Ben nodded and brought the glasses back to his eyes. “There’s the group.” He pointed.
Anselmo brought up his binoculars and found them immediately, “Yeah, all four. A quartet.” He looked again, “They’re still wearing the stuff Ellis made for them on their shoes.”
“I let them walk down a draw before, and tried to find their tracks. Their footprints were almost invisible.”
“It’s a flat, flexible rubber thing he makes, leaves no patterns, only the tiniest flat places, but still flexes over rocks and downed branches.”
“He should patent that.”
“Haha. I think he’s making more money off the drugs than he could get with a patent.”
“How much off this load? They’re bringing fentanyl patches, right?”
“Street value is about six million, and they are carrying light, so they can make another trip tomorrow.”
“Sweet.”
They continued to watch through their binoculars as Adan turned into the shallow, sandy draw to put him on a collision course with the drug mules. Ben and Anselmo rose to move to a better location, to be closer and for a line of fire, and Ben felt his palms sweat because it sure looked like it was going to happen. Shooting a kid, man oh man.
**
Six hours earlier, Hunter and Raymond cut the faintest trail they’d ever encountered, like ghosts walking across the desert. What might normally have taken two hours on a trail took six and they still hadn’t found their quarry. Hunter told Raymond, “Stop by that
small mesa and I’ll go up and glass the area.”
“Let’s hope you get lucky and see something, or we might be on this trail until Christmas.” Hunter gave him a thumbs-up and went to the base of the small mesa, studying the sides and the caprock for a gap to use in reaching the top. She spotted one, and climbed up, steady and sure. At the gap, she checked for snakes first when she saw a gray, shed skin lying in the bottom, then she went up, going carefully and using her hands to pull on the rock while her feet scrambled on the steep incline for footing.
Raymond put his head out of the vehicle and yelled, “Looks like you’re hanging on a treadmill and sprinting!”
Hunter didn’t acknowledge her friend until she reached the top, then she shot him a finger, too winded to talk. Raymond laughed and rolled up his window so the AC would cool him while she baked under a brass colored sun that made rocks too hot to touch. She signaled to Raymond to roll down his window, and he did. “What?”
She said, “Payback is a bitch!”
Raymond laughed, “I’ll go next time, it’s only fair!”, and rolled up the window.
Hunter grinned, then wiped sweat from her forehead under the hat, and scanned the country around her, using her ten power binoculars. Five minutes later, she spotted two men lying on the crest of a low ridge just over a mile distant, and looking down into a draw that paralleled the ridge and angled toward Hunter’s mesa. She walked fifty feet to the east and turned the glasses to the draw.
A single small figure, Hunter felt certain it was a young boy, walked north up the draw. In the distance and around a long gentle curve were four people with backpacks, coming south. The two men lying prone were above the bend in the draw. At the backpacker’s pace, Hunter judged they would meet the boy in about fifteen minutes. Then she saw the prone men adjust rifles and look through their scopes at the boy.
She scrambled down through the rock gap and Raymond saw her coming at a reckless, stone kicking, foot sliding run down the slope. He had the vehicle ready, with the passenger door open for her by the time she reached the bottom. Raymond gunned the engine and scattered gravel and dust from the wheels even before Hunter grasped the top edge of the door and leapt on the gunwale like she was jumping on the boxcar ladder of an accelerating freight train.
Raymond said, “What happened?”
“Two men are setting up an ambush.”
“On who?”
“Either a boy, or four backpackers, or all of them.”
Raymond steered around a cluster of car-sized boulders, “Tell me where we need to go, and what you want to do.”
“To that low ridge,” she pointed. “We’ll go up after the shooters.”
“They have rifles?”
“Uh-huh.”
Raymond licked his lips, “And we have a pump shotgun. One pump shotgun.”