Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

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DAY 4

tash gi’ik

wia

 

Sir Francis Galton, first cousin of Charles Darwin, was the first to study the heritance of behavioral traits and is credited with launching the behavioral genetics movement, from which came the first twin studies and the resultant nature vs. nurture debates that will undoubtedly be waged until the end of time. It is an extension of this science that led to the development of Project Genome, which is dedicated to the understanding and advancement of humanity as a species. Conversely, from this science was derived the concept of eugenics and, by extension, Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. If that in itself isn’t an argument for Team Nurture, then I don’t know what is.

THIRTY-FIVE

Bobquivari District

Tohono O’odham Nation

Arizona

September 12th

I tried to recall Antone’s words as I sped across the desert, my signal jammer making me invisible to the Oscars.

That mountain over there. Kind of looks a little like a top hat? That’s Baboquivari. Waw Kiwulik in our native tongue. It is the most sacred of all places to our people.

There’s a cave below the peak. That’s where I’itoi lives. He’s our mischievous creator god. When the world was first born, he led the Hohokam, from whom we descended, up from the underworld and to the surface. His home is within that cave, deep in the heart of a maze. Visitors to the cave must bring him an offering to guarantee their safe return.

I watched the eastern horizon as the Baboquivari Mountains grew taller and taller. It wasn’t long before I identified the top hat of Mt. Baboquivari. I could see headlights far in the distance to both the north and the south, Border Patrol agents performing their nightly routines. Although judging by the fact that I could actually see them, there had to still be more of them out here than usual because of the death of Agent Matthews. Considering I didn’t want to draw any unwanted attention, I killed my lights and navigated the arrow-straight roads by starlight until the rising winds eventually filled the air with sand and I had no other choice but to turn them back on. At least I was comfortable in the knowledge that if I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. And keeping the Blackhawks in the air during such a ferocious sandstorm was an unnecessary risk. The only problem was that I could no longer see the peak. Dead reckoning was going to have to suffice.

The radio chatter was filled with complaints about the storm and jokes about the poor mechanics who would get to service all of the vehicles in the morning. It sounded like storms like this one cropped up out of the blue from time to time, but rarely tended to last for more than a few hours. Most of the agents were content to hunker down and ride it out, confident that whatever illegals were out there would no doubt be doing the exact same thing. Dispatch continued to coordinate the agents to the west along the I-85 corridor where the sandstorm had yet to hit in earnest. I would have preferred a few hours of sleep in my back seat and a hot cup of coffee upon waking, but I had a job to do. A job that only I could do.

I’itoi. My own Elder Brother. Christ. Only now was I beginning to internalize that fact. Ban—the Coyote—was the genetic expression of half of my father. Half of me. My own mirror image, to some degree. Me. Not me. Bizarro me. Similar life paths, but different choices at some of the crucial forks along the way.

I was at a disadvantage. He knew me far better than I knew him. I thought about his overt hostility the night we first met. The expression on his face had been more than anger and distrust for a federal agent on his native land; it had been directed at me specifically. And he had mocked me without me even recognizing it.

Without a body, you can’t fix time of death. So there’s no way you can pinpoint a date, let alone a time for which an alibi would be necessary.

What do you know about the body? I had asked.

Only that there wasn’t one.

And what do you think might have happened to it?

A lot of things can happen out here in the desert. Could have been a coyote dragged it off…

I hadn’t even been able to recognize his cleverness, which must have made him absolutely furious. Like Roman said, maybe all of this could have been averted had I tracked Ban down and acknowledged him earlier in his life and become something resembling a brother rather than a rival for the affection of a long-deceased father and the cause of the death of a woman I never even knew existed. Maybe. I wasn’t willing to carry that cross, though. We all have to live with the choices we make. I couldn’t change mine, so there was no point in dwelling on them now. I still had one last chance to acknowledge Ban, if that was really what he wanted, and I had every intention of doing just that.

And then I would have the opportunity to mourn him, although I doubted he’d take much solace in that fact. Fortunately, I simply didn’t care. Not about him, anyway. Someone still had to speak for his victims since he’d robbed them of their voices.

