Sulfur Springs

  Drones flew at great heights, I read, and a primary method of tracking was thermal imaging. Several websites devoted to foiling government plots suggested trying to mask my thermal image.

  Along with the other supplies I’d got on my way out to the Lulabelle, I’d bought a thermal blanket in case I was forced to spend the night in the desert. Although it was a long shot, I thought that if I covered myself completely with the blanket, kept all my body heat from escaping, I might be invisible, or nearly so, to a drone. Worth a try, I figured.

  The other possibility was that if they’d actually put a drone on me, they couldn’t keep it in the sky 24/7. Maybe in the dead of night, the thing returned to base.

  I left the lights off. If someone was watching the house, I didn’t want them to know I was stirring. I shouldered the hydration pack, wrapped myself in the thermal blanket, covering everything head to toe, grabbed my Winchester, and slipped out the back door. I felt a little ridiculous, like a character from Lord of the Rings in some sort of cloak of invisibility. I’d continued parking the pickup a distance from the parsonage, in case someone had staked out the little house, and I made a dash for it. The streets were empty, no one to spot a crazy man wrapped up in what probably looked like Christmas foil. I drove to the main drag of town, parked, then walked back to the church and checked the statue. The ribbon was still on the angel’s finger.

  Where the hell were Rainy and Mondragón? Why hadn’t they visited the statue?

  I didn’t have a lot of time to consider those questions. There was a vague suggestion of light along the eastern horizon, the promise of dawn still an hour away. I returned to the pickup and left Cadiz to the last of its slumbering.

  An hour later, I hit the truck stop south of Tucson where Rainy and Mondragón and I had stopped a couple days earlier. I gassed up and refilled the hydration pack with water. I still had the power bars and jerky I’d picked up the day before, but I bought four gallon jugs of water and the same medical supplies that Rainy had purchased. When I hit the road again, the sun was just about to bubble up over the horizon.

  I had no idea if my speculation about the drone was correct and if I’d slipped away from Cadiz unnoticed. I decided it was best to skirt the Border Patrol checkpoint on the Magdalena Road, in case they’d been alerted to watch for me. I left the highway just shy of the turnoff and carefully maneuvered the pickup cross-country, between cactus and mesquite, until I came to the jeep trail that led to the Santa Margaritas.

  I stopped when the GPS indicated I was three miles north of the coordinates for the Lulabelle, which was how far I’d gone the day before when I’d spotted the Jesus-shaped rock and then Sprangers had surprised me. I pulled the truck off the trail and parked in a little swale that gave it some cover should a Border Patrol vehicle or anyone else just happen along. I put the medical supplies I’d bought into the hydration pack, shouldered it, and walked fifty yards away to where I had a good 360-degree view of the desert. The air felt fresh and was still cool from the monsoon rains the day before, and it carried the faint, pleasant scent of sage. The only sound was the chatter of small desert birds. I used the binoculars to scan the sky. It was absolutely clear of clouds and, as nearly as I could tell, of drones. But I knew if one was up there, it was hovering so high my binoculars would never spot it.

  I walked into the foothills of the Santa Margaritas, making my way up the slope. Every time I looked to the west, the dark shadow of the mountains had shrunk and more and more of the desert lay yellow under the rising sun. With the dawn, the air had begun to heat up quickly. I thought about Peter and the people who were with him. They’d been in the desert five days. Even if they’d had water when they began, it had to be gone by now. Once again, the desperation of the people Peter was trying to help, their willingness to risk everything in the hope of finding sanctuary, overwhelmed me.

  As I climbed, I paused periodically to scan the mountains for what I’d begun thinking of as the Jesus Rock. In the vast wilderness of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, unless you know the territory well, you absolutely need a map, since the many lakes and the terrain around them look so similar. It was the same in the desert, at least to me. This was alien country and I hadn’t learned how to read it. I used the GPS to guide me back to the coordinates where I’d ended my search the day before and where, moments before Sprangers had surprised me, I’d spotted the Jesus Rock glowing in the long, golden slant of the sun. The light was different now, everything in shadow, and I couldn’t distinguish it. The heavy rain had washed away any sign that I might have found to help me track Peter. I stood for a while, trying to decide on the best course of action.

  I thought about the advice I’d given Pedro before he started barefoot on his journey through the desert, which was the advice Henry Meloux had once offered me. Wherever we lay our feet, each step of the journey is one we have always been meant to take. Trust. That was the message. I decided to put myself in the hands of the spirit of that place and to trust the journey, and I began in the general direction I believed the Jesus Rock to be.

