“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.