Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

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FOURTEEN

Don’t let anyone tell you I can’t adapt on the fly. I learned from yesterday’s mistakes. After taking a few minutes to change into a pair of jeans and hiking boots, I donned my blue FBI windbreaker and matching ball cap, and got into my car before the chief could object. I had that air conditioner cranked up so high I had to put on my sunglasses just to be able to keep my eyes open against the ferocious arctic winds blowing from my dashboard. I had loaded my hump and had the plastic cup I had reappropriated from the station half-full in the cup holder. I was ready for whatever the morning might bring.

“Turn right up here,” Antone said. He was sitting in the seat beside me with his eyes closed, seemingly perfectly at peace with the world. His jowls jiggled as the car jounced from the pink asphalt onto the gravel road. “Now just keep going straight.”

We were heading due south with the mountains lording over us to the left. I could see Baboquivari Peak at the furthest extent of my vision to the southeast and thought about that mischievous creator god of ours leading the Hohokam up from the underworld. I imagined crawling through dark tunnels from the heart of the earth, emerging to find myself in this almost Apocalyptic desert wasteland, and then turning right back around again.

“What’s so funny?” Antone asked.

I glanced over to see that he hadn’t even opened his eyes. Saguaros flew past behind him like pitchforks raised in defiance of the sky. He smiled and I went back to navigating the straight road. Now that I had satisfied my physiological need for water, my next order of business was tracking down some coffee. The monotonous landscape and the buzz of the tires and the rhythmic vibration of the suspension reminded me of just how long it had been since I last slept.

“Stop here.”

I coasted to a halt at an intersection in the middle of nowhere. The east-west road led straight into a deep valley between mountains to my left and the horizon to my right, where a rooster tail of dust trailed what I assumed to be a vehicle.

Antone opened his eyes.

“Freshly grated,” he said. “Perfect timing.”

The engine made a ticking sound as it idled. I could feel the dust settling on my skin as it snuck in through the vents. It formed a dry paste on my tongue. For a moment, I nearly thought about switching off the AC. Can’t win for losing, I suppose.

“Waiting for the roadrunner, Wile E.?”

If he caught the coyote reference, it didn’t show on his face.

The cloud of dust kicked up by the distant car faded into the eastern horizon beneath the wavering sun.

“Turn left here,” he finally said. “No. Not on the road. Into the desert itself.”

I hesitated for a second or two before cranking the wheel and rocking over the gravel shoulder and into the sand. Branches and bushes scraped the sides of the Crown Vic with loud screeching sounds and I suddenly realized why Antone hadn’t put of much of a fight. It was a pool car, anyway. I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it.

“Keep the drag to your right.” He reached toward the dashboard. For a moment I thought he was going to kill the air, forcing me, in turn, to kill him, but his hand stopped over the portable VHF transceiver/scanner. “May I?”

I nodded and he clicked on the radio. He dialed in a frequency I quickly recognized as belonging to the Border Patrol. Their lingo and radio chatter were unique among all law enforcement agencies. And you could always count on the agents out in the field to have music blaring inside their SUVs. Beneath the snippets of conversation, I could clearly hear both Metallica and Bruno Mars, which, interestingly, didn’t mesh as poorly as one might expect.

“What are we waiting for?”

“You’ll see.”

The desert bumped past beneath us. I had to slow the car to maneuver around clusters of cacti and piles of stones. I could hear cholla skeletons raking the undercarriage. I had to use the windshield wipers to clear the glass of dust, which was seeping into the car and settling in a coating thick enough that I again thought about my lungs and the fun-filled prospect of asphyxiation.

“See that big saguaro up ahead? The one kind of standing out from the top of that hill with all of the palo verdes?” I nodded. It was maybe a few hundred feet ahead and slightly to the left. “Stop when you get right up to it.”

I had no idea what he intended to do, but he was definitely starting to try my patience. I don’t have many inherent character flaws, at least that I’m willing to admit, but the few I have are probably worth at least a casual mention. I’m physically averse to the sound of a person chewing with his mouth open, I can’t stand people who try to talk to me during sporting events, I would love nothing more than to shoot out the tires of people who drive too slow in the left lane, and I absolutely despise people who waste my time. If I had my way, these would be capital offenses that fell somewhere on the spectrum of severity between presidential assassination and mass murder. If Antone didn’t get to the point in a hurry, I was going to sentence him to the long walk home, and we all know how that would end now that it was pushing a hundred-five degrees.

