Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

DAYS 5 – 9

tash hetasp – humukt

mahch

 

Albert Camus said that man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

 

I only wish that were true.

 

Man is a creature that embraces its animal roots and never misses an opportunity to demonstrate evolution’s predilection for violence and depravity.

THIRTY-NINE

Sells District

Tohono O’odham Nation

Arizona

September 13th-17th

Everything kind of passed in a blur from there. I remember finding the remote trigger Ban had used to activate the voice recording on the ground beneath where he had been suspended by his arms. Or at least where he had been pretending to be suspended. The dowel had really only been two pieces, each of which had barely been two feet long. I remember seeing the knife, the way my flashlight glinted from the serrated edge, and having to look away before I envisioned what he had intended to do to me with it. I remember stumbling blindly through the maze, well after my light finally gave up the ghost, until I emerged from the tunnel and drew a deep breath of fresh air for what felt like the first time in my life. There were already flashing lights streaking over the eastern horizon when I sat down on the ledge in the lee of the cactus and drank my final bottle of water to the accompaniment of the coyote skull squeaking on the pike as it nodded its approval. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything as wonderful as that water tasted at that moment.

By the time the first Border Patrol agents arrived, the windstorm had waned to sporadic gusts that pretty well left the sand on the ground where it was supposed to be. I hoped it stayed that way because the only thought that stood out from the chaos of unanswered questions in my mind was an almost physiological need to watch the sun rise from the flat desert ahead of me and abolish the darkness. It wasn’t even a pink stain in the sky when agents from the Phoenix Bureau arrived with a Crime Scene Response Team, which promptly set up portable generators and light arrays that evaporated the shadows as though they had never been. I barely caught a glimpse of the fiery red orb over the shoulder of one of my fellow agents, who was doing his best to put me through the wringer. He could scarcely contain the stench of ambition seeping from his pores, at least until he realized I wasn’t about to say a word to him. As far as I was concerned, my involvement there had come to an end.

My SAC, of course, had other plans for me. I was still the ace up his sleeve that promised promotion, but the personal nature of my entanglement in the case made it difficult to thrust me too far into the limelight, at least not until I’d been formally cleared of any potential collusion with my brother and wrongdoing in his death. The whole situation couldn’t have played out any better for Nielsen, who still got to trot his prize pony out in front of the cameras, while ultimately being the one who held the reins.

By then, I couldn’t have cared less. Getting my picture on TV or in the papers was just about the last thing I wanted to do. Trust me, that revelation surprised me, too. I think I just needed to put this whole business behind me. The sooner I was able to scrub the reek of death out of my skin the better. But there was also the matter of the spin the powers that be were putting on the situation that positively made me sick to my stomach. While there was truth to the story the reporters were fed—and utilized to their advantage with about a million breaking news segments—it was anything but the whole truth. And I figured there would be no misinterpreting the expression on my face had I been forced to regurgitate it in front the press.

Don’t let anyone tell you Lukas Walker is any man’s puppet.

A Native American male—coincidentally of blood relation to one of the lead investigators on the case—snapped and murdered five innocent people, including a decorated Border Patrol agent and the chief of the tribal police force, before being tracked down by one of the Bureau’s finest field agents with the help of Behavioral’s top profilers. Ban Rafael Walker was shot and killed during his attempted apprehension. The maze he constructed was used to illustrate his progressive sociopathic dissociation in response to his inability to find work, his animosity toward the federal government in general, and the Department of Homeland Security, his former employer, specifically.

By the time all was said and done, there probably wouldn’t be a soul alive who couldn’t recite the myth of I’itoi, the Man in the Maze, almost verbatim. That was the part of the story that made it sexy and surely sent screenwriters everywhere scrambling. The bodies unearthed from beneath his trailer warranted a passing mention, with particular emphasis on the number exhumed. Considering the paperwork involved with feeding them into the bureaucratic machine and how long it would take to identify them, if at all, the general consensus was that the victims would eventually make fine stories somewhere down the line to keep the Monster in the Maze, as the Coyote had been dubbed, in the headlines.

Despite the sketchy nature of the “truth” as it was told, some good did arise from the fallout. The plight of the Tohono O’odham people was placed front and center for the whole world to see. The everyday tales of survival in the middle of a war zone brought both humanitarian and federal aid in the form of money, food, jobs, and a whole slew of other promises I really hoped the government would keep this time. O’odham culture also reached the masses, albeit initially in a negative light, but that quickly faded as the general public developed an appetite for Hohokam lore and a people who were largely unknown, even though they’d technically been American citizens far longer than most other bloodlines. Of course, the political machine couldn’t give without exacting its due.

