The man stood, a bunched shadow unfolding as Rice approached. He wasn’t a Stiller.
“Where’s your vehicle? You were supposed to park down here.” He spoke in a quiet voice, his accent not as pronounced as it had sounded on the telephone.
“Where’s yourn?”
He was shorter than Rice but still tall, probably six feet. Medium build, strong-looking, tense. His movements were emphatic, like he could barely contain his own energy. He was making a point of keeping his back to the streetlight. Rice set the cooler on the table and punched the switch on his flashlight twice with his thumb, swept the beam across the man’s face backhand—he was fortyish, dark red hair and short beard. The skin was tight across his cheekbones and forehead, like it had been stretched, an intense face, with close-set blue eyes that squinted as his arm came up to block the light.
“Shut that thing off.”
The man had his own light, a foot-and-a-half-long metal police light with a red filter over the lens. It cast a dull red glow, what he’d seen earlier, inconspicuous at a distance and easy on dark-adjusted eyes.
“Raise your arms.”
“What, you holding me up here, buddy?”
“I’m patting you down.”
“The hell you are.”
“You want to do business you put your fucking arms up.”
Rice shrugged and held his arms out like a scarecrow, glad he’d left the pistol in the truck. The man stepped behind him and swatted Rice under the arms, around his waist, thighs, on both ankles. Rice had been patted down before, and this one was quick, almost perfunctory.
“I got your number from this old boy who’s in business with the Stillers, DeWayne and them? I guess you and them—”
“Unzip the cooler.”
“All right. Okay. See I hear them Stiller boys’re into a lot of different shit around here. Maybe once you got everybody patted down we could all do some business together.” Rice stepped back as the man shone the red light into the cooler.
“Where are the paws?”
Shit. He’d thought this might be a problem. “You didn’t say nothing about no paws.”
“Everybody knows you need the paws.”
“What d’you do with ’em?”
“I don’t do anything with them. Some slant in Korea makes fucking soup with them, what do you care?”
“You send ’em all the way to Ko-rea?”
“Yeah, I FedEx this shit to my buddy Moon Dung Bin in Seoul and he PayPals me the money.”
Rice paused long enough before laughing to seem like he was trying to figure out whether it was a joke. “Well, hell. I can get you a lot more of these.”
“Uh-huh. You’re a big-time bear hunter, are you?” There was a tension in the man’s voice now that Rice didn’t like.
“Me and my cousins, yeah. We got people in West Virginia, too. They kilt eleven bears up there last year. We got eight. We all been saving the galls.”
“But not the paws.”
“We didn’t know.”
“Are you a stupid redneck?”
“Fuck you, buddy. You want these galls or not? I’ll take a hunnerd each, since I ain’t got the paws.”
The man made a show of reaching into Rice’s cooler and lifting the quart plastic Ziploc bag with the three shriveled gallbladders. Held it up to the red flashlight. He was grinning without much humor and his teeth looked bloody in the light.
“I’ll give you five bucks for the three of them if you throw in the cooler.”
This wasn’t going well. Rice sputtered a “Bull-shit” and snatched the bag from the man’s hand, tossed it back into the cooler. His questions about the Stillers hadn’t even generated a denial, and this guy was way too serious to put up with photography. Rice was zipping the cooler shut when the man swatted it off the table with his flashlight.
“You don’t have any paws because these aren’t even bear galls, are they?”
He held the light close to Rice’s face and Rice threw his arm up, pushed it away. He turned to pick up the cooler from the ground and, trying to maintain his ruse, started to say something about how some assholes didn’t know a good business proposition when they was looking right at one, but the man came around the table fast and smacked the big flashlight hard into the back of his knee. His leg buckled and he started to roll to the right but the man caught him with his arm around his neck in a rough one-armed headlock.
“Do you have any idea how goddamn frustrating this is?” He wrenched Rice backward, the thick forearm clamping on his carotid, trying to choke him out. Rice tucked his chin and shrugged his shoulders, protecting his neck. The man’s violence was sudden, confident, the moves of someone used to physically dominating others. “I’m sick of ignorant, stupid, dishonest hillbilly fucks.”