I listened to agents running down UDAs in their cars and on foot and wondered if those immigrants understood just how lucky they were to still be alive out here in the desert with the heat and the Coyote. And I thought about the Tohono O’odham, living in the middle of a war zone where the battles were waged twenty-four hours a day and few people outside of their immediate vicinity were even aware of their struggles. Even I had scoffed at Agent Randall when he pointed it out. I remembered what Antone said in his quote from the newspaper on the wall in his bedroom. The entire country needed to be made aware of the plight of the people on this reservation. The public needed to know about all of the migrants dying out here under the blazing sun while simply searching for the dream we all took for granted. This corridor of death needed to be closed down before things got even more out of hand. Before more drugs could be funneled through here and into the hands of our children. Let the big corporations with their bottomless reserves and slick lobbyists find another way to supplement their largely illegal and woefully underpaid work forces. There were too many problems to make them go away by merely sweeping them under the rug that was my ancestral reservation.

The mountains offered some protection from the wind as I neared, but only a little. At least now I could occasionally see their silhouettes through the sand, which had to have been so high up into the atmosphere as to be visible from space. I tried not to dwell on the fact that asphyxiation was the primary cause of death during a sandstorm, as I’m sure I’ve pointed out, but it bears repeating now that I was preparing to climb out of my car to brave one. I had to focus on the positives. Of all the ways to die, I’d heard that drowning was probably one of the most peaceful, although I did question the validity of whatever survey gathered those results. Most people I knew who nearly drowned tended not to have too many good things to say about the experience.

I had to cut straight through the open desert to get from the drag I had thought would lead me there to an actual road that wended up through the foothills toward the peak. I crossed over a dry creek lined with what looked like massive ghostly cottonwoods through the dust and then through fields packed with so many palo verdes I couldn’t even see a lone patch of bare ground. When I eventually emerged into a stretch of spotted shrubs and cacti again, I found myself nearing the end of the road. It widened into a parking lot of sorts. I assumed the sign nailed to the split-rail fence marked a trailhead, but it had been peppered by so much buckshot that it was impossible to tell for sure.

I rolled to a stop and parked. The windshield wipers flapped back and forth, drawing dirty arcs through the dust. I released a long sigh as I stared uphill beyond the range of my headlights. Saguaros and ocotillos materialized from the blowing sand only to vanish again. Just when I thought I had a handle on the topography and the route I was going to take, the wind shifted and completely altered my perception of the terrain. I was just going to have to trust my instincts.

I grabbed my laptop, looked at the Man in the Maze pattern one last time, then opened the Landsat files I had downloaded from the campus library. With the way the wind and the sand obscured my view, the three-dimensional elevation map wasn’t going to do me a whole lot of good. Instead, I concentrated on the sonographic and magnetometric readouts. As with the majority of the mountains in the range, this one had several distinct subterranean features. One was larger than the others, but it was lower down and, if I was correct, the opening would be clearly visible from this lot under better conditions. If I were to interpret the myth literally, I was looking for something as close to within the peak itself as I could find. In my mind, that meant I needed to look higher. Unfortunately, that also meant greater exposure to someone coming and going and a higher probability of accidental discovery. I took that into consideration as I pondered the remaining two locations. Both were on the eastern slope, which meant that unless I wanted to backtrack to the highway and waste hours driving in from the other side, I had a decent hike ahead of me. One cave was significantly larger than the other, but that didn’t exclude the possibility that the smaller one could be modified like the ones at the crime scenes had been.

Modified.

That was the key.

I examined the magnetometer readings, but both caves were enclosed within substrates of nearly identical density and mineral composition. One would be no easier to modify than the other. I overlaid the sonographic images and studied their shapes, which were little more than vague outlines. The only real difference was that one appeared to be more circular than the other. I zoomed in on the center. The resolution was grainy and pixelated and yet it still almost…almost looked like there were other densities in there. Nothing as solid as rock, but something nonetheless. Maybe I was just seeing what I wanted to see, or maybe, just maybe, I had found exactly what I was looking for.

There was only one way to find out for sure.

I donned my ball cap and windbreaker, killed off the bottle of water in the console cup holder and pocketed two more, and drew my Beretta and Maglite. I used the charger cord from my phone to tie the light to the side of the barrel in order to keep one hand free and the sightline unobstructed at the same time. I jacked the slide to make sure it still slid freely, grabbed two spare clips from the glove compartment, and tucked my cell phone into my pocket. I shut off the engine and sat there a moment longer, running through a mental checklist to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything that might help save my skin. I focused on slowing my heartbeat, on breathing slowly in and out.

A gust of wind struck the car with enough force to rock it on its suspension. It sounded like the sand pitted the glass.

