Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

“I just need to talk to him.”

“No. No. There’s more to it than that. You’re federal. He’s done something really big.”

“Do you still have some way of tracking him down?”

“Don’t you think I’d be smart enough to trade that information if I had it?”

“Honestly?”

“Screw you. Don’t think just because you got that big old badge that you can treat me like something you scraped off your shoe. You think you’re the only fed who comes in here? I probably knew more agents than you do. And don’t think for a second that any of them would be happy to hear that you’re threatening their free…entertainment.”

“You really want me to come back here, don’t you?”

“No.” He smiled. “I want you to get the hell out of here.”

He leaned forward and rested his chin on his pudgy fists. He cocked his head first one way, then the other. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an expression that smug on another human being.

I rose to leave. There was nothing for me here. I had learned everything I was going to, which amounted to somewhere between jack and squat. I turned and headed for the door, uncertain exactly how the confrontation had turned on me. Maybe I just needed to work on my people skills.

“You look just like him, you know,” Armandiriz said to my back.

And there I had my answer.

“What did you just say?”

“It’s the eyes. You guys have the exact same eyes.”

If you’ve never seen a three hundred pound man flip backward over his chair, I highly recommend it. An overhand right to the bridge of the nose works quite well, especially if you swing hard enough. And I guarantee it’ll knock that smug grin right off of his face and onto yours.

Don’t let anyone tell you I don’t know how to loosen my tie and have a little fun from time to time.

DAY 3

tash waik

wuhi

The term sociopath is considered antiquated and has been replaced with the formal medical diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder. Kind of takes away the element of personal accountability, I say. ‘Don’t blame me, I have APD.’ Funny how the staggering increase in violent crime over the last fifty years coincides with the integration of psychology into the mainstream, isn’t it?

TWENTY-ONE

Sells District

Tohono O’odham Nation

Arizona

September 11th

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Take punching a three hundred-pound slab of humanity hard enough to send it flipping head over heels. Or heels over head, as the case may be. The consequences, while not entirely unanticipated, are always worse than you expect at the time.

When you think about the logistics of essentially punching a side of beef with enough force to knock it off the hook from which it hangs, you realize you would have been better off just drawing your sidearm and shooting it. Physics further dictates that force travels in a straight line. For the behavioralists who claim that mankind wasn’t born with the propensity for violence and instead that it’s a conditioned response to negative external stimuli, I offer proof to the contrary. The human arm is one of nature’s strangest and most force-resistant designs, trailing only the rock, the tree trunk, and the mammalian leg. An arm is constructed with the ability to form a compact club at its most distal end. That club is mounted on a long, whip-like fulcrum that attaches to the trunk roughly three feet from the origin of the imparted force. It is designed to impact with the knuckles of the second and third digits, the index and middle fingers, respectively. From there, the force of the blow—in this case, an overhand right—travels up the lengths of the second and third metacarpals, which further distribute that force between the eight carpal bones and then the two long bones of the forearm, although primarily the thicker radius. It’s then further absorbed by the humerus, which is the longest and strongest bone in your body next to the femur. From there it passes into the heavily muscled shoulder girdle and dissipates into the thorax. All so you don’t end up breaking your hand when you hit someone.

That doesn’t mean it won’t still hurt like a mother, though.

I drove with my left hand and rested the knuckles of my right on a cold bottle of water in my lap. Cold being a largely subjective term like pain, which was definitely winning the battle between the two. As much as I had enjoyed punching Boss Nass at the time, I regretted it even more now. Not necessarily because it hurt like a mother, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, but because it was diverting my focus from the task at hand. It also exposed a chink in my armor that until now I didn’t realize I possessed. I’ve always been able to draw a firm line between the personal and the professional, despite the fact that I take my job very personally. This one had hit too close to home, though. Too close to a home I hadn’t lived in for a long, long time, but a home filled with unresolved feelings nonetheless.

