Desert Wind (20 page)
She’d managed a smile, breathed out hard. Then her eyes went dull.
It was over.
It was over for so many of them. Abby’s mother, father, sisters, nieces and nephews.
Not only family.
Friends.
Curly. Karlene Hafen. Sheldon Nisson. Lenn McKenney. John Crabtree. Delsa Bradshaw. Geraldine Thompson. Arthur Bruhn. Irma Wilson. Daisy Lou Prince. Donna Jean Berry.
Over, too, for half the people he’d met on that lifetime-ago movie: John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, Dick Powell, Pedro Armendariz, the Paiute extras, the wranglers…
And the animals. Oh, Lord, the deer, the sheep, the cattle, the horses, Blue One, Blue Two, Blue Three—even Star. All dead too soon because of the disease the wind blew through the desert, like that Middle Ages thing Abby had raved about when she was hopped up on morphine. Only this wasn’t no Black Plague, this was American Plague, and the dying wasn’t as merciful.
Gabe looked down at his dog, into the face of its great-great-grandfather. “You about set, Blue?”
Blue Four wagged his tail.
“Then let’s get the fuck out of here.”
As soon as the sun rose the next morning, I left the motel and drove back to the area where I’d shot the coyote. Everything looks different in the daytime, especially in the early morning when shadows are long. Although I’d placed a rock cairn over her body it took several passes along the blacktop to locate the right spot. During the fourth pass, I found her.
She had picked a peaceful place to die. Near the cairn, a jackrabbit—more fortunate than the road kill last night—hopped through a miniature forest of cholla cacti. On the west side of the road, silver-green cottonwoods trembled in the breeze that whispered along the Virgin River. Not far away, a mitten-shaped mesa glowed red and purple in the new light, a brilliant contrast against the softer lavender hues of its sister mesas that stretched for miles behind it. Providing a soundtrack to this otherworldly scene, a flock of sparrows sang as they darted through the pink-streaked sky.
When a less musical sound, a cross between a sneeze and a cough, caught my attention, I looked toward the river and glimpsed something increasingly rare in Arizona: a small band of pronghorn antelope grazing in the brush. Hunters had decimated the animals in the southern part of the state, but in these wild northern badlands they were making a comeback. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have watched their slow progress along the riverbank, but I wasn’t here to sightsee.
The day promised to be a hot one, so after exiting the Trailblazer I attached a filled canteen to my gun belt. Through no fault of my own, I’d once been caught out in the desert without water, and I’d never let that happen again. I patted my jeans pocket to make certain my cell phone hadn’t slipped out while I’d been rustling around inside the car. It was there, but remembering those big mesas and their tendency to block signals, I doubted the phone would work. Still, the tenuous connection to civilization made me feel more secure.
Steeling myself, I set out to follow the coyote’s paw prints to her den.
The ground was so strewn with boulders and rocks that tracking was difficult but not impossible. Stretches of soft sand revealed that the coyote had crossed the road mere feet in front of my rental. She appeared to have come from the east, in the direction of the mitten-shaped mesa. I struggled up the loose shale of the graded incline bracketing the road until I reached a hard granite ridge at the top. Squinting my eyes against the sun, I made out a tumble of boulders at the base of the mesa. The perfect place for a wild animal’s den. Ever alert for the rattlesnakes endemic to this part of the country, I wove my way through the rock-strewn ground toward it.
A few minutes later I found the coyote’s den, cunningly hidden in a depression between two massive boulders and further disguised by a dense stand of brittlebrush. Cautiously, I looked in.
Out of a litter of four pups, three were already dead.
I helped the last one die.
The desert was populated by scavengers that might spread the disease, so I holstered my .38 and sealed the tomb with rocks. Heavy-hearted, I started back toward the Trailblazer. As soon as I was in calling range, I would alert the Walapai County Department of Health Services. The coyote hadn’t developed rabies on her own; she’d contracted it somewhere. Maybe from a skunk, a bat, or even a brush with a rabid mountain lion. The outbreak needed to be eradicated before a human came into contact with a rabid animal.
