Kage (4 page)

sparing use could make them, and their nature made them

practical only for the fittest travelers. His cargo would be up to

desert travel, his clients had assured him. And they smiled at

each other as if enjoying a particularly good joke.

Hector couldn’t remember the precise moment during the

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Kage

night crossing when he began to suspect that he was being

shadowed. He always made a habit of scanning his route ahead

whenever the terrain made that possible. He often checked his

back trail as well. He paused to listen in the night, having the

cargo crouch down in silence at intervals. They did what he

said without protest. To Hector, they seemed like men familiar

with noise discipline and quiet travel in out of the way places.

They waited patiently in the darkness. Their eyes sometimes

caught the glitter of starlight, but they said nothing to give

away their location, content to let their guide set the pace.

Hector’s vigilance had revealed nothing alarming during

the night passage. But a nagging feeling, like a faint breath of

clammy wind across the nape of his neck, lingered with him.

He redoubled his security checks, scanning the night’s hori-

zon lines for threats, pausing often to strain to hear the telltale

sound of a boot scraping across the hard ground. He typically

did not travel armed, but on these special trips he sometimes

found a weapon useful. An old long-barreled .38 was tucked

into his waistband, covered by his shirt. He had never used

the pistol in anger and it gave him little comfort this night. To

shoot, you needed a target you could see.

They reached the drop off point two hours before dawn.

Hector led the men into a small canyon that opened from a

spur of rock that pushed out from the hills rising in a rough

jumble of rock in front of them. He walked quickly into the

darker confines of the canyon, his hand brushing lightly against

the side of the wall. He felt more protected out of the open

desert and uttered a faint sigh of relief at completing the jour-

ney. He almost laughed at his fears, but some residual sense of

foreboding choked off the emotion. He cautiously flicked on

a flashlight, the lens covered with a red filter to preserve night

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John Donohue

vision. The canyon was littered with boulders of various sizes.

There was a winding path through them, but it took caution

and care. Hector hadn’t come this far only to break his leg.

The men he was delivering followed him to the end of the

canyon. Here, the narrow defile widened to a roughly circular

space perhaps twenty meters wide. Looking up, you could see

the night stars shining; remote pinpricks in the remote disk of

sky at the top of the canyon. Hector motioned to his travelers

to squat down around him. He flicked the light off and could

hear their faint panting in the darkness, the sound contained

and amplified by the rock walls.

“What now?” one asked him in English. He did not sound

like an American. But Hector forced himself not to speculate.

These men were packages. Nothing more.

Hector checked the fluorescent hands of his watch. “We

wait until four. Then I call.” He stood up and stretched his

back. He turned back down the trail, straining to see in the

darkness of the canyon. Nothing. He faced the men and flicked

on his light once more, playing it along the wall of the canyon.

“The Old Ones lived here,” he told them. Up the cliff at

a ledge some ten meters off the ground, the men saw the jag-

ged opening of a doorway, framed by uneven rock masonry. In

the daylight, they would have seen the black stain of ancient

campfire smoke that licked out across the dwelling’s ceiling and

up the doorway’s lintel. The
coyote
played the light carefully

up the surface of the cliff, showing them the regularly-spaced

handholds. “You climb up here to the mesa top. Follow the

gully northeast for perhaps two kilometers. It washes out into a

sandy bed. The truck will pick you up there.”

“And you?” It was the most conversation they had made all

night.

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Kage

“I lead you up,” Hector said simply. “Then I go back.” It

wasn’t completely accurate, but it was all they needed to know.

When the time came, he made the phone call and then led

the way up the canyon wall, playing his light along the surface

to show them the handholds. They clambered over the rim at

the top and Hector pointed them down the gully to the ren-

dezvous. He squatted in the darkness until the sound of their

passing faded, content in a job completed.

And then he heard the clink of a rock kicked loose from the

canyon passage below.

Hector felt the adrenalin rush of alarm grip his chest at

the same time that he acknowledged that his gut instincts had

been right: they were being tracked. Still crouching, he backed

slowly away from the edge of the canyon. He touched the pistol

in his belt like a talisman, took a deep breath, and thought.

They do not know the trail. Otherwise they would have inter-

cepted us at the end.
He squinted off down the gully in the direc-

tion he had sent the men he had brought across.
It will take

time to discover the way up. By that time, the rendezvous will have

been made.
He grunted softly in satisfaction: he had a profes-

sional’s commitment to completing a job. If whoever was track-

ing them had hoped to hijack his package, they had failed. All

that remained now was for Hector to elude them and make his

way back across the border. He hefted his canteen and felt how

light it had become. There was water and food stashed in the

cliff dwelling below him. He had planned to rest there during

the day and return with the coming of another night. Now his

pursuers blocked access to his supplies. Hector would have to

wait until they realized they had failed to intercept him and

left. Then it would be safe to grab the supplies and head home

by another route.

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John Donohue

The rationality of the plan comforted him, despite the

shock of being tracked. He would have to review his security

procedures before heading out again. For now, however, he

believed that he merely had to hide and wait.