Despite what anyone might say about him, I am my father’s son and I take great pride in that fact. I may not have known him as well as I would have liked, but I knew him well enough to know that he placed loyalty and honor and service above all else. He believed in his ideals and believed to the very end that they were worth fighting and, ultimately, dying for. Maybe a part of me wishes he had placed me before his ideals. That he would have recognized a boy needs a father worse than a largely forgotten war needed a largely forgotten hero. I guess I understood that in his own way he had. We can’t always choose the way our parents love us. Which, I suppose, serves as the sad war cry of the abused child, too.

The irony is not lost on me.

The comparison to the man I was convinced was the Coyote cut me to the bone. I’m not blind. I couldn’t help but see the physical similarities between us, the parallels between our lives. He was a few years older, but we had essentially been born at the same time. I had been raised in a different world, though. He was born here and stayed here. His was the life that could have been mine had my father bowed to tradition as his had before him. And as his brother had, as well. I had been raised in a large house on a large lot in an upscale suburb by people who pretty much devoted the last quarter of their lives to raising their grandson as if he were their own son. My cousin had been raised apart from the outside world and largely in a position to resent it for past wrongs perpetrated by a government that no longer existed in the same form. While I had gone to a prestigious prep school and an even more prestigious college, he had been shown a route from a single communal school straight through community college and into a job force that existed to serve the community. I had joined the FBI and received the best law enforcement training in the entire nation. Where I had been taught to hunt out in the real world, where rules applied. He had been trained by the Border Patrol, and, by extension, the very same government, to hunt in a lawless land where none of the traditional rules applied. He had seen the pictures of my successes accumulating on the wall in his family’s homestead, seen me living essentially the same life, only on a grander scale. He had known about me while I hadn’t even looked hard enough to learn of his existence. I wasn’t responsible for the path he had chosen, but I wasn’t entirely blameless, either.

This case had always been destined to fall into my lap and he had known it from the moment the idea first crossed his mind. This was his challenge to me, the gauntlet he had thrown at my feet. Me vs. him. Mano a mano.

Blood on blood.

But that wasn’t the part that bothered me the most. The worst part was the realization that our roles could easily have been reversed, were it not for the random nature of fate.

The impartation of force.

We had both chosen the same straight line of impact, yet here we both were now, two irresistible forces on a collision course with one another, hunting on the reservation of our ancestors, which had already tasted the blood of countless generations of our forebears. And before this was over, it would taste even more. One way or the other. I could feel it deep in my very being…

That had always been his plan.

I just couldn’t understand the sheer ferocity with which he hated me. There had to be something more, some reason above and beyond living a lifetime in the shadow of a cousin who had no idea he was even casting one. I was the kind of guy who tended to take a rattlesnake striking at his face a little bit personally. Maybe it all boiled down to the fact that Ban and I were both just really sensitive, touchy-feely kind of guys.

I’d been so distracted by my thoughts and the pain in my hand and the furious itching on my face and neck that I didn’t at first appreciate the subtle inquiries of one of the dispatchers over the scanner until a note of panic crept into her voice. I turned up the volume in an effort to isolate her thread from all of the others, which, while every bit as frantic, had some semblance of control to them. This woman’s voice reflected concern of a more personal nature, something entirely outside of her normal work routine. And I wasn’t the only one who noticed it. The background din faded significantly as field agents turned down their stereos and limited their communications to the bare essentials. There was an electricity crackling from the underlying static that I couldn’t quite define. A palpable tension, a sense of expectation, a mounting potential. The kind of energy that ripples through the air moments before the thunderheads crest the mountains and the grumble of thunder rolls down through the valleys.

“Unit one-one-eight respond. One-one-eight respond! Damn it, Matthews! Respond!”

“Talk to us, dispatch. What’s going on out there?”

“Two-six-eight. Zero-seven-five. You both should still be close to the Destruya Drag, correct?”

“Zero-seven-five. Fifteen miles south.”

“Two-six-eight twelve miles north. What’s going on over there, Teri?”

“I lost one-one-eight between Oscars fourteen and fifteen.”

“What do you mean…lost?”

“He radioed in brush sign across the drag at twenty-three fifty-three.”

I looked at my clock. The glowing green numerals on the dash read 1:14 a.m.

