Fatal Refuge: a Mystery/Thriller (The Arizona Thriller Trilogy Book 2)

by Sharon Sterling

  Win crossed his arms. “Yeah. You’ve made quite a name for yourself at the local Audubon Society. And with those articles in the birding mags.”

  She said nothing, wondering if he expected an apology for her success or assurance he would someday surpass her in the narrow, competitive world of serious bird-watching.

  Suddenly he pounded the arm of the chair with his fist. “Damn! I hate doing nothing. With the weather like this it’s too crappy to go out, and with no wifi in this excuse for a hotel I can’t even go on line to make plans for another trip.”

  “Win, don’t you like bird-watching just for the fun of it?

  He stared at her.

  “The excitement of the hunt, the glory of the birds! Well, aren’t some of them gorgeous? When I look through the binoculars they take my breath away.”

  She couldn’t read his expression. Then he said, “Very smug and self-satisfied about your little hobby, aren’t you?”

  “It sounds nasty when you say it that way. But as a matter of fact I’m very satisfied with my life right now, not just the birding. I love my work and my clients, and I love the birds. I’m the ‘Life is good!’ girl.” He didn’t answer. A rush of disappointment filled her solar plexus with heaviness and her mind with remorse. She had taken this trip with Win hoping it would be the beginning of a long and loving relationship. Now she couldn’t get her mind around it enough to create a pleasant fantasy.

  “I know you’re not enjoying yourself, Win. Maybe it’s not just the rain. You and I come from such different backgrounds.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means maybe we aren’t good for each other.”

  “That’s crap. I don’t have to be like you. You don’t even understand who I am, and you’re starting to think about ending us?”

  “Then tell me who you are.”

  He sat forward in the easy chair with both feet on the floor and his forehead in his hands. Finally he said, “When I sit around like this, not accomplishing anything, not earning any recognition at all, I feel useless. It’s like I don’t even exist.”

  “Don’t even exist? How can you say that? You get a lot of recognition when we’re home. You do a good job as H.R. director, you belong to those two civic groups, you even got into the “most eligible bachelor” section of Yuma Now.”

  “You’re right. I’m being a complete pig. I adore you, Red, and I know you love me too much to think of leaving. It will be okay when we get home tomorrow.”

  Cindy fell silent, mute with uncertainty and indecision. Could the full emotional connection and satisfying sex life she had almost tasted with Win still be in reach? Words failed her but she had hope. She lifted the sheet and bedspread from her naked body and pushed it all the way down with her feet. She watched his boredom give way to interest, his eyes focus and grow avid.

  “Come here, Win,” she said. “We’ll find out how many parts of you exist.”

  “When all else fails, let’s f. . .”

  “Win! You know I don’t like the F-word.”

  “Whatever. At least for this I won’t need my freaking binoculars.” He stood and began to unbuckle his belt.

  She fell back on the pillow and laughed. “No, you don’t need binoculars for sex, Win, not even spiritual sex.”

  She saw his eyes on her diaphragm and stomach and knew he was mesmerized by their rise and fall. His eyes lingered on her pubic patch. The rich, red color never failed to arouse him.

  “Damn,” he muttered, looking down at his groin. “You always hit me like a jolt of electricity.” He quickly lifted his shirt off and carefully unzipped his pants over the obstructing erection.

  When he reached the bed, he stopped, as if her words had just registered. He looked down at her. “Spiritual sex? Spiritual sex?”

  “Haven’t you ever. . .? No, I guess not.” She closed her eyes and said softly, “Sometimes when the emotion is there and it’s slow and lovely, the world disappears and you’re just floating in space – both of you in one body, but without a body. It’s. . .it’s heaven. It’s pure.”

  She knew he hadn’t heard. The urgency of his arousal had rendered him deaf. Naked, he climbed onto the bed. She rose to her knees and pushed him onto his back. Moving her hands down his body, she spread his legs far apart, leaned her head to the side and with exquisite slowness trailed her long, silky, red hair from between his thighs up and over his quivering genitals.

