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.