“Thanks anyway.”
He popped the cap and started drinking while he walked across the living room toward the front door. It was a room at odds with itself. Aged adobe walls with surround sound speakers mounted to the cracks. A hand-planed mesquite table with a fifty-one inch flat screen on it. A wicker chair with a beaded design next to a leather La-Z-Boy recliner. Frayed woven rugs. A laptop on the end table. A Blu-Ray player balanced on a chipped and faded ceramic pot.
My phone vibrated in the front pocket of my pants. That was never a good sign. Especially not at eleven at night. I kept my thoughts from betraying me on my face.
“Thanks for the hospitality,” I said.
“It was nice to finally meet you. I loved your daddy. I see a lot of him in you.”
I tried to smile, but had to settle for a curt nod.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to Ban. Wish him my best.”
“I’ll tell him you asked after him. He’s night security at the Desert Diamond Casino if you find yourself up that way. He’s not the trusting kind, but he’s got a good heart. Probably do you both some good to have a few words before you leave.”
“We’ll see what the future holds. It wouldn’t surprise me if we ran into each other again.”
I stepped down onto the porch. A scorpion skittered away from my shoe. When I looked back, Roman opened his mouth as though about to say something, then closed it and nodded to himself. I smiled and nodded back. I knew all about regret.
He closed the door, sealing off the strip of light that had spilled onto the driveway.
I climbed into the Crown Vic, slid my phone out of my pocket, and checked the number of the missed call. I didn’t immediately recognize it. I had to drive all the way back into town before I was able to hold a signal long enough to check my voicemail.
The call had come in more than forty minutes ago. It must have been just floating out there in the atmosphere, waiting for me to catch a signal long enough to come through. Two more messages had been delivered since.
By the time I finished listening to the first, I had turned right on the main street through town and pinned the gas. Before the second ended, I had the brights on, the speedometer flirting with eighty, and gravel pinging from my undercarriage. I saw the lights on the horizon shortly after finishing the final message.
This wasn’t good news.
This wasn’t good news at all.
DAY 2
tash go:k
me’a
The Emergency Medical Research Center of the University of Arizona, in an effort to educate the public about the dangers of crossing the Arizona-Sonora border, developed a formula to determine the incidence of heat-related death. At ninety degrees Fahrenheit, there’s a twelve percent probability of death should a walker set out across the desert. At ninety-seven degrees, that risk more than doubles. At a hundred degrees, the chances of individual survival plummet to sixty percent.
The average temperature in the Sonoran Desert in July is one hundred and four degrees.
TEN
Baboquivari District
Tohono O’odham Nation
Arizona
September 10th
I arrived at the same time as the dogs. There were two CBP SUVs parked facing the hillside, their headlights illuminating a game trail that wended up into a forest of heavily needled cholla and prickly pears. I parked between them and left my brights on. The top of the rise was crowned with a massive stone formation reminiscent of a medieval fortress. To either side of it, the jagged hills were a serrated blade aligned against the night sky. I could see the flicker of flashlights moving through the brush.
I opened my door and was assaulted by the sound of barking. The canine agent had the rear doors of his truck open and was unlatching the cage doors for a pair of large dogs that looked like a cross between a German shepherd and a wolf. One was jet-black, the other mottled brown and gray. Both had teeth that looked sharp enough to tear through a meaty thigh and jaws strong enough to snap bone. Had I not worked with units like this in the past, I would have been positively terrified by their apparent ferocity, but I knew these dogs were partners with their handlers in the truest sense. They went home with him at night and quite possibly even slept in the same bed. When they were in the field, though…
“Special Agent Walker.”
I flashed my badge at the handler, who didn’t even look at me. He was a wiry man with large ears and a long face. He wore his green CBP ball cap so low over his brow that I couldn’t see his eyes. According to his name badge, my friendly new pal’s name was B. Sykora.
“Stay behind me,” he said. “Keep downwind at all times. Don’t cross the tracks or you’ll confuse the scent. Don’t even think about trying to pet either of them. These dogs are trained to go for the groin or the throat if they sense that I’m threatened in any way, so don’t try to approach me. If I tell you to do something, you do exactly what I say the moment I tell you to do it. Are we clear?”
I smirked and rolled my eyes.
“You had me at ‘trained to go for the groin.’”
He sighed and shoved past me.
“Come on down, Pookie,” I heard him whisper as he lifted down the black one. The other one hopped down on its own. He had them leashed and headed up the path in a matter of seconds. Sykora ran with them like the third dog in the pack. It was everything I could do to keep a visual on them. I don’t know what kind of animal cut this path, but it was definitely thinner than I was. My sleeves kept snagging on the cholla needles and it felt like I had impaled my feet on spikes. I kind of hop-ran sideways through the hellish landscape until the headlights faded behind me and I had to use my penlight and the occasional bark to guide me uphill toward the point where I had seen the flashlights when I arrived. At least that fortress-rock served as a decent landmark.
The very second I exited the field of cacti, I pulled off my shoes and started plucking the needles out of my socks. I had whole chunks of cholla on the bottoms of my shoes where the thick needles had been driven clear through the soles. The pain was fierce, but tolerable. The itching, however, was something else entirely. I felt like I had ants crawling under my skin as I scrabbled up the slick talus to where the path wound back behind a cluster of saguaros and entered a shallow, sloping canyon.
I didn’t know exactly where I was, but I had a general idea. This was the northern portion of the Baboquivari Mountain Range, near the point where it began to taper back into the rolling desert hills. I was roughly twenty miles east-northeast of Sells, ten miles south of I-86, and fifteen miles north of the crime scene Antone had taken me to mere hours ago. The site the CBP agent had shown me this morning was now forty-some miles southwest of here. If there was any significance to the geographical arrangement, I couldn’t see it.
The path led deeper into the canyon, down the eastern slope of the mountain. I could hear the echo of voices, but couldn’t make out the words. Flashlight beams glowed from around the bend.
The dogs started to bark. Hard. Frantic.