Текст книги "The Coyote"
Автор книги: Michael McBride
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 21 страниц)
Brush marks on the sand in front of me. The side-to-side trails of leaves being swept back and forth to cover prints. They were faint, but they were fresh.
I leapt to my feet and followed them at a sprint. They led down the hill and around a stand of cacti and onto a flat stretch of desert spotted with creosotes and sage and palo verdes that had grown to the size of trees. And that was where the trail ended. There was a splotch of blood still aggregating in the dirt and what looked like the print from the back of a hand and wrist. A wad of foul cellophane was tangled in a creosote.
No more brush marks.
No footprints or branch marks or thorn scrapes or tire tread.
Nothing at all.
The ground leading away from me almost looked like someone had taken a leaf blower to it, scattering the sand and flattening the weeds and erasing any sign of passage.
I had been so close.
So close…
NINETEEN
By the time I again scaled the hill and reached the crime scene, there were a handful of CBP agents waiting to greet me. Perhaps greet was the wrong term. There was a whole lot of shouting and waving of pistols, but we eventually got things straightened out and all walked backed to our respective cars with the sun setting ahead of us across the desert.
Having spent the majority of my life on the front range of the Colorado Rockies, I was so accustomed to what others might call majestic sunsets that I rarely even noticed them anymore. The sun set behind the snow-capped peaks every night. That was just kind of what it did. I hoped the people who lived here didn’t take this one for granted, for this was one of those things you had to see to believe. The way the red sun seemed to waver on the distant horizon, spreading a glow the color of the flesh around a peach pit across the rolling hills, was positively breathtaking. Or maybe it was merely the way the temperature was plummeting and the fact that I no longer felt like I was in immediate danger of dropping dead that lightened my spirits. Whatever the case, something in my brain had finally seen fit to give up a decent idea of how to proceed. The only problem was I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it until the morning, which left me with the whole night to kill.
Hopefully, that wasn’t the Coyote’s plan, as well.
The CBP agents had been about as courteous as one would expect from civil servants. They thanked me for wasting their time and encouraged me to find just about anywhere else on the planet to be. One especially helpful fellow even suggested about the only place that might be hotter than this, which made me feel a whole lot better about not telling them what I had found at either of the crime scenes. There would come a point when I would have to, but not yet, and not like this. This was still my game to play and, fortunately, they hadn’t searched my car and found my signal jammer beneath the driver’s seat, so I still had the ability to play it. As far as they knew, I had no knowledge of the Oscars, which left them with the impression they would still be able to monitor my movements while I traveled relatively unimpeded. And I had learned that the batteries lasted less than four hours with continuous use. The guys back at Ajo Station were probably racking their brains trying to figure out how my car had just suddenly appeared on top of one of their Oscars in the lot and would have their tech guys going over the preceding units in the series to check for malfunctions. I, on the other hand, simply needed to pick up some more batteries.
I was surprised to find the streets of Sells all but deserted upon my return. After witnessing so much activity earlier in the day, I kind of figured there’d be at least some sort of night life, but I was sorely mistaken. The daytime apparently allowed the community to perpetuate an illusion that vanished with the setting sun. This was an occupied zone. The only cars on the streets were the green and white Border Patrol Explorers. They cruised slowly through town with their spotlights directed between houses and buildings. The agents driving them couldn’t possibly have stared me down any harder if I’d had illegals clinging to my roof and hanging out of my open trunk. I turned on my scanner and listened to them call in my license plate and the make and model of my car each time I passed a patrol, although it was hard to hear with the insane amount of radio activity.