“Visual confirmation of target?”

“Negative. He elected to track on foot.”

“Fifteen on the Destruya is the wash at the base of Mt. Vainom. When did he fall out of contact?”

“Last check-in was oh-oh oh-eight. He failed to make the oh-one hundred.”

“He could have been right on top of the wets and had to go silent.”

“He would have clicked to acknowledge. You know that. You all know that.”

“What was his last communication?”

“He said the sign led northwest into an arroyo before he lost it, that it just stopped right there in front of him and he was going to have to try to pick it up again. Must have backtracked on him, he thought. Probably saw whatever coyote was in there marking his territory. He said something about it smelling like a whole pack in heat up there…”

Her words faded and the ground seemed to drop out from under me. I glanced at the clock again.

1:16.

Unit one-eighteen had radioed in sign at 11:53. It had taken him fifteen minutes to reach the point where the trail terminated. And he had now been out of contact for sixty-eight minutes. The closest unit was a twenty-minute drive and a fifteen minute walk away. One hundred and three minutes. Nearly two hours, when all was said and done. That was more than enough time.

Way more than enough.

I pinned the gas and launched the Crown Vic across the desert toward the jagged ridge of the Baboquivari Mountains, which I could barely see on the distant horizon.

We were already too late.

TWENTY-TWO

Time passed like an out-of-body experience. I barely remember racing my headlights down dirt roads I could hardly see for the dust. Saguaros firing past my windows like shadowed mile markers. Gravel pinging from my wheel wells with machine gun rapidity. Sliding sideways through turns and righting myself in the open desert. Branches screeching through the paint job. Only having the vaguest idea of my destination until I saw the distant convergence of sirens and headlights and the clouds of dust from their passage rising up to blot out the stars. Arriving to find Explorer doors standing ajar and light stretching out onto the bare dirt. Flashlights jouncing across the wash, appearing and disappearing through the branches of the mesquites and cottonwoods. Barely having the presence of mind to put my car into park before I jumped out into the night and barreled through the darkness with my Beretta in my hand. Trying desperately to keep the flashlights ahead of me in sight while simultaneously negotiating the rugged terrain and keeping my skin from being flayed by the thorns and the cactus needles. Feeling the ground shake as a Blackhawk streaked across the sky toward the mountains, luring me onward with the sweep of its spotlight. The continuous arrival of lights and sirens behind me. The shouting of agents. The barking of dogs.

Under any other circumstances I would have marveled at their fluidly coordinated response, especially when you take into account the vastness and remoteness of their patrol zone. But it was like showing up for the fireworks on the fifth of July.

The show was already over.

I had expected both escalation and acceleration from the Coyote, yet I never imagined anything like this. Taking down a Border Patrol agent in the field would make him public enemy number one for the more than three thousand agents roaming the deserts from Southern California through Eastern Texas, who tended to take the death of one of their own almost as personally as the act of avenging him. This wasn’t a nameless, faceless immigrant who no one would ever notice was missing. This was a man with a name and a face and a badge that guaranteed the full resources of the federal government would be at the disposal of those in pursuit of his killer.

The Coyote had signed his own death warrant.

And maybe that was exactly what he wanted. The powers-that-be could only keep a lid on this situation for so long, but what could he possibly hope to accomplish by gaining so much attention? A serial killer made a pretty lousy martyr.

The staggering wind generated by the chopper blades buffeted me as I entered a narrow valley of sorts. The steep slopes to either side were grassy and spotted with clumps of cacti, yuccas, and creosotes, which grew from bare gaps in the red soil where scree had slid down the mountain through the eons. A dry creek bed a mere half-foot wide meandered between the trunks of palo verde trees. There was all sorts of trash and discarded clothing heaped under their bowed branches, and it was obvious even to a novice like me that this was a fairly common layover point for undocumenteds attempting to sneak through the Baboquivaris.