  Chapter Three

  Kim realized she was holding her breath, whether from shock or to block the odor of the decaying body, she didn’t know. She closed her eyes for a second, forced herself to open them again and took a deep breath, resigned to take in all that demanded to be witnessed. On the thin rocky soil in front of her the terrible stillness of the woman’s body contrasted with a perceptible stir of activity. Ants, beetles, flies, lizards, things pale and squirming, were active around, on and inside the dead flesh.

  The woman’s less fleshy parts, the wrists, fingers and lower legs appeared partially mummified. The smell of decay emanated from the woman’s mid-section and open chest. Kim stared, thinking it must have been a mountain lion or coyotes that consumed her internal organs, because powerful jaws had twisted the rib cage upward. The positioning was a bizarre pose never seen in life, upper and lower body face-down, with midsection tilted upward so the ends of the lower ribs on one side were visible. The arms and hands were out-spread with fingers claw-like, death-blackened nails still digging into the dirt, as if the woman had made a last, desperate attempt to claim the earth, claim life.

  Kim coaxed her mind toward analysis and reason. The woman was probably a hiker or bird-watcher who became lost and died of heat stroke. Her shorts and shirt, stiff and darkened by the process of decay, were just what a hiker would wear, although now they appeared too big for the shriveled and decimated body.

  Kim had seen worse death scenes, both in her job as a Yuma City emergency medical technician and as a dog handler with the Yuma County Canine Search and Rescue team. This wasn’t so bad. There was nothing vital, flesh colored or contoured about this body. It wasn’t bleeding and there was no question of saving it.

  She stood stock still, staring, almost as immobile as the body in front of her. She was relieved the woman lay prone, face hidden. At the thought, a prickle down her back gave way to a shudder. She realized her eyes were focused on the ruined color and pattern of the woman’s shirt, but her mind refused to retrieve a memory associated with it. Her focus moved to the woman’s head. The long red hair had fallen into a part down the back and spread around the skull in a mat, the color dulled by dust and dirt but still striking in this landscape of tans and muted greens. Above the nape of the woman’s neck, the hair appeared caked with a round crust of dark gore Kim recognized – dried blood and brain matter.

  Suddenly, something she had been holding back clicked in. Her eyes widened and her head jerked back. Damn! That hair and the shirt. I know her! She was wearing the same green and yellow shirt. The living person her mind pictured, Cindy Cameron, was the only person Kim had ever known who had such a long, thick mane of gloriously red hair.

  No longer a professional observer, Kim was flooded with the overwhelming wrongness of this: a young and vital human being bereft of life, ravaged by animals and abandoned like so much garbage on long-suffering ground.

  • • •

  Chapter Four

  SARA

  The 1999 Chevrolet long-bed pickup truck is parked on the gravel driveway of a rest stop on the outskirts of Yuma, Arizona. This rest stop is unlike those on the interstate, which accommodate fifty cars and trucks with all their passengers and resemble a busy shopping mall; this rest stop serves a two-lane side-road. Its shallow pull-off is lined by dry native shrubs and provides space for two vehicles. There are no buildings here, but a concrete table and bench suffice for both dining and repose. Behind it a few thirsty trees hold back the desert.

  The truck, a faded blue in color, appears to need its
rest under the shade of a Cottonwood tree. It is fitted with a green camper shell scavenged from a salvage yard. The once-vivid colors of truck and shell have mellowed with age so they no longer clash, but blend into an abstract-painting of blues, greens and rusty primer hues, with dents of varying shapes and sizes to add depth and detail. The windshield is embellished by several dime and quarter-size wounds. The heavy truck rests on tires that appear too worn and mushy to support it.

  Near it, lying on her back on the bench, a small woman in her late fifties or early sixties is dozing in the afternoon heat, with knees drawn up, feet flat, an open notebook across her face. Her drugstore reading glasses are clutched in her hand. Even under the Arizona sun her short hair reflects no highlights from its mix of grey and brown. She wears khaki shorts and a sleeveless polyester shirt that reveal arms and legs thin, straight and deeply tanned.

  She comes awake with a start. Someone is approaching. She sits up in one swift movement, tossing the notebook onto the table. The two vertical lines between her eyes draw deeper, sharpening her face. She looks but doesn’t spot another person or another car. The interloper strolls into sight. She raises her hand in casual greeting, then leans back against the hard edge of the table, body language telegraphing unconcern. After all, it’s a public place.