I rolled to a stop and put the car into park. The hell if I was killing the engine, though. Not while there was still Freon to abuse.

Antone lifted the transceiver out of its charger and opened his door. The heat raced in and buffeted me from the side like a runaway truck, nearly knocking the wind out of me.

“You coming or what?” Antone said, and closed the door.

I was thinking “or what” sounded like the better option, but I opened my door anyway and climbed out into what felt like an oven. Glass is made from superheated sand, as everyone knows. Sand has reflective properties similar to the facets of gemstones, which serve to both conduct and repel light and heat. The ambient temperature might have been a mere hundred-five, but with the added heat radiating from the ground, it had to be pushing one-fifteen. I could feel the rubber soles of my shoes starting to melt. The sweat came so hard and fast it gave me the chills. My chest felt as though there was a midget sitting on it. My vision momentarily wavered.

And it wasn’t even noon yet.

Antone crested the rounded knoll and stood on top of a rock that looked like a tortoise shell. The saguaro stood a solid five feet taller than him. I shoved through the sharp shrubs and climbed up beside him. Cacti grew from the crevices in the rock and I’m pretty sure I didn’t want to meet the diamondback that shed the monstrous length of desiccated skin tangled in the prickly pear by my right foot.

“You listen.” Antone passed me the two-way. “Tell me what you hear.”

There was a lot of activity. It sounded like one unit was chasing a group of UDAs toward the highway while two more converged on a different group northeast of Lukeville. A park ranger in Organ Pipe blurted something about shots fired and a panel truck tried to barrel straight through a barricade at the edge of the reservation. The dispatcher was positively frantic trying to coordinate backup units and air support. It was mass chaos on a scale the likes of which I’d never imagined. It sounded like a battlefield out there, and yet from where I stood I couldn’t see another living soul, let alone any indication that we weren’t the last two people on the planet.

“What am I supposed to be hearing?”

Antone smirked, hitched his pants, then crouched at the base of the saguaro. He brushed aside the leafy branches of a palo verde and looked up at me expectantly.

“They plant these in features of the landscape they can readily identify from a distance, like this big old cactus here.”

I didn’t see what he meant at first, not until I squatted down beside him. There was a lump in the soil from which an antenna stood like a willowy sapling.

I listened to the chatter again, then looked from one horizon to the other before letting my gaze settle on the chief.

“We’re sitting right on top of an Oscar and dispatch didn’t relay the alarm to a field unit.”

Antone’s smirk broadened into a smile. He stood and reached into the front pocket of his pants. He pulled out a sleek black box roughly the size and shape of a radar detector. A series of lights ran down one side; a row of switches on the other. Four rubber-capped antennae were screwed into the very top of it. I stared at the lone red light glowing on its face.

“A hundred thirty bucks at Radio Shack,” he said, waving it in front of me. It was a portable digital GPS/five-band signal blocker, the kind of thing people used in movie theaters and classrooms and at all sorts of events to make it impossible for the jerks to ruin their experience by yammering endlessly through it. The kind of device favored by conspiracy theorists everywhere to prevent the government from triangulating their location using the microchips implanted in their brains or teeth or wherever. “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 beamed and switched the red light off.

The response was immediate.

“Oscar Nineteen? Oscar Nineteen?” the dispatcher’s voice crackled from the static.

“Unit three-two-six responding,” another voice cut in. “I’m maybe ten miles out.”

“Might want to straighten your tie, Special Agent Walker,” Antone said. “We’re about to have company.”

He started back down the hill toward my car.

I looked past him at the horizon, where I could already see the cloud of dust rising from the road once more.

FIFTEEN

I dropped the chief back off at the station and drove out of town. I needed time to think. The portable signal jammer changed everything. The Coyote, as I had come to think of him, could travel through the desert with relative impunity, as long as he was able to prevent the Oscars from radioing in his location, but that still left two glaring problems.

