The lines around her eyes and mouth.

I stood perfectly still and repeated the words in my head.

The lines around her eyes and mouth…

What was it about them? I looked at her picture again, at the wrinkles around—

I ran to the bathroom and threw open the medicine cabinet with enough force to crack the mirror. Damn it. I should have recognized it earlier. I was stupid and arrogant and allowed myself to be manipulated. I knocked the entire row of prescription bottles from the shelf and had to crawl around on the floor until I found the one I was looking for. I grabbed the box of OnabotulinumtoxinA and held it up before me. One hundred units of purified neurotoxin complex. OnabotulinumtoxinA was the generic name for Botox, a purified form of the neurotoxin responsible for botulism. It was used to treat chronic migraines and neck pain, not to mention cosmetic applications like reducing wrinkles and erasing the signs of aging. It worked by blocking the nerve impulses between the brain and the muscles at the site of the injection, essentially paralyzing the muscles.

Paralyzing the muscles.

I remembered the nicks and cuts on Antone’s face that I had mistaken for sloppy shaving or a butcher job from a dull razor. He had hidden the sites where he had injected the Botox perfectly among the real cuts he must have deliberately inflicted upon himself. That was why I had never been able to read him. He’d paralyzed certain groups of facial muscles to mask his expressions.

He’d known the Bureau would send me in from the start and he’d known about my skills. He’d been manipulating me since I first set foot on the reservation. He’d been in league with my brother, who he must have discovered was out there killing people in the desert, and had decided to put Ban’s skills to use for his own ends. That’s why Antone hadn’t appeared threatened by him when we found Ban waiting with Roman near the first crime scene, the one they had discovered.

Master and puppet.

I’itoi and Coyote.

I bellowed in frustration and spiked the bottle against the wall. The plastic cracked and the top snapped off and I felt fluid spatter my cheek, but I was already in motion.

Out of the bathroom and down the hall. Through the main room and the kitchen. Out the back door and onto the porch. Past the lone chair in which I assumed Antone sat to watch the setting sun, where I had sat only days before and noticed the nearly invisible tracks in the sand leading toward the distant ridge, beyond which I had seen the roofline of an aluminum outbuilding. The seat where Antone had sat not to keep an eye on the majestic desert sunset, but rather the outbuilding itself, so as not to make the tracks any more visible than absolutely necessary, because he really only needed to drive back there when he had a full trunk. A full trunk brimming with packages he didn’t want anyone to see him unloading.

It took me twenty minutes to walk there. The building reminded me of a small airplane hangar with a low, flat roof. The kind of thing someone could find on an abandoned Air Force bombing range, disassemble under the cover of darkness, and reassemble on his own land where no one else knew of its existence. It was situated in a narrow stone cul-de-sac formed by the convergence of the hills on the opposite side of the ridge from his house. It had been painted a reddish-brown to match the surrounding sand, but the wind had scoured it back to the bare metal in spots. There was a garage door on the face of the building. I gave the handle a solid tug. It didn’t budge in the slightest. Locked from the inside. Or maybe rusted shut. I walked around the side. There were no windows. I found the main entrance on the rear of the building, abutting an escarpment that kept the front door in perpetual shadow. I used the same lock rake that granted me entrance to Antone’s house to make short work of the main knob. The series of deadbolts running nearly all the way up the height of the door above it took a bit more finagling.

When I finally drew the door open, the smell swatted me in the face. Not the stench of rotting flesh or anything even remotely resembling death. Still, it was a smell I recognized immediately.

Marijuana.

I pulled out my flashlight and shined it around the interior of the building. There were large wire cages to either side of a central aisle. It reminded me of evidence lockup. Each of the cages was packed with bricks and bags and crates of drugs, all of them carefully catalogued and documented with their weights on the clipboards hanging from the locked doors. I was no expert, but the street value of this one building was probably enough to buy a small country. Or maybe even a large one. Antone had gathered it all here to be found and seized by the proper authorities. And my gut told me that everything he had accumulated was still here, right down to the last gram.

I strolled down the aisle, glancing from one side to the other. Marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines, Mexican tar, crates of semiautomatic pistols and assault rifles. Everything that could possibly be smuggled across the reservation shy of a cage full of undocumenteds and an insulated case of plutonium. Or maybe I just hadn’t come across them yet.

It was an impressive collection by anyone’s standards. I couldn’t imagine how much time and effort Antone had invested into confiscating this amount of contraband. It was a wonder he hadn’t already been hunted down and killed by the cartels. I shuddered to think that this volume of drugs could be considered too small to actually be missed.

I found it hard not to respect Antone for making it his mission to help rid his reservation of at least a portion of the drugs being funneled across his land and into the public school system, but that didn’t change the fact that he had crossed the line. No matter what crimes these criminals had committed, they didn’t deserve to be hunted down in the desert by someone like my brother.

Or maybe they did. Was not the definition of morality a code of conduct that served the greater good of society?

The cages ended with about fifteen feet remaining before the garage door. I smelled the faintest hint of gasoline. There were oil stains all over the floor. The concrete was lined with tire tracks. Rubber imprints. Three close together. Parallel. Like a tricycle would make. Or perhaps, more accurately, like an ultralight “trike” one-man aircraft would make. The kind that looked like a hang glider attached to a go-kart with an engine-driven propeller mounted to the back. The kind that could fly at more than thirty miles-an-hour and stay under the radar where the Border Patrol couldn’t see it. The kind that the cartels used to make nighttime drops in remote locations where collection teams were ready and waiting. The kind that could easily get a man across the border and into the kind of town where he could disappear in less time than it took for all of the inept law enforcement officers swarming the desert to find his abandoned police cruiser.

I unlocked the garage door, rolled it upward, and stepped out into the night. The tire tracks led about four hundred feet away from me to a point where they vanished altogether.

Who in his right mind would leave the ‘States and risk his life crossing the desert to get into Mexico, you know?

Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howled at the moon.

Coyote is the master of deception.

Coyote.

I’itoi.

This infernal desert was positively crawling with gods of mischief.

THE CALM BEFORE THE SWARM