I was so deep in thought that at first I didn’t respond to the shower of sand that suddenly kicked up from the desert floor nearby. But when it was followed a millisecond later by the sharp report of a rifle, I dove for cover behind a rock outcropping.
Some fool city hunter out for pronghorn, amateur enough to shoot at anything that moved?
“Hey!” I yelled. “Hold your…”
Before the word “fire” left my mouth, another shot rang out. This time the bullet pinged off the outcropping, scattering stone chips everywhere.
“Asshole!”
Another shot. A hit even closer than the last.
No amateur, then. Whoever the shooter was, he was zeroing in. On purpose.
Someone was trying to kill me.
The “why” being irrelevant right now, I slipped my .38 out of its holster and waited. During my running and ducking, I hadn’t been able to get a definite fix on the source of the shots, but I thought they’d come from an area fifty yards to my east. The next shot, illuminated by a brief flash, proved it.
Now that I knew where my assailant was hiding, I could take appropriate defensive action. One quick look behind revealed the long, safe barrier of the rock ridge I’d originally clambered up. A few yards beyond that, my Trailblazer waited on the side of the road. Enough large boulders lay between my present position and the ridge that I might be able to make it, but once the land fell away on the shale slope, there was no cover at all. When I started down, I’d be totally exposed.
Often the best defense is a good offense, so I aimed in the general area where I thought the shooter had taken cover and snapped off a shot. I was rewarded by a grunt of surprise.
Good. Now he knew I was armed.
Simply returning fire was no solution. My snub-nose .38 might be a nice weapon for close work, but it performed poorly at distances. From the sound of my assailant’s gunfire, he had a rifle, maybe even one with a sight, so he was better armed for our desert shootout. A quick check of my cell phone revealed that my earlier concerns were true: no signal. At least I’d had enough sense to bring along a canteen. I had only taken a couple of sips while searching for the coyote’s den, so there was a chance I could simply wait the shooter out. But from a better spot, one visible from the road.
Gauging the distance to a boulder nearer the Trailblazer, I fired two more times, then ducked and ran. I reached cover before he had time to react, and paused to regain my breath. Only one more sprint and I would reach the rock ridge.
Better to act now before he realized what I was doing.
I ran again but this time he was ready for me and his next shot hit my canteen. At least a half cup of precious water spilled down my leg before I managed to fling myself over the ridge. After landing hard on the loose shale, I caught my breath again, then put my thumb over the hole to still the flow. Scrabbling around on the desert floor, I found a pebble that looked to be the right size. When I jammed it into the hole water still trickled out. Desperate to stop the flow I ripped a piece off my tee shirt, wrapped it around the pebble and jammed it in again. Success.
I took a short sip from the canteen, then placed another pebble in my mouth, an old Indian trick used as a stopgap from thirst. As the sun rose higher, the day would heat up even more. No point in going to all this trouble just to ultimately pass out from dehydration.
I reloaded my .38. There was no way of knowing whether this would end in a face-to-face shootout but if it did, I wanted to be ready. My situation wasn’t good, but it could have been worse. I was within sight of the blacktop, and soon cleaning ladies would begin their commute to Sunset Canyon Lakes. Or maybe I’d be seen by some early-bird shopper heading toward Walapai Flats to buy more fancy Western duds. All that increased activity might scare the shooter away. Then again, maybe not, because what good would a Walapai cleaning lady or an Eastern dude do me? Threaten the shooter with a mop or a Mont Blanc pen? With no reasonable alternative in sight, I settled in and waited for the shooter to make the next move.
Twenty minutes passed, then thirty. The morning breeze stilled as the sun climbed higher. Birds that had ceased their calls when the shooting started began to sing again. Warmed from the sun, a gopher snake slithered toward a gnarled mesquite where a woodrat sat nibbling on a seedpod. Sympathizing with the prey, I whistled a warning, and the woodrat scurried away.
A while later—I’d stopped checking my watch—a grouping of four cars sped along the road toward the resort. None slowed to look at the parked Trailblazer. Maybe they thought some tourist was having a look-see at the pretty scenery. As soon as the last car disappeared over the horizon, the shooter tried his luck again but I was well hunkered down now and his shots did little more than kick up sand.