I pulled the handle and the wind ripped the door from my grasp and hammered it against its hinge. I had to throw my full weight into it to force it closed. Sand and debris blew sideways through the headlights, limiting their range and effectiveness, but I was still grateful for even that little illumination. The sand pelting my jacket sounded like rain on an umbrella, only I can’t recall rain ever smacking the side of my face and ear so hard I could feel it peeling off the top layer of skin.

I lowered my head in an effort to use the brim of the cap to shield my eyes and struck off away from the car. I found the trail without much effort and figured I’d try to follow it as long as possible. Eventually I was going to have to cross the dark ridge high above me. I assumed this path led either to a good vantage point from which to take pictures of the famous peak or to the peak itself. Whatever the case, I was counting on it to get me high enough that I could pick my way eastward between peaks.

I had to remind myself that my brother—that the Coyote—had been one step ahead of me the entire time. It was safest to assume that he had anticipated my choice of routes. Hell, for all I knew he could be watching me through the storm or otherwise monitoring my progress by other electronic means. Regardless, I was confident he knew I was coming and would be ready and waiting for me.

Coyote is the master of deception.

I needed to remember that more than anything else. After all, the Coyote fancied himself a mischievous creator god.

Good thing bringing down men who thought themselves gods was my specialty.

THIRTY-SIX

Ever been struck by a chunk of cactus hurled by a sixty mile-an-hour wind? It feels pretty much like you’d imagine. Worse still is the pain of prying it back out. Those needles may look straight to the naked eye, but I’m convinced they’re covered with little barbed hooks that latch into your flesh and make them next to impossible to excise. It could have been worse though. The wind could have whipped up a rattler and slung it at me instead.

Don’t let anyone tell you I don’t know how to keep things in perspective.

Navigating the path was harder than I thought it would be. The wind did its best to shove me into the bushes and cacti and down hills slick with talus and over the edge of various precipices. Not to mention the fact that the sand it kept perpetually airborne made it nearly impossible to see. It also helped mask whatever subtle sounds lurked beneath it, and those were definitely the ones that were in my best interests to hear. It screamed through the valleys with an almost human voice, and, from time to time, made a high-pitched sound that reminded me of a horse whinnying. I slid the sleeve of my jacket over my entire hand and the majority of the pistol to keep any grit from getting inside and screwing with the firing mechanism. And I couldn’t have that. I had a pretty good hunch I was going to need to use it.

I watched the ground for sign, knowing full well the wind would have already erased it, but I couldn’t afford to take anything for granted. A footprint could potentially remain intact in the lee of a bush or a large rock. A bullet dropped while hastily attempting to load a gun would pretty much stay right where it landed. And heaven forbid I step down into a snake hole. There was no way I could scrutinize everything around me with one measly little light, especially since I was forced to watch my own tail at the same time.

The ground grew steeper and more treacherous. I didn’t know how far I had come or how high I had ascended. My headlights had faded into the storm behind me long ago, and only occasionally was I able to glimpse Baboquivari Peak. I had to be nearing the top. At least I thought so anyway. Soon enough I was going to have to decide whether I was going to follow the trail, which was slowly starting to steer me to the right, or strike off away from it and utilize one of the valleys to cross over and onto the eastern slope. I had pretty much decided I was going to continue on the path for a little while longer when I glanced up and to my left.

My instincts kicked in and I hit the ground on my belly. I rolled to my left behind I boulder and leaned cautiously around the side to direct the beam at what I had seen from the corner of my eye.

It took me a few seconds to find it again. Up the hill along what almost looked like a narrow, cactus-lined animal trail I might otherwise have walked right past under the storm, maybe even under normal conditions. I had at first thought someone had been standing there, but as my brain sorted through the mental snapshot, I realized it couldn’t have been. Not unless he was inhumanly thin and lacking things like organs and skin. My beam illuminated a thin post about four feet tall, on the top of which a canine skull had been fitted through the foramen magnum, the hole at the base of the occipital bone where the spinal cord connects to the brain. The skull drifted in and out of the blowing sand as I watched. It turned one way and then the other on the wind as though shaking its head at me.

I waited for several more minutes before I risked rising to a crouch and darting uphill behind another boulder that offered a better view. The pike had been staked into the crevice between two rocks, which held it tightly enough to defy the wind. A counterclockwise spiral design had been painted onto the dead animal’s forehead. The majority of the teeth were intact, but it was apparent, even from a distance, that this skull had been sitting out under the sun for a long time.