  The man approaches, close enough to touch her with his outstretched hand. She sits bolt upright again and glares at him, warning, “Don‘t touch me! And don’t think for a minute I’m afraid of you. I don’t shake hands.”

  His response calms her. She listens, replies indifferently, then to another question says, “My name? What do you want with it? Yeah, I might be suspicious, but then maybe you’re nosy. If you need a label, Sara’s as good as any. And Sara doesn’t like questions. I’ll tell you just what you need to know about me, not another blessed thing.”

  She grabs the thick, spiral bound notebook from the table and places it on her lap before replying to his next question. “No, I never saw you before, either. I’m new here, same as you. I’m looking for someone. Who? None of your business who.”

  At his next comment she smiles a little, not at him, but at an inward reflection, and then speaks, “That song says it, says, ‘Everyone’s lookin’ for someone.’ They wrote that song about me.”

  The man has now seated himself on the bench on the other side of the table. Sara is fingering her thick notebook, fanning the one hundred lined pages darkened by penciled handwriting. Something in the manner of the newcomer challenges Sara. “You keep looking at me! What, my grey hair?” she asks. “Yeah, I’m an older woman, but no fool. No fool like an old fool? Got you fooled, then!” She hugs the notebook to her almost-flat chest with both arms.

  “Yeah, I got here the same way you did, heading west on Interstate Eight. Or maybe I drove south, down Highway Ninety-five. For you to figure out. Sure didn’t head north from Taco-Land, or east from Californication, that pit of sin and foolishness. But I’ll tell you one thing – if you drive down Highway Ninety-five from Quartzsite in summer you’ll think you’re on the road to hell. You’ll know it when you pass the entrance to Yuma Proving Ground off to the west. That huge war jet and that death-machine sitting there with no shame at all. Why, I’m talking about that cannon with a barrel as long as a country mile. They designed that abomination to fire an atomic bomb right from the battle field. It’s out there on display tilted up and up like it wants to blast the angels out of heaven.”

  She pauses and shakes her head. “Yep, coming down Ninety-five in summer, not even a glimpse of fire in sight, the heat will roast your skin dry and sear your soul to desolation. If you got one.”

  She doesn’t notice his reaction or pause for a comment. She places the notebook back on the table. Her voice is louder, her speech more animated by the importance of what she is revealing. “Then if you keep coming south, when you pass that range of jagged, rust-colored hills off to the east where the signs say ‘Kofa National Wildlife Refuge’ you’ll know they’re back in there, and I‘m not talkin’ about wildlife. It’s a refuge all right, for what the government’s hiding. You can’t see it but you can feel it, smell it on the air even goin’ sixty miles an hour, the stink of corruption. “What? Don’t look at me like that. I know what I’m talking about and I don’t need to prove it to people like you – ostrich!

  “Well, okay, then. Like I was saying, miles past the Kofa, you know you’re almost here when the land lowers out to flat and you see the green springing up all around, cool and fresh. Then you know Yuma isn’t all bare dirt and cactus.”

  She pauses and he remains silent. She asks, “You haven’t seen much in the valley yet, have you? There are fields here with lettuce and cantaloupes and such – and the palm trees make it look like one of those oasis kind of spots, like in the Sahara. Pretty nice down there by the river, too, under the trees. The Cottonwoods are best, but even the Mesquite shade and hide real good.

  “I went down the dirt road over there and found a spot where I can park my truck near the river, but away from those homeless camps. No, got nothing against them, but got no business with them, either, ‘though some say men with that much hair can’t be trusted.”

  She looks around her briefly then realizes she is still holding her glasses. She puts them on and inspects her companion more closely. “You’re not all fuzzy like you’ve not seen a barber in a month of Sundays.” She draws a deep breath, more comfortable now, and continues, “Sometimes when I bed down for the night in my truck with all the doors locked tight, sometimes I feel – I feel almost safe.

  “What’s that look you’re givin’ me? Yeah, ‘safe,’ none of us will be safe from those death-loving ghouls in the government and what they’re planning. They chose this place. I didn’t. Not where I predicted Armageddon, but I’ve been wrong before, and I know this poor valley will see the apocalypse, birthed from the ass-hole of the devil himself – unless I can stop it. Yeah, me. I came here just lookin’ for someone. Haven’t found her yet, but this Yuma valley found me. It needs me, even if she doesn’t. These Yumans don’t know it yet, but they need me. They all need me.”