If I thought what I’d heard earlier with Chief Antone was chaos, this gave a whole new definition to the word. There were multiple dispatchers coordinating so many different units on so many different frequencies that I couldn’t even begin to keep them straight. A Blackhawk streaked past overhead, so low it rattled my windows. Its spotlight snapped on as it traced the street all the way to the edge of sight, where I saw several shadows break cover and sprint off into the night. Two Explorers raced past me on either side, their sirens blaring. It was hard to fathom that I was still in the same country as I had been two days ago. This felt like a military state, and I supposed that was exactly what it was. I couldn’t help but wonder what it might have been like before the simultaneous invasion of the narco-insurgency and the para-military forces of the country to which the sovereign Tohono O’odham Nation was forced to swear its allegiance. It was hard to believe that the construction of a great wall along the US-Mexico border could be any worse than this. I tried to imagine how different the course of my life might have been had my father been awakened by the sounds of warfare in the street outside his home rather than the distant rumble of bombing that heralded the end of the world, while at the same time closing off my mind to thoughts of the children trying to sleep behind the shivering windows of the houses lining what should have been quiet rural streets.
I found a twenty-four hour store that reminded me of a pawn shop on East Colfax in Denver. It was an adobe structure with bars on the cracked windows and a hand-painted sign over the door that was stenciled with oddly inflected O’odham words, beneath which it read simply “Always Open” in English. I was able to load up on batteries and jerky and even a cold four-pack of Red Bull. There was a coffee pot full of black tar and a sign above it that declared it free for law enforcement officers. Judging by the expression on the face of the cashier behind the wire-reinforced glass at the back of the store, I had a pretty good hunch how he felt about the law enforcement community as a whole and figured that no matter how much I loved coffee, I would never need it that badly. He was looking at me like I’d deflowered his sister in front of him on prom night and then followed him home and asked for an introduction to his mother. There was something else in his eyes, though, something that led me to believe he was stroking the freshly oiled barrel of a shotgun under the counter and just praying for the opportunity to use it. I slid the cash through the pass box and told him to keep the change, if for no other reason than to expedite my departure.
Don’t let anyone tell you I’ve lost touch with the common man.
I changed the batteries in the car, switched on the jammer, and listened to the chaos on the scanner all the way out to the second crime scene, which was technically the first chronologically. It was the one to the southeast along the Baboquivari Range, where Antone had introduced me to my biological uncle and cousin, who had found the first smiley face in the shadow of Baboquivari Peak, beneath which our creator god, I’itoi, lived deep in his maze. I was starting to think there was some significance to the myth, some symmetry between the underground from which the Hohokam had been led to the surface of the earth and the tunnels the Coyote had excavated to stash his victims.
Like I said, I have a hard time trusting the notion of coincidence. I found it strange now, in retrospect, that Chief Antone had told me that legend on our way to the site. Stranger still his initial reaction to my arrival at the station. It’s about time. We’ve been expecting you. Like he hadn’t just been awaiting the arrival of a federal agent…
He’d been waiting for me.
I had a harder time finding my way to this crime scene than either of the previous two, which gave me the opportunity to test my recognition of rattling sounds in the dark and introduced me to both a gila monster and a banded kingsnake. Or was it a coral snake? At least it was cooling off rapidly enough that both reptiles were sluggishly working their way back to their burrows. I couldn’t remember if it was the kingsnake or the coral snake that was venomous, but it had been a long enough day already without having to find out.
When I finally identified the right canyon and followed the correct fork, I just sat there on a rock across from the design, staring up at the faded smiley face for the longest time. The blood was flaking off in some spots, already completely gone in others. There was something about it that just wasn’t right. I couldn’t pin down what any more than I could explain why. The lines were too carefully formed. Their incompleteness somehow seemed complete, for lack of a better way to describe it. Everything about it seemed precise, and yet the design itself appeared as though it wasn’t meant to. The eyes could have been depicted in any number of ways. Why slanted lines? Why one longer than the other? Why did the nose look like it did: an angled straight line and a curved underside? There had to be some significance to it, to its precise lack of precision. Why was it painted onto the stone rather than on the ground? Why was it so large when it was on a stone face you couldn’t see from a distance, only when you were standing directly before it? Was it meant to imitate a primitive petroglyph? Was that why the lines themselves were seemingly so stylized? Did the Coyote intend to use a native motif to help purvey his message or in order to point the investigation in the wrong direction?