A hundredfold.

The suffering of the O’odham was used to railroad Congress into appropriating increased funding for the Department of Customs and Border Protection to the tune of roughly two billion dollars annually, none of which would actually be used to fortify the Arizona-Mexico border that cut right through the middle of the reservation, I’m sure. At least the Tohono O’odham Nation would be receiving an annual stipend in the low millions, which would undoubtedly get a few politicians reelected, but would also allow the tribe to build and staff an eight-bed hospital and outpatient clinic, a new casino in Sun City, closer to Scottsdale money, and rebuild its police force into something more reminiscent of an actual force. There would probably even be enough left over to buy the staff honest-to-God ceramic mugs with their names printed on them in some medium other than Sharpie.

Antone would have been proud. It may have cost him his life, but his plea had eventually reached the rest of the country. No longer was the misery of his people a political mess to be swept under the rug. The entire world was now aware of the sheer volume of drugs being funneled through his reservation and the Department of Justice, the only actual loser in the situation, had been forced to make shutting down its designated High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area its foremost goal. In doing so, it had to sacrifice even more of its power to the Department of Homeland Security. The liberal media had also latched onto the human interest angle by exposing just how many migrants died out in the Sonoran every year, a statistic that brought to light the nature of the coyote human smuggling network and its ties to the Mexican drug cartels.

I thought about Antone’s quote from the newspaper article on his bedroom wall, about how he would put an end to this situation, even if he had to do so himself. And maybe he hadn’t ended it, but his sacrifice certainly signaled the beginning of that end. I only wished I could have learned what it was about his facial expressions that had so totally mystified me before his passing.

My Uncle Roman quickly negotiated the sale of the rights to his story for a sum large enough to allow him to disappear. He was the reservation’s pariah, the man who had created the Monster, and there would never be anything he could do to change that. He was the one who would forever bear the brunt of its wrath. I felt badly for him. His initial mistake had been in loving a child who wasn’t biologically his and the boy’s mother, who had never stopped loving someone else. He had made mistakes along the way, but his only real crime—and it wasn’t an insignificant one—had been in looking the other way and allowing the murders to continue. If I were to be totally honest with myself, I don’t know if I would have done anything differently with my own son. I hoped to track him down one day and tell him I was sorry for the lot life had given him, if he would even listen to the nephew who had robbed him on his only child; the son of the man whose shoes had proved too big to fill.

Me? I had a straight shot into the hallowed halls of Behavioral and could have cut just about any deal I wanted, financial or political, if I decided to play the game. Instead, I used the capital I had earned to negotiate a year off, with pay. I had made a promise I intended to keep. Someone needed to speak for the dead, and that someone was going to be me. I had already made arrangements with both the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office and the various Mexican and Central American consulates to serve as a liaison of sorts in the effort to coordinate the identification of the victims and the notification of their families. It had all the makings of a sad and depressing year, but don’t let anyone ever tell you I’m not a man of my word. It also afforded me the opportunity to learn a little about my heritage, which delighted a certain librarian, who was more than happy to share her seemingly unlimited knowledge with me, even if I, like my father before me, had more than my share of coyotes nipping at my heels.

And I figured I owed it to the man whose death had brought about all of these changes to make sure his twelve year-old granddaughter, who fancied herself twenty-two, knew that her grandfather had loved her very much. And that he died a hero. Besides, I was starting to think I might not mind spending a little time with her mother, when things eventually settled down. Whoever would have thought I would potentially find what I was missing right where my father had left it for me.

There was just one little problem.

I couldn’t let the case go. There were too many inconsistencies, too many questions and too few answers. Too many coincidences. As far as the Bureau was concerned, this one had been tied up with a big bow, but there was still one glaring hole right at the heart of it.

The mixed metaphor.

Ban had thought of himself as the Coyote.

Coyote is the master of deception.

But it had been the legend of I’itoi that had been the theme of the endgame, which had captured the attention of the entire world.

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.

Which was exactly what I feared.

And with each day that passed without the recovery of Antone’s body, I feared it even more.

FORTY

By the fourth day following the breaking of the story, I’d had enough of cameras to last me several lifetimes. I’m pretty sure the feeling was mutual. I was too close to the story and it was in everybody’s best interests to let me fade into the background, lest they inadvertently humanize the Monster. The bogeyman was no longer frightening when you turned on the light to find that he looked just like anyone else. Everyone else. The world needed him to remain a monster for fear we might look at him and see a reflection of ourselves.