I had to shield my face from the blowing sand and branches as I passed from the arroyo into a narrow canyon where the soil and grasses gave way to sheer red rock. The golden spotlight jiggled across the ground ahead, guiding me around a bend and to a spot where I finally caught up with the other agents at the convergence of two even narrower canyons, one of which led nearly straight up a series of stone ledges to where I could see the Blackhawk attempting to hover. One of the agents had his free hand pressed to his ear and was shouting into his two-way. I couldn’t hear a word he was saying over the mechanized thunder, but his face was scarlet with the exertion. The other was staring at the stone outcropping another ten paces ahead of me and to my right, his sidearm drawn and pointed uselessly between his feet. The expression on his face was one of utter disbelief, as though his brain had yet to sift through the myriad emotions to settle on just one.

I tried to wave off the chopper, but it made no outward sign that it had seen me. Or maybe the pilot simply didn’t care. They were blowing away whatever evidence may once have existed. That was the problem with working any sort of crime against a law enforcement officer of any branch; his brothers-in-arms were prepared to go to any lengths to find the perpetrator and carry out their own brand of justice, even if it meant trampling every law they upheld through the normal course of service. I couldn’t fault them for it, though. Were our roles reversed, I would have undoubtedly felt the same, but this approach was counterproductive, especially considering how small the Coyote’s lead was on us now. He had to still be out here in the desert somewhere, and if they wanted retribution to be served, they needed to get the hell out there and find him.

“Give me that!” I shouted and took the transceiver away from the surprised agent before he could object. I depressed the button and shouted into the microphone. “Get that chopper out of here! You’re destroying the crime scene! If you want to actually do something useful, sweep the desert to either side of this mountain for any sign of where he might have had a vehicle waiting. If there isn’t one, then that means he’s still up here with us somewhere! And get us some more goddamn backup and an emergency response team in case your guy’s still alive up here!”

I shoved the radio back into the agent’s chest. I could have interpreted the rage on his face from space. The Blackhawk banked away and took its light with it, stranding us in darkness, but at least it was a darkness bereft of wind and noise.

“You want to help your guy? Suck it up and do your job. He could still be out here somewhere. And so could the man who came after him, so get your head in the game!”

The professional in him tempered his emotions and grudgingly nodded. He stepped away and clicked on his flashlight. I could hear him taking control and radioing his other units to set up a firm perimeter and gather all of the necessary investigative teams as I walked toward where the other agent still stood, staring slack-jawed at the canyon wall. I don’t think he’d so much as breathed since I first saw him.

I commandeered his Maglite—a six-inch mini professional-plus LED model that produced a beam every bit as powerful as that of the old two-foot billy club model—from his utility belt and shined it up at the design painted on the wall. The blood was so fresh it glistened. There were spots where rivulets of blood still trickled from the carefully constructed lines. The paw prints were so fresh and clear that it almost appeared as though they’d been made by a living coyote, which, I guess, in a sense they had, because the Coyote was the master of deception and continued to prove it.

This design was different. It broke the pattern. It wasn’t a continuation of the previous design. It wasn’t the more completed construction of the smiley face I had expected. This one was unique. This one was meant just for me. To mock me. This was his way of showing me and everyone around me who was running this show.

And, up to this point, that most definitely wasn’t me.

This changed everything.

I stared at the design painted in the Border Patrol agent’s blood and allowed myself a moment to seethe before I again mastered my emotions.

I turned and walked away. I still had a tunnel to find around here somewhere with Lord only knew what waiting for me inside.

TWENTY-THREE

Fortunately, the agents on the scene were so preoccupied with their designated tasks that I was able to wander off on my own without drawing any unnecessary attention to myself. They were undoubtedly all happy I wasn’t anywhere near them anyway. My presence would only complicate the mission of vengeance upon which they had all embarked. And it didn’t help that the customary interagency distrust was in full swing, and not just from their side. Besides, the majority of them had already scattered to the four winds. From where I stood on a crest of rock overlooking the desert to the east, I could see at least a dozen different sets of headlights bounding through the sand. A pair of Blackhawks had already swept the area around me and the immediate vicinity and were now working their way toward the horizon. Thus far, they’d found exactly what I thought they would.

Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch.