Rice felt the flashlight come down again, this time on his ankle, but his boot cushioned the blow. He still had his own flashlight in his hand and he jabbed the crenelated bezel into the guy’s elbow, three quick stabs, finally hitting the funny-bone notch with the third try, the guy’s ulnar nerve lighting up, drawing a surprised “Ah!” as the arm went limp. He sucked in a big lungful of air and grabbed the paralyzed arm, reached his other hand behind the man’s knee, and stepped under his center of gravity all in a single motion, lifting him from the ground in an improvised fireman’s carry. He was about to break him in half on the picnic table when he felt cold metal pressed against his temple.
“Okay, that’s enough. Put me the fuck down.”
Rice set him on his feet, shook him off, and stepped away, keeping his hands visible. The man stood bracing his hip on the table, silhouetted against the distant parking lot lights. In the red wash from the flashlight on the ground, Rice could make out a medium frame semiauto in his right hand. He was breathing hard but the gun was steady. Body language said a shot was possible but not imminent. Rice squatted slowly, eyes on the gun, and retrieved his own flashlight and his baseball cap, reached for the strap of the cooler, and swung it over his shoulder. The bag with the galls had fallen out. Quick look around, no sign of it. Didn’t matter.
“Who the fuck are you?” the man asked. His voice was calm, the temper tantrum apparently over. “What are you up to?”
Without answering, Rice turned his back on the gun and walked to the steps under the bridge, pins and needles up and down his spine. When he looked down from the railing, the man was gone. He walked around the block, making sure he wasn’t followed, limping a little, favoring his right knee, glad the guy hadn’t whacked him on his glass kneecap. He was angry at himself for getting into a fight on his very first attempt at undercover investigation. Near where he’d parked, he leaned against an old black maple buckling the sidewalk with its roots. The town was quiet except for distant music from a college party somewhere. After twenty minutes he walked to his truck and drove away.
Fourteen
Standing next to the spring box, Rice drew the .45 from its holster and shot holes in homemade cardboard head-and-shoulder silhouettes. He shot singles, pairs, double taps; he practiced head shots, center mass, Mozambiques; he shot two-handed, right-handed, left-handed, standing, sitting, lying down, from behind trees, walking. He tried running but his leg was still stiff from the gall buyer whacking it with his flashlight. He worked on his magazine changes, shooting to slide lock every time. Guys who had been in an egregious number of firefights had told him to train that way because in the real world nobody counts their shots, you just keep shooting until you realize you’re empty and you have to reload in a screaming panic.
He’d bought a bunch of lead-free ammunition for the .45—wouldn’t want to pollute the drinking water—and every month or so he would drive up here to this small, steep-sloped hollow to run through this backwoods Travis Bickle routine. He used the holster his father had kept with the gun, a pancake design handmade by a guy in Boise. It held the pistol high behind his right hip where you wouldn’t see it under an untucked shirt, the butt raked forward and snug against his side.
The holster had been almost new, but Rice had used it for two years in the desert and now the leather was sweat-stained and molded to his body.
His decision not to arm himself in his dealings with the locals had come easily, but he was starting to reconsider. The gall buyer last night had spooked him, just a little, the way he’d handled his pistol, drawing it as he was being lifted off his feet, the steady hand. Probably ex-military. Not some bumpkin you’d expect to write his number on the wall in a public bathroom, who would misspell ginseng unless it was on purpose. Crime organizations in Arizona—the Mexican cartels, street gangs, bikers—had been actively recruiting military personnel, combat vets rotating out of the sandbox and getting dropped into a crap economy. He wondered if the buyer was working for an East Coast gang, somebody with Asian connections.
He wasn’t sure what to try next. The simplest approach would be to catch the poachers on the property. He’d been spending more time up there, but it was a big mountain, and according to Boger they used crossbows, so he shouldn’t expect to hear gunshots. He thought about calling Boger again, asking him for some names of other bear hunters he could talk to, but when they’d spoken the other night, Boger had been unfriendly, like he’d decided Rice wasn’t someone he wanted anything to do with.
