t forgotten. The world out there?” He made a wide sweeping gesture with his arm. “It has no i:bdag. No heart. It is a world devoted to greed and ambition and the usurpation of the individual. It is a giant bee hive where the drones don’t even seem to recognize the fact that they’re building a giant hive for a ruling class that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them, all while destroying the traditions of the land—the very land itself—in the process. Of course she didn’t leave. Regardless of whatever plans she and Raffi might have made, when it came time to actually do it, there was no way she could. Not for her child. Not for her heart. And in the end, not even for her life.”

“But you were here for her.”

He chuckled, but there was no humor in it.

“Yeah…I was here.” He drew a long swill that emptied half the bottle. “I think she loved me, too. In her own way. I wasn’t Raffi. But I was here. And I loved her. With all of my heart. I loved her. Maybe a part of it was because I initially felt obligated to do what my brother didn’t. To right his wrong. Maybe at first, anyway. But it wasn’t long before there were genuine feelings. I loved her and I loved her child. My child. Ban. My little coyote.”

“Coyote?”

“Ban’s O’odham for coyote. Carmen chose that name because the night Raffi left, she sat alone in the desert crying while coyotes bayed at the moon all around her. She thought it was an omen. More of a self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess.”

“Why’d she do it?”

“Kill herself? Haven’t you figured it out yet? Aren’t you supposed to be the big shot investigator? She killed herself because of you.”

I sat stunned for a long moment.

“Everything changed between us when Carmen heard Raffi had another child. Another life with another woman. I never tried to be Raffi. I couldn’t replace him. I didn’t want to replace him. I wanted my own family…and for a while…I had it.” He released a long sigh. “Carmen was beautiful—the most beautiful woman in the world—but there was always a sadness to her. Something deep down. A hole she couldn’t quite seem to fill. I think she must have filled it with Raffi. Or at least thought she had. I guess I couldn’t fill it. Not for lack of trying. Hell, not even her own child could fill it. She was just one of those people always meant to burn really hot, but really fast.”

“Ban blames me for her death. You both blame me.”

“Can you fault him for that? Here he was, orphaned by his mother, raised by a father who wasn’t his father by nature, and forced to watch all of those pictures of your successes accumulate on his grandmother’s wall while he would never enjoy any of the same opportunities. He did the very best with what he was given. He breezed through school, earned his degree, and joined with Homeland Security to protect and patrol his ancestral land. It was noble and it was good, but many of our people viewed it as selling his soul to the enemy. He was shunned everywhere he went. And on top of it all, you had to go and one-up him every step of the way. He earned his associate’s; you got your bachelor’s. Mechanical engineering, if you can believe that. He had a mind for that kind of thing. But then nine-eleven happened and Gatekeeper closed down the established migrant routes and they started flooding across our land. All of them potential terrorists, you know? So he signed on with the Border Patrol. And you had to show him up again by joining the FBI. And to top it all off, the very same week he made one of the largest drug busts in history and was starting to catch the eye of the DEA, you go and get your face in every newspaper across the country by helping to take down the Delivery Man. I think that was what did it for him. In his mind, you guys were in a competition that not only could he never win, but one in which you would never even acknowledge the fact that he was competing against you.”

He looked down at his now-empty bottle for nearly a full minute before he continued. “So he just quit. His job. His life. Everything. One day, it was all over. I could see the change in him, but it was a long time before I started to understand what had happened, why he had changed so suddenly. He had always been like his mother. He had that hole inside of him, too. I think he thought he could fill it with all of his accomplishments, with the way he thought people in the community would look at him. I guess he ended up filling it with anger. Hatred. And you personified everything that was wrong with his life and his world. His biological father was dead by then. We all knew that. He couldn’t even track him down and try to get the answers he needed. And that left only you. Despite everything I had done for him. Despite the fact that I had assumed the role of father when no one else wanted to job. I chose him. But it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. Not for his mother. And not for him.”

His cheeks glistened with tears when he looked up at me. The expression on his face was one of unadulterated anger, though. I was in no mood to allow him his indulgences. I wasn’t about to let him brush the responsibility off on me. I refused. He was Ban’s father. By birth or by choice. It made no difference. He needed to accept that whether intentionally or not, he had helped create a monster.

“At what point did you learn he was killing people?”

“All you had to do was look us up. Come down here and show him that he wasn’t alone, that you didn’t think you were better than him, that you were—”

“Don’t try to pin this on me.”

“—brothers.”

“You knew he was killing people and did nothing to stop it. That makes you every bit as guilty in my eyes.”

“Your eyes…”

“This has to end, Roman. You have to—”

“I know,” he whispered.

“Tell me where he is.”

“I don’t know where he is.” He blinked away whatever thoughts had been distracting him, then looked up me with an expression that I easily interpreted as sincerity. “I don’t know where he is.”

