Long Road to Mercy Read online

  When Pine’s boots hit the asphalt, she could feel the heat from the tar wicking through her soles and into her socks and from there into her feet. The sun was intense at this elevation, which was about the same as Denver’s. And it was now beating down on Pine.

  She had run into some traffic because of an accident and gotten back too late to return to the office. But Blum had emailed her on the way with some more information. She was going to go over it while sipping a beer in her apartment. That was her idea of a night out without actually going out.

  On the way to the stairwell leading to her digs, Pine approached two men in their twenties in the parking lot. They were lounging against a cherry red Ford F150 with a jacked-up frame and doublewide rear tires. It looked ready for a duel at a Monster Truck smashup. They were smoking weed and drinking beer. One was indigenous, with his long, dark hair clipped at the back with a leather thong. He had on dirty jeans, a colorful short-sleeved shirt, and a stained, wide-brimmed hat. A knife in a leather sheaf rode on his belt. The other guy was white, with skin that was peeling from sunburn, a fact readily apparent since he was wearing a tank top.

  He also had a Sig Sauer in a hip holster.

  Arizona was open carry, concealed carry, any carry you wanted, no permit, training, or brain required.

  Pine glanced at the rifle rack in the cab of the Ford. Suspended there were a sleek Browning over/under twelve-gauge shotgun, and an AR-15 that could kill a whole lot of people in a very short amount of time.

  Pine recognized one of the men but not the other. She nodded to them as she was passing by.

  “I hear you’re a fed?”

  This came from Sunburn.

  “Who wants to know?”

  Sunburn threw his empty beer can into the truck bed. “I was a fed once. Army. They screwed me over,” he said quietly, his menacing gaze boring into her.

  Pine couldn’t tell if he was stoned or just creepy. Or both.

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “So are you a fed or not?” he said, drawing closer.

  “Yeah, I’m a federal agent.”

  “They’ll screw you over, too.”

  “Not so far.”

  He took a puff on his joint.

  She watched him and said, “And maybe you need to knock that off and clear your head. Especially if you’re driving. You don’t want any more trouble with the authorities, right?”

  “This is a free country, right? I fought for that shit.”

  “You got your medical marijuana card? Otherwise, it’s illegal to possess or use it in Arizona. And under federal law you shouldn’t be carrying a gun if you’re using weed, though the state of Arizona sees it differently.”

  “Got PTSD. Left my card at home. You can arrest me if you want.”

  “If you don’t have a card, I could arrest you. It’s a felony.”

  “Like I said, I got a card. Just forgot it. I was in Iraq, lady. You go to Iraq, you’ll want to smoke weed too.”

  Pine eyed his buddy, who seemed disinterested in the whole interaction.

  “How about you?”

  “I left my card home too.”

  Pine shook her head. She was not arresting these guys for that. But still.

  She eyed the AR-15 and said to Sunburn. “I’m assuming you passed a background check for the AR.”

  “Not my gun,” replied Sunburn.

  Pine, who was done with this exchange, said tersely, “Right. Okay, you guys have a good evening. Just don’t drug, drink, and drive, okay? And be careful with your weapons.”

  She started to walk past him when Sunburn moved in front of her.

  “I ain’t done talking to you.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m done talking to you.”

  As she moved past him, he roughly grabbed her arm.

  Pine gripped his wrist, bent it backward, drove it behind his back, and launched him headfirst into the side of the truck. His forehead punched into the sheet metal and he slowly slid to the ground.

  With her free hand Pine whipped out her Glock and pointed it in the direction of the other guy, whose hand had drifted to his knife.

  “Don’t do it unless you want to die right here,” barked Pine. “Put it on the ground and kick it away. Now.”

  The man quickly did as she ordered, laying the weapon in the dirt and then propelling it about two feet away with his boot.

  Sunburn slowly groaned and turned over on his back. She reached down and jerked his Sig from the holster.

  “Hey, you can’t take my gun!” he protested.