It was obvious that Chief Antone and Roman and Ban Walker all knew more than they were telling me and it was starting to really get under my skin. It was high time we all put our cards on the table, but I needed to gather more information before I was in a position to confront them. If I was right about my plans for the morning, I would be in a position to do so tomorrow.
It was already shaping up to be a banner day.
I stomped around for a while, but that proved unnecessary in the end. I was starting to get a feel for what I was looking for. It wasn’t an identifiable track per se, but rather the utter and complete absence of them that led me to the egress. Maybe I didn’t have the skills or the experience to do what the CBP agents did and maybe I never would. All I knew was that I could tell the difference between the surrounding sand and the stripe that looked like it had been smoothed with a leaf blower. It didn’t hurt that it led straight up to a hole in the hillside like a red carpet the killer had rolled out just for me. I don’t know if I had missed the hole before because I hadn’t been looking for it or because it had been concealed the last time I was here. I didn’t suppose it mattered much considering it had undoubtedly been scoured of any potential evidence like the others. I figured I’d just perform a cursory search to satisfy my own curiosity and hopefully figure out what was troubling me about the physical crime scenes, this one in particular. It was something about the smiley face, which, the longer I looked at it, the less I truly believed that someone who had spent so much time planning these crimes would go to such extreme lengths to deliver such a seemingly benign and meaningless message. I mean, what did he hope to accomplish? The Smiley Face Killer wasn’t much of a moniker if he was angling for notoriety or his story on the big screen. And why use the coyote motif on top of it? There were too many contradictions and coincidences. I was obviously missing something crucial that would serve as the domino that would make the entire row topple in sequence.
The hole itself was halfway up a steep slope covered with wild grasses, cacti, and irregularly-shaped red rocks that appeared to have been arrested in a perpetual state of avalanche readiness. Despite first impressions, they were deeply lodged in the mountainside and allowed me to climb over them so as not to have to do battle with the omnipresent cholla and prickly pears. It didn’t take long to make my way to the hole, which appeared to be a coyote burrow, just like the last. At least it had the appearance of being excavated by claws rather than any manmade implement. From where I was now, I could see where the canyon opened onto the desert, and a slice of the flatlands that stretched away into the infinite darkness. This had to be his back door. It would have been too visible by the standards he’d already set forth to be the main entrance. If I hadn’t lost all sense of direction, the crime scene itself was maybe twenty-five feet uphill and a hundred feet to the northwest. His primary point of egress couldn’t be too far from there; I just hadn’t been able to identify it in the dark.
Of course, there was always still a chance I was wrong and I was about to disturb a pack of starving mongrels by sticking my head right into their midst. At least that would make for a better smell than I anticipated in any of the other scenarios that played out in my head.
The stench that wafted from inside the hole removed any doubt as to what was or what might once have been inside. I was going to have to remember to pick up some Vicks at the very next opportunity. Or maybe I’d be better off just lopping off my own blasted nose.
I gave the rim a cursory inspection, then lowered myself to my belly, held my penlight and my gun in front of me like before, and squirmed into the earth. I advanced slowly. Cautiously. If I were going to set a trap for someone, this is where I would do it. I couldn’t think of any other reason he would have left his back door standing wide open, assuming that was indeed what had happened. The scratches from the branches he had dragged through here were nearly indistinguishable from the marks made by the claws that carved this tunnel, but I was coming to be able to see these things with the kind of clarity that I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of mere days ago.
My entire body wasn’t even all the way into the horizontal shaft when it bent sharply to the right and out of sight.
I paused and listened.
A blind corner was the perfect place for some sort of booby trap. It was an opportunity that was almost too good to pass up. Based on the narrowness of the tube and the sharpness of the turn, I would essentially have to wiggle the majority of my torso around the bend before I would be able to raise my head far enough to clearly see the way ahead of me.
The only sound was the harsh echo of my breathing.
I guess it all boiled down to how badly I wanted this guy and to what lengths I was willing to go to catch him. When I looked at it like that, there really was no decision to be made at all.
