I guess it all boiled down to how badly I wanted this guy and to what lengths I was willing to go to catch him. When I looked at it like that, there really was no decision to be made at all.

I wriggled forward and around the bend as fast as I could. The hell with it. By the time I was able to see ahead of me, I was halfway to the end of the tunnel, a dark oval through which the beam of my penlight diffused into a weak golden aura. I could hear the buzzing of flies and another sound that I couldn’t quite place. I was nearly to the den itself when my light fell upon the object resting on the ground just across the earthen threshold. It was a small burlap pouch with a leather cord threaded through the material and cinched on top. The fabric was black with what could only be blood. It was positively alive with flies.

Just sitting there where I couldn’t possibly miss it.

Where I had been meant to find it.

I heard a kind of swishing sound beneath the drone of the flies.

I exhaled slowly to steady my nerves. I was either going to have to set down my penlight or my Beretta in order to grab it, and I honestly didn’t much care for either option. In the end, I decided neither was acceptable and managed to toss my penlight backward and close enough to my face that I was able to manipulate it into my mouth. I tilted the beam as well as I could toward the satchel and dragged it closer, into the tunnel and out of the den. A tug on the leather cord and the bag opened wide enough that I could pinch it by the crusted underside, invert it, and dump the contents—

“Oh, God…”

TWENTY

I don’t know what I had expected to be inside the satchel. I guess I didn’t ever really stop to think about it. Maybe a part of me just assumed it would be something like a finger or a toe. Maybe a few of each. It was a decent size bag. Something meant to taunt or torment me, some way for him to show me he was in charge, but nothing at all like what fell out. In fact, it took several beats for me to recognize exactly what they were. They looked almost like little ceramic balls glued together, side-by-side in ascending size, crusted with blood. A T-shaped knob of bone protruded from the broad end of each.

They were rattles.

The realization hit me at the same moment I heard the sweeping sound again. Closer this time. I shoved myself backward with every last ounce of strength as a dark shape streaked past my face and struck the dirt wall beside me. It wasn’t a sweeping sound. It was hissing. In context, I clearly recognized it now. My sudden movement had set off a frenzy in the coyote den. Hissing and thrashing sounds echoed from the warren. As rattlesnakes, they were born in a bad mood that could only be enhanced by lopping off their tails and throwing them down into a strange den that smelled like death warmed over.

I dropped my penlight, which shined deeper into the tunnel, illuminating dark shapes slithering across the threshold behind the one that had missed me. It had already recoiled and reared up into striking position. The nub of its tail stood straight up as it vibrated. The thing had to be as wide around as my forearm. Fortunately, I still had my pistol and the damn snake was so big it made an easy target. I squeezed the trigger. The diamondback unraveled and whipped backward into the darkness beyond the light’s reach at the same moment the thunderclap of the report swatted me upside the head. I’d swear I saw the other snakes strike at the ruined reptile as it flew past, but I was backing around the bend in such a hurry that I didn’t stick around to find out for sure. And I was more than happy to let them share their venom with each other instead of with me.

I felt my feet drop over the outside edge as another shape sliced across my field of view and past my face, so close I could smell it. The deafening report in such close quarters had thrown off my equilibrium and made the tunnel appear to turn clockwise around me, but I was still able to squeeze off another shot that hit the snake while it was recoiling to take another strike at me.

And then I was out of the tunnel and into a darkness so much lighter it was like daytime in contrast. I tried to stand, tried to run, but only managed to send myself toppling over a large rock and tumbling down the hillside. For several seconds, I felt like I was being bludgeoned with baseball bats and then I was flat on my back, gasping for air I couldn’t quite seem to catch. The image of rattlesnakes firing out of the mouth of that hole and raining down on me got me crawling. The air finally broke through and I gasped and lunged to my feet. The ground teetered beneath me as I staggered away from the hillside and finally collapsed onto a sage bush that felt like a pincushion, but was vastly preferable to the nopales beside it.

I don’t know how long I lay like that, just draped over the shrub with the imagined sound of rattles shaking in my head. When I finally rolled off of it and onto the sand, I started to laugh. I laughed harder than I had in a long time. I laughed so hard I’m sure there were a dozen migrants crossing the Sonoran who dove into the nearest hiding place at the sound of my dawning madness. The Coyote had known I was nipping at his heels and tried to eliminate me before I caught up with him. And he had wanted me to know his true identity right before I was struck repeatedly by a half-dozen rattlesnakes. He wanted me to wonder why he did it as I stumbled through the desert, the venom coursing through my blood, stealing the sight from my eyes while the pain became unendurable. Or maybe he thought I’d never make it back out of the tunnel. Regardless, he had taken a risk in doing so, a gambit that was going to blow up in his face.

I rolled over onto my back and looked up the slope to where the mouth of the hole was limned by the beam from my lost penlight.

“I’m coming for you,” I said, and pushed myself to my feet.

I spent nearly the entire walk back to my car plucking cactus needles from my hands and arms by the light of the moon. I waited until I reached my car before prying the large ones from the left side of my face and neck with the aid of the mirror app on my cell phone. The last thing I needed was to leave bits embedded under the skin or create any ghastly puckered scars. Besides, I had a little extra time to play with.

The Coyote thought I was dead.

It was only a matter of time before he learned the truth, but for now, I essentially had my own personal jammer that would allow me to sneak up on him. And I was going to enjoy every second of it. I wanted to see the expression on his face when he realized that he had failed, that I knew who he was. That I had beaten him. I wanted to memorize the expression so I could recall it whenever I chose. I wanted it to be the last thing I saw at night before I drifted off to sleep and the first thing I saw before I opened my eyes in the morning.

This was personal now.

I guess it always had been, and I needed to know why. It made sense that if I was going to figure out the answer to that question, Why was the best place to start.

The town of Why, Arizona was actually the location of Ajo Station, despite being ten miles south of the town of Ajo. It sits just to the west of the Tohono O’odham Reservation and north of Organ Pipe National Monument, twenty-five miles straight up Highway 85 from Lukeville and the Mexican border at Sonoyta. Prior to 9/11 and the subsequent commission of the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, the town boasted a whopping population of roughly one hundred and its sole claim to fame was the Y-shaped intersection where Highways 85 and 86 merged. At the time of its founding, state law required all city names to have at least three letters, thus the über-creative Why. And now that the Arizona Department of Transportation had caved to safety concerns and convention and rebuilt the intersection into a more traditional T-shape, disappointed tourists now had to content themselves with a peek at the unrestrained bedlam that was Ajo Station and blow their money at the Desert Diamond Casino east of town.