I peered uphill during a rare pause between gusts and saw what I had hoped to see.

There was another marker up there, at the top of an escarpment and nearly concealed by an enormous nopales. The pike and the skull leaned forward, away from the wind and toward me. When another gust rose, the skull lifted its chin and started to nod. I could barely see the upper crescent of what looked like a dark orifice behind it.

I turned my back to the wind and racked the slide of my pistol to make sure no sand had gummed up the mechanism. I couldn’t afford for it to jam at a crucial moment.

I pressed onward, never once taking my eyes off of the shadows behind the cactus. Somewhere back there was the man I had come to find. The Coyote. My brother Ban. He was waiting for me somewhere down there in the darkness. I was walking right into a trap and I knew it.

I hauled myself up onto a ledge maybe four feet deep. The mountain grew even steeper from there as it headed up toward the peak. The cactus battled against the yellow grasses for a small patch of soil, into which a hole had been dug. The lid of the hatch that had formerly sealed it rested against the cactus. One side was bare wood; the other molded to imitate the contour of the slope and covered with sand and rocks that had been affixed to it with clear epoxy. This had once been a coyote den, no doubt. I had seen enough of them by now to know. It seemed almost poetic from a certain point of view.

The wind screamed past me. It made a hollow whistling sound from the mouth of the tunnel.

I shined my light down into a darkness so deep it swallowed the beam.

The coyote skull squeaked and nodded on the pike, almost as though it was laughing at me from beyond the grave.

Coyote is the master of deception.

I drew a deep breath, blew it out slowly, and crawled into the hole.

THIRTY-SEVEN

The smell hit me the moment I was out of the wind. It was a hundred, no…a thousand times worse than anything I had ever smelled in my entire life. This one would haunt me for the rest of my life. I retched several times before finally seizing control of my stomach. I had found where he had taken the bodies of his victims. No doubt about that. The stench of decomposition was so thick I felt like I was swimming through it as I wriggled deeper into the mountain. I couldn’t afford to let it distract me. Nor could I spare a thought to figure out how to cover my mouth and nose. Anything that divided my attention was liable to get me killed.

I had squirmed maybe ten feet when the light from the outside world faded behind me. I stopped where I was and waited until my eyes adapted as well as they were going to. The bluish glow of my light reached out ahead of me to the point where the tunnel opened into a larger space. I gripped my pistol with both hands to steady my aim and used just my knees and feet to scoot forward on my belly. Progress was slow and laborious, but it allowed me to keep my finger tight on the trigger and my eye even with the sightline. I cleared the earthen tunnel and recognized immediately what the Coyote had done. Walls had been erected to either side of me from the dirt floor clear up to the rocky roof, maybe six feet tall. It wasn’t quite high enough for me to stand fully erect, but I’d had enough of crawling to last me a lifetime. I rose to a shooter’s stance and entered Elder Brother’s maze.

The passage was perhaps five feet wide, not quite wide enough to allow me to raise my arms to either side. The circle of my flashlight grew smaller and smaller against the wall ahead of me. The only opening was to my right. I leaned against the adjacent wall, glanced around the corner, and ducked back.

Nothing there.

I went around the corner in a crouch, just in case, and walked straight toward another wall. This time, my only option was to turn left. I flattened to the wall, slid down lower, and peeked quickly around the corner. My beam flashed across an arm and a leg and threw a man’s shadow across the ground. I squeezed the trigger three times in rapid succession. The report was deafening. It echoed back at me in the confines like pencils slammed straight through my eardrums.

The figure bucked and jerked and flopped backward to the ground with a clattering sound. I barely heard the faint tinkle of my spent brass over the ringing in my ears.

I fully rounded the corner and approached the body, which lay perfectly still on its back. The feet were bare and marbled purple and black. The jeans were crusted and bloodstained to match the checked western button-down shirt, the bottom of which had risen just enough to reveal the ragged wound on his abdomen. The ends of a long wooden dowel poked out of his sleeves. The entry wounds were plain as day: two roughly circular holes at center mass and a third in the upper chest. No blood flooded to the surface. No puddle expanded beneath the body. I raised my beam to the face and took an involuntary step backward.

The man’s head had been replaced by a coyote’s.

No. A coyote’s head had been skinned to create a mask for the man underneath it. Such care had been taken that it was nearly impossible to tell. The snout and the teeth had been left intact, presumably on the original bony framework. The man’s milky eyes stared up at me through the black-rimmed holes where the coyote’s had once been.

I guess I now had a pretty good idea what he’d done with the heads he’d taken from the dead animals I found in the den yesterday.

I nudged the snout with my foot to lift it from the man’s face. The wound on his neck looked like a great black bedsore through which I could see slimy liquefied flesh. I hadn’t seen his face before and doubt I would have been able to recognize it even if I had. His cheeks were in such an advanced state of decomposition that I could see his bones and teeth through the rotten holes. His skin sagged from his facial architecture and drooped from the left side as though he were having a posthumous stroke. The moment I saw something start to crawl out through the shriveled ring of his severed trachea, I jerked my foot aside and let the mask fall back down.

I could only imagine Ban sitting somewhere nearby, trying to stifle his laughter. Or maybe just running his fingertips along the edge of a sharp blade and summoning his own blood in some sort of painful release.

The shots had undoubtedly given away my location, so I needed to get a move on.

I stepped over the corpse and followed the passage. Slowly. Allowing my light to do the exploring for me. The corridor wound to the left. The walls were choppy, not smooth, as though pieced together from scraps. Dropcloths had been nailed over them to cover whatever holes or seams remained. I imagined my light probably showed through on the other side, but I wasn’t about to give it up. Not until I absolutely had to. I kept walking, letting myself continue to be guided in a wide arch until my light focused on another wall in my way. I felt like I was roughly parallel to the point where I had initially turned left and found the first body. This branch opened to the left, as well.

I tried to envision the maze in my head. I imagined it had likely been built as a replica of the one I had reconstructed from the crime scenes, but I hadn’t paid close enough attention to it to be able to recreate it in my mind. I cursed my lack of foresight.

I slid along the wall to my left and stopped at the turn.

I had an idea.

I fished my cell phone out of my pocket and opened the mirror app. If I held it out and away from my body at the right angle, I could use the forward-facing camera to look around the corner without having to stick my neck out. It obviously wasn’t a perfect solution. The phone would make an easy target for anyone with a weapon, but I’d rather lose my hand than my head. The digital “reflection” was a split-second slow, the tilting movements slightly blurred the image, and it was so dark I could see little more than grainy shades of black and gray. Considering the alternative, though, I figured one remaining hand would be sufficient to pat myself on the back for my ingenuity.