First…his tracks.

If he was traveling by car, he would still leave tire tracks. And he couldn’t cover any significant distance on foot, least of all with a corpse in tow, without leaving at least one recognizable print. Even if he was avoiding the main roads and driving through the open desert, someone would have noticed something. With so many CBP vehicles routinely patrolling all of these drags and the almost superhuman tracking skills the agents possessed, I found it hard to believe there was a single one among them who would miss tire tracks like the ones I had left when I drove off the road with Antone. You could probably see my trail from orbit. Throw in the fact that the air space was closely monitored by radar due to all of the drug trafficking and there was no possible way he could have flown in. Not to mention the predator drones with their thermal sensors flying sorties over the desert. How could one man possibly beat them all?

And second…where were the bodies of his victims? Or maybe a better question would be what exactly was he doing with them? I got that he was leaving a message. What further use could he have for the remains after leaving his cryptic design? Deep down, a part of me suspected there was more to the message than what I’d seen so far. More than the eventual completion of the smiley face. I couldn’t help but think that the victims themselves had a role to play in the killer’s endgame, but, for the life on me, I couldn’t imagine what.

I wished I could run a few thoughts past Nielsen and through the guys at Behavioral. I still hadn’t determined where the information was leaking yet, so I couldn’t trust anyone, especially since I was dealing with someone who not only knew how the specialized law enforcement protocols worked, but someone who was technologically adept enough to circumvent every countermeasure we had in place. For all I knew, someone with that kind of skill could pluck all of our communications out of the ether and break our encryptions in his head.

I had thought I was driving aimlessly until I found myself parked across the street from the house where my father had grown up. Maybe subconsciously this had always been my destination. Like I really needed a distraction. Or perhaps that’s exactly what I needed. Who knew? I was just about to drive off again when the front door opened and Roman stepped out onto the porch. It was a long driveway and I was about two hundred feet away, but the Crown Victoria wasn’t the invisible, anonymous vehicle the federal government must have envisioned when it signed the contract with Ford. I might as well have had a siren mounted on the roof.

Roman cupped his hand over his brow to better see my car with the glare on the hood and roof, then raised his arm in greeting.

Nothing I could do now. I turned down the driveway and drove right up to him. He stepped back inside and closed the door before the dust could enter the house. I sat in my car until the dust settled. He emerged onto the porch at the same time I climbed out of the driver’s seat.

“I had a hunch you’d be back,” he said.

“That makes one of us.”

He grinned and ushered me inside with a sweep of his hand. I guess there was a part of me that hoped something of an echo of my father might still reside here, something through which I could feel closer to him, if only for a short time, but nothing like that existed here. This was a stranger’s house. This man was a stranger to me. There was nothing to bind me to this place, nothing to link me to my past or foretell of my future. And yet I found myself inexorably drawn to it. A behavioral geneticist would argue that blood seeks blood, that I inherently recognized a “sameness” in my uncle and that my senses identified a biological similarity in hormones or pheromones or the smell of his sweat or any number of invisible traces. A psychologist might say I felt orphaned and isolated and was attempting to create a sense of wholeness to fill the void left by the deaths of my parents when I was so young. I just knew that I needed to be here right now, whether I was led here by my brain or my instincts. There was some deep-seated answer I needed to find for a question I didn’t even know how to pose.

Roman stood back while I walked a circuit of the room, again studying the contradictions in furnishings. The collision of modern and traditional was a train wreck that made me uncomfortable on a primal level, as though there were a war being waged just out of sight.

“You want to know why your father left,” he said.

I nodded. Maybe it was as simple as that.

Roman sighed and sat down in the La-Z-Boy while I continued to pace the small house, perhaps feeling like a tiger in a cage as my father once must have. A wistful smile settled onto his face.

“Rafael and I were inseparable, you know. We did absolutely everything together from the time we could crawl nearly until his eighteenth birthday. That was when things started to change. We went from playing football and going hunting every day to barely speaking. I’m a big enough man to admit my role in our falling out. Not a whole lot of good that does me now. I think Raffi knows that, wherever he rides the wind now.”