  She pointed her gun at his head. “You ever lay a hand on me again, you won’t be waking up. You got that?”

  When he didn’t answer she nudged him with her boot. “I said, you got that?”

  “Yeah, I get it, okay. Shit!”

  “And be thankful I don’t want to waste another minute of my life dealing with you idiots. Now clear out of here.”

  He struggled up and, with his buddy’s help, climbed into the passenger seat of the Ford.

  When his friend went to get his knife, Pine placed her boot over it.

  “Don’t think so.” She paused and studied him. “I know you. Your old man is Joe Yazzie, isn’t he? You’re his oldest, Joe Jr. Does he know you’re hanging out with dicks like that?”

  “I’m twenty-four, I can hang out with anybody I want,” retorted Yazzie.

  In her periphery, Pine kept a visual on Sunburn, just in case he went for the Browning or AR.

  She said to Yazzie, “Then exercise better judgment. What are you doing here anyway?”

  “Our buddy lives here. Kyle Chavez.”

  Pine nodded. She knew the Chavez family. The parents were illegals, hardworking, never in any trouble, and went to Mass every Sunday at the only Catholic church in town. But their son, Kyle, was a piece of work, and giving them endless trouble. He had nearly come Pine’s way a couple of times.

  “Like I said, exercise better judgment.”

  “You think you’re a badass?” screamed Sunburn from the truck.

  “Get him out of here before I change my mind about arresting you both,” Pine said.

  Yazzie quickly climbed into the truck, started it up, put it in gear, and drove off.

  Pine watched them go until they were out of sight.

  Then she picked up the knife, shoved Sunburn’s Sig into her pocket, and walked up the stairs to her apartment.

  Now she really, really wanted that beer.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Blum’s email had contained more information about the website where she had originally found the two articles.

  If the letters carved on the mule were referring to Jordan and Kinkaid, then the person who had carved them might have accessed this website. And whenever you accessed a digital space, you left behind your electronic prints in the form of an IP address. The Bureau had busted many a crook who didn’t understand this. It was a long shot, Pine knew, but Blum had also told her that there weren’t very many websites dealing with this subject, so they might just get lucky. Ordinarily, Pine would have forwarded this information to IT specialists at the Bureau who could check out web traffic to a site.

  Yet she hesitated to do that now.

  Eyes in the back of my head.

  Avery had told her that, and yet he was no particular ally of hers. But she was under his chain of command and maybe he was giving her some subtle assistance for some reason as yet unknown. Or maybe he was setting her up to swing in the wind. She supposed only time would tell which possibility was correct.

  She finished her beer and took two pork sausages out of the fridge. She had already fired up her little hibachi that was out on the balcony. It had come with the apartment, having been left behind by the last renter. She only had to add a fresh bag of charcoal. Pine wasn’t much of a cook, but eating out every night was not in her budget, or good for her physical well-being.

  She plopped the fat sausages on the hot grill, and her nostrils were instantly assa
iled with the smell of cooking spiced meat.

  She grabbed a bottle of water from her fridge, uncapped it, and took a long drink. Dehydration was a real problem here. People trying to hike the Canyon failed all the time to take this into account, despite all the warning signs posted everywhere about how much water and salty foods to carry with you, and how much to consume during your trek. Becoming dehydrated was potentially deadly. Blood pressure dropped to dangerously low levels, the heart slowed, the organs could begin shutting down. And then you were gone. All from not imbibing enough H2O.

  She mixed a small salad, cutting up tomatoes, cucumbers, snap peas, and beets. She sprinkled a homemade lemon vinaigrette over it and set it on the kitchen table. A few minutes later she checked on the sausages. They were plump and bursting and marked with the tines of the grill.

  Just how she liked them.

  She sat at her table and ate, while she used her laptop to look through the website Blum had found. It was quite conspiratorial in tone. The whole country, maybe the whole world, was wallowing in paranoia. She thought it was still anyone’s bet as to whether the internet would turn out to be more good or evil.

