It wasn’t just me he hated. He hated himself. For allowing himself to be bested in life, for losing a competition against an opponent who had no idea he was competing; for his perceived sense of self-worth, which he derived from the abandonment first by one parent, and then the other. In his mind, neither of them had cared about him. His biological father had found himself a better wife and had fathered himself a better son. His mother decided she’d rather step out in front of a car than live another day with him. They had seen it in him, this inevitable failure, this culmination of all of his shortcomings. They had recognized that he would never be good enough, that no matter how hard he tried he would never be worth anything. But he had tried all the same. He had pushed himself as hard as he could to prove them wrong, if only in his own eyes.

And there I was, seemingly one-upping every little thing he did. I was the reason he would never be able to be proud of his own accomplishments. I was the son his father had wanted. I was the reason his mother was dead. I was the source of all of his problems. We shared the same genetic material, but I had utilized mine to greater advantage. I was just like him, only better. The version of himself he wished he could be. The version of himself that had been given every opportunity he had been denied. And there was only one way to prove he was better than me. He needed to beat me, head-to-head, in a competition of which we were both aware. And he needed to do so in convincing fashion on a stage for the whole world to see.

I found another coyote skull staked to a pike about a quarter of a mile up the slope and slightly to the north, in the mouth of an arroyo, which at least spared me from the brunt of the wind for a while. The walls weren’t especially high, nor was the passage particularly steep. It gave me the opportunity to rub the grit from my eyes and lubricate them with tears, if only a little. I didn’t realize how uncomfortable even the unconscious act of blinking had become.

There was a lone saguaro ahead of me, a perfect pitchfork framed against the distant outlet of the wash. A hunched shape rested on the ground in front of it. I could only see its outline, but I could definitely see the long hairs whipping away from it on the breeze. My first thought was that Ban was trying to trick me by playing dead, or perhaps he had even done the deed himself, but I quickly dismissed it. The shape was too large to belong to a woman either, to a human being for that matter. It wasn’t until I was nearly on top of it that I recognized what it was.

A horse.

A slender mare the color of the desert sand, an almost rusty-brown. The wind tousled its mane and tail. I remembered hearing what sounded like a whinnying horse, but at the time had blamed it on the wind. It had been alive then, before its throat had been slit from one side to the other in a ragged, serrated seam, right to left, splashing buckets of blood onto the ground, more even than the greedy desert could absorb. My feet squished in the mud as I crept closer, sweeping my light from one side of the arroyo to the other before zeroing in on the carcass. Remnants of fresh vegetables were scattered around its head and spattered with crimson. The thought of Ban offering the horse the treats and then nearly decapitating it caused me to shiver involuntarily. There was something almost inhuman about the act. I was happy enough to leave that line of thought behind when my flashlight reflected from metal on the far side of the body, partially concealed behind the enormous cactus.

I’ll cop to my prejudice. When Roman said Ban had earned a two-year degree in mechanical engineering, I kind of dismissed it as a fancy way of saying he had learned to be a grease monkey. Kind of like a custodial or a domestic engineer, you know? The contraption upon which I now stared might have been ugly and unwieldy, but the genius of its design was unmistakable. I had never seen anything quite like it. Thanks to growing up an Air Force brat, I had a rudimentary understanding of how engines worked. There was a certain irony in retrofitting twin engines to a horse’s saddle that would have been comical under other circumstances. Each unit reminded me of a garbage disposal with four intake valves in a ring formation on the forward end and a drive shaft on the back. Both were fueled by portable propane tanks small enough to be holstered on the saddle, their pressure control knobs within easy reach of the rider.

If I understood the design correctly, the propane served to create both heat and pressure on the power pistons in the piston shafts. The force of the air driven into the intake valves by the horse’s momentum would drive the displacer pistons. The cooler air would then meet with the heated air, creating a miniature pressure front. Working in tandem, the two pistons would compress the pressurized air and displaced it laterally to turn the drive shafts on either side of the horse’s flanks. The shafts themselves had been fitted with a series of chrome exhaust pipes that looked like they could have been ripped right off of a muscle car. Each pipe had been retrofitted with an array of miniature fans, which, when turned by the drive shaft, amplified the force with which the pressurized air was expelled from the pipes and channeled it across the ground behind the horse. It was essentially what I had theorized. A leaf blower. Only one that ran without electricity or the stink of petrol fumes and didn’t emit a black cloud of exhaust. And it operated so quietly that I was almost shocked to see that the engines were still running. Without the force of the motion-induced airflow, it was only operating at a fraction of its potential, but that was more than enough to blow the sand a good ten feet across the wash.

I assumed the straps tethered to the back of the saddle were to tie down cargo, or, more specifically, the bodies of his victims.

The fact that he had dispatched the horse and left his means of covering his tracks behind was a giant neon sign that told me he had no intention of trying to escape. Either he killed me and waited for the police or the FBI or the Border Patrol to find my abandoned Crown Vic and ultimately arrest him and create a media circus, or I killed him.

I didn’t like having my options dictated to me, but I couldn’t waste any energy thinking about that now. I needed to remain focused on my surroundings if I was going to get out of this alive. And, believe me, I had every intention of doing just that.

I left the horse behind and continued eastward until I found another marker situated in the egress of the arroyo, where it began its steep journey down the red rock steppes toward the desert once more. I bumped the skull with my shoulder as I passed, causing it to swing in a circle.

The wind swatted me from the side the second I cleared cover, nearly knocking me from my feet. I turned into it and shielded my eyes with my free hand. Either I’d already forgotten how bad the storm was or it had gotten worse. I tried to get a clear view of the slope to my right, but the sand blasted me in the face. If I remembered correctly, and if I was where I thought I was, one of the caves should be roughly on my level and about half a mile straight ahead; the other would be close to the same distance diagonally up the mountain toward where the top hat rock occasionally materialized from the storm.

I had to use my free hand to maintain my balance on the slick boulders and scree to keep from toppling into the cacti lining what appeared to be an old animal trail. I looked for tracks, but had there been any, the wind would have obliterated them a long time ago. At least my instincts were telling me I was heading in the right direction. My heart beat faster with each step and it was getting harder to keep up with my body’s oxygen demands with the increasing altitude and the wind blowing directly into my face. The adrenaline was starting to fire from my fuel injector, as well. My mouth was dry. I took a drink of water and used the momentary respite to calm my nerves. One way or another, this would all be over soon.