The victims, however, needed to be humanized. They needed to be seen as somebody’s children. As husbands and fathers or wives and mothers. The whole of mankind needed to be made aware that the world was poorer for their absence from it. At least, the ones we were able to identify.

The first victim, whose skin had nearly drained from his bones, was identified by a rather conspicuous tattoo of La Santa Muerte, the patron saint of sinners, which covered the entirety of his chest. His name was Juan Valarosa, and was a known member of the Mexican gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS, 13. He was currently wanted in Arizona for the trafficking of both controlled substances and human beings. His profile read like the resume of a coyote. The DEA was hopeful it would be able to use the news of his death to draw out known associates who could be coerced into leading it higher up the chain.

The young woman was portrayed as a good little Catholic girl searching for a fresh start in life. That the bruising on her shoulders suggested she’d been carrying an extraordinarily heavy load and her remains tested positive for tetrahydrocannabinol, THC, and methamphetamines had been withheld from the press. Even I would never have known about it had I not been working with the ME on the process of identification. Nor would I have otherwise been there when the fingerprints of the third victim matched prints found at the scene of an arms deal gone bad in Houston that had cost an undercover DEA agent his life. These facts would never see the light of day, though. John Q. Public couldn’t afford to think, even for a second, that the Monster might actually have been doing something that could be perceived as beneficial to society.

Despite his repeated attempts on my life, I was starting to have my own doubts.

Agent Brian Matthews broke the pattern. At least superficially. There would undoubtedly be books written about the heroism of the lone agent who struck off into the night to face the Monster. And while there was an element of truth to the story, a tiny element anyway, the papers weren’t privy to his personnel file, which I’m sure was now confetti at the bottom of a shredder in some back room. Agent Matthews did have an exemplary record, with one minor blemish. A blemish that, were I not an investigative agent, I would never have bothered to uncover. For, while the DHS had taken full responsibility for the incident and compensated the reservation with the new Tribal Council Building, the identity of the agent involved had been withheld, for obvious reasons. Withheld from the media, not from the other law enforcement agencies involved. Namely, the tribal police. It was, however, a blemish that had led to an extended leave of absence and the derailment of a career that appeared to be on track for bigger and better things. A blemish caused by an overzealous agent playing cowboy out in the desert while chasing down a bad guy like it was the Wild West all over again. He had run down a modern day Jesse James in the Jesus Malverde mold, in fact, and made a bust that had led to the confiscation of more than three-quarters of a million dollars in marijuana. Unfortunately, it had also led to the death of a school teacher whose vehicle just happened to be in the way when they launched across I-86. The teacher’s name?

Eloise Maria Antone.

Which brought me again to Chief Raymond Javier Antone, and the reason I was currently standing inside his house. The CSRT, under the oversight of Interim-Chief Louis Abispo, had performed a fairly cursory examination of the house. They’d confiscated Antone’s maps, opening whole new worlds of underground fun for the forensics agents to explore, once they recovered from the shock of Ban’s talisman cave, anyway. I’d been more than happy to absolve myself of every bit of knowledge I had about the underground warrens. After all, best they hear that I was down there from me. Besides, between all of the crime scenes and caves and the corpse pit under the trailer, they were going to have their hands full for the foreseeable future without having to run down all of my prints and tracks.

They’d left the tables in the middle of the room covered with fingerprint powder, but the place otherwise looked just as it had the last time I was here, which was one of the few facts I had kept to myself. The CSRT had undoubtedly found exactly what it was looking for in here, while I had broken in once more in hopes of finding something no one had thought to look for. And even then, I wasn’t quite certain what that could possibly be. All I knew was that something was really starting to eat at me and I was beginning to think that regardless of how long or how hard anyone searched, Antone’s remains would never be found.

I needed to know why I felt that way. My instincts had served me well so far; I’d be a fool to ignore them now.

It’s about time. We’ve been expecting you.

I remember thinking at the time that he hadn’t been referring to me as a federal agent, but to me specifically.

I wandered through his house. Leisurely. As though I were an out-of-town guest merely killing time while I waited for him to come home. Looking for signs of his life, for what he had been doing during the previous years. This wasn’t a home; it was a way station. This was where he satiated his biological functions and plotted his subterranean investigations. Little more.

And you’re here because of the report I faxed to the Phoenix office last month…

The same formal request for assistance that ended up lost in the shuffle.

