Coyote is the master of deception.

I glanced down at my flashlight, at the stretch of ground illuminated by the golden beam, at the very edge where the red glow turned it a subtle shade of orange. At the footprints heading inward.

And at the other set that crossed right over the top of them in the opposite direction, back toward me. Behind me.

“You need to bring a gift for I’itoi.”

Coyote is the master of deception.

The red light.

The shoes.

Jesus.

I dove forward, flipped over in midair, and aimed my pistol between my feet, back toward the direction from which I’d come. I was firing before I hit the ground on my back and still firing as I slid up against the makeshift wall. The strobe of the discharge silhouetted the large form sneaking up on me from behind. I watched it buck in reverse, watched its coyote head snap backward, watched a mist of blood freeze in time behind it, watched the reflection of the knife as it fell from its hand. The report was painful and lanced right through my eardrums.

I grabbed the flashlight from the ground beside me and scurried to my feet. I shined it down at the body sprawled before me. Bloody cotton stuffing bloomed from above the collar of Antone’s uniform shirt and the entrance wounds on his gut. A black puddle expanded beneath his head. The coyote mask had flopped back from his face.

“Did you bring a gift for Elder Brother to ensure your safe return?”

“Yeah.” I turned away from the dead man’s face and the entry wound between a pair of eyes that were nearly identical to mine. “I brought him exactly what he deserved.”

I walked around the corner and stomped on the digital recorder before I was forced to endure another word uttered in the voice of my dead elder brother.

DAYS 5 - 9

tash hetasp - humukt

mahch

Albert Camus said that man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

I only wish that were true.

Man is a creature that embraces its animal roots and never misses an opportunity to demonstrate evolution’s predilection for violence and depravity.

THIRTY-NINE

Sells District

Tohono O’odham Nation

Arizona

September 13th-17th

Everything kind of passed in a blur from there. I remember finding the remote trigger Ban had used to activate the voice recording on the ground beneath where he had been suspended by his arms. Or at least where he had been pretending to be suspended. The dowel had really only been two pieces, each of which had barely been two feet long. I remember seeing the knife, the way my flashlight glinted from the serrated edge, and having to look away before I envisioned what he had intended to do to me with it. I remember stumbling blindly through the maze, well after my light finally gave up the ghost, until I emerged from the tunnel and drew a deep breath of fresh air for what felt like the first time in my life. There were already flashing lights streaking over the eastern horizon when I sat down on the ledge in the lee of the cactus and drank my final bottle of water to the accompaniment of the coyote skull squeaking on the pike as it nodded its approval. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything as wonderful as that water tasted at that moment.

By the time the first Border Patrol agents arrived, the windstorm had waned to sporadic gusts that pretty well left the sand on the ground where it was supposed to be. I hoped it stayed that way because the only thought that stood out from the chaos of unanswered questions in my mind was an almost physiological need to watch the sun rise from the flat desert ahead of me and abolish the darkness. It wasn’t even a pink stain in the sky when agents from the Phoenix Bureau arrived with a Crime Scene Response Team, which promptly set up portable generators and light arrays that evaporated the shadows as though they had never been. I barely caught a glimpse of the fiery red orb over the shoulder of one of my fellow agents, who was doing his best to put me through the wringer. He could scarcely contain the stench of ambition seeping from his pores, at least until he realized I wasn’t about to say a word to him. As far as I was concerned, my involvement there had come to an end.

My SAC, of course, had other plans for me. I was still the ace up his sleeve that promised promotion, but the personal nature of my entanglement in the case made it difficult to thrust me too far into the limelight, at least not until I’d been formally cleared of any potential collusion with my brother and wrongdoing in his death. The whole situation couldn’t have played out any better for Nielsen, who still got to trot his prize pony out in front of the cameras, while ultimately being the one who held the reins.

By then, I couldn’t have cared less. Getting my picture on TV or in the papers was just about the last thing I wanted to do. Trust me, that revelation surprised me, too. I think I just needed to put this whole business behind me. The sooner I was able to scrub the reek of death out of my skin the better. But there was also the matter of the spin the powers that be were putting on the situation that positively made me sick to my stomach. While there was truth to the story the reporters were fed—and utilized to their advantage with about a million breaking news segments—it was anything but the whole truth. And I figured there would be no misinterpreting the expression on my face had I been forced to regurgitate it in front the press.

Don’t let anyone tell you Lukas Walker is any man’s puppet.

A Native American male—coincidentally of blood relation to one of the lead investigators on the case—snapped and murdered five innocent people, including a decorated Border Patrol agent and the chief of the tribal police force, before being tracked down by one of the Bureau’s finest field agents with the help of Behavioral’s top profilers. Ban Rafael Walker was shot and killed during his attempted apprehension. The maze he constructed was used to illustrate his progressive sociopathic dissociation in response to his inability to find work, his animosity toward the federal government in general, and the Department of Homeland Security, his former employer, specifically.

By the time all was said and done, there probably wouldn’t be a soul alive who couldn’t recite the myth of I’itoi, the Man in the Maze, almost verbatim. That was the part of the story that made it sexy and surely sent screenwriters everywhere scrambling. The bodies unearthed from beneath his trailer warranted a passing mention, with particular emphasis on the number exhumed. Considering the paperwork involved with feeding them into the bureaucratic machine and how long it would take to identify them, if at all, the general consensus was that the victims would eventually make fine stories somewhere down the line to keep the Monster in the Maze, as the Coyote had been dubbed, in the headlines.

Despite the sketchy nature of the “truth” as it was told, some good did arise from the fallout. The plight of the Tohono O’odham people was placed front and center for the whole world to see. The everyday tales of survival in the middle of a war zone brought both humanitarian and federal aid in the form of money, food, jobs, and a whole slew of other promises I really hoped the government would keep this time. O’odham culture also reached the masses, albeit initially in a negative light, but that quickly faded as the general public developed an appetite for Hohokam lore and a people who were largely unknown, even though they’d technically been American citizens far longer than most other bloodlines. Of course, the political machine couldn’t give without exacting its due.