This may have been a dramatic escalation, but it hadn’t been haphazardly executed. This had been the plan from day one. I was just struggling to grasp Ban’s reasons for bringing the might of the Border Patrol into a situation it would have been happy enough to avoid.

I had to keep thinking of him as the Coyote. I couldn’t afford to humanize him, to allow myself to make some sort of personal connection to him. He was a killer, a sociopath whose blood may have come from the same pool as mine, but who was nothing like me. Parallels and physical similarities were all we had in common. That, and the fact that each of us intended to destroy the other. There was no other possible outcome.

This most recent message really pissed me off. I wanted to storm back down there and tear the canyon wall apart with my bare hands. A winking face. For Christ’s sake. He had shoved a stick right into the bee hive and enraged the honey bear in the process. Forget the design, I was going to tear him apart with my bare hands.

I turned away from the desert and headed back around a tall spire of rock that looked like a serrated knife blade from the distance, slid sideways through a crevice in the northeastern face of the mountain, and found myself in a small circular clearing nearly completely enclosed by walls of red rock. There were faded petroglyphs all around me, carved so long ago that even the sparse amount of rain and wind that penetrated the enclave had nearly erased them. Perhaps that was part of the personal message the Coyote was trying to deliver to me. I simply wasn’t in the mood, though. I’d had enough of his games and it was time to put an end to them once and for all.

It stood to reason that his entryway couldn’t have been far from the killing zone. I couldn’t think of any other reason for there to have been so much coyote urine near the design, especially considering he’d used it to cover the end of his trail in the past. The dogs had been all but useless in close proximity to the site and had led their handler on an escapade across the Sonoran that had ultimately brought them right into the midst of a group of walkers bedded down in a gully, waiting for what had to sound like World War III to end. No one noticed me slip off the beaten path, haul myself up the rock steppes, and cross a ledge bordered by a sheer drop to where I now stood. It was the perfect place for a man to work undisturbed for hours on end, where no one would see him excavating earth day after day from afar. I was starting to understand him, and I was reaping the rewards of my patience.

The hole was at the base of the southern side, approximately one hundred feet due north of the winking face. He obviously hadn’t hauled his victim up the rocks and across that narrow trail, so this had to be where he had emerged following the killing. From here, he could have headed north toward the distant Baboquivari Peak or to the east or the west through one of the narrow valleys or canyons. His brush mark tracks led from this clearing to the edge of a slope carpeted with wild grasses and prickly pears, where they vanished completely. There were leaves and broken branches around my feet. He’d snapped them from the trees nearby and had them waiting right here for him when he emerged with the body. Thus, I was confident in my assertion that the Border Patrol agent’s remains weren’t inside, but I knew my adversary well enough to know that the warren wasn’t empty. Whether he thought I was dead or not, too much planning had gone into this plot to take any chances. At least the agent from whom I had commandeered the flashlight hadn’t come looking for it. I was going to have to be completely inside the tunnel before I turned it on. Those choppers might have been far off now and the patrol vehicles scattered across the desert, but if any one of them by chance saw my light, I was going to have a hard time explaining exactly what I was doing and the reason I had withheld information from them. Plus, angry agents crawling through dark, tight spaces in pursuit of a fellow agent’s murderer tended to shoot first and ask questions later.

I stared down at the boulder I had rolled away from the orifice. This tunnel hadn’t been burrowed by a coyote. This one bore all the telltale chop marks of a spade or a shovel. I could see the wooden cribbing from where I stood. He had known where he was going when he started to dig, which justified my earlier assumption that he had extensive knowledge of the area’s geology. I looked around the edge for wires or a transmitter. Nothing. I listened for the sound of anything inside. Silence. Of course, just because I didn’t hear a rattle didn’t mean I was safe in that regard.

I was stalling and I knew it.

We were nearing the endgame. I could feel it. There was no more time to waste.

Leading with the Beretta and the Maglite as I was now accustomed, I squirmed into the darkness. I flipped on the light the moment I was able and saw that the tunnel ended only a short distance ahead of me. The edges of the opening were jagged where he’d been forced to chisel through solid rock to reach the surprisingly large cave. The lower rim was scarred in straight lines where ropes had bitten into the stone. It didn’t matter if he had used the rope to haul himself or heavy equipment up and down since I didn’t have one, nor did I have the ability to track one down.