One of the worst things about holding a crouching position for a length of time is that your body rebels. My weak left leg, scarred from a bullet wound during my days on the Scottsdale police force, began to cramp. I twisted it first one way, then the other, but what little relief I could find was momentary. As soon as I reversed it to the original position, it cramped again and the right leg began cramping in sympathy. The pain increased, making me realize that my plan of waiting out my attacker out wouldn’t work. I needed to end this stalemate before I became so crippled up that I couldn’t move at all, let alone run for cover. But try as I might, I couldn’t think of a sensible and safe alternative. Not even a semi-sensible, semi-safe one.
I was still racking my brain for a possible solution when Fate, that arbitrary dame, intervened. In the distance I heard music. A choir of angels singing me up to Heaven? Given my past, doubtful. The music drifted closer, revealing the rich tenor of Garth Brooks bragging about friends in low places. Barreling toward me was a battered red pickup, an American flag flapping from its big CB antenna. Seconds before the truck reached my Trailblazer, I saw printed on its side, MONTY CARSON, FARRIER. The windows were down and the driver, a male, was blasting his stereo at top volume. Unless I was wrong, that long dark shape in the rear window was a loaded gun rack.
Angels don’t always wear wings; sometimes they wear leather aprons.
I knew what to do. When the driver slowed to check out the Trailblazer I fired my .38 at the truck’s hood. The resulting clang was testament to the hours I’d spent at the firing range. Braking, the truck slewed sideways along the asphalt, leaving behind two curls of rubber. Oh, yeah, I’d caught the driver’s attention, all right.
As the truck came to a complete halt, I fired twice more, this time in the air. Garth Brooks yelped a final note and stopped singing.
Within seconds, a bowlegged little man wearing a farriers’ leather apron and carrying a big shotgun, came hurrying toward me.
“You shot my truck!” he howled. “Drop that gun, you stupid bitch, and get your reckless ass down here before I shoot it off!”
Never had bad temper sounded so sweet.
“Radio for help!” I yelled down to him. “But don’t come any closer. Someone’s shooting at me, and I’m pinned down here!”
From the next ridge over, I could hear rocks sliding in the distance. When I peeked above my own ridge, I saw a trail of dust rising from the desert floor, testament that my outgunned assailant was hoofing it out of there. It was over.
I holstered my .38 and walked downhill toward him with my hands in the air, wondering how my insurance company would react when the farrier submitted his claim.
***
“People are always shooting something up around here, Miss Jones,” the deputy said, handing me back my ID after I’d explained my situation for the third time. “This is Arizona. But you’d be better off minding your own business, not wandering around causing trouble.”
It was Officer Smiley Face. The wife-beating deputy, now revealed as Deputy Ronald Stark, had arrived less than five minutes after the farrier saved my ass, explaining that he’d been checking on a report of a dead pronghorn in the road.
“I haven’t caused any ‘trouble,’ as you so incorrectly put it.” I was growing more uncomfortable by the minute, partially because Stark’s eyes were hidden behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, the kind that make people look like Martians or hit men.
A cold smile. “Walapai Flats is a small town and I’ve heard about the questions you’ve been asking. We keep an eye on people who poke their noses into things that don’t concern them.” Turning away from me as if I didn’t matter, he said to the farrier, “You did right radioing this in, Monty. For all you knew, there was an emergency. But you know how women are, excitable, always imagining things that aren’t there.”
Monty frowned. “Lena don’t seem all that excitable to me.”
Although from a distance the farrier had appeared to be much older, up close I could see that he was no more than fifty, but his face was deeply creased and burned by the desert sun. After I’d explained my situation, his temper had cooled to the extent that he’d even volunteered to walk back out into the desert with me to look for shell casings to back up my claim of attempted murder. Deputy Stark, however, was reluctant. And his comment about people poking their noses into unwanted places worried me. Was he talking about my connection to the Ike Donohue case, or could he have found the business card I’d given his battered wife? Adding to my discomfort was the fact that his cruiser looked dusty enough to have been driving across surfaces a lot rougher than blacktop.
