I watched the ground for sign, knowing full well the wind would have already erased it, but I couldn’t afford to take anything for granted. A footprint could potentially remain intact in the lee of a bush or a large rock. A bullet dropped while hastily attempting to load a gun would pretty much stay right where it landed. And heaven forbid I step down into a snake hole. There was no way I could scrutinize everything around me with one measly little light, especially since I was forced to watch my own tail at the same time.
The ground grew steeper and more treacherous. I didn’t know how far I had come or how high I had ascended. My headlights had faded into the storm behind me long ago, and only occasionally was I able to glimpse Baboquivari Peak. I had to be nearing the top. At least I thought so anyway. Soon enough I was going to have to decide whether I was going to follow the trail, which was slowly starting to steer me to the right, or strike off away from it and utilize one of the valleys to cross over and onto the eastern slope. I had pretty much decided I was going to continue on the path for a little while longer when I glanced up and to my left.
My instincts kicked in and I hit the ground on my belly. I rolled to my left behind I boulder and leaned cautiously around the side to direct the beam at what I had seen from the corner of my eye.
It took me a few seconds to find it again. Up the hill along what almost looked like a narrow, cactus-lined animal trail I might otherwise have walked right past under the storm, maybe even under normal conditions. I had at first thought someone had been standing there, but as my brain sorted through the mental snapshot, I realized it couldn’t have been. Not unless he was inhumanly thin and lacking things like organs and skin. My beam illuminated a thin post about four feet tall, on the top of which a canine skull had been fitted through the foramen magnum, the hole at the base of the occipital bone where the spinal cord connects to the brain. The skull drifted in and out of the blowing sand as I watched. It turned one way and then the other on the wind as though shaking its head at me.
I waited for several more minutes before I risked rising to a crouch and darting uphill behind another boulder that offered a better view. The pike had been staked into the crevice between two rocks, which held it tightly enough to defy the wind. A counterclockwise spiral design had been painted onto the dead animal’s forehead. The majority of the teeth were intact, but it was apparent, even from a distance, that this skull had been sitting out under the sun for a long time.
I suppose I should have expected something like this. Maybe not the red-carpet treatment, but considering the Coyote’s flair for the dramatic and questionable sense of humor, I really should have been prepared for some sort of macabre trail marker. We both knew how and where this had to end. No sense postponing the inevitable.
While the display had been left here to help me identify the proper route, it also served to let me know that had Ban wanted to kill me right here and now, he probably could have. Instead, he wanted to take this thing all the way to the end. I’m sure he’d fantasized about this scenario so many times that it had become almost an actualization of all of his hopes and dreams, of his very life, which meant that he had a very specific denouement in mind, one he’d gone to great lengths to plan. I tried to put myself in his shoes, to enter the mind of a sociopath whose brain undoubtedly worked in a similar fashion to my own. It wasn’t as hard as I wish it had been.
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.