  I found the shoe half an hour later, a child’s canvas sneaker. There was so little of it left that I could understand why it had been discarded. Or maybe it had simply fallen off and the child was too tired or injured to care. The inside was stained with blood. As I knelt on one knee, holding that little piece of some child’s hope in my hand, I lifted my eyes, and there it was. The Jesus Rock. Catching the first gold rays as the sun mounted above the Santa Margaritas. I was no more than half a mile from it.

  The rock might have been a guide, but the entrance to the Jesus Lode was a bitch to locate. Unlike the El Dorado, there was nothing in the area to indicate an old excavation. There was no clear flat in front of the entrance as there’d been at the Lulabelle. What gave the mine away was the child dipping her head to drink from rainwater gathered in the shallow depression of a stone shelf. She was so intent on drinking that she didn’t see me until I was almost upon her. Then her dark eyes grew huge and she turned and fled into the rocks at her back. I followed. And there in a small fold was the opening to the mine, so well hidden that you would have passed right by it unless you had a good sense of what you were looking for or were just incredibly lucky.

  The girl was nowhere in sight, but I knew where she was, and I figured that whoever she was with, they were watching me from inside the black throat of the mine.

  I called out, “Peter Bisonette, are you there?”

  No sound at all came from the darkness.

  “Peter, it’s Cork O’Connor.”

  I heard something then, a very low murmur, and a moment later, the little girl appeared again, stepping carefully into the light. She was small, emaciated, dirty, no more than ten years old. Her hair was black and cut raggedly short. Her features looked more Native than Mexican. She wore khakis and a yellow T-shirt that, at the moment, looked as if they’d never been washed. She had canvas shoes on both her feet, so I figured she wasn’t the child who’d lost the sneaker. There were probably other children inside. She approached me slowly, and when she was very near, reached out for my hand. I gave it to her, and without a word, she led me into the mine.

  The tunnel was a low, narrow dig, not nearly so well or artfully worked as the Lulabelle. The little girl still held my hand, but waited patiently for me as I paused to let my eyes adjust to the dim light inside. As the details began to emerge, I saw several women crowded together, and behind the protection of their bodies were the other children. As tired and beat up as I felt, these women and children looked to be in far worse shape. They were all so very thin, and the clothing that hung on them seemed held together only by threads. Like the little girl, they were Native in their features, and their eyes, when I could finally make them out, were dark wells of weariness and fear.

  “Peter Bisonette?” I said to them quietly.

  From behind them came a man’s voice speaking in a tongue I didn’t understand. The women parted, and the little girl guided me through. r />
  “The last person on earth I expected to see,” Peter said from where he lay. “How in God’s name did you find us?”

  * * *

  He’d been hit in his right thigh. When I cut away his pant leg, I saw that the wound was a through-and-through and seemed to have struck no bone. There were entrance and exit wounds, which had bled significantly. He’d bound them with a strip of cloth one of the women had torn from her blouse. Blood had completely soaked the binding, and when I removed the cloth, I saw that the bullet holes were festering. I took the iodine from the first aid kit I’d bought at the truck stop, cleaned the wounds, and bound them with sterile gauze.

  “Mom?” Peter asked as I worked.

  “She’s with your father. I’m not sure where they are right now. We were all at the Lulabelle yesterday, but you’d left.”

  “Jocko must have told you he’d seen my signal.”

  “I was in the plane with him.”

  “I would have kept signaling, but I saw the chopper hovering off to the west.”

  “We figured,” I said. I finished the bandaging and sat back. “What happened at the rendezvous with these people?”

  “Someone gave us up to Carlos Rodriguez,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. But Rodriguez and his people were waiting for us after we crossed the border.”

  “They shot you?”

  “Maybe. Or it might have been the others.”

  “The others?”

  Peter lay back against the rock of the tunnel wall. At twenty-nine, black-haired, tawny-skinned, and slender, he looked little different from those he was helping. I could see Rainy in him, in his eyes especially. They were like hers in color and in the compassionate spirit that shone through them. But Mondragón was there, too, in the handsome face and the hard set of his jaw. The women and children—I’d counted eleven in all: six women and five children—had crowded near and had watched as I’d worked on Peter’s wounds.

  “A bunch of men jumped us but didn’t fire their weapons. They were suddenly there, all around us, coming out of the dark. I thought we were done for. Rodriguez identified himself and told me he was going to kill me. He said he was going to take the women and make prostitutes of them and sell their children. Then all hell broke loose. Someone started firing at Rodriguez and his men. I have no idea who it was. I saw him go down. I called to the women and the children, and they followed me out of the firefight. It was only after we were away that I realized I’d been hit. Thank God I was the only one.

  “I patched myself up as well as I could and took everyone to the Lulabelle, a full night’s walk from the border. On the way, I called Mom. Or tried. I had only one bar and my cell was in the process of dying on me.”

  “You have a sat phone though, right?”

  “Had. I lost it in the firefight.”

