Chapter 7 - The Desert Property
The wind came off the Salton Sea smelling of alkaline dust, dead tilapia, and the sharp, metallic tang of an approaching high-desert front.
It was 4:30 in the morning.
We sat in an unmarked Chevy Tahoe two miles south of State Route 78, tucked into the lee of an eroded clay ridge that the locals called The Fish Creek Wash. The engine was off; the dash lights had been killed by a master toggle under the steering column.
In the front seat sat Detective Miller and a tactical officer named Cross, who held a thermal imaging scope against the cracked glass of the passenger window.
In the back seat, wedged between a tactical trauma bag and a pair of carbon-fiber crutches, sat Elena Ramos and me.
My left leg was locked straight in an articulated steel brace that ran from mid-thigh to the arch of my boot. Every twenty minutes, Elena would lean over, her fingers finding the popliteal pulse behind my knee, checking for the telltale swelling that would signal a failure of the internal fixation screws.
"Nothing moving on the main wash," Cross muttered, his breath misting the glass. "Ambient temp is forty-two degrees. If he’s out here in a civilian vehicle, the engine block should glow like a flare on the Flir."
"He isn't in a civilian vehicle," I said, resting my forehead against the cold door panel. "Austin had three off-road vehicles stored in an industrial unit in Brawley. Two modified Yamahas and a four-seater Polaris RZR with a dry-sump racing motor. He doesn't need the wash. He can run the ridge trails without headlights using military-grade night vision goggles he bought from an online surplus dealer in Oceanside."
"He’s that confident?" Miller asked.
"He’s that terrified," I said. "Austin doesn't think about consequences until the room starts filling with water. Right now, he’s drowning. He knows the Selectric ribbon gives us Evelyn. He knows the marriage certificate gives us motive. The only thing standing between him and a lethal injection at San Quentin is the physical corpus delicti."
"Look," Cross said, his voice dropping an octave.
Through the green phosphor display of the thermal scope, a bright, white-hot silhouette appeared three miles to the northwest, moving along the rim of the sandstone mesa at forty miles an hour.
It was small, low-slung, with four oversized balloon tires kicking up plumes of silt that lingered in the cool air like glowing smoke.
"Polaris," Cross said. "No running lights. Traveling south-southeast toward the Devil's Punchbowl coordinates."
Miller reached for the ignition key, but I caught his shoulder.
"No," I said. "If you start the V8 now, the exhaust note will echo off the clay canyon walls for four miles. He’ll drop the buggy into one of the narrow slot canyons where the Tahoe can't follow, and you’ll never find him before sunrise."
"We can't let him start digging, Monica," Miller hissed.
"He won't start digging with a shovel," I said. "He doesn't have an excavator this time. He brought something else."
"What?"
"Diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate," Elena whispered from the seat beside me. Her face was pale in the starlight, her fingers tracing the gold hummingbird pin on her collar. "When we were kids in Holtville, Austin used to brag about his grandfather’s old mining cache. He told Leah that if you pour forty gallons of fuel oil down an old shaft and drop an electric blasting cap, the sandstone walls collapse inward like a deck of cards. You don't have to dig a body up if you put three hundred tons of mountain on top of it."
Cross lowered the scope. "He’s at the claim. The vehicle just stopped on the flat ground above the shaft."
Miller didn't hesitate. He turned the key.
The Tahoe’s four-hundred-horsepower engine rumbled to life with a deep, muffled roar. Miller dropped the transmission into four-low, kicked the headlights onto high-beam, and slammed the accelerator through the floorboards.
The truck lunged forward, the oversized Goodyear tires biting into the deep sand of the wash, throwing twin rooster tails of silt forty feet into the desert night.
We hit the first alluvial fan at fifty miles an hour.
My head slammed against the upholstered ceiling; a white-hot knife of agony ripped through my left hip where the bone graft was held by stainless pins. I bit through my bottom lip, the taste of blood filling my mouth, my hands clenching the nylon grab-handle until the seams popped.
"Hold on!" Miller roared, spinning the wheel as the wash narrowed into a sandstone chute with three-foot clay walls on either side.
Through the windshield, the red-rock bluff of the Devil's Punchbowl rose against the gray pre-dawn horizon like a broken tooth.
At the summit, illuminated by the halogen floods of the Polaris buggy, stood Austin.
He was wearing a heavy canvas chore coat, work boots, and yellow leather gloves. He had a five-gallon plastic fuel container tipped over the mouth of a four-foot square wooden cribbing that protruded from the desert floor.
Beside him sat three more red jugs and a heavy yellow spool of commercial detonation cord.
As our high beams hit him, Austin dropped the empty can.
He didn't run.
He stood in the blinding light, his chest heaving, his face smeared with black grease and desert dust, looking at the charging Tahoe with an expression of wild, manic ecstasy that made him look completely alien.
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He reached into the pocket of his chore coat and pulled out a heavy, red-cased electronic blasting machine—the kind used by highway demolition crews, with a T-shaped handle that had to be twisted and depressed to send twelve hundred volts down the firing line.
"Miller!" I screamed. "Stop the truck!"
