Just when I thought I would never reach the bottom, my feet touched solid ground and I collapsed to my hands and knees. All of my muscles seemed to be trembling at once and I was confident I’d peeled the skin off of my back, elbows, and knees. I hoped I wasn’t going to have to go back up the same way because I flat out didn’t have it in me. Fortunately, it only took a minute to find the way out. Just enough sunlight leaked through the cracks around a large stone that I could tell it didn’t quite fit perfectly. It also allowed me to see the starburst of blood from where the body had been dropped down the chute. The rocks beside and above the makeshift egress had been braced with wood and epoxy to hold them in place. I rolled the center stone outward and recoiled from the sudden influx of sunlight. I blinked until I could see again, then crawled out into the murderous heat. I hadn’t realized how cool it had been underground until I emerged.

The tripwire sparkled to my right, but it no longer mattered that I had triggered it.

From where I crouched, I could see the point where the east-west drag terminated against the mountain. Right where the Border Patrol agent had parked last night before starting uphill on foot. All someone needed to do was back up to the end of the gravel road, haul the body out, and throw it—

Brush marks on the sand in front of me. The side-to-side trails of leaves being swept back and forth to cover prints. They were faint, but they were fresh.

I leapt to my feet and followed them at a sprint. They led down the hill and around a stand of cacti and onto a flat stretch of desert spotted with creosotes and sage and palo verdes that had grown to the size of trees. And that was where the trail ended. There was a splotch of blood still aggregating in the dirt and what looked like the print from the back of a hand and wrist. A wad of foul cellophane was tangled in a creosote.

No more brush marks.

No footprints or branch marks or thorn scrapes or tire tread.

Nothing at all.

The ground leading away from me almost looked like someone had taken a leaf blower to it, scattering the sand and flattening the weeds and erasing any sign of passage.

I had been so close.

So close…

NINETEEN

By the time I again scaled the hill and reached the crime scene, there were a handful of CBP agents waiting to greet me. Perhaps greet was the wrong term. There was a whole lot of shouting and waving of pistols, but we eventually got things straightened out and all walked backed to our respective cars with the sun setting ahead of us across the desert.

Having spent the majority of my life on the front range of the Colorado Rockies, I was so accustomed to what others might call majestic sunsets that I rarely even noticed them anymore. The sun set behind the snow-capped peaks every night. That was just kind of what it did. I hoped the people who lived here didn’t take this one for granted, for this was one of those things you had to see to believe. The way the red sun seemed to waver on the distant horizon, spreading a glow the color of the flesh around a peach pit across the rolling hills, was positively breathtaking. Or maybe it was merely the way the temperature was plummeting and the fact that I no longer felt like I was in immediate danger of dropping dead that lightened my spirits. Whatever the case, something in my brain had finally seen fit to give up a decent idea of how to proceed. The only problem was I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it until the morning, which left me with the whole night to kill.

Hopefully, that wasn’t the Coyote’s plan, as well.

The CBP agents had been about as courteous as one would expect from civil servants. They thanked me for wasting their time and encouraged me to find just about anywhere else on the planet to be. One especially helpful fellow even suggested about the only place that might be hotter than this, which made me feel a whole lot better about not telling them what I had found at either of the crime scenes. There would come a point when I would have to, but not yet, and not like this. This was still my game to play and, fortunately, they hadn’t searched my car and found my signal jammer beneath the driver’s seat, so I still had the ability to play it. As far as they knew, I had no knowledge of the Oscars, which left them with the impression they would still be able to monitor my movements while I traveled relatively unimpeded. And I had learned that the batteries lasted less than four hours with continuous use. The guys back at Ajo Station were probably racking their brains trying to figure out how my car had just suddenly appeared on top of one of their Oscars in the lot and would have their tech guys going over the preceding units in the series to check for malfunctions. I, on the other hand, simply needed to pick up some more batteries.

I was surprised to find the streets of Sells all but deserted upon my return. After witnessing so much activity earlier in the day, I kind of figured there’d be at least some sort of night life, but I was sorely mistaken. The daytime apparently allowed the community to perpetuate an illusion that vanished with the setting sun. This was an occupied zone. The only cars on the streets were the green and white Border Patrol Explorers. They cruised slowly through town with their spotlights directed between houses and buildings. The agents driving them couldn’t possibly have stared me down any harder if I’d had illegals clinging to my roof and hanging out of my open trunk. I turned on my scanner and listened to them call in my license plate and the make and model of my car each time I passed a patrol, although it was hard to hear with the insane amount of radio activity.

If I thought what I’d heard earlier with Chief Antone was chaos, this gave a whole new definition to the word. There were multiple dispatchers coordinating so many different units on so many different frequencies that I couldn’t even begin to keep them straight. A Blackhawk streaked past overhead, so low it rattled my windows. Its spotlight snapped on as it traced the street all the way to the edge of sight, where I saw several shadows break cover and sprint off into the night. Two Explorers raced past me on either side, their sirens blaring. It was hard to fathom that I was still in the same country as I had been two days ago. This felt like a military state, and I supposed that was exactly what it was. I couldn’t help but wonder what it might have been like before the simultaneous invasion of the narco-insurgency and the para-military forces of the country to which the sovereign Tohono O’odham Nation was forced to swear its allegiance.  It was hard to believe that the construction of a great wall along the US-Mexico border could be any worse than this. I tried to imagine how different the course of my life might have been had my father been awakened by the sounds of warfare in the street outside his home rather than the distant rumble of bombing that heralded the end of the world, while at the same time closing off my mind to thoughts of the children trying to sleep behind the shivering windows of the houses lining what should have been quiet rural streets.

I found a twenty-four hour store that reminded me of a pawn shop on East Colfax in Denver. It was an adobe structure with bars on the cracked windows and a hand-painted sign over the door that was stenciled with oddly inflected O’odham words, beneath which it read simply “Always Open” in English. I was able to load up on batteries and jerky and even a cold four-pack of Red Bull. There was a coffee pot full of black tar and a sign above it that declared it free for law enforcement officers. Judging by the expression on the face of the cashier behind the wire-reinforced glass at the back of the store, I had a pretty good hunch how he felt about the law enforcement community as a whole and figured that no matter how much I loved coffee, I would never need it that badly. He was looking at me like I’d deflowered his sister in front of him on prom night and then followed him home and asked for an introduction to his mother. There was something else in his eyes, though, something that led me to believe he was stroking the freshly oiled barrel of a shotgun under the counter and just praying for the opportunity to use it. I slid the cash through the pass box and told him to keep the change, if for no other reason than to expedite my departure.