Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

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THREE

My memories of my parents are yellowed and faded by time. What were once full-length videos in my head are now scattered snippets. Most have become just lifeless photographs. Time is a thief that takes only what’s near and dear to us, the things to which we cling so tightly we assume they can never be pried from our grasp, and yet one day we open our hands to find them gone. We wonder how we allowed such a thing to happen and cling even tighter to the few precious memories that remain, memories we commit to our very being, to our unconscious mind where time can’t find them, even if we can only visit them in our dreams.

I never really knew my parents, at least not as a boy grows to know them. My spotted memories are captured inside the glimmering prism of youth, which tends to lend truth to lie and lie to truth. I remember my mother humming to me while she gently traced her fingertips around my eyes and I slowly drifted off to sleep. I remember her cutting the crusts off of my bread and wiping her hands on a dish towel. I remember waking to the sound of her laughter, and, ultimately, to the sound of her tears.

My father was a military man, through and through. He believed in his country. He believed in his ideals. He believed so deeply that when the Air Force demanded he up and move his family, he immediately asked “How far?” I was born at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, and by the age of two had lived in three different states and three different countries. By third grade, I had attended five different schools, the last of which was in Kaiserslautern, or K-Town, Germany. I remember that clearly, because that’s where we’d been stationed when my father was shipped off to Iraq for Desert Storm, and that was where I was awakened by the sound of my mother crying the night she learned he had died.

My mother was never the same after that. Whatever memories I have of her after we moved to Colorado aren’t the kind I try too hard to recall. I know it was cancer that claimed her, but she had started to follow my father the moment the Scud missile obliterated the fuselage of his F-15. I choose not to believe it was because she loved me any less, just that he had been her reason for living and I was a manifestation of that love, not separate from it. By the time we committed her ashes to the sky with my father’s, I’d already been living with my maternal grandparents for nearly two years, the longest I had ever lived in any one place.

My grandfather had retired from the Air Force a full colonel in his early fifties in order to live the life his earlier sacrifices had afforded him. He had also been my father’s commanding officer when he inadvertently introduced him to the daughter he had hoped would never live the life of a military wife as her mother had. I know he loved my father, yet, at the same time, I’m sure he hated him for taking his daughter from this earth. He didn’t blame him, though. At least I don’t think so. My grandmother did for a while, but my presence helped her get past it, for to despise him was essentially to despise me, since I was half of him, and I wore the better part of that half on the outside. And she would have thrown herself in front of a truck before ever thinking such thoughts.

They weren’t my parents, nor did they pretend to be. Still, they devoted themselves to making me happy and helping me build a future. A future which, unfortunately, they had never been destined to share, but one for which I will eternally be in their debt.

My paternal grandparents were a different story. I could only assume that my father had parents. I mean, we all had to come from somewhere, right? He never spoke of them though, and when I asked about them his eyes would cloud up and he kind of vanished into a world inside himself. I figured if they were still alive, they’d try to track me down. I was their grandchild after all. By the time I was old enough to look for them, they had already passed. In fact, they weren’t buried far from where I was now. Assuming they were indeed the right Billman Hilarion and Wavalene Maria Walker. I pretty much stopped looking once I found their obituaries. There was really no point in attempting to learn any more about them considering they were dead to me long before they died, or, rather, they had never actually existed. Nor had this reservation, which apparently my father had left the moment he was able and never once looked back. Like my grandfather, ever the pilot, used to say, “The future’s on the horizon, not in your slipstream.”

I knew precious little about that half of my heritage. Truth be told, I had never really cared. Not because I didn’t get curious from time to time, but because for whatever reason it was my father’s cross to bear, one he had elected not to bequeath to me. Now here I was, sitting in my pool Crown Victoria outside the tribal police station on a street my father must have intimately known as a child, soaking up every last bit of the air conditioning before I again braved the god-awful heat.

The thermometer on the in-dash readout said it had dropped to a mere one-hundred-five and I could feel the warmth radiating from the closed window. The faded asphalt wavered as a primer-gray pickup materialized in the distance like a mirage. It blew past fast enough to rock my car on its suspension. I glanced at my rearview mirror and saw that the bed was brimming with dark-skinned men, women, and children, crammed one on top of the other.

I opened the mirror application on my iPhone and tilted it so I could perform a quick crust check of my nostrils. It wasn’t an actual mirror, obviously, but rather a forward-facing camera that was looking at you even as you were looking at it. I’d love to say I was above a certain level of vanity, but the way I saw it, you were the one who determined how other people would judge you. The last thing you wanted was to cede the upper hand before the first words came out of your mouth.