I suppose I should have expected something like this. Maybe not the red-carpet treatment, but considering the Coyote’s flair for the dramatic and questionable sense of humor, I really should have been prepared for some sort of macabre trail marker. We both knew how and where this had to end. No sense postponing the inevitable.

While the display had been left here to help me identify the proper route, it also served to let me know that had Ban wanted to kill me right here and now, he probably could have. Instead, he wanted to take this thing all the way to the end. I’m sure he’d fantasized about this scenario so many times that it had become almost an actualization of all of his hopes and dreams, of his very life, which meant that he had a very specific denouement in mind, one he’d gone to great lengths to plan. I tried to put myself in his shoes, to enter the mind of a sociopath whose brain undoubtedly worked in a similar fashion to my own. It wasn’t as hard as I wish it had been.

It wasn’t just me he hated. He hated himself. For allowing himself to be bested in life, for losing a competition against an opponent who had no idea he was competing; for his perceived sense of self-worth, which he derived from the abandonment first by one parent, and then the other. In his mind, neither of them had cared about him. His biological father had found himself a better wife and had fathered himself a better son. His mother decided she’d rather step out in front of a car than live another day with him. They had seen it in him, this inevitable failure, this culmination of all of his shortcomings. They had recognized that he would never be good enough, that no matter how hard he tried he would never be worth anything. But he had tried all the same. He had pushed himself as hard as he could to prove them wrong, if only in his own eyes.

And there I was, seemingly one-upping every little thing he did. I was the reason he would never be able to be proud of his own accomplishments. I was the son his father had wanted. I was the reason his mother was dead. I was the source of all of his problems. We shared the same genetic material, but I had utilized mine to greater advantage. I was just like him, only better. The version of himself he wished he could be. The version of himself that had been given every opportunity he had been denied. And there was only one way to prove he was better than me. He needed to beat me, head-to-head, in a competition of which we were both aware. And he needed to do so in convincing fashion on a stage for the whole world to see.

I found another coyote skull staked to a pike about a quarter of a mile up the slope and slightly to the north, in the mouth of an arroyo, which at least spared me from the brunt of the wind for a while. The walls weren’t especially high, nor was the passage particularly steep. It gave me the opportunity to rub the grit from my eyes and lubricate them with tears, if only a little. I didn’t realize how uncomfortable even the unconscious act of blinking had become.

There was a lone saguaro ahead of me, a perfect pitchfork framed against the distant outlet of the wash. A hunched shape rested on the ground in front of it. I could only see its outline, but I could definitely see the long hairs whipping away from it on the breeze. My first thought was that Ban was trying to trick me by playing dead, or perhaps he had even done the deed himself, but I quickly dismissed it. The shape was too large to belong to a woman either, to a human being for that matter. It wasn’t until I was nearly on top of it that I recognized what it was.

A horse.

A slender mare the color of the desert sand, an almost rusty-brown. The wind tousled its mane and tail. I remembered hearing what sounded like a whinnying horse, but at the time had blamed it on the wind. It had been alive then, before its throat had been slit from one side to the other in a ragged, serrated seam, right to left, splashing buckets of blood onto the ground, more even than the greedy desert could absorb. My feet squished in the mud as I crept closer, sweeping my light from one side of the arroyo to the other before zeroing in on the carcass. Remnants of fresh vegetables were scattered around its head and spattered with crimson. The thought of Ban offering the horse the treats and then nearly decapitating it caused me to shiver involuntarily. There was something almost inhuman about the act. I was happy enough to leave that line of thought behind when my flashlight reflected from metal on the far side of the body, partially concealed behind the enormous cactus.

I’ll cop to my prejudice. When Roman said Ban had earned a two-year degree in mechanical engineering, I kind of dismissed it as a fancy way of saying he had learned to be a grease monkey. Kind of like a custodial or a domestic engineer, you know? The contraption upon which I now stared might have been ugly and unwieldy, but the genius of its design was unmistakable. I had never seen anything quite like it. Thanks to growing up an Air Force brat, I had a rudimentary understanding of how engines worked. There was a certain irony in retrofitting twin engines to a horse’s saddle that would have been comical under other circumstances. Each unit reminded me of a garbage disposal with four intake valves in a ring formation on the forward end and a drive shaft on the back. Both were fueled by portable propane tanks small enough to be holstered on the saddle, their pressure control knobs within easy reach of the rider.