I stepped into the hallway and looked at the boys. They had been happy as only children can be. They knew nothing of pain or suffering and each new dawn brought the promise of excitement and adventure. Perhaps a part of me was envious, maybe even a little jealous, for by the time I reached the age of the boys when they started to braid their hair, I had been forced to confront the worst thing in any child’s life, regardless of his age. I lost both of my parents, the threads that tethered me to the world. As far as I was concerned, they died on the same day; I just had the opportunity to say a long goodbye to my mother as she wasted away.

“You have to understand…this was a different time. This was the early eighties and the threat of nuclear war was real. Especially out here. The ground shook nonstop from the bombing range. Day and night. Boom-boom-boom. Dust filling the air. It felt like the end of the world. As far as we knew out here, it was just a matter of time before we went to war with the Commies. There were all sorts of people moving down here and digging up the desert building bomb shelters. Survival camps. Pseudo-military groups. Propaganda out the wazoo. And your daddy got it in his head that he needed to be the one to do something about it.”

I moved on to the pictures of my grandparents: one whose face was alight with life and the other who desperately wanted to join her but felt the pressure of his responsibilities and traditions. I wished I had known them.

“Look at this from our perspective. The O’odham are a proud people. We’ve been here since before there was a United States, since before the first white man ever set sail on the ocean, since before anyone started keeping track of time. We might be citizens of your country, but we are first and foremost members of the Tohono O’odham Nation. Our responsibility is to our families and our people. To our way of life. To the perpetuation of our sacred traditions. My father and those of his generation viewed the Cold War as someone else’s problem. The white man’s problem. We all knew the Commies wouldn’t launch their nukes because we would launch ours. Mutually assured destruction. It was all political posturing, a stalemate. So why did we need to throw our hat into the ring? Rafael felt differently. He said we all have a responsibility to freedom, without which the O’odham Nation would be absorbed and our way of live destroyed forever.”

As the pictures aged, so did the people in them. These were serious men and women from a more serious time. When more children died at birth than not. When starvation was a real threat. And when people still carried the memory of their land being sold by people who didn’t own it, and them right along with it.

“Your daddy and mine were too much alike. That was what it came down to in the end. Both of them treated responsibility like a religion. They swore an oath to it and lived and breathed its tenets. The only difference was they prayed at different altars. When Raffi came home from school one day and said he’d decided to join the ‘Forces, there was so much yelling you could have heard it all the way from the Rio Grande. I was going to the community college and working construction at the casino, but I was still living here. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was sitting right over there by the hearth. Eating black beans. Strange the things you remember. Raffi walked right in with his head held high and told my father that he was getting married and signing on with the Air Force.”

That caught my attention. He didn’t meet my mother for at least another two years.

Roman glanced over his shoulder. I caught his expression as he caught mine. He looked like a man who’d tracked mud into someone else’s house. He hadn’t meant to let that slip. He recovered quickly and turned away once more.

“The very next day he disappeared for close to a week. Came back with his head shaved and news that he’d been in Colorado. He’d enlisted in the Air Force and would only be around until the end of the summer. Your grandfather told him there was no reason to wait that long. Your daddy agreed. Your grandfather disavowed his very existence and your father turned his back on his people. My parents were never the same after that. I don’t think my mother ever forgave my father for chasing Rafael away. I don’t think he was ever able to forgive himself either. Those were some dark days, and I was more than happy to find my own place right after that.”

I tried to position myself so that I could see the expression on Roman’s face when I asked the question that was eating at me, but he stared straight through me and into another time and place.

“What happened to the girl my father was going to marry?”

“She met someone else and moved on with her life. I think she was always haunted by his ghost, though. First love and all that. Hmph. We were all just kids back then.”

“He was your brother. Why didn’t you ever track him down?”

“I loved him, but I had nothing to say to him. He turned his back on me too, you know. Don’t make him out to be some kind of saint.”

There was an edge to Roman’s voice. The same edge I had heard the night before in his bedroom. The edge that told me it was time for me to leave.

He continued to stare off into memory as I stood there in front of him, caught between the present and the past.