Chapter Six
The UH-60 circled like a shark sniffing its prey, descending, slowing to hover beside Coyote and his burro. The laser remained locked on him.
The helicopter was a dark, almost black green. I couldn’t read any markings on the fuselage or tail. The laser went out and the helicopter dropped low enough to kick up a wall of dust that reduced Coyote and Rayo to dusky silhouettes.
At the instant the helicopter’s wheels touched ground, three men bounded out and advanced on Coyote, carbines at the ready.
Jolie tensed and reached to cross draw her pistols. Against her, the crew from the helicopter had little chance. Against the both of us, they had none. But when the helicopter had appeared, Coyote had ridden into the open and ordered Jolie and me to stay under cover. So I had to trust that he knew what he was doing. I grasped Jolie’s elbow and hauled her down and behind a juniper.
The men drew close to Coyote. One of them gestured—the leader no doubt, asking questions. Coyote waved a hand. The three men froze for an instant, then turned for the UH-60 and boarded. The pilot cranked the engines to maximum volume, and the helicopter hopped upward in a tornado of dust and sand.
Jolie and I waited for the helicopter to disappear over the rim of the gully before we ran to Coyote. He spit dirt and Rayo hacked cartoony puffs of dust.
“What was that about?” I brushed sand from Coyote’s shoulders.
He removed his dust-smeared sunglasses, revealing clean circles around his eyes. “They were listening, ese. When I stamped my feet around the tower, they heard.”
The seismograph in the tower. When Coyote disturbed the dirt around its base he had triggered a signal.
“Why would they use a seismograph? Wouldn’t it be easier to mount a camera on the tower?”
Coyote put his hands in front of his eyes like he was holding binoculars. “Maybe they were watching.”
I thought back to Coyote’s insistence that we leave the Porsche and his constant checking the time on his stolen Rolex. “You were timing the arrival of the helicopter, weren’t you?”
Coyote winked. “Say vato, you might yet get a gold star.”
Jolie palmed one of the .45s and kept her eyes on the horizon. “What did those guys ask about?”
Coyote shrugged. “A little of this, a little of that.”
“What did you tell them?”
Coyote waved his hand like he’d done with the men and mimicked Alec Guinness doing Obi-Wan Kenobi. “These are not the droids you are looking for.”
“A Jedi mind trick?”
“More like an old Indian trick. From an old indio. Me.”
“I thought you were Mexican.”
“If you’re Mexican, you’re part Indian. And part Spaniard. Part eagle. Dog. Snake. Parts from whatever no one else wants.” Coyote put his sunglasses back on. They were now immaculately clean.
“Who does the helicopter belong to?”
“You know.”
I was about to answer that I didn’t, then remembered the towers were property of Cress Tech International.
Jolie must’ve been thinking the same thing because she said, “That’s nuts. Why are such heavily armed guards from Cress Tech protecting those towers? This is public land.”
Coyote tugged the burro’s reins and urged the animal forward. “Too many questions. Soy muy cansado and I want to get home. Come along unless you want to spend the night out here.”
We hustled through the gully. Coyote rode with his head and shoulders drooping. The toes of his shoes hung low enough to snag the creosote and grass, and I expected to see him eventually tumble off the burro.
The sky darkened, azure to indigo. Long shadows fell over us, and the air cooled. We put away our sunglasses and used vampiric night vision to pick our way through the gloom. Critters dashed around us, their tiny bodies swaddled in glowing auras.
The walls of the gully flattened and we ran in the open toward a mesa a quarter of mile to the west. The sky became velvet black and set off the brilliance of the Milky Way that hung above like a sash of diamonds.
“Wonder which one of those is where we’ll find Carmen?” Jolie pointed to the stars.
I scoped the celestial vista horizon to horizon. “Take your pick.”
“Light from most stars is centuries old.” Jolie dropped her arm and sighed as if humbled by the majesty of the heavens. “Even the closest, Proxima Centauri, is over four light years away.”
“You an amateur astronomer?”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Carmen.”
The sadness in the mumbled reply told me that Jolie loved Carmen with more depth and in a way that I never did. My thoughts about Carmen pivoted around the guilt I carried for not preventing the aliens from kidnapping her. But more than guilt that gnawed at me. I felt incomplete without her, and that loss would never begin to heal as long as I suspected she was alive.