I wriggled forward and around the bend as fast as I could. The hell with it. By the time I was able to see ahead of me, I was halfway to the end of the tunnel, a dark oval through which the beam of my penlight diffused into a weak golden aura. I could hear the buzzing of flies and another sound that I couldn’t quite place. I was nearly to the den itself when my light fell upon the object resting on the ground just across the earthen threshold. It was a small burlap pouch with a leather cord threaded through the material and cinched on top. The fabric was black with what could only be blood. It was positively alive with flies.
Just sitting there where I couldn’t possibly miss it.
Where I had been meant to find it.
I heard a kind of swishing sound beneath the drone of the flies.
I exhaled slowly to steady my nerves. I was either going to have to set down my penlight or my Beretta in order to grab it, and I honestly didn’t much care for either option. In the end, I decided neither was acceptable and managed to toss my penlight backward and close enough to my face that I was able to manipulate it into my mouth. I tilted the beam as well as I could toward the satchel and dragged it closer, into the tunnel and out of the den. A tug on the leather cord and the bag opened wide enough that I could pinch it by the crusted underside, invert it, and dump the contents—
“Oh, God…”
TWENTY
I don’t know what I had expected to be inside the satchel. I guess I didn’t ever really stop to think about it. Maybe a part of me just assumed it would be something like a finger or a toe. Maybe a few of each. It was a decent size bag. Something meant to taunt or torment me, some way for him to show me he was in charge, but nothing at all like what fell out. In fact, it took several beats for me to recognize exactly what they were. They looked almost like little ceramic balls glued together, side-by-side in ascending size, crusted with blood. A T-shaped knob of bone protruded from the broad end of each.
They were rattles.
The realization hit me at the same moment I heard the sweeping sound again. Closer this time. I shoved myself backward with every last ounce of strength as a dark shape streaked past my face and struck the dirt wall beside me. It wasn’t a sweeping sound. It was hissing. In context, I clearly recognized it now. My sudden movement had set off a frenzy in the coyote den. Hissing and thrashing sounds echoed from the warren. As rattlesnakes, they were born in a bad mood that could only be enhanced by lopping off their tails and throwing them down into a strange den that smelled like death warmed over.
I dropped my penlight, which shined deeper into the tunnel, illuminating dark shapes slithering across the threshold behind the one that had missed me. It had already recoiled and reared up into striking position. The nub of its tail stood straight up as it vibrated. The thing had to be as wide around as my forearm. Fortunately, I still had my pistol and the damn snake was so big it made an easy target. I squeezed the trigger. The diamondback unraveled and whipped backward into the darkness beyond the light’s reach at the same moment the thunderclap of the report swatted me upside the head. I’d swear I saw the other snakes strike at the ruined reptile as it flew past, but I was backing around the bend in such a hurry that I didn’t stick around to find out for sure. And I was more than happy to let them share their venom with each other instead of with me.
I felt my feet drop over the outside edge as another shape sliced across my field of view and past my face, so close I could smell it. The deafening report in such close quarters had thrown off my equilibrium and made the tunnel appear to turn clockwise around me, but I was still able to squeeze off another shot that hit the snake while it was recoiling to take another strike at me.
And then I was out of the tunnel and into a darkness so much lighter it was like daytime in contrast. I tried to stand, tried to run, but only managed to send myself toppling over a large rock and tumbling down the hillside. For several seconds, I felt like I was being bludgeoned with baseball bats and then I was flat on my back, gasping for air I couldn’t quite seem to catch. The image of rattlesnakes firing out of the mouth of that hole and raining down on me got me crawling. The air finally broke through and I gasped and lunged to my feet. The ground teetered beneath me as I staggered away from the hillside and finally collapsed onto a sage bush that felt like a pincushion, but was vastly preferable to the nopales beside it.