  She texted a friend of hers who worked for a satellite office of Google in Salt Lake City and gave him the information on the site, with a request that he track the IP addresses that had accessed the site within the last several weeks. Pine had no idea what sort of traffic this site experienced, so she felt it was practical to put in a time parameter, if just to see what sort of volume she’d be looking at.

  She finished her dinner and put her plate and utensils in the dishwasher.

  It was nearly nine o’clock now, but she wasn’t really tired.

  She received an answering text from her friend in Salt Lake. He had gotten the information and would try to have something for her tomorrow.

  Pine sat back and thought things through. It was quite a mishmash in her head. How did a carved-up mule that might be tied to an old legend square with a defense contractor gone missing, along with the man impersonating him?

  No, she was wrong about that. It was still unproven that Benjamin Priest was a defense contractor. He could be something else entirely. And Benjamin Priest wasn’t even technically missing—the man pretending to be him was.

  And why the Bureau’s national security interest?

  Pine couldn’t even prove that the real Benjamin Priest had ever visited the Grand Canyon. The only concrete evidence she had was that someone calling himself Benjamin Priest had ridden Sallie Belle down to the Canyon floor and then vanished, leaving a mutilated mule in his wake.

  Had the impersonator hiked out at night? Hikers did make the trek from rim to rim at night, to avoid the heat of the day, which could feel like a sauna from May to September.

  Pine had made the nighttime journey numerous times, taking a quick nap on the banks of the Colorado at midnight before hiking up to the opposite rim to see the sunrise. But she was in excellent physical shape, knew the trails, and had the right equipment, including headlamps. Walking along rocky, uneven narrow trails with sheer drops without lights was a suicidal endeavor.

  So, a guy who was nervous coming down on a mule would have had to hike up alone in the dark. Pine had no way to explain this seemingly incongruous possibility.

  And she certainly wouldn’t figure it out tonight.

  She stripped off her clothes and took a shower, and put on a pair of gym shorts and a white tank top.

  She sat on the bed and looked at her heavily callused hands. She had had to scrub hard to get out the fine bits of weightlifting chalk embedded in her fingers.

  When she wasn’t traveling for a case, she lifted three times a week at a gym in downtown Shattered Rock. It used to house a Chinese restaurant, but apparently the denizens of the Rock would rather push iron than eat kung pao. Next door to that was an MMA studio, where she practiced her kickboxing three days a week. On the seventh day, unlike God, she didn’t rest. Instead, she put on her Nikes and ran along the flat, dry plains, with an unforgiving sun beating down on her.

  The unincorporated town of Tuba City was to the east of Shattered Rock and hugged the westernmost edge of the Navajo Nation like a parenthesis. Shattered Rock lay just outside the boundaries of the Navajo’s territory, sitting within the Painted Desert. The summers were hot and dry and the winters cold and equally dry because of the barrier mountains to the south.

  Her first winter here, Pine thought her skin was literally going to break off. She had gone through a ton of moisturizers and kept a humidifier in her apartment and office running from November to April. Even then, she’d had to buy lip balm and Aveeno by the crate.

  She lay back on her bed, one arm across her forehead as she stared up at the dark ceiling. It was a little after ten, and even with her window shut she could hear the baleful howl of a coyote coming from somewhere.

  They’d had coyotes back in rural Georgia. While she had watched, her father had shot one that had gone after their chickens. Her father wasn’t the best shot, and the animal hadn’t died right away. Pine could recall her eyes filling with tears as the poor beast writhed in pain. The bullet must have hit its spine and paralyzed its rear legs. Her father had walked over and calmly shot the coyote in the head, ending its misery.

  He had turned to his remaining daughter, taken the smoldering cigarette from his lips, and stuffed the still-smoking pistol inside his belt.

  “You don’t let things be in pain, Lee, you hear me. That’s one’a God’s creatures, so you got to put them out of their misery, okay? You hear me, girl? Pain ain’t no good that way. Ain’t right. You hear me now?”