  • • •

  Sara has found a new place to live, quiet and secluded. The place is known locally as Betty’s Kitchen, but there is not a commercial kitchen within miles. This recreation and picnic area was named after the owner of a restaurant built in the early nineteen-hundreds, when the Laguna Dam was constructed nearby. Neither the dam nor the restaurant remain now in this isolated refuge surrounded by agricultural fields, where stacks of hay the size of houses separate the tilled and irrigated farm land from the hardpan-dry soil of the refuge.

  Here, a good twenty minutes northeast of Yuma, the chained-off parking spots are never filled, four or five widely-spaced picnic tables provide some privacy from rare visitors, and a large, outhouse-type restroom made of concrete block, generally unused by anyone but Sara, and is clean and odor-free.

  She often walks the paths of this all-but-abandoned picnic spot that meanders along the banks of the meandering Colorado. In this place the river is transformed into a shallow lagoon easing over a thirty-foot wide spillway before it continues its way down to Yuma. Oasis that it is, not a blade of grass flourishes in the alkaline soil.

  Today, Sara is alone at the concrete picnic table, writing in her notebook, her glasses perched low on her nose. A worn Bible rests on the bench beside her. An unaccustomed noise finally penetrates her concentration and she turns to see someone approaching. “You just love appearin’ out of nowhere, don’t you?” she says. Then she chuckles, “Yeah, I know, your job is keeping an eye on me.” It is the man she met two months ago at the highway rest stop, who is now her frequent companion.

  “But don’t bother me today,” she says, pushing up her glasses with an index finger. “I’m working here. I’m reading and writing, and figuring. Trying to make a plan.”

  His questioning voice is a baritone, thick and demanding.

  “You know ‘for what’,” Sara says. “Somebod
y’s got to stop them. What Ebola and AIDS and ISIS can’t do, those Marines and their government masters are gonna do. They’re getting ready to launch the Third World War out there. Out there in the Kofa. They don’t keep their evils bound in the Proving Grounds any more. They loosed it in the Kofa.

  “I know because I saw them out there just after I got here in January, about a dozen of them with some civilians, in big trucks. And then I camped, and after dark I saw lights flashing over, not high up, but real low to the ground and I heard strange noises, like ‘whoosh.’ It was evil, sure as God is good. It’s startin’. I can feel it.”

  She furrows her brow. “But not all of ‘em are military. Some are civilians living on the banks of the irrigation canals, some by Smucker Park, in the Old Town barrio and nearby the orange groves.

  “I know, I know,” she says, impatiently. “Every place takes on the sins people do there. It’s got a bad history, this town. Settlers and Indians, Quechan and Cocopah all fighting and killing each other over the land and over the poor Colorado River. Now-days, it’s little more than a trickle by the time it gets to Arizona. They’ve dammed it and drunk it almost dry from up-river, to down here, to the Yuma farmers and Marines. Those L.A. gangs and Hollywood pretenders don’t deserve it. Let them have the trickle.”

  She pauses, biting the end of her pencil, listening to her companion. Her face is troubled, her voice thin with stress. “God destroyed Sodom just to kill one thousand evil souls. The only hope for Yuma is its righteous ones. It’s the numbers will seal their fate, one way or the other. I’m working with the numbers.”

  She puts down her pencil and runs her fingers through her short hair as if summoning her thoughts. Silence broken only by the listless chirping of a few birds, the rustling of dead leaves as a lizard works its way under them and the urgent scrape of her pencil on paper.

  Suddenly she stops writing, drops the pencil, and looks up. “I worked out the ratio!” she exclaims, pounding her fist into the other palm. “Nine hundred people! It’s the solution of Sodom. It’s Abraham’s righteousness ratio. Ten people could have saved Sodom when it held a thousand. This sorry town holds ninety thousand, not counting the ones that come in winter.” She hesitates briefly. “No, we can’t count them. Those Canadians bolt north like rabbits when the thermometer hits eighty. So one in ten is nine hundred for Yuma.” Another furrow appears in her forehead. “Are there nine hundred righteous souls in Yuma?”