Chapter Five
Imagine a scrawny, mangy coyote. Imagine the tricky, thieving look in its eyes. Now turn that coyote into a human form.
That’s Coyote.
The last time I saw him, back in Los Angeles, he had cleaned up his act—literally. With a haircut and a shave, a tailored dress shirt with pearl snaps, pressed jeans, Mexican cowboy boots. No surprise the reason for that transformation was an ex-porn star with J-cup breasts.
Now he appeared as I remembered him best, dressed like he’d stolen clothes from the Salvation Army and then scrambled through a barbed wire fence. A stained and tattered denim jacket over a threadbare plaid shirt, a pair of jeans even more ragged than his jacket, dirty cross trainers with his toes pushing through the sides. I’d have to ask him what had happened to his girlfriend with the big hooters.
A wispy mustache darkened his upper lip and a spot above his chin. Nubby hairs poked from his jaw. He adjusted a frayed baseball cap so that it sat farther back on his head. His complexion resembled the leather in the pocket of an old catcher’s mitt.
I removed my sunglasses and studied his aura. The glowing orange sheath bubbled serenely like the liquid in a lava lamp.
Coyote was over five hundred years old. The bastard son of a Jewish conquistador (on the lam in the New World from the Inquisition) and Doña Marina aka La Malinche—the indigenous maiden who became Hernán Cortés’ interpreter, advisor, and concubine—Coyote considered himself the very first Mexican.
His dark, almost black, eyes reflected a wariness and cunning from being on the lookout for centuries, always suspect and so hunted like his animal namesake.
“So you’re Coyote?” Jolie asked.
“All day and tomorrow, chiquita.”
She tilted her head. “Where the fuck did you come from?”
“I knew you’d be here.” He walked between us toward the tower.
Jolie stepped close behind him. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“There are more important things to know.” He began stamping his foot around the base of the tower.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He rapped a knuckle against the steel pole and it echoed hollow. “These things have a sigmoidoscope inside.”
Sigmoidoscope? I was surprised he could pronounce all the syllables. “You mean like for a colonoscopy?”
Coyote halted and stared at me, the shine in his eyes dulling with confusion. Blobs in his aura formed into question marks. His ability to manipulate his aura was one of his many tricks.
“Felix means an up-your-butt examination,” Jolie explained.
The creases around Coyote’s eyes deepened when he grinned. “A butt check?” He thumped the tower again. “With one of these? You’re a funny guy, ese. Kind of freaky but that’s your business.” The question marks turned into exclamation points then dissolved back into random blobs.
“Then what are you—”
“An earthquake detector chingadera.” He returned to stamping around the tower.
“A seismograph?”
Coyote rolled his eyes at Jolie. “Now he gets it. That’s what I said.” He chuckled and whispered to himself. “Butt check. Qué pendejadas.”
Now I was confused. Jolie shrugged and gave me a WTF look.
Coyote started down the slope toward the Porsche. Jolie and I trotted after him.
“Are those towers earthquake detectors?” She sounded disappointed.
“No chica. They are exactly what you think they are.”
Jolie shot me a second WTF look.
“Get used to it,” I said.
Coyote reached the Porsche. He stuck his head through the driver’s window. He sniffed and bent lower. Jolie and I watched him inhale deeply as if he was taking in the aroma of a fragrant flower. Pleasure sparked through his aura. He straightened and turned to Jolie. “This is where you sat.”
She crossed her arms and tapped one foot. Her aura crackled with the same annoyance that matched her tight frown. The low angle of the afternoon sun cut into my eyes and I put my sunglasses back on.
Coyote craned his neck to check out the owner of the Porsche, still unconscious in the backseat. Coyote licked his lips. “Shame to waste all that blood. Oh well.”
He crossed his arms and blinked I-Dream-of-Jeannie style. The trunk popped open. He chuckled. “And they say you can’t learn nothing from the television.”
Jolie and I were so rushed to get to Fajada Butte that we hadn’t examined the trunk. It contained matching Gucci luggage in masculine black leather with gold trim—two suitcases and a wheeled carry-on.
A briefcase that I had gone through before sat on the front seat. Didn’t contain much of interest. Business papers. A laptop with porn.
Coyote unzipped the carry-on and told Jolie and me to search the suitcases.
I ran my hand through suits and trousers. “What are we looking for?”
He stuffed socks inside his jacket. “Whatever looks worth keeping.”
“The driver has a nice watch.…”
Coyote already had the gold Rolex on his wrist. And wore the Texan’s Ray-Bans.
Jolie held up a box of Trojans and rattled a prescription bottle of Cialis. “The guy wears a wedding ring. What makes me think he wasn’t on the way to see his wife?”
“These?” I showed her a pair of banana hammocks—one in red satin and the other in gold lamé.
She winced and shut her eyes. “I’m getting a visual of that Texan that I don’t need.”
Coyote snatched the underwear from my hand. “No time for fooling around.” He shoved both man panties into his pocket. Now I was getting a visual I didn’t need.
“Now we go.” Coyote left the car and proceeded up the hill for a moment before stopping to address me. “Hey, you owe me money.”
I didn’t but so what as far as Coyote was concerned. Hint that you might spring him a few bills and he’d turn that offer into an ironclad debt. I handed him the $320 I had lifted from the Texan’s wallet.
“I was expecting more but thanks anyway, ese. I know you’re good for the rest.” He folded the bills and slipped them down the front of his pants. He patted where he’d just stashed the money. “Give the old lady a reason to go treasure hunting.”
