While the anger in my cousin’s eyes was understandable, I was having a hard time interpreting his facial expression. It was almost as though he wasn’t wearing one at all, as though he had a permanently bland affect, an emotional void. I was going to have to look into that. Not necessarily because I cared about him or about mending fences on my father’s behalf, but because in much the same way as Chief Antone, he was an enigma to me.

I was still pondering the way he had stared at me through the car window, as though he could actually see me through the dark tint, as I picked my way higher along the treacherous path Randall had guided me up for the second time in as many days. I was so lost in thought, in fact, that I didn’t notice I wasn’t alone until I heard the skitter of pebbles.

I suppose a normal person’s response to an unexpected noise is to look up and evaluate the situation. I drew my Beretta and aimed it at the source.

Two men burst from behind a clump of cholla and sprinted away from me.

Blue jeans and cowboy boots. Dirty button-downs with fake pearl snaps. Hair wet with sweat.

Immigrants.

I jerked my finger out of the trigger guard before I shot them both in the back of the knee.

The woman who had been killed here had never stood a chance.

I stepped around the cholla and found myself staring down the sightline of my pistol into three dirty faces, the whites of their wide eyes a stark contrast to their filthy skin. They were just kids. The oldest was a boy who couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old. The girl he cautiously eased behind him and out of the line of fire appeared to be a few years younger. The third was a mop-haired boy who couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. He started to cry.

“La Migra?” the older boy said. He stared me up and down and then repeated the words. “La Migra?”

I shook my head slowly back and forth and lowered my weapon.

The older boy’s expression metamorphosed from terror to bewilderment to understanding in the span of a heartbeat. I could only continue to stare as they leapt up from the ground where they’d been cowering and ran right past me. I stared down at the bloody needles of the dead cholla clusters on which they’d been kneeling as they raced toward the open desert in the same direction as the older men who had abandoned them to their fates.

I hoped that I hadn’t just done the exact same thing.

I heard the scrabbling sounds of their shoes on the gravel and rock, the clatter of talus as they slid downhill, the scraping of the mesquite branches across their clothing, and then a hollow thump. Then another. And another still.

I turned and looked downhill, to where the loose scree slid down into the yellow weeds at the edge of the mesquites. The branches still swayed where the children had shoved through and into the dry creek bed. I never took my eyes from that spot as I slipped and slid and skidded down. I pushed through the now-still branches and weeds that tangled around my ankles, stomping the ground as I went.

Stomp.

Stomp.

Stomp.

Stomp.

I hopped down into the sandy creek bed and turned around. I could see the signs of their passage. The bent and broken branches. The trampled weeds. The collapsed edge of what was once a rocky bank. I stared at one point that didn’t look quite right for a long moment, then raised my foot and stomped on it.

Thump.

I did it again.

Thump.

I dropped to my knees and brushed at the sand and gravel, but they didn’t move. I could have sworn I smelled a trace of urine. I swept my hands to either side until I found the straight edges of what appeared to be a large square board and fully exposed them. I dug my fingers into the dirt, grabbed one edge with either hand, and lifted it upward. The board came away with minimal resistance. It was only an inch thick and about two feet tall by two and a half feet wide, but it was large enough to conceal the mouth of the tunnel that led down into the earth.

SEVENTEEN

Everyone knows about Pavlovian or Classical Conditioning. Whenever Pavlov fed his dog, he would ring a bell. Eventually his dogs began to salivate at the mere sound of the bell. A specific physiological reaction had been conditioned in response to an external stimulus. Another, lesser know facet of this psychological concept is generalization. You let a boy pet a rabbit and every time he does, you scare the hell out of him by clanging two pipes behind his head. In time, he grows to fear not only the rabbit, but every other furry white animal. Even a fur coat. A specific reaction to a general stimulus. Further down the chart you come to odor generalization, which is an unusual phenomenon wherein your brain conditions itself with a kind of sensory memory. It remembers the worst thing you’ve ever smelled and categorizes it as such so that whenever you smell something really dreadful, your brain interprets that scent to be the classically conditioned odor of memory.

In my case, it was the scent of a stagnant warm-water slough in the San Louis Valley marshes. My grandfather took me duck hunting there about twenty years ago and, I kid you not, the smell that belched out of the vile black mud when I slogged through it in hip waders was like burying my face in a fat man’s crack after he ate a ton of chili seasoned with sulfur, and inhaling deeply when he passed damp wind. Ever since, I haven’t been able to smell cabbage soup, a park trash barrel, a gym locker room, or enter a port-o-potty without their rather ordinary scent generalizing into that flatus-bog odor.

Until today.

The horrific stench that came from the dark hole in the earth was worse than anything I had ever encountered. This one was going to be with me for the rest of my life, I was certain. It was how I imagined the asphalt might smell after driving by the same dead dog on the side of the highway every day for an entire sweltering summer, watching the fur rot off and the flesh putrify and the scavenger birds pick at it and the insects dissolve it, hoping someone would come along and scrape it up, and when no one ever did, finally pulling over with a spoon and trying to do it myself. I was going to miss that fat man and his sulfur-chili, because after this, that was going to be a fond childhood memory.

The flies didn’t seem to mind, though. I could hear the echoing drone of their contented buzzing coming from the depths, beyond the range of my penlight.

If this was my reward for not shooting those undocumenteds, I was going to need to have a little chat with the man upstairs about his incentive plan.

I pulled my shirt up over my mouth and nose and bit it to hold it in place. A couple of deep breaths proved that the smell had already invaded my sinuses and there was no way of evicting it now, so I resigned myself to breathing through my mouth. I held out my Beretta and my penlight and slithered into the hole behind them.

The tunnel was barely wide enough to accommodate my shoulders. There was no way I would be able to turn around. If I ran into trouble, I was going to have to back blindly out. Fortunately, whoever had constructed it had put some serious thought into its design. There was rudimentary cribbing made from scrap wood supporting irregular plywood remnants. Based on the texture and the color of the wood, it had been down here for years. At least I knew the sand and rocks weren’t going to collapse on me and bury me alive with this rotten stench.

The dirt floor was scarred with scratches I was now easily able to identify as the thorns of mesquite branches. There were coarse ridges that suggested the tunnel had originally been dug with a collapsible shovel or spade. They hurt my elbows and knees, but at least they provided some traction.