But things hadn’t worked out as he anticipated. The

approaching day brought with it the awareness that they were

coming—for him. Hector began to move away from the can-

yon rim, throwing glances behind him in the dim grayness of

coming dawn, but the shadows and shapes of the rocky desert

twilight could have held a hundred pursuers and he would have

been none the wiser if they were gaining on him.

Hector worked the pistol out of his waistband. If the men

moving up the cliff below him had tracked him across the

border and done it carefully, they now knew one of his most

closely held secrets. And perhaps this was not the first time he

had been followed. He had to admit that this was a possibility.

So why come for me now?

Hector had a sudden mental image of one of the old women

of the town, a leather-faced specter with wet, red-rimmed eyes.

She had warned him that luck was a passing thing. Now, in

the darkness, Hector imagined that she looked at him with the

penetrating stare of a
bruja
, a witch. Her mouth moved, and

the night around him seemed to mimic her voice.

Perdido
the wind whispered. Danger.

Hector exploded across the slope, suddenly breathless with

certainty and the need to escape. If the trackers knew his routes,

then all they needed to do was eliminate him.
Control the route,

control the business.
If they caught him, he would simply disap-

pear in the night, one more
coyote
swallowed up in rock and

heat.

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Kage

The men down below had scaled the cliff. They heard Hec-

tor’s movement. Their hushed voices sounded strained and

urgent, and the sound of their boots on the rock grew louder.

Hector stumbled along the slope, hands outstretched for bal-

ance. He wanted to use his flashlight, but feared that it would

give his position away. His mind was racing reviewing what he

knew of the terrain, of the possibility of escape. Of survival.

He skittered along a slope of loose, flat rock fragments. His

passage was marked by the clatter of rocks cascading down the

hill. He lost his footing and, as his arms windmilled, the pistol

went flying from his grasp, clattering into oblivion along with

the moving rocks. Hector heard his pursuers closing on him

and knew he couldn’t waste time searching for the weapon. He

reached firmer ground, breathless with effort. But this was no

time to rest. He bent double, using his hands to propel him-

self forward. Hector never sensed the cut in the hillside until

he plunged into it. The sudden sense of weightlessness; for a

moment he thought he could fly.

Hector went down hard. Although the drop was not more

than a few meters, it was studded with rocks that caught him

on the tumbling plunge to the bottom of the cut. He lay there,

tasting blood, and rock dust, winded. He tried to move, felt the

stab of pain in his ribs and almost shrieked out loud when his

leg shifted.

Broken.

He gasped, trying to get his breathing under control. Along

the crest of the hil , the horizon was lightening. He would be able

to see the silhouettes when his pursuers came along the slope, if

he waited that long. But Hector knew that to wait was real y just

to die. He began to drag himself along the bottom of the cut,

moving in painful jerks that made him bite his lip with the effort

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John Donohue

of staying silent. He didn’t look back. He didn’t see the shadowy

shapes of his pursuers, shapes that paused at the arroyo’s edge and

then fanned out to look for a safe way down.

Hector’s world had narrowed down to the dirt and rock of

the arroyo floor, to the imperative need to keep moving, and to

the jolting stabs of pain that accompanied each lurch forward.

His mind raced, seeking an escape. If he could elude them,

move toward the rendezvous… He still had the cell phone. He

could even call the Border Patrol. They would merely deport

him. It was an option to consider.

The fact that Hector could think like this, could plan

despite the pain, and could adjust and react to the situation,

were the qualities that had made him such a good
coyote
in the

first place
.
That and luck.

He knew now that he would not be able to outdistance his

pursuers. His only option was to hide. Another jolt of pain shot

through his leg and Hector dragged himself into the meager

shadow of a creosote bush. He was panting, he realized, and

made a conscious effort to quiet his breathing.
They will hear

you,
he reminded himself. Hector strained to listen, to sort out

the bird sound and the faint pulse of wind from noises that

suggested something more sinister. He was sure that his pursu-

ers were still out there. He closed his mouth, knowing that it

would preserve moisture. He would need it. His water bottle

had been lost in his shambling, twisting escape from his pursu-

ers. But the need for water discipline was a distant concern.

First he had to survive.

The night was fading. The
coyote
could sense the growing

power of the sun looming just below the horizon. In the sparse

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Kage

brush along the arroyo, birds had started to chirp, but the only

sounds he heard were rougher things: the gasp of his own breath

and the scrapes and thuds as he dragged himself painfully over

the stony earth. The end of night brought no comfort to him:

the heat would kill him if his pursuers did not.

Hector dragged himself deeper into the space between the

creosote bush and the rocks near it. He lay there, silent and

still, like all animals when they hide from hunters. His heart

was hammering in his chest. He closed his eyes and saw the

image of the old
bruja
, her eyes red and insistent, boring into

him.
Pobrecito. Luck fails us all.

Exhaustion dragged on him. His body burned, his mind grew

fuzzy. His eyelids drooped. Hector jerked his eyes open, unsure

whether the sound of a voice was real or something from a dream.

In the spreading light of the desert morning, the creature that

loomed over him was a thing of shadows and swirls. He had the

briefest of moments to react to the terror of discovery, unsure of

what he was seeing. A man? Its tattooed visage was more like a

devil. Hector’s last moments were a jumbled mix of pain and con-

fusion. The clutch in the chest as he realized he was doomed. The