“You look just like him, you know,” Armandiriz said to my back.

And there I had my answer.

“What did you just say?”

“It’s the eyes. You guys have the exact same eyes.”

If you’ve never seen a three hundred pound man flip backward over his chair, I highly recommend it. An overhand right to the bridge of the nose works quite well, especially if you swing hard enough. And I guarantee it’ll knock that smug grin right off of his face and onto yours.

Don’t let anyone tell you I don’t know how to loosen my tie and have a little fun from time to time.

DAY 3

tash waik

wuhi

The term sociopath is considered antiquated and has been replaced with the formal medical diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder. Kind of takes away the element of personal accountability, I say. ‘Don’t blame me, I have APD.’ Funny how the staggering increase in violent crime over the last fifty years coincides with the integration of psychology into the mainstream, isn’t it?

TWENTY-ONE

Sells District

Tohono O’odham Nation

Arizona

September 11th

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Take punching a three hundred-pound slab of humanity hard enough to send it flipping head over heels. Or heels over head, as the case may be. The consequences, while not entirely unanticipated, are always worse than you expect at the time.

When you think about the logistics of essentially punching a side of beef with enough force to knock it off the hook from which it hangs, you realize you would have been better off just drawing your sidearm and shooting it. Physics further dictates that force travels in a straight line. For the behavioralists who claim that mankind wasn’t born with the propensity for violence and instead that it’s a conditioned response to negative external stimuli, I offer proof to the contrary. The human arm is one of nature’s strangest and most force-resistant designs, trailing only the rock, the tree trunk, and the mammalian leg. An arm is constructed with the ability to form a compact club at its most distal end. That club is mounted on a long, whip-like fulcrum that attaches to the trunk roughly three feet from the origin of the imparted force. It is designed to impact with the knuckles of the second and third digits, the index and middle fingers, respectively. From there, the force of the blow—in this case, an overhand right—travels up the lengths of the second and third metacarpals, which further distribute that force between the eight carpal bones and then the two long bones of the forearm, although primarily the thicker radius. It’s then further absorbed by the humerus, which is the longest and strongest bone in your body next to the femur. From there it passes into the heavily muscled shoulder girdle and dissipates into the thorax. All so you don’t end up breaking your hand when you hit someone.

That doesn’t mean it won’t still hurt like a mother, though.

I drove with my left hand and rested the knuckles of my right on a cold bottle of water in my lap. Cold being a largely subjective term like pain, which was definitely winning the battle between the two. As much as I had enjoyed punching Boss Nass at the time, I regretted it even more now. Not necessarily because it hurt like a mother, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, but because it was diverting my focus from the task at hand. It also exposed a chink in my armor that until now I didn’t realize I possessed. I’ve always been able to draw a firm line between the personal and the professional, despite the fact that I take my job very personally. This one had hit too close to home, though. Too close to a home I hadn’t lived in for a long, long time, but a home filled with unresolved feelings nonetheless.

Despite what anyone might say about him, I am my father’s son and I take great pride in that fact. I may not have known him as well as I would have liked, but I knew him well enough to know that he placed loyalty and honor and service above all else. He believed in his ideals and believed to the very end that they were worth fighting and, ultimately, dying for. Maybe a part of me wishes he had placed me before his ideals. That he would have recognized a boy needs a father worse than a largely forgotten war needed a largely forgotten hero. I guess I understood that in his own way he had. We can’t always choose the way our parents love us. Which, I suppose, serves as the sad war cry of the abused child, too.

The irony is not lost on me.

The comparison to the man I was convinced was the Coyote cut me to the bone. I’m not blind. I couldn’t help but see the physical similarities between us, the parallels between our lives. He was a few years older, but we had essentially been born at the same time. I had been raised in a different world, though. He was born here and stayed here. His was the life that could have been mine had my father bowed to tradition as his had before him. And as his brother had, as well. I had been raised in a large house on a large lot in an upscale suburb by people who pretty much devoted the last quarter of their lives to raising their grandson as if he were their own son. My cousin had been raised apart from the outside world and largely in a position to resent it for past wrongs perpetrated by a government that no longer existed in the same form. While I had gone to a prestigious prep school and an even more prestigious college, he had been shown a route from a single communal school straight through community college and into a job force that existed to serve the community. I had joined the FBI and received the best law enforcement training in the entire nation. Where I had been taught to hunt out in the real world, where rules applied. He had been trained by the Border Patrol, and, by extension, the very same government, to hunt in a lawless land where none of the traditional rules applied. He had seen the pictures of my successes accumulating on the wall in his family’s homestead, seen me living essentially the same life, only on a grander scale. He had known about me while I hadn’t even looked hard enough to learn of his existence. I wasn’t responsible for the path he had chosen, but I wasn’t entirely blameless, either.

This case had always been destined to fall into my lap and he had known it from the moment the idea first crossed his mind. This was his challenge to me, the gauntlet he had thrown at my feet. Me vs. him. Mano a mano.

Blood on blood.

But that wasn’t the part that bothered me the most. The worst part was the realization that our roles could easily have been reversed, were it not for the random nature of fate.

The impartation of force.

We had both chosen the same straight line of impact, yet here we both were now, two irresistible forces on a collision course with one another, hunting on the reservation of our ancestors, which had already tasted the blood of countless generations of our forebears. And before this was over, it would taste even more. One way or the other. I could feel it deep in my very being…

That had always been his plan.

I just couldn’t understand the sheer ferocity with which he hated me. There had to be something more, some reason above and beyond living a lifetime in the shadow of a cousin who had no idea he was even casting one. I was the kind of guy who tended to take a rattlesnake striking at his face a little bit personally. Maybe it all boiled down to the fact that Ban and I were both just really sensitive, touchy-feely kind of guys.