Coyote halted the burro. “You want to know where to find Carmen?” Without raising his head, he lifted an arm and jabbed his index finger to the Milky Way about midway above the horizon. “A planet orbiting that star.”
Jolie and I stared at the spot, unable to pick out one star from the dazzling cluster.
“You sure about that?” I asked.
“Vato, I’ve never been more sure of anything in my long chingada vida.” He lowered his arm and jerked his legs to spur the burro forward.
It had been years since I’d been under a sky so dark and yet so bright with stars. I began thinking about my immortality. Theoretically, I could outlive any star. In fact, I could be walking this same ground long after our sun had gone super nova, boiled the oceans, and then cooled into a big cinder. The thought depressed me. What would be the point of living on a big empty rock?
Maybe none of us were supposed to survive that long. The end, when it came, no matter how gruesome, would be a welcome escape from a bleak and far more terrible future. Better to die fighting than waste away twiddling our thumbs into infinity.
Pondering what lay on the other side of forever made my head hurt. I pulled my mind back and set it to scan the landscape for signs of trouble and pick at the knot of questions around the task to rescue Carmen and stop Phaedra.
How were Jolie and I going to get to that planet? Who held Carmen prisoner? Would they simply let her walk away? How were we to return home? And once all that happened, how would we defeat Phaedra? When was Coyote going to clue us in?
We reached the mesa. Coyote and his burro stutter-stepped over a narrow path that wound up the cliff. Jolie and I followed along the tight switchbacks. The hard-packed dirt often crumbled beneath our feet and we scrambled to avoid sliding over cactus and sharp rocks. The trail dead-ended at the bottom of a steep, sandy wash.
I expected Coyote to stop the burro, thinking he might have taken a wrong turn.
Instead, the burro scaled the trough as if that ground was level pavement and the rest of the world was at an angle. Coyote could walk up the pitched slope using vampiric levitation, but not Rayo. Unless he was a supernatural creature.
“Is Rayo a shape-shifter?” I asked. “Maybe one of the local skin-walkers?”
Coyote muttered, “Vato, if you had the power to change shape, would you turn into a burro and let me ride you?”
“Maybe Rayo lost a bet.”
The burro chuffed and brayed.
Coyote stroked its neck. “You insulted him, ese. Rayo takes pride in his work. He’s a better burro than most people are human.”
Jolie and I planted our feet in the wash and stepped upward. The long day and the anxiety stressed my kundalini noir, and I found myself straining to reach the top.
Coyote and Rayo stepped over the rim and out of view. Jolie beat me to the top and waited.
Once I climbed out of the wash and onto the mesa, I sniffed a desert breeze scented with grilled onions, peppers, corn, and goat meat. Add some Type B Positive and I’d be a happy vampire.
Tiny yellow squares—the windows of a distant home—beckoned along the rim of the mesa. A feather of smoke twisted from the squat dwelling.
The trail followed the rim of the mesa. To our right sprawled the valley west of Chaco Canyon, a carpet of dull grays and beiges blurred together. Way to the south, tiny points of light crawled along the service road.
We approached the dwelling. Two adobe structures sat on either side of a doublewide. A wire fence enclosed a yard behind the closest adobe building. Chickens clucked inside a coop. Goats bleated. A wooden fence surrounded a second yard behind the doublewide. Scrub, junipers, and a few scraggy cedars grew across the mesa on the far side of the buildings.
A mongrel hound barked but didn’t advance beyond the circle of light cast by a bare bulb above the front door of the doublewide. Wise dog. The high desert had all kinds of predators—coyotes, mountain lions, and wolves—that would snack on its canine hide.
“What’s this place?” Jolie asked.
“Home,” Coyote grumbled.
“You don’t seem too pleased about it.”
A long trek across the wilderness. Getting accosted by a helicopter and its crew of goons. If this was my home, I’d be glad to be on familiar turf.
A voice slithered through the gloom, sounding eerie and forbidding, even to me, an undead bloodsucking killer.
“Dónde están mis hijos?”
Any kid with a drop of Mexican blood recognized the cry. It was La Llorona, the ghost woman who had drowned her children and who now prowled rivers, streams, and lakes for victims. She’d lure you into the water and drown you, hoping to trade your soul for those of her lost children.
What was La Llorona doing up here, so far away from water?
She cried out again, her piercing voice now closer and louder.
Coyote yelled back. “Okay, mom, I heard you. Shut up already.”