“But you know where he’d go if he was out of options, don’t you? Not that old abandoned trailer. Someplace where nobody would think to look for him. Someplace no one else knows about.”

He nodded, closed his eyes, then hurled his bottle against the wall. Shards of brown glass shot in every direction. A gob of foam rolled down the wall.

“Where can I find him, Roman.”

“There’s another trailer.” His voice became progressively softer as he spoke. “At the back of the property. By the wash. Used to belong to my mother’s brother before he passed. Long time ago now. Long time ago…”

“The trailer, Roman. Where exactly…?”

But he was already gone, vanished inside of himself, or perhaps into another place and time altogether as I had seen him do before. A part of me wanted to hurt him even more, to vent my frustrations on him, but I realized that there was nothing I could do to hurt him more than I was already going to.

I was going to kill his son.

There was no other way I could see this playing out.

I was going to kill the Coyote.

I was going to kill my brother.

THIRTY-FOUR

My patience was spent. I was pissed off and frustrated and tired of being manipulated. I didn’t care about the desert and I most certainly didn’t care about the pool car as I drove away from the house across the open gravel and sand. If there was a road, I didn’t see it. Then again, I didn’t look too hard either. All of the deaths wore heavily on me. They always did. I think that was what allowed me to do what I did. Without that personal impetus, I can’t imagine what wells of motivation an investigator draws from in order to follow the trails of blood and suffering so many sociopaths leave in their wake. This one drove me harder than I’d ever been driven before, though. Antone’s death was weighing on my conscience. I don’t believe it was merely the fact that I had known and liked him that caused his death to trouble me so much. Maybe it was because after enduring so much loss and heartache, he’d been trying to combat the bad guys within the constraints of the system, by the rules, only to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. A freak stroke of bad luck. My old nemesis coincidence. Whatever the case, something was nagging at me like the sound of footsteps behind me, but every time I turned around, there was no one there.

I found the trailer pretty much right where Roman said it would be. It made the previous one look positively futuristic by comparison. Like he said, this one had been set up right beside the wash. So close, in fact, that the bank had eroded out from beneath it. Either that or someone had dug such a large hole beneath it they had nearly toppled the trailer, which was a line of thought I had no intention of pursuing at the moment. Even from a distance, I could tell the trailer was leaning away from me.

I parked in front of it and climbed out of the car. I left the headlights on and directed at the dilapidated single-wide. I added my Maglite to the cause and drew my Beretta.

A coyote yipped and howled in the distance. Maybe just over the rise on the other side of the mesquite-lined gully. The wind rose with a scream, pelting the back side of the trailer with grains of sand that sounded like buckshot. I figured that was probably the reason for the lack of paint on the mobile home. It was just plain gray wood and cracked windows patched with duct tape and sealed behind a layer of dust and grime.

Red flagstones had been stacked in front of the door to form uneven stairs. Tumbleweeds clogged the skirt, a crosshatched pattern of thin wooden slats that had proved no match for whatever animals had tunneled under it and, in spots, straight through it. The way the trailer canted toward the dry streambed made it impossible for the front door to close in its frame. Which also meant there was no way to lock it. I’d caught so few breaks up to this point that I was almost surprised at my good fortune. Of course, all it saved me was a little wear and tear on my leg from kicking in a door a good solid knock would probably topple. It was held closed by a bungee cord stretched between the door knob and what looked like the handle from a kitchen cabinet that had been screwed onto the exterior.

I undid the cord and drew the door open. The smell that greeted me was one of tobacco smoke, sour sweat, dust, and rotting wood. The shadows fled from the flashlight as I ascended the uneven rocks and entered. Even my softest tread made it sound like I was stomping on the hollow floor. The carpet was so old that there was nothing left of the actual knap, only the crunchy matrix through which it had been sewn. It had pulled away from the far wall, due in large measure to the transverse ridge that bisected the main room where the settling of the trailer caused it to break its own back. The lone item of furniture was a threadbare couch that looked like it had spent more time outside than in. It had slid down the slope to rest against the far wall.

The wind roared and again assailed the wall opposite me with sand. The entire trailer shuddered with the gust. Dust shivered loose from the ill-fitting, yellowed acoustic ceiling tiles and sparkled in my light, lending an element of unreality to my already surreal surroundings. It was almost as though I had stepped across some magical threshold from the rational world I knew and loved into another reality entirely. There was something about this place that made me uncomfortable on a primal level.