I don’t know how long I lay like that, just draped over the shrub with the imagined sound of rattles shaking in my head. When I finally rolled off of it and onto the sand, I started to laugh. I laughed harder than I had in a long time. I laughed so hard I’m sure there were a dozen migrants crossing the Sonoran who dove into the nearest hiding place at the sound of my dawning madness. The Coyote had known I was nipping at his heels and tried to eliminate me before I caught up with him. And he had wanted me to know his true identity right before I was struck repeatedly by a half-dozen rattlesnakes. He wanted me to wonder why he did it as I stumbled through the desert, the venom coursing through my blood, stealing the sight from my eyes while the pain became unendurable. Or maybe he thought I’d never make it back out of the tunnel. Regardless, he had taken a risk in doing so, a gambit that was going to blow up in his face.
I rolled over onto my back and looked up the slope to where the mouth of the hole was limned by the beam from my lost penlight.
“I’m coming for you,” I said, and pushed myself to my feet.
I spent nearly the entire walk back to my car plucking cactus needles from my hands and arms by the light of the moon. I waited until I reached my car before prying the large ones from the left side of my face and neck with the aid of the mirror app on my cell phone. The last thing I needed was to leave bits embedded under the skin or create any ghastly puckered scars. Besides, I had a little extra time to play with.
The Coyote thought I was dead.
It was only a matter of time before he learned the truth, but for now, I essentially had my own personal jammer that would allow me to sneak up on him. And I was going to enjoy every second of it. I wanted to see the expression on his face when he realized that he had failed, that I knew who he was. That I had beaten him. I wanted to memorize the expression so I could recall it whenever I chose. I wanted it to be the last thing I saw at night before I drifted off to sleep and the first thing I saw before I opened my eyes in the morning.
This was personal now.
I guess it always had been, and I needed to know why. It made sense that if I was going to figure out the answer to that question, Why was the best place to start.
The town of Why, Arizona was actually the location of Ajo Station, despite being ten miles south of the town of Ajo. It sits just to the west of the Tohono O’odham Reservation and north of Organ Pipe National Monument, twenty-five miles straight up Highway 85 from Lukeville and the Mexican border at Sonoyta. Prior to 9/11 and the subsequent commission of the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, the town boasted a whopping population of roughly one hundred and its sole claim to fame was the Y-shaped intersection where Highways 85 and 86 merged. At the time of its founding, state law required all city names to have at least three letters, thus the über-creative Why. And now that the Arizona Department of Transportation had caved to safety concerns and convention and rebuilt the intersection into a more traditional T-shape, disappointed tourists now had to content themselves with a peek at the unrestrained bedlam that was Ajo Station and blow their money at the Desert Diamond Casino east of town.
I made the drive in thirty-five minutes flat, despite the lights and sirens that were positively everywhere as I neared town. There were Explorers literally bursting with undocumenteds. The station itself might as well have been equipped with a turnstile for all of the arrests coming in and transport buses heading back and forth from any number of overflowing detention centers, where the illegals would simply plead guilty to save time and be shipped back across the border, only to try their luck again.
Even this close to midnight, the level of activity was positively insane. Blackhawks thundering past overhead, their spotlights scouring the desert. Headlights bounding through the hills. The scanner was going nuts. Whatever they were paying their dispatchers, it wasn’t enough. They made air traffic controllers sound like Ben Stein. I couldn’t imagine there was an insurance company on the planet that would sign any of them to a life insurance policy with a suicide payout.
The casino itself was sleepy by comparison. It was really little more than a Vegas-themed truck stop. The real magic happened at the main Desert Diamond Casino outside of Tucson, where I heard it rumored that John Mellencamp frequently performed, sans Cougar. This place wasn’t even open twenty-four hours. Probably even had clocks. It had that vibe of sweaty desperation about it that made me not want to touch anything for fear of contracting some form of terminal depression. I could positively taste the haze of cigarette smoke all the way from my car, where I sat trying not to scratch at the itchy spots from which I’d recently removed the cactus needles.
There was a steady stream of traffic, primarily interstate truckers, through the self-serve bays. A good number had already bedded down for the night in the dirt lot around the side of the casino. I didn’t have to sit there for very long to realize that the women coming and going from the cabs weren’t carhops. I’d imagine they probably weren’t legal residents either.