If it had ever been sent at all.

I stared at the timeline of the pictures, at the conspicuous gap I could only attribute to the death of a wife and mother and the wedge it had somehow driven between a father and daughter. I couldn’t presume to know how either Antone or his daughter had chosen to grieve, but it was obvious they hadn’t done so together and little effort had been invested into reparations. I understood that. He had become a man on a mission, one that led him to look for hidden stockpiles of drugs in order to strike back at the cartels that had stolen his wife from him. Was it so farfetched to think he had also plotted revenge against the Border Patrol agent who had been in pursuit of the drug runner?

The Oscars function just like any other remote transmitter. They generate an RF signal that’s amplified by the cell towers and relayed to a receiving station. And I just jammed the signal with the push of a button.

He had given me the ability to move invisibly across the reservation. The jammer had granted me investigative freedom, but it had also effectively isolated me from all of the other agencies and cut me off from my backup.

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.

He had pointed it out to me, hadn’t he? We’d been on our way to Fresnal Canyon. I hadn’t asked, nor had I cared. It was information volunteered out of the blue to serve a purpose I hadn’t recognized at the time.

And if he was spending his nights spelunking, what did he do with whatever he found? He hadn’t turned it in to the DEA or any other federal entity, nor had he delivered it to his own station. So where were the drugs?

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 never would have known about the legend had Antone not planted it in the back of my mind. I wouldn’t have learned of the significance of Elder Brother or been familiar enough with the concept of the Man in the Maze to piece together the smiley faces. Without that knowledge, I wouldn’t have been able to bring about the endgame.

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.

And there was the root of the problem.

The mixed metaphor.

The coyote. I’itoi.

Two distinct mischievous entities. Two distinct MOs.

One was a killer who engaged me directly, who used coyote urine to obfuscate his trail, and who removed the bodies of his victims so he could replace their faces with those stolen from a family of coyotes. The other fancied himself a god. He used the most famous legend surrounding the most recognizable symbol on the entire reservation to bring the trials of the Tohono O’odham into the collective consciousness of a nation and orchestrated this entire affair from start to finish, but he never had complete control over his own puppet or his dark nature. He was a god who could have easily and willingly allowed a section of his head to be scalped and pretended to be dead for the picture that would serve as proof of his demise, who could have used the copiously bleeding wound to cover the inside of the cruiser he had driven across the reservation himself and abandoned a mere half-day’s walk from his house.

The cartels must be stopped and held accountable for their crimes, whatever the cost. Even if I have to do so by myself.

They might have been the words that propelled him into the chief’s office, but they were also a declaration of war.

I was searching for something easily overlooked, seemingly innocuous. I perused his bedroom, the shrine to his wife. The woman who revealed her upper gums when she smiled, who had taught her students about the history of the Hohokam and the O’odham. The woman who never aged past her early fifties, whose face revealed only the lines of laughter and smiles around her eyes and mouth.

The lines around her eyes and mouth.

I stood perfectly still and repeated the words in my head.

The lines around her eyes and mouth…

What was it about them? I looked at her picture again, at the wrinkles around—

I ran to the bathroom and threw open the medicine cabinet with enough force to crack the mirror. Damn it. I should have recognized it earlier. I was stupid and arrogant and allowed myself to be manipulated. I knocked the entire row of prescription bottles from the shelf and had to crawl around on the floor until I found the one I was looking for. I grabbed the box of OnabotulinumtoxinA and held it up before me. One hundred units of purified neurotoxin complex. OnabotulinumtoxinA was the generic name for Botox, a purified form of the neurotoxin responsible for botulism. It was used to treat chronic migraines and neck pain, not to mention cosmetic applications like reducing wrinkles and erasing the signs of aging. It worked by blocking the nerve impulses between the brain and the muscles at the site of the injection, essentially paralyzing the muscles.

Paralyzing the muscles.

I remembered the nicks and cuts on Antone’s face that I had mistaken for sloppy shaving or a butcher job from a dull razor. He had hidden the sites where he had injected the Botox perfectly among the real cuts he must have deliberately inflicted upon himself. That was why I had never been able to read him. He’d paralyzed certain groups of facial muscles to mask his expressions.

He’d known the Bureau would send me in from the start and he’d known about my skills. He’d been manipulating me since I first set foot on the reservation. He’d been in league with my brother, who he must have discovered was out there killing people in the desert, and had decided to put Ban’s skills to use for his own ends. That’s why Antone hadn’t appeared threatened by him when we found Ban waiting with Roman near the first crime scene, the one they had discovered.

