“Good point,” said Tracy. “We’ll only take essentials.” She walked over and picked up A.J.’s rifle.

Just before they turned to walk back toward their packs, Gwen swung the flashlight back toward A.J. He was still passed out, chin on his chest, a growing lump on his cheek. There was a trickle of blood running down the side of his face and a strip of duct tape over his mouth. He looked peaceful, almost harmless. He was bound securely to the tree, and seeing all this, Gwen felt a complicated mix of emotions. Anger and hatred and fear all bubbled together with a strange wish that he wouldn’t die, that they wouldn’t be responsible. I hope I never see your face again, she thought. Then she swung the light away and left him in darkness.

Chapter Eleven

Oscar

They hiked without speaking, but their passage seemed terribly loud. The sound of their boots kicking rocks and breaking twigs reverberated through the woods. There was just enough light from the first-quarter moon that they could see where they were going; still, Tracy switched on her headlamp several times, light muffled by her fingers, to make sure they were staying on track. In these moments, all their faces looked haunted and ghostly, deep dark shadows where eyes should have been. And the trees. They looked weirdly alive in the short bursts of light, or maybe undead, malevolent creatures looming in the dark.

They were headed up the same trail they’d come down the previous afternoon, a lifetime ago. Their loads were less than half of what they’d been the day before, but everything else seemed heavier. Originally they’d planned to spend two more days in the mountains, but now, instead of hiking eight miles each day, they’d push to do all sixteen at once. And so there were things they could leave behind—sleeping bags and tents, and some of the food, the heavy bear canisters. Since it was probably as cold right then as it would get, they left most of their extra clothes. They carried water, some food, and Tracy brought her bear spray. They worried that whoever found their things might blame them for José’s death, but they worried more about getting out of the mountains alive. They debated about leaving a couple of the big packs behind, but no one wanted to feel like they were taking less than their share, so they all still carried their packs. The only new things they added were guns. Tracy took José’s handgun, and Todd carried A.J.’s rifle.

It was three thirty in the morning, and Oscar couldn’t believe where he was or what he was doing. He thought of his daughter, asleep in his mother’s house; he thought of his mother and Claudia. What would he say if he could talk with them now? He had never imagined himself in a situation like this.

Now he wished that they had killed the skinhead creep, or at least maimed him in some serious way. They had him secured pretty tightly, but who was to say they hadn’t made some error that left room for him to wiggle out of the bindings? And what if his brother showed up? Even though Oscar believed what the people at the Franklin Cash Store had said about the bad element in the area, and what Gwen had said about white supremacists, he’d never imagined that he’d meet such guys himself. He never thought he’d see racial hatred so naked and frank—so much more in-your-face than the subtle prejudice he was used to. Oscar’s emotions had been jerked around so much that he felt an emotional whiplash. The terror he’d experienced when the gun first touched his head had settled into a fear so steady and deep he forgot what it was like not to feel it. Then the confusion and relief of their first captor being shot, followed by an even deeper fear.

He’d always associated pot gardens with aging hippies, pleasantly stoned older folks who ate pot brownies and strummed ’60s-era guitars. And he smoked out himself at parties sometimes—who didn’t? But it had somehow not really occurred to him that there were higher stakes, and dangerous people, or that he could ever run into trouble. He’d known, of course, about the Mexican drug cartels, and he sometimes saw slick, intimidating men driving tricked-out BMWs and Mercedes through Glassell Park. There was a direct line between those arrogant guys and members of the Avenues, who actually distributed the drugs on the street. But even with his awareness of the Mexican mafia, of the gangs, Oscar hadn’t made the next step in his mind—connecting the everyday worry about the Avenues and the suppliers in fancy cars to the actual place where the pot was grown, the actual people. And wrapped up now in his surprise and fear there was also growing anger: anger at the trouble the dealers caused in his neighborhood; anger that he, by virtue of being Latino, could be seen by anyone as somehow connected to them.

He had worked so hard his whole life to disassociate himself from that element. And now he’d stumbled onto it, in the middle of nowhere. One thing was for sure—if he got out of this, he was never going to smoke again.

The woods and dark seemed endless and their progress was slow. Several times he was startled by a shape in the woods, a still, hulking presence that might have been a bear. Ever since A.J. had described the dead bears, Oscar had seen them in his mind, imagined the horror of running into the furry carcasses, or even worse, the marble-like bodies of the ones that had been skinned. They were long gone, he knew that logically; they’d been dumped off a cliff. But he still thought of them, and feared them, and was relieved each time when the shape he saw revealed itself to be a boulder or a fallen log. Finally they gained the top of the ridge, the place where the trails intersected. They lowered their packs, sat down, and exhaled. It was windier here so they put on their jackets and zipped them up to their chins. Ahead of them, the silhouette of the eastern mountain range. Above them, the quarter-moon, which seemed to shine more brightly than usual. By its light, Oscar could make out the others’ faces.

“We can’t go back the way we came,” said Tracy. “A.J.’s brother is coming.”

“José’s people too,” Gwen added.

“We don’t know that,” said Todd. “We don’t know which way the Mexicans might be coming.”

Oscar fought down his annoyance. Were the people coming for A.J. the Americans? The whites? “Should we just take this other trail?” he suggested. “The one we didn’t take yesterday?”

And as he said this, it occurred to him how different everything would be if they had taken this trail yesterday; how their choice to take the other trail, made in good faith but with limited knowledge, had led to the death of one man and the abandonment of another; to all their confusion and terror.

“We should,” Todd said. “We should stick to what we know. And without our maps, all we really know is that this trail goes to Lost Canyon and eventually loops around to our car.”

“But the trail is the first place they’ll look,” Tracy said. “We should leave it and find another way.”

“You really comfortable doing that without a map and compass?”

“We know generally where we’re going.”

“But wait,” Gwen said. “If A.J. followed us, that means he knows where our car is. What if they’ve done something to it? What if someone else is there?” She sounded slightly hysterical.

They all sat with this possibility for a moment.

Then Todd lifted the rifle. “Well, we do have these guns, if we need them.”

“No, she’s right,” Tracy said. “We don’t know what we might find.” She was quiet, they were all quiet, and then she lifted a pole and lightly struck the ground. “I’ll tell you what. I think we should forget the loop altogether. I think we should go cross-country and out the other side of the mountains.” She pointed to the dark silent shapes in front of them. “That way, for sure we keep A.J.’s brother behind us. It shouldn’t be more than a day or two’s walk, and we’d come out into the Owens Valley.”