“In return?”

“You keep your penis a little while longer. Do this right, I leave you here. Maybe you see your family again.”

The Superstitions were now just a black wall in the backdrop.

“Here, hold it to his ear, hit ‘Talk’ when I say.” Kalyn handed the Black-Berry to Will and aimed the Glock between Javier’s legs. “Transparence is key, Javier. If you launch into Spanish, if you say things to Jonathan that don’t make sense, that sound suspect, I will pull the trigger. Clear?”

“Yes. You are handling this all very well.”

“Do it, Will.” Will pressed the button, held the BlackBerry to Javier’s ear. They waited; then came the static sound of the ring. On the third, someone answered—the voice husky and low over the speakerphone. Will could hear the voice on the other end, but he couldn’t make out the words.

“It’s Jav. I have someone. . . . No, I have them already. . . . They’re with me right now. . . . Yes, I can do that. . . . Okay. . . . No, that’s plenty of time. . . . All right, I’ll see you then.”

Javier nodded. Will broke the connection.

“That was it?” Kalyn asked.

“That was it. So. I tell you the information and you both walk away?”

“That was the deal,” Kalyn said.

“And my family stays unharmed?”

“In twelve hours, I call the police, tell them where they are.”

“The exchange is in two days,” Javier said.

“Where?”

“Interstate Eighty-four, exit fifty-six, twelve miles outside of Boise, Idaho.”

“What’s there?”

“An abandoned drive-in movie theater.”

“And you’re supposed to meet Jonathan there?”

“Monday night. Eleven o’clock.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Long red hair, bushy beard, weighs over three hundred pounds. Smells terrible.”

Something rustled a ways off in the underbrush.

“Look at me,” Kalyn said. “You’ve been responsible for the deaths of more than a few people. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“Ever looked one of their loved ones in the eye? Accounted for what you’d done?”

“I don’t believe so. This situation has been unique in many ways.”

“I want to know if you feel remorse.”

“It is not personal what I do. I did not take your sister because I desired to do her harm.”

“No, you took her for money. But you did cause—”

“Let’s not pretend I am in any way like you. You ask about remorse. You would like me to say that I deeply regret harming your sister, his wife. I can say these things, but they would be untrue. I would know it. You would know it. My line of work does not allow for remorse. Tell me what you were. I’m guessing DEA.”

The whites of his eyes stood out in the growing darkness.

“FBI.”

“You’re very good, Kalyn. I would have enjoyed killing you.”

“How many of you are there?”

“How many what?”

“Alphas.”

He chuckled. “Not as many as people think. Some who believe they are Alphas are not.”

“How many?”

“Fifty-seven at the moment.”

“Any gringos in the bunch?”

“Just two.”

“Come with me, Will.”

He followed Kalyn back to the car, stars now visible.

“You believe him?” Will asked, leaning against the hood. It was the first time since arriving in Phoenix five hours ago that he wasn’t overwhelmed by heat.

“Yeah, actually. I’m going after Jonathan.”

“The trucker?”

“You be up for that?”

“I don’t know. What about Javier? You comfortable just leaving him here?”

“No.”

“Well, what’s the alternative? Take him with . . .” Will felt something tighten in the small of his back. “No. No way.”

“I dug a hole three days ago. About fifty yards out.”

“Kalyn—”

“Alphas aren’t the kind of people you walk away from. You understand what I’m saying? They’d use every resource tracking us down. Kill friends, family to get to us.”

Will shook his head. “Not in cold blood, Kalyn.”

“You can wait here, Will, for all I care. I’ll take—”

“No. Not like—”

“Oh fuck.”

Will didn’t even see the draw, just a blur of movement, then Kalyn standing with her feet shoulder width apart, a two-handed grip and the Glock out in front of her, sweeping back and forth, aimed into all that darkness.

“You see him?” she whispered.

Will kept staring at the trunk of the dead saguaro, as if the man might rematerialize, but he wasn’t there.

“No.”

“Get in the car, passenger seat. Right now.”

Will turned and opened the door, got in and shut it as Kalyn climbed behind the steering wheel.

She flicked the locks.

For a moment, with the interior lights on, they were blinded to the nightscape beyond.

“Keys.”

Will handed them over and she fumbled with them for a moment before jamming one into the ignition.

The engine cranked. She flicked the headlights to high beam, shifted into drive.

The brights shone out into the desert, and the first thing Will noticed was the glimmer of metal near that dead saguaro where they’d questioned Javier.

“You see that?” he said.

“What?”

“By the cactus. He got out of the handcuffs.”

Kalyn eased her foot onto the accelerator.

“What are you doing?”

The car lurched forward, crossed twenty feet of pavement, then rattled into the desert.

“He can’t have gone far,” Kalyn said, dodging jumping chollas and shrubs of Mormon tea. “He had what? Thirty seconds? At a dead run, might have covered—”

“Two hundred meters.”

“Really?”

“I ran track in college. He’s in great shape.”

Something darted out from behind an ocotillo—just a cottontail, two bunnies in tow.

“See the arroyo up ahead?” Will said.

“Yeah.”

Kalyn braked, the Buick sliding through the dirt. She reversed, then drove on again in a slow, wide circle, the headlights scanning the desert.

Thirty seconds later, they were stopped again at the arroyo’s edge.

“Think he went down in there?” Will asked.

Kalyn pulled her Glock out of the shoulder rig.

“No,” Will said.

“He’s out here. We either get him now or spend the foreseeable future looking over our—”

“Don’t go out there.”

“I’ll be fine.” She shook the Glock. “He doesn’t have one of these.”

She threw open the door, got out.

“Kalyn.”

“He’s not supernatural, Will. Bleeds like you and me. Stay here.”

She slammed the door. With the interior lights on, he couldn’t see Kalyn moving away from the car, only heard her footsteps crunching through the dirt.

Just the headlights now, blazing into the desert, and the last thing he saw before they went dark was a roadrunner streaking between chollas on the far side of the arroyo, a snake twitching in its beak.

TWENTY-ONE

Kalyn was at least a hundred yards out from the car before she realized she’d forgotten the flashlight in the glove compartment. She stopped beside an ancient saguaro, gnarled and rotting to death. With no wind, the silence screamed, though after a moment, she began to discern the subtlest inklings of noise—low bass from a radio blaring out of the campground a mile away, the scraping hiss of dry brush set in motion by a wood rat or a wren.

She scrambled down the twenty-foot embankment and stood on the sandy bottom of the arroyo. It was absolutely quiet, the cooler air having settled here.

She stood for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the meager starlight. Shapes appeared—boulders, scrubs, ten feet away, the carcass of a coyote—sharp whiff of decay.

There was movement in the sand behind her—crunch of fast footsteps.

A cottontail bounded past.

“You little shit,” she called after it.

She climbed back out of the arroyo. The moon had edged above the Superstitions. The car was up ahead, a black hulk standing in the desert, the chrome glowing as the moonbeams struck it.

She walked around to the driver’s side. As she touched the door handle, a bush shook behind her and she turned, saw Will.