A flash of light caught her attention. She stopped and looked at the mountain, and saw the tiniest of movements at the edge of the mass of stone and boulders.
Five minutes of nothing, and she felt she couldn’t wait any longer. The trail beckoned, and she raced after the tracks weaving their way through the patches of creosote and sage, and around cactus and ocotillo. Ten minutes later, she glimpsed the man and recognized him as the one called RL. He and the boy increased their pace across the flat toward a long finger of a rise, thick with junipers that extended beyond her sight.
Doubling her pace to a gr
ound-churning run, Hunter closed on them. As they entered the dense green foliage of the junipers, RL glanced back and Hunter saw the surprise on his face, then he disappeared in the green shadows of the trees.
Hunter entered the trees, still at a run, and dodged and stumbled and pushed her way through the limbs as she stayed on the fresh tracks. Limbs cracked ahead of her, some she knew were small, but several were large ones, so that meant RL was pushing through some of the thickest of the trees.
Cutting at right angles to the trail put Hunter out of the junipers and onto the sloping edge of a rise forming the western edge of the ravine where the trees grew. Hunter could see better from her increased elevation and ran again to intercept RL and the boy. She didn’t know which boy it was, but she felt that it was Dario, not Adan.
The ravine widened ahead of her and the junipers formed a larger, almost forest-like area of green. RL’s head bobbed among them and that allowed Hunter to parallel the man and boy. She closed on them until there was less than one hundred yards between her and RL.
The juniper bushes narrowed a quarter mile ahead as the ravine played out, and two hundred yards beyond that was only open desert with scrub brush and soap yuccas among the patches of tobosa and occasional sacahuista.
That’s where she would catch him, she thought. Hunter focused on the spot where a caliche road passed the shallow end of the ravine.
Something caused her to look to the right, and she saw a pale column of dust as a vehicle drove on the caliche road, coming in their direction.
Hunter increased her speed to a sprint.
The vehicle, a tan Dodge Ram pickup with huge tires, suddenly slammed on its breaks and slid to a dust roiling stop. The pale cloud rolled forward and enveloped the pickup, making it disappear in a bone colored cloud.
RL yelled something, then started toward the pickup on the road, pulling and fighting Dario. The boy spotted Hunter and struggled to get away from his captor.
The sight made adrenaline flood through her veins and she flew across the irregular desert ground. Two hundred yards separated them, and she could almost close the distance in half a minute.
The cloud dissipated and the Dodge Ram materialized. The driver’s window came down and the barrel of a rifle appeared, immediately cracking off a series of shots.
Dario yelled for Hunter to duck as bullets struck around her, shooting geysers of dust and gravel into the air. Hunter dropped into a three-foot deep wash and low crawled on her hands and knees to move forward. She thought about why the pickup stopped, because it had been evident just before the shots began. A recent rain washed a trench across the road, leaving it impassable.
RL had to get to the pickup, not the other way around. He tugged at the boy’s arm, but the kid struggled to break free. A voice came from the pickup, “Come on!”
Hunter low-crawled in the wash and stood when she was by a large Spanish dagger that could hide her. Hunter breathed deeply, watching from behind the hardy desert plant armored with bayonet-like leaves. She moved from behind the Spanish dagger and, staying in a crouch, scurried through an area of shoulder-high sage showing tiny purple blooms from a recent rain shower.
Dario spotted her and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Hunter!” He jerked with all his strength and broke free of RL’s grip, staggering a few steps before getting his footing, and then raced off the road and into the brush, going like a twelve-year-old arrow toward his friend.
Hunter ran toward him, even though the distance was over a hundred and fifty yards. She saw the hope in his face, his shining eyes, and sudden red wounds appearing on his neck and chest as she heard the shots from the pickup.
Dario went down hard, hitting face first in the dust.
Hunter screamed his name as she pulled her Glock and fired at the pickup. The distance was far, but the pickup’s body clanged like a tin drum from bullet impacts, and the driver’s window blew out from one round.
RL climbed down one side and up the other to cross the washout, and got in the pickup as the driver spun the wheels and made a tight U-turn.
It sped away as Hunter ran, crying at the same time. She knew even before she touched him that Dario was dead. She knelt and felt for a pulse, but found nothing. She wiped his face with her fingers, removing dust and tiny bits of sharp stone from his cheeks and forehead.
Hunter stroked Dario’s hair, smoothing it off his forehead. She had failed another person, another child. Grief filled her. And what could she tell Dario’s mother, Erica? God-o-mighty…
**
RL hung on tight as Ellis drove the pickup, going so fast that the oversized tires whined on the road. RL said, “You have glass in your cheek.”
“The other side’s worse. Stings like a sonofabitch, too. Missed my eyes, though.”
“She was a long way off, doing that kind of shooting with a pistol.”
“Tell me about it. I wasn’t worried when I saw her raise it, then it sounded like hail hitting the truck.” He picked another diamond-like shard of glass out of his forehead. “She must have been, what, a hundred fifty, sixty yards away, and running when she shot?” He wiped blood from his face, “She won’t get that chance again.”