  This had occurred after Mercy had been taken from them. They were all changed, all on edge, all different from what they had once been. Pain, yes, they were all certain that Mercy had been in pain.

  She had wiped her eyes and nodded at her father, but her gaze had remained on the dead animal, its lifeless eye seemed to be trained solely on her, as the blood pooled around its destroyed head. She would never forget the howl the beast had made when it had first been shot. Shot for simply hunting for something to eat. She would never forget its piteous writhing on the ground, its spine crushed by a bullet, unsure of what had just happened, but instinctively knowing that its life was just about over, even as it desperately tried to rise and flee.

  And survive.

  On this thought Pine’s memory lurched to her sister.

  And how Mercy must have felt something similar to this, as she was taken from the only home she had ever known. Her life forfeited by an unknown force. For no reason at all other than a violent lunatic’s whim.

  Did someone put you out of your misery?

  Did someone take the pain away, Mercy?

  I hope he did. I pray he did.

  At that exact moment Pine wanted to finally let something out of her that had been inside far too long. She was a dammed-up river desperately needing a release.

  But it wouldn’t come. The tears would not come.

  The imposing image of Daniel James Tor briefly flitted across her mind.

  If he had taken Mercy, she prayed that the end had come quickly. But knowing Tor’s history, she very much doubted that was the case.

  With her sister’s features firmly in her mind, Pine fell into a troubled sleep.

  As she usually did.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Grand Canyon, one.

  Cadaver dogs, zip.

  And why should that be a surprise? thought Pine.

  The Canyon was nearly 280 miles long and up to eighteen miles wide, with more nooks and crannies than you could count in a lifetime. It was no wonder that a body had not been found. But it could be that no body had been found because no corpse was there to be found.

  Lambert had texted her early that morning with the results, or the lack thereof.

  Pine didn’t have the resources to check every pocket of the Canyon, not that anyone did. And then there was the mighty Colorado River that had serv
ed as both jackhammer and scalpel to the hard and soft rock constituting the Canyon. It was the only reason there was a Canyon. If Mr. Imposter had fallen into the icy and swift-running Colorado, his body might be in Mexico by now.

  Pine changed into her workout gear and grabbed a duffel with clean clothes, which she had packed the night before. She climbed into her truck and drove off.

  It was a ten-minute trip to her gym. It was pretty much a ten-minute drive to everywhere in Shattered Rock. You knew you were in rush hour if you saw more than one car at the same time. She parked on the empty street. It was early and the heat had not yet built. But the sun had already started its rise and the warmth would follow with it, until sweat would sprout on anyone who happened to be outside moving at anything faster than a slow walk.

  It would be two more months before the weather would approach anything that could be called cool or refreshing.

  And right now, Pine was going to sweat inside.

  She nodded to the owner of the place as she walked in.

  His name was Kenny Kuni, a transplant from Maui. He was about five eight and a massively ripped 240 pounds.

  He was on the squat rack with enough stacked plates to make the barbell bend at the ends. Kuni nodded back and then did another set. His shirt was soaked through from his battle with the barbells, and his shorts were stretched tight over his monster-veined and tanned thighs.

  His gym was old-school, hard-core with no fancy bells and whistles, just the basic tools for the seriously inclined pusher of iron.

  And another thing: Kenny didn’t believe in AC when one was working out. The only thing you got were two floor fans moving warm air from the left to the right and back again with every feeble oscillation. If you didn’t sweat in here, you needed to have your glands and pores checked.

  There were two other people in the gym. Both were regulars. One was a tall black guy in his fifties who had washboard abs, the other a stocky white guy in his forties working hard to come back from a scoped knee. Pine didn’t know their names and in fact had never asked. She just knew them by their routines. The same was probably true of them toward her. The regulars didn’t come here to chat. They came here to push as much weight as they could. They saved their breath to do just that, because if you did it correctly, you wouldn’t have any wind left over to talk.