With a sigh, I reluctantly opened the door and climbed out onto the gravel parking lot. The searing heat hit me squarely in the chest and I inhaled fire into my lungs. How anyone could endure this climate on a daily basis was beyond me. By the time I passed the second-hand cruisers—which looked like early nineties model Caprice Classics handed down by another department whose logo still showed through from beneath the tribal seal—and entered the station, I was ready to trade my soul for a tall glass of something even remotely cold. What I found was all of the humidity that had somehow been sucked right out of the arid region.

A ceiling fan turned overhead and a window-mount swamp cooler chugged from behind the unmanned front counter, blowing little more than the rapidly evaporating hot water. I felt like I’d walked into a gym locker room. Beads of sweat rolled down my back between my shoulder blades. Maybe I should have just called from my car. After all, this was just a simple notification to let them know I would be actively conducting an investigation within their jurisdiction, one that required neither their assistance nor consent. I was just about to turn around when I heard the clomp of footsteps on the hollow wooden floor and a large man appeared from the office door at the back of the room.

He wore a tan uniform with the Great Seal of the Tohono O’odham Nation on the shoulder and a badge on his chest. I say wearing, but what I really mean was bursting out of. The collar threatened to cut off circulation to his head, which sat on a triple ring of chins, and his belly hung over his belt to such a degree that his shirt couldn’t possibly remain tucked in. He had jet-black hair and dark, hooded eyes, which glittered with an intelligence belied by his sloppy appearance. It looked like he’d lost an argument with his razor. There were small nicks and cuts all over his jaw line and neck.

He stopped mid-stride and turned to face me. He looked me up and down for a long moment, then slapped the files he’d been carrying onto a desk at the back of the small squad room. The phone on the desk rang, but he paid it no mind.

I watched his face, zeroed in on his eyes, but for the life of me, I couldn’t read him, which was a unique and somewhat disorienting experience for me. He must have read the expression on mine, because he placed his fists on his hips and cracked a crooked smile.

He said something in a language I didn’t understand. The words were blunt and halting and delivered with an almost singsong rhythm.

I shook my head.

“It’s about time,” he said in English. “We’ve been expecting you.”

FOUR

“You’ve been expecting me?”

“We were expecting you about a month ago. That’s why I said it was about time.”

“A month ago?”

“Suddenly there’s an echo in here?”

“I’m at a loss.”

“You’re a fed, right?”

“Special Agent Lukas Walker. FBI.”

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

He pantomimed a rolling gesture with his hands like he was trying to coax the rest of the story out of me.

“No. I haven’t been briefed on your report. I’m here on an entirely different matter.” I smiled. “Why don’t we start over?”

“I think that would be for the best.”

I flashed my shield, leaned across the front counter, and extended my arm over the logbook.

“Special Agent Lukas Walker. FBI.”

“Chief Ray Antone. Tribal Police.”

He shook my proffered hand and discreetly wiped his palm on his trousers. Like I could help it. It had to be a hundred and twenty degrees in here.

“So if you aren’t here at my request,” Chief Antone said, “then why are you here?”

I walked slowly from one side of the entryway to the other, checking out the small adobe structure. The walls were thin and cracked. There were points where the grid pattern of the chicken wire framework showed through discolored patches. The laminate desks were chipped and mottled with cigarette burns. The overhead fluorescent tubes hummed and flickered. The computers on the desks were bulky old Gateway PCs. Against the rear wall, behind the desks, were rows of dented file cabinets incapable of closing with all of the paper poking out, framed pictures of the new Tribal Council Building I passed on the way here, and a faded painting of the tribal seal on the wall above a fancy stainless steel coffeemaker. The sunshine outside was attenuated by the accumulation of dust on the windows.

It was exactly what you would expect from an underfunded tribal police station in the middle of nowhere and it looked as though great care went into the perpetuation of that image. After all, I had seen the craftsmanship of the council building and figure whoever did that job undoubtedly had an exclusive contract and could have done a better job patching the walls in here with his feet. I could also see the bulge of a smart phone in the chief’s front breast pocket. This was a man willing to let people think him primitive and incompetent in order to gain the initial advantage, but not at the expense of his taste for a good cup of coffee.

I liked him already.

That didn’t mean I was ready to concede that advantage, however. And I still hadn’t figured out how to read him. A man accustomed to the daily maintenance of such an elaborate lie undoubtedly knew what he was doing.

“Why do you think I’m here?”

“Who died?”

“Why do you think someone’s dead?”