I wiggled my torso out over the nothingness and shined my light downward. The smooth stone floor had to be fifteen feet down. Two and a half times my height. Definitely feasible. But I was going to have to holster my sidearm, pocket the flashlight, and drop down into the pitch black. If there was a better option, I couldn’t see it. I shined the beam throughout the cave, but accomplished little more than moving the darkness around. I rolled over onto my back, shoved my pistol into the holster under my left arm and the Maglight into the right pocket of my jacket, and maneuvered myself toward the hole. It took some doing, but I twisted and turned in such a way that I ended up hanging from the lip by my hands, my feet dangling roughly seven feet above the ground. Dropping from this height wouldn’t kill me, nor would I probably break any bones. A sprained ankle would seriously hamper my style, though, so the moment I let go and felt the earth strike the soles of my feet, I was already flexing my knees and hips to absorb the impact and rolling to dispel the momentum. In one motion I really wished there had been people around to witness, I rolled to my feet, crossed my arms over my chest, and simultaneously drew both the Beretta and the flashlight.

I turned slowly in a circle, evaluating my surroundings.

The cave itself was nearly the size of a single-car garage, with an irregular roof to one side, domed to the other. The petroglyphs on the walls were remarkably well preserved, despite the thick layer of dust adhering to them. There were no shadowed forms crouching against the walls, strange burlap sacks on the ground, or slithering forms composed of darkness and fangs. Besides the pile of scrap wood from the cribbing in the corner and the smear of blood across the rock floor, there wasn’t a damn thing—

I froze when I saw it.

A quick reflection from the deep shadows up and to my right.

My heartbeat thundered in my ears. A million potentially shiny objects, all of which were easily capable of doing serious bodily harm, raced through my mind in the time it took me to raise the beam to the small alcove about eight feet up, where I saw just about the only object in the world I didn’t imagine.

It was a digital audio recorder.

Small. Handheld. Spatters of blood had dried to black blotches and smears. I stared at it for several moments before I finally decided “screw it,” tucked my hand into my sleeve, reached up and brought it down. I pressed the largest button, which I assumed would be the one to make it play. The recorder started to hiss. From beneath the hissing came a scraping sound. It grew louder and more distinct until it defined itself as footsteps. The tread was heavy and natural. Maybe a little hesitant, but not overly so. A clattering sound; the recorder shifting location, perhaps into a pocket. Rustling. Static. The footsteps again. Closer. Slower.

Whoever was walking toward the recorder sensed something was amiss.

Another footstep. Another.

Stop.

More clattering.

“Hola, amigos. Estan arrestados.” Hello, friends. You’re under arrest. After days in the brutal heat, that was often enough to get the undocumenteds out of their hiding places with their hands on their heads.

There was a note of concern in the agent’s voice. Concern, but not fear.

A muffled footstep. Another.

The crackling sound of gravel trickling across stone.

The rush of wind.

A thud.

A scrabbling, scraping sound.

A grunt.

A clatter.

A high-pitched gasp.

A wet splatter.

A gurgle.

Another thump.

Thrashing.

A footstep. Strong, confident. Another.

Heavy breathing. Exertion of some kind.

A tearing sound.

Fabric.

More tearing sounds.

Flesh.

The difference between them was distinct. It was a sound I knew I’d never be able to forget as long as I lived.

I stood there in the darkness listening to the killer dip the coyote paw into the sopping wound, take a step toward the canyon wall, and slap it onto the rock. Over and over. Listened to the faint scratching sounds of the dead animal’s nails on the rock. I listened to it beyond the point where he tore away more clothing and slashed open the gut. Then I listened to the damp slapping sounds some more. There will always be a part of me standing in that dark cave listening to the gruesome scene, as life was transformed into death, and death into a meaningless message meant only for me. To think that a boy had been born and raised, had lived and loved, had walked the earth for however many years, only to meet his fate in a slot canyon in the form of a winking face.