He picked up his brass and loaded his frames and targets in the truck, repaired the divots in the earth, and raked fresh leaf litter over the top. When he pulled his earplugs, the water rushing from the spring box sounded preternaturally loud. The Traver family had built a stone and masonry spring box about the size of a minivan on top of the cleft in the limestone bedrock, and they’d buried pipe to the lodge, several hundred feet lower in elevation, so the whole system was gravity-fed, no pumps. An eight-inch pipe protruded near the top of the box for the overflow, and the water pouring out constituted the headwaters of Perry Creek, a brook trout fishery that tumbled toward the Dutch River Valley—part of Rice’s job was to seine the creek twice a year and count the bugs he caught.
He was climbing into his truck when he saw something on the spring box, an animal perched there, absolutely still, watching him. The creature was inky black, dark as a hole in the world, slender, and he thought black weasel, then he remembered that was how Sara had described the feral cat. He was surprised the shooting hadn’t scared her off. More like it had attracted her. He eased back out of the cab and walked closer.
“So you’re Mel.” The name didn’t suit her. He’d asked Sara if it was short for melanistic and she’d shrugged and said she was a scientist, not a poet.
The cat blinked at him. Then she disappeared without seeming to move. He climbed up on the box to look, but she was gone so completely that he wondered if he’d imagined her. He would bring the Havahart trap tomorrow just in case; he couldn’t leave her up here in good conscience.
He cleaned his pistol at the desk in the office and forced himself to sit there afterward and make some calls to arrange supplies—nontoxic laminates for the subflooring, recycled insulation, some special kind of wallboard, all per STP’s specs. Replacing the notebook he used for cabin remodel notes in the desk drawer, he noticed a small stack of Sara’s Virginia Tech business cards tucked in a corner. The phone was still plugged into the wall. He dialed her number before he could change his mind.
She didn’t seem surprised that he’d seen the cat. “I knew she was a survivor.”
“Well, she’s not supposed to be surviving on the preserve. I’m going to try the trap in the shed. Maybe I’ll have better luck than you did.”
Sara asked if he’d installed the trail cameras, and he demurred, having forgotten about them altogether. Then she was inviting herself for another visit Wednesday. She would drive up first thing, help him set up the cameras, and pick up the cat if he managed to trap her.
He didn’t reply right away.
“Rice, is that okay? You see I just went out on a limb there, asking if I could visit? Help me out.”
“I think I’m free Wednesday.”
“You’re free every day. Why don’t you invite me to stay for dinner. We can see if we’re going to be able to stand each other.”
Fifteen
Southbound, deep in the Tohono O’odham Reservation, Rice and Apryl made their way by moonlight in a dry wash. This route was comfortable, and they’d used it half a dozen times. The banks on either side were fifteen feet high, making a trench through which they could pass invisible to anyone watching the surrounding country. They’d picked up two twenty-liter dry bags at a stash house in Phoenix, sealed with a special kind of tamper-proof tape the cartel had started using. Rice was still new enough at this that he wasted mental energy speculating about What Was in the Bags. The math was easy: if it was bulk cash, and if it was all hundreds, it could be around $2 million in each. That would be heavy, though, forty-some pounds per bag, and these weren’t quite full. But still. And it might be something more interesting than cash, maybe uncut stones, bearer instruments, prepaid $9,900 cash cards. He had been shocked at the amount of value Apryl routinely carried for the cartel.
Three months ago, on that stone ledge overlooking Baboquivari, he’d told Apryl she should have someone on overwatch, that her counterparties would expect her to, and maybe she’d faked it so far, feigned the kind of confidence you have when you know, and you know the other guy knows, that there’s someone who cares about you, someone armed, someone hidden nearby and watching. But eventually, he said, word would spread that she was all alone, and someday some asshole was going to take advantage of that.