“I’ve got a reservation crawling with drug runners, a twelve-year-old granddaughter who thinks she’s twenty-two, and my sciatica’s acting up something fierce. But you’re right…I’ve got nothing better to do than verbally spar with you, so I’ll play along. If you were investigating trafficking, you’d be part of a task force and wouldn’t be able to go anywhere without your ATF gorilla escort. If the problem was the gangs moving out onto our land, they would have sent someone of Hispanic descent. The only reason that I can think of for a handsome young buck with native blood like yourself to be out here is if there’s the potential for media involvement and the boys back in Washington don’t want to end up with a racial issue on their hands. You’re obviously educated and the fact that you don’t have a partner attached to your hip suggests a certain amount of autonomy, at least in the field. And I know the federal government doesn’t trust anyone. So that means you’re working closely with important people who can’t be bothered to waste their precious time on actual physical investigative work. They trust you well enough to serve as their eyes and ears, but you also have the law enforcement skills to potentially bring permanent resolution to the situation. So I ask you again, who died?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“You’re just trying to piss me off now, aren’t you?”

I smiled. I still couldn’t read him, but I had gained the upper hand in the situation. It wasn’t much of an advantage, though. Not yet anyway.

I removed a manila envelope from under my jacket and set it on the counter between us. Antone looked up at me and I nodded. He opened the envelope and slid out three pieces of paper. Each was a photocopy of a digital picture forwarded to my office three days ago from the Border Patrol station in Ajo via the Phoenix office. The first was of the cliff side itself for locational triangulation, the second of the ground where the victim had bled out, and the third was of the smiley face painted on the wall.

Antone studied each in turn, then stacked them, straightened them on the countertop, and slid them back into the envelope. Without a word, he handed the pictures back to me, turned, and walked away from me into the office from which he had emerged when I arrived. A moment later, he appeared with a file folder in his hands. He held out the file and stared expectantly at me. I failed to read the expression on his face as I took it from him. I opened it and slid out a stack of reports, beneath which was a series of digital photographs.

“This is what I sent to the Phoenix Bureau a month ago,” he said.

There was a picture of another mountain from a distance, then one of a trail running between two steep red rock walls. A classic bottleneck. I didn’t see the blood spatters on the path until I turned the page and viewed the detail shot. The final three pictures were all of the twenty-foot design painted on the rocks in the victim’s blood.

“That’s Fresnal Canyon, about twenty miles south-southeast of here.”

When I glanced up from the pages, I couldn’t hide the surprise on my face. We were on a level playing field again, at least for the moment. And then he took the advantage back.

With a vengeance.

“Damned if you aren’t the spitting image of your old man, but I’ll bet you must hear that all the time.”

FIVE

The Tohono O’odham Nation is the third largest Native American reservation in the country. The forty-five hundred square miles of desert land is divided into eleven geographical districts, which are governed by a council and an elected chairperson. The better part of its traditional land was acquired in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 and then bisected by the now hotly contested Arizona border. Once known as Indian Oasis, the city of Sells changed its name in 1913 to honor Cato Sells, whose name in the O’odham language means “tortoise got wedged.” It serves as the capital and government seat and houses roughly three thousand of the twenty thousand total O’odham, which kind of explained why I didn’t have to look especially hard to find the police station.

The whole town was smaller than the subdivision in which I lived with my grandparents. I tried to imagine how I would have felt had my neighborhood been overrun by thousands of immigrants every day, some armed and toting drugs on their backs, others starving and dropping dead in the hills. I tried to imagine armed federal agents cruising the streets and Blackhawks beating the air overhead, day and night. Then I tried to imagine being impoverished and roasting alive on top of it all, a citizen of a country largely oblivious to my daily suffering and yet entirely separate from it, isolated from blood relations on the other side of an invisible line and unable to visit for fear I would never be able to return again.

And, ultimately, failed.

Not that I lack the imagination, but because the entire situation is far outside of my realm of comprehension. All I know is that even putting myself in that fictional position in my mind made me uncomfortable. I felt helpless. I felt hopeless. And I felt angry.

But angry enough to kill?

That was a line in the sand that took a certain kind of individual to cross, one already predisposed to sociopathic tendencies. And at this point I couldn’t even be sure our suspect pool consisted of the twenty thousand O’odham. Any person from any state could have driven down here for a hunting expedition, and any bandit willing to smuggle drugs and potentially shoot federal agents couldn’t be placed above killing for pleasure.

I was no better off now than I had been when I stepped off the plane this morning. Worse, actually. At least had we taken my car we could have enjoyed the modern convenience of air conditioning. The chief’s squad car was like a sauna. He smirked every time I toggled the AC switch. I was starting to think of it as a stick I used to poke the midget who lived under the hood, prompting him to blow his rank breath through a straw and into the vents.