If I understood the design correctly, the propane served to create both heat and pressure on the power pistons in the piston shafts. The force of the air driven into the intake valves by the horse’s momentum would drive the displacer pistons. The cooler air would then meet with the heated air, creating a miniature pressure front. Working in tandem, the two pistons would compress the pressurized air and displaced it laterally to turn the drive shafts on either side of the horse’s flanks. The shafts themselves had been fitted with a series of chrome exhaust pipes that looked like they could have been ripped right off of a muscle car. Each pipe had been retrofitted with an array of miniature fans, which, when turned by the drive shaft, amplified the force with which the pressurized air was expelled from the pipes and channeled it across the ground behind the horse. It was essentially what I had theorized. A leaf blower. Only one that ran without electricity or the stink of petrol fumes and didn’t emit a black cloud of exhaust. And it operated so quietly that I was almost shocked to see that the engines were still running. Without the force of the motion-induced airflow, it was only operating at a fraction of its potential, but that was more than enough to blow the sand a good ten feet across the wash.

I assumed the straps tethered to the back of the saddle were to tie down cargo, or, more specifically, the bodies of his victims.

The fact that he had dispatched the horse and left his means of covering his tracks behind was a giant neon sign that told me he had no intention of trying to escape. Either he killed me and waited for the police or the FBI or the Border Patrol to find my abandoned Crown Vic and ultimately arrest him and create a media circus, or I killed him.

I didn’t like having my options dictated to me, but I couldn’t waste any energy thinking about that now. I needed to remain focused on my surroundings if I was going to get out of this alive. And, believe me, I had every intention of doing just that.

I left the horse behind and continued eastward until I found another marker situated in the egress of the arroyo, where it began its steep journey down the red rock steppes toward the desert once more. I bumped the skull with my shoulder as I passed, causing it to swing in a circle.

The wind swatted me from the side the second I cleared cover, nearly knocking me from my feet. I turned into it and shielded my eyes with my free hand. Either I’d already forgotten how bad the storm was or it had gotten worse. I tried to get a clear view of the slope to my right, but the sand blasted me in the face. If I remembered correctly, and if I was where I thought I was, one of the caves should be roughly on my level and about half a mile straight ahead; the other would be close to the same distance diagonally up the mountain toward where the top hat rock occasionally materialized from the storm.

I had to use my free hand to maintain my balance on the slick boulders and scree to keep from toppling into the cacti lining what appeared to be an old animal trail. I looked for tracks, but had there been any, the wind would have obliterated them a long time ago. At least my instincts were telling me I was heading in the right direction. My heart beat faster with each step and it was getting harder to keep up with my body’s oxygen demands with the increasing altitude and the wind blowing directly into my face. The adrenaline was starting to fire from my fuel injector, as well. My mouth was dry. I took a drink of water and used the momentary respite to calm my nerves. One way or another, this would all be over soon.

I peered uphill during a rare pause between gusts and saw what I had hoped to see.

There was another marker up there, at the top of an escarpment and nearly concealed by an enormous nopales. The pike and the skull leaned forward, away from the wind and toward me. When another gust rose, the skull lifted its chin and started to nod. I could barely see the upper crescent of what looked like a dark orifice behind it.

I turned my back to the wind and racked the slide of my pistol to make sure no sand had gummed up the mechanism. I couldn’t afford for it to jam at a crucial moment.

I pressed onward, never once taking my eyes off of the shadows behind the cactus. Somewhere back there was the man I had come to find. The Coyote. My brother Ban. He was waiting for me somewhere down there in the darkness. I was walking right into a trap and I knew it.

I hauled myself up onto a ledge maybe four feet deep. The mountain grew even steeper from there as it headed up toward the peak. The cactus battled against the yellow grasses for a small patch of soil, into which a hole had been dug. The lid of the hatch that had formerly sealed it rested against the cactus. One side was bare wood; the other molded to imitate the contour of the slope and covered with sand and rocks that had been affixed to it with clear epoxy. This had once been a coyote den, no doubt. I had seen enough of them by now to know. It seemed almost poetic from a certain point of view.

The wind screamed past me. It made a hollow whistling sound from the mouth of the tunnel.

I shined my light down into a darkness so deep it swallowed the beam.

The coyote skull squeaked and nodded on the pike, almost as though it was laughing at me from beyond the grave.

Coyote is the master of deception.

I drew a deep breath, blew it out slowly, and crawled into the hole.