She’d been taken aback. He hadn’t done it intentionally, but by challenging her tactical chops he had got her mind off shooting him in the head. They argued, and she put her pistol down on the sandstone, sat cross-legged behind it. Later she pulled a knife and cut his zip ties. She admitted she couriered packages—she didn’t call it smuggling—to help buy meds for her schizophrenic little sister who had run away from their parents to live with her. He laughed at that because he thought she was joking, but she was altogether serious. Her dealer had talked her into carrying when he’d found out she made her living hiking around in the backcountry along the border. She knew a lot of the Border Patrol agents; they all thought she was an eccentric tree hugger. The dealer’s Mexican supplier was a comer in the cartel—she wouldn’t say which one, though Rice could guess—and he’d liked Apryl, liked her grit and reliability, and as his star had risen, so had hers. It was an unusual arrangement. Apparently he preferred a multimodal approach to smuggling, and he had come to rely on Apryl to move low-mass, moderate-to-high-value assets both ways. She filled a niche.
After doing it for eighteen months, she was making enough that she could pay for her sister’s meds, salt away some cash for her sister in case something happened to Apryl, and fund a few biological studies she thought should be conducted. Her way of giving back to the border country. According to Apryl, the border mountain ranges were the only “real” places on the continent, grown increasingly anarchic in the past decade as the Border Patrol had forced the northbound cross-border traffic into more remote, difficult terrain, deadly geography with poetic names: the Perillas, the Pedregosas, the Dos Cabezas. Apryl loved the Chiricahuas best, a gigantic, rugged sky island of staggering biological diversity, haunted by the ghosts of her kin Cochise and Geronimo, they afforded barely plausible routes north for hundreds of desperate migrants conveying their hopes, dreams, and plastic water containers into the “pristine” wilderness. Apryl was half-Apache, a fact he thought she sometimes made too much of, adopted as a toddler in hyperconservative Mr. and Mrs. Whitson’s spasm of open-mindedness amid a middle-aged reproductive panic, followed within the year by Mrs. Whitson’s pregnancy with sister Tracy and—all of this according to Apryl—a growing buyer’s remorse as to the little dark-skinned girl with behavioral problems.
Tonight, whispering as they snuck through the dry wash, she’d told him about the planned border wall along most of the Arizona–Mexico line, and her idea to fund a major study
showing how it would fuck up the cross-border migration of threatened and endangered megafauna. He was thinking about that, wondering if they were likely to get good data on any endangered species, as there were only so many that had been listed, and Homeland Security probably got to ignore the ESA anyway. He let himself become a little distracted in the heat that was stupefying even in the middle of the night, and when two coyotes bringing in a bunch of illegals came around a bend he was too stunned at first to react. The illegals, quick-witted survivors that they were, turned and ran back down the wash. One of the coyotes fired a shot as Rice and Apryl scurried behind a boulder. Rice shot back once with his .45, nearly blinding himself with the muzzle flash, and the other guy opened up with an automatic weapon of some sort, bullets ripping past, ricocheting off the rocks, sounded like a 9mm submachine gun.
While Apryl crouched beside him with her .22 in her hand, cursing, Rice experienced a sensation of detachment, thinking here he was in his first firefight, and that instead of a scientist he’d become some kind of ridiculous desert outlaw—a dilettante Clyde to Apryl’s only slightly more credible Bonnie, and that the bullets going by sounded sibilant, like insects.
They weren’t completely naïve. They’d tried to prepare for something like this. Neither of them had any knowledge of gunfighting beyond what they’d seen in movies, but at Rice’s insistence they would drive way out in the desert to an old dump once every week or so and shoot rusty kitchen appliances with their pistols. It was a forbidding, postapocalyptic place where someone—they imagined gang members working on their drive-by marksmanship—had cut down every saguaro in sight with what looked like machine-gun fire. They knew they would probably be outgunned in any violent encounter, but they had built their success on stealth, their innocent-scientists cover, and their knowledge of the remote border country, and so far they’d been lucky. Now here they were out in a remote part of the Sonoran Desert, a small, or possibly large, fortune in their backpacks, being shot at by criminals with a submachine gun.
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