This kind of heat does strange things to your brain, as I was coming to learn. I saw lakes on the horizon, but we never seemed to reach them as they poured off the edge of the earth. I was saving the last two sips of my bottled water for when I needed them most, even though I knew they were evaporating by the second. My mouth was filled with the salty taste of my own sweat and the greedy passenger seat was soaking up every drop I wasted. I had a Beretta Px4 Storm .40 caliber under my left arm, there was a sawed-off twelve-gauge Remington bolted to the console between us, and Antone had a Smith & Wesson M&P .357 magnum semiautomatic in a holster under his right. I considered myself an even-tempered and level-headed individual, but a part of me really wanted to draw any one of those three and paint that smug grin of his all over the interior.

I hadn’t risen to the bait he had dangled in front of me back at the station, but I knew it was only a matter of time. Eventually, I would stop deluding myself, and, in doing so, would sacrifice every advantage I currently held, which really only boiled down to the fact that my badge was bigger than his.

“Fresnal Canyon’s just up there.” Antone nodded toward the towering red rocks up the rise and to our left. “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.”

That he had said “our” and not “my” didn’t escape my notice. Sure, a part of me was curious. Who wouldn’t be? I knew next to nothing about this half of my heritage, but I wasn’t in any kind of mood to be drawn into this world right now. At least not while I had a job to do.

Antone went on anyway, despite the fact that I tried to appear as though I hadn’t heard him. I stared out the window to my right, watching the creosotes and palo verdes fly past through the cloud of red dust that accumulated on the glass, and somehow inside of the car, as well.

“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 guess our victim must have forgotten to bring along an offering for this mischievous god of yours.”

“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.”

“Probably ought to look into getting that problem taken care of.”

“You mock me, but you don’t know the desert. Coyote is the most mischievous trickster of all, and it’s thanks to the ineptitude of your policies that we have so many coyotes running amok out here.”

“Touché.”

“If it weren’t for NAFTA and the sudden influx of cheap American corn, these people wouldn’t need to risk their lives braving this heat in search of minimum wage—”

“If your reservation didn’t offer them unmolested passage, they wouldn’t be risking their lives braving this heat.”

“I do not condone the smuggling of illegal substances on my reservation, humans included. I don’t want drugs in the hands of my children any more than you do. But you try telling a rancher who gets a two thousand dollar annual treatise stipend from a government that claims ownership of his land that he can’t feed both his starving animals and his family. You try telling a single mother she’s going to have to leave her home in search of a job or subsist on the paltry sum the casino pays out once a year. These men come in here with cash money, and a lot of it at that. They throw it around like they have more than they could ever want. Heck, what’s the harm in letting a man store some things in your barn when he’s willing to pay you five grand a month? Or how about that single mother who suddenly meets a nice man who’s willing to take good care of her and her children and all she has to do is look the other way from time to time? This is our daily reality. The law—my law, your law—doesn’t exist out here. When it comes right down to it, these smugglers are a whole lot less intrusive than the damn green and white Explorers tearing up our land and the war choppers thundering over our homes and sweeping their spotlights across our windows all night long. But you wouldn’t know about things like that, would you? How could you possibly understand?”

His face was flushed and he was breathing hard when the cruiser coasted to a halt on a widened stretch of the shoulder.

I can honestly say that for the first time I was thankful to climb out into the heat and did so the first second I was physically able.

Surprisingly, it felt like it was starting to cool off. It might even have dropped below a hundred. I wouldn’t have bet my life on it, but even if it was all in my head, I was grateful for the illusion.

The arrow-straight dirt road shot back toward the wavering horizon, where the blood-red sun was preparing to slink off into oblivion. The leaves of the bushes looked like they were on fire. To the east, the Baboquivari Mountains rose abruptly from the flat terrain, giant red rocks that made me somewhat nostalgic for the Garden of the Gods back home in Colorado. Shadows had even started to form behind some of the taller formations and in the steep canyons. And over it all lorded Baboquivari Peak like the angry fist of a dictator, somewhere beneath which the god who led my ancestors from the underworld sat inside of his maze, rubbing his palms together and plotting mischief.

Leave it to Chief Antone to kill my rising spirits.

“Don’t get too excited about the falling temperatures. All that means is the snakes and scorpions are going to start coming out to hunt. And, believe me, they’re going to be hungry and pissed off.”

“I know exactly how they feel.”

Antone smirked, mounted what appeared to be a trailhead, and struck off toward the mountains. I followed, but at a reasonable distance. I figured it was probably best to let him take the lead, considering he was the one who actually knew where we were going. That, and he was a bigger target for the rattlesnakes to strike.

Don’t let anyone tell you I can’t be considerate when I have to.