Sshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuuhrr.

Louder now.

This was where the Coyote had waited, just out of sight, for Antone to reach the end of the arroyo. I turned around and looked back in the direction from which I had come. He had stood to my right with his back against the escarpment, hidden from view by a thick saguaro. He had listened to Antone’s heavy tread approaching until he was scant feet away and then made his move.

Antone had never stood a chance.

The attack had come directly at him. No time to retreat. No time to draw his sidearm. No time even to raise his arms in his defense. A slash across the throat from right to left, backhanded, by someone with considerable skill with a knife. And considerable strength.

Sshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuuhrr.

I looked up and to my left. The sound was coming from somewhere up there, above where the twenty-foot cliff terminated and the dirt and weeds and cacti resumed. A vulture perched on top of a rock formation shaped like a plow blade, beneath which I could see a dark orifice. Something small and metallic reflected the sun from the opening.

Sshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuuhrr.

It wasn’t until I looked closer at the rock face to determine the best way to scale it that I saw what the Coyote had painted on it.

Comprehension struck me a physical blow, nearly driving me to my knees. I had been wrong about everything. This wasn’t a stylized smiley face. It didn’t incorporate any native symbology. This was something else entirely and I had absolutely no clue what it meant.

Sshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuusshhuuhrr.

As I stood there, dumbly staring at the design presumably painted in the blood of a man I both liked and respected, my mind rationalized the sound. It wasn’t waves or the wind or a shushing sound. It was a voice. A man’s voice repeating the same words over and over in a continuous loop.

‘Bout time you got here.

‘Bout time you got here.

‘Bout time you got here.

‘Bout time you got here.

THIRTY-ONE

I remember a time when I was maybe eight or nine. We were living in family housing on some base or other. Maybe Travis AFB in California. They all looked alike. Anyway, we had mice, and anything that entered our home uninvited was treated like an invading army. My father took it as a personal challenge to eradicate whatever pest dare violate the sanctity of his domain. My mother and I were happy enough to be party to the utter annihilation of spiders and earwigs and roaches and ants. My mother never really had a problem with his war on rats, either. I think it was because of their strangely fleshy tails, but it could just as easily have been their sordid history of spreading diseases like the black plague. But mice were a different story. Maybe it was their size or the fact that they had such cute, fuzzy little faces. I don’t know. All I remember was walking into the kitchen one day in my pajamas and Spider-Man slippers to find her kneeling on the floor in front of the open cupboard beneath the sink where we kept the trash can.

She didn’t hear me until I was right behind her. When she turned, she had tears in her eyes and I couldn’t quite understand why, until she pulled me close and hugged me and I saw the little gray mouse snared in the trap. The wire rim had snapped down squarely on its face, all but separating the body from the whiskered snout and hooked yellow teeth that pointed in an entirely different direction than they were supposed to. The rear legs were stiff and held the hind quarters upright, as though it had tried to find the leverage to yank its head out. There was a puddle of urine underneath it, dotted with two small black pellets. A third poked halfway out of its rear end beneath its tail.

At the time, I didn’t comprehend why it bothered her so much unless she was just grossed out by the fact the she was going to have to touch it. I mean, I had been watching my father set and bait the traps every night and this kind of felt like a respectable victory in an ongoing war. I remember asking her what was wrong, or maybe why she was crying.

“Because I’m sad.”

“You wanted to keep the mouse?”

“No, honey, but I didn’t want it to go out like that.”

“You mean in the trash?”

She smiled despite the tears and ruffled my hair.

“Silly boy. In a trap like…that.”

I remember looking at the mechanism, at the point where the metal had snapped nearly clean through its skull, at the gob of peanut butter that had flipped off of the pressure lever.

“It must have really wanted that peanut butter. It knew it was a trap and it still stuck its head right in. Why would it do that?”

I wish I could recall her answer, because right about now I felt a whole lot like that mouse must have as I stared down into the hole in the earth with the digital recording playing over and over in front of me.

‘Bout time you got here.

‘Bout time you got here.

‘Bout time you got here.

It was the same model of recorder the Coyote had used before. There was blood smeared on the casing. The digital readout indicated there was only one recording and the two arrows forming a circle confirmed it had been looped.

Five words. Five ordinarily innocuous words delivered in a mocking tone by a man I hadn’t even known existed three days ago, but one who had kindled the fires of hatred for me every day of his life. Why didn’t he just come at me and be done with it? What could he possibly hope to gain? To prove he’s better than me? To show me up in the media on a national stage? Those are some stupid reasons for so much death. There had to be more to it than that, something that was staring me right in the face.

And that damn painting on the wall below me…what the hell was that supposed to be anyway?

I grabbed the recorder and hurled it out across the desert. Probably not the smartest move from an investigative standpoint, but it did make me feel a little better hearing his voice plummeting into the valley below.

The opening itself was natural and had obviously been here since these mountains first reared up from the sea. There were scuff marks where a large rock had been repeatedly dragged in front of and away from the orifice. I assumed it was somewhere down the mountainside now that it was no longer needed. I clicked on the Maglite and directed the beam into the darkness. A series of irregular ledges led down to a point where the light diffused into the shadows.

I thought of the mouse again, with its skull snapped in half and its jaw askew, as I ducked my head and crawled inside.

Don’t let anyone tell you I’m not paying attention to life’s little lessons.

The first thing that hit me was the smell. Or the lack of the nauseating stench of death, to be precise. Not that it smelled wonderful, mind you. It smelled pretty much like any other cave: dank, earthy, and maybe a little like body odor, but, believe you me, I wasn’t complaining. It allowed me to focus my senses on the main goal of keeping myself alive. I couldn’t afford to work under the assumption that there was no one inside, despite what all of my instincts told me. That didn’t preclude the possibility of springing some kind of trap, though. For all I knew, the entire cave could be slithering with diamondbacks without rattles or worse, although I had a hard time imagining anything worse than that. Not to jinx myself, anyway.

Maneuvering myself into a position where I could lower myself from one ledge to the next while still keeping the flashlight trained below me took some doing. The temperature dropped rapidly as I descended. I could feel the sweat cooling on my skin, raising goose bumps. It was both an uncomfortable and divine sensation.