The windows had been boarded over from the inside and painted bone-white to match the walls. Nothing hung from them. There were no pictures or speakers or bookshelves or plants or knickknacks. Only the flat white walls that served as a canvas for a tableau of an entirely different sort than the one in the cave, but somehow nearly as unsettling. There were stylized smiley faces painted on the walls. Every square inch, covered with variations of smiley faces. Some were red. Others were black or gold or brown. All of them had similar slanted eyes and that broad arched grin. Some had eyebrows, others nearly full circles for the heads. Some had what I took to be upward-curving mustaches, others various markings that seemed at odds with the overall motif. There were literally thousands of them, painted on every available surface, one on top of the other. All of them nearly the full height of the walls. There were some sections where it looked like he had simply practiced painting circles, over and over and over again until they were just right.

My first impression was that he’d made himself a modern cave similar to the ones through which I had been crawling; an enclosed space with walls covered with primitive artwork. And maybe that had been his intention, but it had the overwhelming sense of incompleteness, of a work abandoned before it was finished. It was the same sense I got from the smiley faces themselves, or perhaps because of them. There was just something inherently inconsistent about the nature of the designs. I found it hard to believe that anyone with enough talent to paint nearly perfect circles would content himself with such childish and meaningless expressions of his creativity.

I advanced deeper into the house. There were gaps where appliances had once been and the kitchen cupboards hung slightly open with the will of gravity. The counters were covered with dust. There was a black trash bag on the floor that smelled of the Dumpster behind a Taco Bell, crawling with black flies so fat I doubted they were capable of flight anymore.

Another gust of wind shook the entire structure. The sand and gravel sounded like hailstones.

The bathroom to my right smelled like an outhouse. The buzzing racket of flies sounded hollow, as though they were swarming somewhere beneath the sink, or possibly under the lid of the toilet. All of the walls in the hallway were painted in the same fashion as the living room, variations on the theme anyway. Even the master bedroom was white and covered with smiley faces, although it was obvious these hadn’t been painted with a brush like the others had. I recognized the distinct paw pad marks. It was in this room that he taught himself to paint with the severed limb of a coyote. I shuddered at the thought of him unwrapping the stiff leg from a bundle of cellophane, turning it over and over in his hands, and then dipping it into the red paint for the first time, the charge causing the goose bumps to rise all over his body.

There was a military surplus cot with a large footlocker overflowing with clothes in the middle of the room. This was where he’d been living, all right. But there was nothing here that offered any sort of clue as to where he was now. At least not that I had found.

Yet.

I turned around and headed back into the living room. That was where all of this had started, where one day he had boarded over the windows, painted the walls, and begun creating his modern-day cave. Another Hohokam allusion? It certainly fit the established pattern, but why go to such lengths to actualize a small portion of a myth? It was only a story, after all, a story that eventually led to a mischievous creator god.

Don’t be too quick to lay this at the feet of I’itoi. There are many gods of mischief out here in the desert.

A creaking sound behind me.

I spun around, my light tracing the wall as I aligned it with my pistol and sighted down the open front door—

The wind wailed and sand clattered.

An animal stood before me, its front haunches inside the trailer, its back legs on the makeshift stairs. Its eyes reflected my light like twin moons. One ear stood straight up while the other sagged against its cheek. Its gray fur was mangy and matted and the crescents of its ribs showed. It just stood there, looking right at me, its tongue lolling from its mouth.

Another gust rattled the trailer and it disappeared back into the night again.

I stared after it for a long moment before I finally turned around once more. As before, my beam swept across the smiley faces, seemingly animating them like a zoetrope. I was already attempting to mentally catalogue the differences from one face to the next when my brain caught up with my eyes.

I turned again, this time swinging my light across the opposite wall. I did it again. Faster. Watching one face metamorphose into another and another. I did it again. And again and again and again.

“Son of a bitch,” I whispered.

It had been right in front of me the entire time.

I sprinted out the front door, cleared the stairs, and raced to my car. The moment I was in the driver’s seat I grabbed my laptop, launched my digital photo manipulation program, and imported the pictures from the various crime scenes. My feet tapped restlessly on the floorboards while I worked. I needed to know for sure. I couldn’t afford to go running off on another tangent. I found the clearest example of each smiley face, the winking face, and the armless K. I scaled and resized them and converted them into semi-transparent masks that allowed me to separate the designs themselves from the rocks upon which they’d been painted in the blood of the Coyote’s victims. I arranged them in chronological order.

Then I took all five and placed them one on top of the other.

It was a mess, but I was getting closer.

I highlighted each mask in turn and started to rotate them in various directions.

Almost. I could positively feel the tumblers falling into place. I had it now.

I had him.

More rotation.

Closer still.

And then I saw it take form in front of me. I could see the moves I needed to make like a chess master surveying his board and recognizing there was no way his strategy could fail.

I made the final moves and held the screen up before me.

I knew where he was.

Ban.

The Coyote.

My Elder Brother.

I’itoi, that mischievous trickster god.

The Man in the Maze.