Master and puppet.

I’itoi and Coyote.

I bellowed in frustration and spiked the bottle against the wall. The plastic cracked and the top snapped off and I felt fluid spatter my cheek, but I was already in motion.

Out of the bathroom and down the hall. Through the main room and the kitchen. Out the back door and onto the porch. Past the lone chair in which I assumed Antone sat to watch the setting sun, where I had sat only days before and noticed the nearly invisible tracks in the sand leading toward the distant ridge, beyond which I had seen the roofline of an aluminum outbuilding. The seat where Antone had sat not to keep an eye on the majestic desert sunset, but rather the outbuilding itself, so as not to make the tracks any more visible than absolutely necessary, because he really only needed to drive back there when he had a full trunk. A full trunk brimming with packages he didn’t want anyone to see him unloading.

It took me twenty minutes to walk there. The building reminded me of a small airplane hangar with a low, flat roof. The kind of thing someone could find on an abandoned Air Force bombing range, disassemble under the cover of darkness, and reassemble on his own land where no one else knew of its existence. It was situated in a narrow stone cul-de-sac formed by the convergence of the hills on the opposite side of the ridge from his house. It had been painted a reddish-brown to match the surrounding sand, but the wind had scoured it back to the bare metal in spots. There was a garage door on the face of the building. I gave the handle a solid tug. It didn’t budge in the slightest. Locked from the inside. Or maybe rusted shut. I walked around the side. There were no windows. I found the main entrance on the rear of the building, abutting an escarpment that kept the front door in perpetual shadow. I used the same lock rake that granted me entrance to Antone’s house to make short work of the main knob. The series of deadbolts running nearly all the way up the height of the door above it took a bit more finagling.

When I finally drew the door open, the smell swatted me in the face. Not the stench of rotting flesh or anything even remotely resembling death. Still, it was a smell I recognized immediately.

Marijuana.

I pulled out my flashlight and shined it around the interior of the building. There were large wire cages to either side of a central aisle. It reminded me of evidence lockup. Each of the cages was packed with bricks and bags and crates of drugs, all of them carefully catalogued and documented with their weights on the clipboards hanging from the locked doors. I was no expert, but the street value of this one building was probably enough to buy a small country. Or maybe even a large one. Antone had gathered it all here to be found and seized by the proper authorities. And my gut told me that everything he had accumulated was still here, right down to the last gram.

I strolled down the aisle, glancing from one side to the other. Marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines, Mexican tar, crates of semiautomatic pistols and assault rifles. Everything that could possibly be smuggled across the reservation shy of a cage full of undocumenteds and an insulated case of plutonium. Or maybe I just hadn’t come across them yet.

It was an impressive collection by anyone’s standards. I couldn’t imagine how much time and effort Antone had invested into confiscating this amount of contraband. It was a wonder he hadn’t already been hunted down and killed by the cartels. I shuddered to think that this volume of drugs could be considered too small to actually be missed.

I found it hard not to respect Antone for making it his mission to help rid his reservation of at least a portion of the drugs being funneled across his land and into the public school system, but that didn’t change the fact that he had crossed the line. No matter what crimes these criminals had committed, they didn’t deserve to be hunted down in the desert by someone like my brother.

Or maybe they did. Was not the definition of morality a code of conduct that served the greater good of society?

The cages ended with about fifteen feet remaining before the garage door. I smelled the faintest hint of gasoline. There were oil stains all over the floor. The concrete was lined with tire tracks. Rubber imprints. Three close together. Parallel. Like a tricycle would make. Or perhaps, more accurately, like an ultralight “trike” one-man aircraft would make. The kind that looked like a hang glider attached to a go-kart with an engine-driven propeller mounted to the back. The kind that could fly at more than thirty miles-an-hour and stay under the radar where the Border Patrol couldn’t see it. The kind that the cartels used to make nighttime drops in remote locations where collection teams were ready and waiting. The kind that could easily get a man across the border and into the kind of town where he could disappear in less time than it took for all of the inept law enforcement officers swarming the desert to find his abandoned police cruiser.

I unlocked the garage door, rolled it upward, and stepped out into the night. The tire tracks led about four hundred feet away from me to a point where they vanished altogether.

Who in his right mind would leave the ‘States and risk his life crossing the desert to get into Mexico, you know?

Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howled at the moon.

Coyote is the master of deception.

Coyote.

I’itoi.

This infernal desert was positively crawling with gods of mischief.