He woke to hot breath outside the window, the stink of mangy hair, something clawing at the metal door. The sky was ribboned red-orange, and when he looked outside, he saw the coyote sniffing at his blood. Dark shapes moved in the brush beyond and then stilled to shadow again. He opened the car door and the coyote leapt backward. He placed one foot and then the other on the dry ground, and the coyote retreated, growling, its teeth bared in fear. He stumbled toward the animal—his head a balloon on a string floating high above his shoulders—and followed it into the brush until he was in the cold breath of the wilderness and the coyote became air. He would become a coyote, he decided then, a hunter disappearing into the night, and he would walk out the other side of the canyon, back into the town, back among them.
Now it was dark, the sky above him bruise blue. He listened for the men, listened for their horses, the rattling of the bits, the pounding of hooves, but he heard nothing, just the thumping sound of a distant helicopter. He slunk along the edge of the canyon wall, his body shadowless in the moonless night. Then the helicopter came thundering down the canyon, its spotlight exploding the brush and trees and rocks with overexposed light. He was caught in the open, between the canyon wall and a row of manzanita, and when he started to run, three mule deer burst out of the underbrush and he ran with them, the helicopter hurling light behind them, the deer darting and kicking in front of him. Up ahead he saw them, the policemen’s flashlights like little lightning strikes against the sagebrush. The deer veering and cutting, careening through chaparral, and then a shot punched the air and one of the deer dropped and he could see the policemen’s flashlights slashing across the shuddering animal.
“Shit,” he heard one of them say.
There was another shot and he heard the policemen arguing, their walkie-talkies sending static into the air. He crouched then in a clump of cactus with the needles poking into his skin, and the helicopter’s light burned across his body until it floated above the men and the dead deer. He crouched there for ten minutes, just outside the circle of light, the cactus thorns puncturing his arms, stabbing into his thighs, until he watched the legs of the horses pass him by on the trail.
“Fucking deer hunter here,” he heard one of them say, a couple others laughing.
“Wonder how that’s going to look in the report.”
“Shut the hell up, Gonzalez. You practically jumped out of the saddle.”
Then they were gone, following the trail north, back up to the entrance to the canyon, back where the stolen car lay broken in a ditch. He crouched there for five more minutes, watching the helicopter splash the canyon with light. The spotlight slashed across the canyon wall once, and he saw the fold in the land, a thin chute of rock rising to the ridge above. He knew then he couldn’t stay on the canyon floor.
18
BEN SPED HIS TRUCK DOWN the washboard ruts of Black Star Canyon Road toward the sunrise over Limestone Canyon.
He’d slept until three in the morning when he startled awake, remembering something from his senior year. He checked in on the sleeping Emma and Rachel, and then went out to the barn and studied the topographic map of the canyon, listening to scanner chatter of the manhunt, watching the helicopter spotlights circling above the distant hills. By dawn, it was clear to Ben they’d lost the serial. The mounted units had ridden up and down the canyon all night, foot patrols were searching under every bush; they’d shot a deer, for God’s sake, startled up by the helicopters. There were a couple rangers from the park service up there, too, but they’d imported them from Alpine, down near San Diego, and they didn’t really know the land. They had the north and south ends of the canyon bottled up, just like Ben had said, but the killer wasn’t down in the canyon. Ben was sure of it.
When he got to the command post—a folding picnic table and a nylon canopy to keep the sun off—Hernandez and the county sheriff were bent over a national forest map.
“Don’t believe you’ve got medical clearance yet,” Hernandez said as a greeting.
“I don’t believe you know where the hell the killer is,” Ben said.
Ben was laying out his topo map over the national forest map, setting a walkie-talkie on each corner to keep the ends down.
“Well,” Hernandez said, glancing at Ben’s truck, “at least you didn’t use city resources to get up here.”
Hernandez explained to the sheriff, Barrow, that Ben used to ride these hills with his father, back when it was a cattle ranch. Barrow, a gaunt older man as tall as a basketball center, blew smoke from his cigarette and eyed Ben.
“You’re the officer that shot him, right?”
“Yeah,” Ben said.
“You’re bleeding, son,” Barrow said, and handed him a handkerchief.
“Thanks.” Ben touched the cloth to his eye. Just a little blood, a stitch shaken loose from the rough ride up, maybe.
The sheriff explained the situation: patrols on the south end of the canyon, cruisers blocking all dirt roads leading out of the hills, Ventura and Riverside mounted units picking the canyon trails.
“Got a couple footprints,” the sheriff said, pointing at the map. “Here and here.”
Ben marked the spots in blue pen.
“Blood on the trail here,” the sheriff pointed, “and a smeared handprint here, on the trunk of an oak tree. But that’s it, as of an hour ago.”
“He knows how to disappear,” Hernandez said.
Ben glanced out along the ridge to where the land fell away in limestone folds.
“We need some foot patrols up on those bluffs,” Ben said. “I think he’s climbing.”
“Up there?” Barrow said. “That’s steep as hell. The guy’s bleeding like a son of a bitch.”
“There’re coyote trails,” Ben said. “Mule deer trails up and down the canyon walls. If he was down on the canyon floor, you’d have found him by now.”
These were city police, used to alleyways and strip malls and neat rows of suburban homes. The sheriff blew smoke and then called to a captain, who sent a half dozen grudging officers hiking up the ridgeline. Ben watched them pick a deer trail through the scrub brush on the lip of the canyon wall.
“I need to get down in there,” Ben said.
“Looks to me,” the sheriff said, “like you should be feet up on a couch.”
“There’re a couple small caves,” Ben said. “Here, and here.” He stabbed his index finger into the map. “Anybody up here know that?”
The sheriff glanced at Hernandez.
“When an injured animal is being hunted,” Ben said, “what does he do?”
“He hides,” Hernandez said.
“Or attacks,” Ben said. “If these guys were anywhere near him, he would’ve attacked already. He’s in one of those fucking caves.”
“Did you read your own medical report?”
“I can’t just sit around on this, Lieutenant,” Ben said, looking Hernandez in the eyes. “You understand?” He thought Hernandez would get it, thought he’d understand all that Ben felt he had to make up for. “Let me do my job. I’m going into the canyon,” Ben said, turning to walk away from Hernandez. “You’d have to arrest me to stop me. You going to do that?”
—