The convenience store slash restaurant was well-lighted and relatively vacant. There were a couple of heavyset men at the counter and another perusing a wall of magazines. The rotund woman at the register also capped off the coffee, walking back and forth from one to the other in a continuous loop that had surely worn a trench into the floor.
The casino side was the diametric opposite. It was dark and smoky and all sorts of sirens flashed and lights flared from the rows of slot machines I could see through the front glass doors. A uniformed security guard stood sentry just inside the right door and out of sight. He magically appeared to admit anyone who neared. I didn’t figure my cousin Ban would be so easy to find and I wasn’t disappointed. I still needed to approach this the right way, though. I couldn’t afford to give up my advantage.
By the time I stepped out of my car, the security guard was already in the open doorway, staring straight at me. It appeared as though I wasn’t the only one doing a little surveilling. I opted for jeans and a T-shirt and left my jacket and cap in the car, but the damage was already done thanks to my conspicuously inconspicuous Crown Vic. He smiled as he ushered me inside and led me down a long row of slots to a small doorway concealed in the wall. Another guard, who wore the air of supervision as heavily as the gut hanging over his belt and onto his lap, was seated behind a desk upon which sat a dozen flickering monitors only he could see. He stared expectantly up at me from a fleshy face that appeared to hang from the bones of his face like a big gob of snot. The name badge on his chest read: J. Armandiriz, Chief of Security.
I smiled.
He didn’t.
Great. I was going to have to do this the hard way.
I reached for my badge jacket, but he waved me off.
“No need.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The rooms are in the back. Just head through the door behind the blackjack table and find the first open room. One of the girls will be in short—”
“I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding here. I need—”
“I know all about your needs. Spare me the song and dance. We’re closing up in half an hour and I have a fun-filled night of hosing the drunks out of here ahead of me. So just get back there and—”
Turns out I wasn’t the only one who could read expressions. This joker was a little slow on the uptake, but he managed to get the gist of mine just fine. I watched his change from surprise to alarm to sheer terror in the time it took me to reach across the desk and grab him by the hair. I had a hunch he was the kind of guy who wasn’t going to run off and tattle on me. I bounced his head off of one of the video monitors and sat down in the chair across the desk from him. Pleasantries out of the way, I got right down to business.
“Here’s the deal: I’ve had a pretty rotten night and I’m all out of patience, so I’ll make this so simple that even you can understand it. I’m going to ask some questions. You’re going to answer them. If you do so, I’ll walk out of here and you can go back to doing whatever it is you do. If you don’t, I’m going to drag you out of here by the scruff of your flabby neck and drop you somewhere out there in the desert where you can wipe your fat ass with cactus pads for all I care. If you repeat a single word of what transpires here, I will descend upon you with the wrath of God and shove that cereal box badge of yours straight down your throat. Have I made myself perfectly clear?”
A trickle of blood rolled down his forehead. I watched his Adam’s apple rise, then jiggle as he swallowed a knot and whatever pride he might have thought he possessed up until that moment. I think he might have tried to speak, but I was able to read his face well enough without verbal confirmation.
“And I expect whatever cut your taking off of these girls’…labors…to go back into their pockets as a bonus so they can move on a little faster.”
That one hit him like a blow to the gut. He just had one of those faces that made you want to keep hitting him. Fortunately for him, I had a more pressing engagement.
“Where’s Ban Walker?”
The expression on his face was one of utter confusion. I knew right then and there that I was wasting my time, valuable time that I simply didn’t have.
“How the hell should I know? I haven’t seen that guy in probably two years. Not since I had to let him go.”
“Why?”
“He was an arrogant prick. Thought he was better than all of the rest of us just because he’d worn the colors of the green Gestapo for all of about thirty seconds. Like his shit don’t stink, right?” His eyes had been doing their best to avoid mine, but they latched on when he finally caught up with the situation. His cheeks flushed with what could have passed for the return of his confidence. “I always knew there was something wrong with that guy. What did he do?”