“What’s so funny?” Antone asked.
I glanced over to see that he hadn’t even opened his eyes. Saguaros flew past behind him like pitchforks raised in defiance of the sky. He smiled and I went back to navigating the straight road. Now that I had satisfied my physiological need for water, my next order of business was tracking down some coffee. The monotonous landscape and the buzz of the tires and the rhythmic vibration of the suspension reminded me of just how long it had been since I last slept.
“Stop here.”
I coasted to a halt at an intersection in the middle of nowhere. The east-west road led straight into a deep valley between mountains to my left and the horizon to my right, where a rooster tail of dust trailed what I assumed to be a vehicle.
Antone opened his eyes.
“Freshly grated,” he said. “Perfect timing.”
The engine made a ticking sound as it idled. I could feel the dust settling on my skin as it snuck in through the vents. It formed a dry paste on my tongue. For a moment, I nearly thought about switching off the AC. Can’t win for losing, I suppose.
“Waiting for the roadrunner, Wile E.?”
If he caught the coyote reference, it didn’t show on his face.
The cloud of dust kicked up by the distant car faded into the eastern horizon beneath the wavering sun.
“Turn left here,” he finally said. “No. Not on the road. Into the desert itself.”
I hesitated for a second or two before cranking the wheel and rocking over the gravel shoulder and into the sand. Branches and bushes scraped the sides of the Crown Vic with loud screeching sounds and I suddenly realized why Antone hadn’t put of much of a fight. It was a pool car, anyway. I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it.
“Keep the drag to your right.” He reached toward the dashboard. For a moment I thought he was going to kill the air, forcing me, in turn, to kill him, but his hand stopped over the portable VHF transceiver/scanner. “May I?”
I nodded and he clicked on the radio. He dialed in a frequency I quickly recognized as belonging to the Border Patrol. Their lingo and radio chatter were unique among all law enforcement agencies. And you could always count on the agents out in the field to have music blaring inside their SUVs. Beneath the snippets of conversation, I could clearly hear both Metallica and Bruno Mars, which, interestingly, didn’t mesh as poorly as one might expect.
“What are we waiting for?”
“You’ll see.”
The desert bumped past beneath us. I had to slow the car to maneuver around clusters of cacti and piles of stones. I could hear cholla skeletons raking the undercarriage. I had to use the windshield wipers to clear the glass of dust, which was seeping into the car and settling in a coating thick enough that I again thought about my lungs and the fun-filled prospect of asphyxiation.
“See that big saguaro up ahead? The one kind of standing out from the top of that hill with all of the palo verdes?” I nodded. It was maybe a few hundred feet ahead and slightly to the left. “Stop when you get right up to it.”
I had no idea what he intended to do, but he was definitely starting to try my patience. I don’t have many inherent character flaws, at least that I’m willing to admit, but the few I have are probably worth at least a casual mention. I’m physically averse to the sound of a person chewing with his mouth open, I can’t stand people who try to talk to me during sporting events, I would love nothing more than to shoot out the tires of people who drive too slow in the left lane, and I absolutely despise people who waste my time. If I had my way, these would be capital offenses that fell somewhere on the spectrum of severity between presidential assassination and mass murder. If Antone didn’t get to the point in a hurry, I was going to sentence him to the long walk home, and we all know how that would end now that it was pushing a hundred-five degrees.
I rolled to a stop and put the car into park. The hell if I was killing the engine, though. Not while there was still Freon to abuse.
Antone lifted the transceiver out of its charger and opened his door. The heat raced in and buffeted me from the side like a runaway truck, nearly knocking the wind out of me.
“You coming or what?” Antone said, and closed the door.
I was thinking “or what” sounded like the better option, but I opened my door anyway and climbed out into what felt like an oven. Glass is made from superheated sand, as everyone knows. Sand has reflective properties similar to the facets of gemstones, which serve to both conduct and repel light and heat. The ambient temperature might have been a mere hundred-five, but with the added heat radiating from the ground, it had to be pushing one-fifteen. I could feel the rubber soles of my shoes starting to melt. The sweat came so hard and fast it gave me the chills. My chest felt as though there was a midget sitting on it. My vision momentarily wavered.
And it wasn’t even noon yet.
Antone crested the rounded knoll and stood on top of a rock that looked like a tortoise shell. The saguaro stood a solid five feet taller than him. I shoved through the sharp shrubs and climbed up beside him. Cacti grew from the crevices in the rock and I’m pretty sure I didn’t want to meet the diamondback that shed the monstrous length of desiccated skin tangled in the prickly pear by my right foot.
“You listen.” Antone passed me the two-way. “Tell me what you hear.”
There was a lot of activity. It sounded like one unit was chasing a group of UDAs toward the highway while two more converged on a different group northeast of Lukeville. A park ranger in Organ Pipe blurted something about shots fired and a panel truck tried to barrel straight through a barricade at the edge of the reservation. The dispatcher was positively frantic trying to coordinate backup units and air support. It was mass chaos on a scale the likes of which I’d never imagined. It sounded like a battlefield out there, and yet from where I stood I couldn’t see another living soul, let alone any indication that we weren’t the last two people on the planet.
“What am I supposed to be hearing?”
Antone smirked, hitched his pants, then crouched at the base of the saguaro. He brushed aside the leafy branches of a palo verde and looked up at me expectantly.
“They plant these in features of the landscape they can readily identify from a distance, like this big old cactus here.”
I didn’t see what he meant at first, not until I squatted down beside him. There was a lump in the soil from which an antenna stood like a willowy sapling.
I listened to the chatter again, then looked from one horizon to the other before letting my gaze settle on the chief.
“We’re sitting right on top of an Oscar and dispatch didn’t relay the alarm to a field unit.”
Antone’s smirk broadened into a smile. He stood and reached into the front pocket of his pants. He pulled out a sleek black box roughly the size and shape of a radar detector. A series of lights ran down one side; a row of switches on the other. Four rubber-capped antennae were screwed into the very top of it. I stared at the lone red light glowing on its face.
“A hundred thirty bucks at Radio Shack,” he said, waving it in front of me. It was a portable digital GPS/five-band signal blocker, the kind of thing people used in movie theaters and classrooms and at all sorts of events to make it impossible for the jerks to ruin their experience by yammering endlessly through it. The kind of device favored by conspiracy theorists everywhere to prevent the government from triangulating their location using the microchips implanted in their brains or teeth or wherever. “The Oscars function just like any other remote transmitter. They generate an RF signal that’s amplified by the cell towers and relayed to a receiving station. And I just jammed the signal with the push of a button.”