“More like salvage diving,” Jolie quipped. She put her pistol holsters and jacket on.
I stuffed whatever of mine I could fit into the pockets of my jacket—some makeup, contacts, spare ammo. The rest—including Jolie’s fancy-ass motorcycle helmet—we left in the car.
Jolie and I hustled to catch up with Coyote.
She asked, “Where are we going?”
“Away from here.”
She turned to me. “Is he always this talkative?”
“He’s a real chatterbox today.” I threw a regretful glance back to the forlorn Porsche. What remained of its sleek lines was covered in dust and scratches, the high-performance wheels mired in the sand, and the trunk gaped open with clothes and luggage spilling out. The poor car looked like I felt after a bad weekend.
Jolie’s initial dose of amnesia enzymes had wiped clean the driver’s memory from the moment before he met her, and the pleasure enzymes we had pumped into him during our feeding had kept his mind blank of everything but pleasant dreams.
“What about the driver?” Jolie asked.
Coyote waved off her concern. “Somebody will come by tomorrow morning. They’ll take care of him. Gabachos get lost around here all the time.”
We continued up the rise and past the towers. Jolie and I marched along in graceless un-vampiric steps across the uneven, hardscrabble ground and its checkerboard patches of wickedly thorny plants. As bad as the washboard road had been, at least it was a defined trail through this desert wilderness.
Jolie halted to pick cholla spines out of her pants. “Coyote, how far are we walking?”
“Not far. I got a ride.”
Out here? But he sounded confident and I wanted to believe him.
We wandered around outcroppings and cactus, down and up dips and reached the crest. Looking across the reverse side, I saw clusters of piñon, scrub oak, and juniper following the edges of a shallow gully.
Coyote slid down a steep narrow wash to the gully floor and into the shadows beneath the trees. Jolie and I followed him, our asses bumping over rocks and broken sticks. Once at the bottom, I noticed that something shifted ahead, rustling branches and tearing shrubs. Coyote continued straight to the source of the noise.
It was a little burro hitched with a frayed sisal rope to the branch of an oak. The small beast placidly chewed buffalo grass and twitched its ears at our approach. The remainder of the rope had been knotted into a bridle and reins.
“This is Rayo.” Coyote stroked the burro’s neck and loosened the rope from the branch.
“Means lightning,” I explained to Jolie.
The burro’s withers were almost at my waist, meaning Rayo was small for a pack animal. Coyote grasped the reins, put an arm around the burro’s neck, and whipped a leg over. He adjusted his posture and sat straight. The toes of his cross trainers almost touched the ground. The burro-Coyote combo looked top heavy but Rayo didn’t seem to mind. He just kept munching the grass and twitching his ears.
I looked to the other trees and didn’t see any more burros. “You said we had a ride.”
“I said I had a ride. Attention to detail, ese.” Coyote gestured to the shrubs around us. “So unless you two find a couple of burritos of your own, you better keep walking.” He tugged on the reins, pointing Rayo in the direction we had been hiking, and clucked. The little burro lurched into a quick rhythmic gait. Coyote rode with his elbows up and head bobbling on his neck.
Jolie exhaled a deep, regretful sigh. “Our quest to save Carmen from the aliens and stop Phaedra has come to this. Mr. Third World on a donkey.”
We jogged after Coyote. He led us on a path that meandered around and under the trees, where we had to pick our way past low branches, cactus, and spiny weeds.
“Going forward will be easier if we either follow the middle of the gully or the ridgeline.” Jolie said this loud so Coyote couldn’t ignore her pissed-off lilt.
But he acted like he hadn’t heard her. Instead, every few minutes he would check the Texan’s Rolex, which was interesting since I thought he seldom cared if it was morning or afternoon, yesterday or today.
“You late for an appointment?” Jolie asked, still sounding pissed.
“Me?”
“There another vampire on a burro checking his watch?”
Coyote tugged on the reins and halted. He panned the gully. “Not that I can see.” He flicked the reins and Rayo went back to his trot.
We kept on. Coyote’s obsession with checking the time made me read my watch as well. It seemed we’d been hiking over this God forsaken terrain for hours but it had been only forty minutes. A low rhythmic drone echoed toward us. Coyote popped the reins and shouted, “Vámonos, Rayo.”
The little burro bolted into the middle of the gully, Coyote’s arms, legs, and head bouncing like they were held together with loose springs. He yelled over his shoulder. “Stay under the trees.”
The drone grew loud and became the sound of rotor blades and turbine engines. Coyote continued into the gully, the burro high-stepping over the sand.
Jolie grabbed my arm and hauled me under a thick growth of branches. She swiveled her head to pinpoint the approaching sound, looking alert and wary as a hunted wolf.
The noise echoed louder and an instant later, a UH-60 Blackhawk zoomed into view high and to our right. The black helicopter swerved when the crew must’ve spotted Coyote and it entered a banking descent over the gully.
Coyote acted oblivious to the approaching aircraft. Its cargo doors were open, and men in tactical uniforms—Kevlar helmets, armored vests, cargo pants bloused into combat boots, ammo pouches and radios and holsters strapped to their legs and torsos—stood on platforms behind the wheels. They carried M4 carbines equipped with grenade launchers. A sensor turret under the nose of the Blackhawk rotated toward Coyote. A red laser shot from the turret and locked onto him.