  “Why call your mom? What could she do? Why not call one of the Desert Angels?”

  “So you know about us?” he said. “I understood we’d been compromised, and I had no idea who’d sold us out. I thought if I could explain to Mom, she’d rope you into helping. Which, it looks like, is exactly what happened. She must have called my father to enlist his help, too.”

  He paused a moment and squeezed his face in pain.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I’ll live. You didn’t happen to bring water, did you?”

  “I have some in my hydration pack and four gallons in the truck.”

  “Could you share what you have with the folks here? That rain yesterday gave us some relief, but they’re all still pretty thirsty. And hungry. If you hadn’t come along, I was ready to head out, see if we could find some Border Patrol and turn ourselves in.”

  “Head out? With that leg? You wouldn’t get far.”

  The water in the hydration pack went quickly. I gave out the jerky and the power bars, and they went down fast. Peter asked me to tend to the feet of several of the women and children. They’d walked from Guatemala. Some had worn the shoes nearly off their feet, and their soles were cut and blistered. That they’d kept walking spoke in a heartbreaking way of the depth of their desperation.

  “Maybe it would have been better to give them up to the Border Patrol,” I said as I worked.

  “Last resort,” Peter replied. “None of them have family here. Do you know what would have happened? After all they’d been through, they’d have been sent back to Guatemala. And do you have any idea what they ran from? So many of them have seen their husbands, fathers, brothers slaughtered in the violence there. If you could talk to them, they’d tell you that dying in the desert is no worse.”

  “Why did you leave the Lulabelle?”

  “I’d posted some of the women and children as sentries. They spotted men coming into the mountains. These men weren’t wearing uniforms, so I knew they weren’t Border Patrol. I figured Rodriguez’s men. Or maybe whoever it was who’d attacked Rodriguez. We left quickly and set out for the Jesus Lode.”

  “You knew where it was?”

  “Approximately. I have to tell you, though, it was a stroke of luck actually finding it.”

  “I know a man who would say you were always meant to find it.”

  “I know him, too,” he said with a laugh. “How is Uncle Henry?”

  “Hopeful, as always.”

  I finished tending the final woman whose feet needed care, and she said something shyly to me in a tongue I didn’t recognize.

  “She says thank you,” Peter translated.

  I began to put away the medical supplies. “We were ambushed at the Lulabelle yesterday. By the same people you ran from, I’m sure. Rodriguez’s men. We’d have been toast except your father called in the cavalry.”

  Peter looked pained, and not from the wounds in his leg. “Who knew about the Lulabelle?”

  “Jocko. Somebody beat him up, and maybe the intel came from him. He was still in bad shape when I talked to him, and he couldn’t say for sure. I also talked to your friend Sylvester. But somebody killed his mule, so I’m thinking he wasn’t inclined to be cooperative. It’s possible whoever was in the chopper that was hovering out here spotted your signal and relayed that information to Rodriguez.”

  “I figured the chopper was Border Patrol.”

  “Could have been. Like your father said to me, anybody can be bought. What now?”

  “First, we cart that water up from your truck. Then you get me to Ark.”

  “Arivaca?”

  He nodded. “I have friends there who’ll help us. I need to arrange to get these people to safety.”

  He spoke to the women in a language that wasn’t Spanish, and three of them followed me down to the pickup. We carried the water back to the mine. Peter talked with them all for some time, then he said to me, “They understand that you and I have to leave, but that I’ll be coming back. I’ve promised them. If I can’t come back, for whatever reason, you have to make sure that someone does.”

  I looked at the faces of those women and their children, who’d traveled God knew how many miles and had endured God knew how many different kinds of hell. I understood why Peter would do his best to move heaven and earth to help them. What human heart was stony enough to refuse?

  “You have my word,” I said.

  CHAPTER 28

  * * *

  Peter knew the desert. He directed me along a network of jeep trails south of the Santa Margaritas that kept us off main roads as we headed toward Arivaca. It was clear his leg was giving him a lot of grief. The rough ride didn’t help. He listened as I filled him in on all that had happened since the night he’d left the message on Rainy’s phone. I told him that in the firefight in the desert, Carlos Rodriguez had been wounded and his son Miguel had been killed.

  “I tried to be so careful,” Peter said. “I didn’t want anyone getting hurt because of what I do.”

  “You’ve set yourself a pretty difficult task.”

  “Somebody had to.” He shut his eyes for a mome
nt, against the pain, I thought. When he opened them, he said, “A little over a year and a half ago, I was hiking in the desert, scouting safe routes. I came across a skeleton, very small. A child. There was nothing around it, nothing to tell me how it had got there. Lost, abandoned, murdered? However it had happened, I couldn’t help imagining that child, dying alone and afraid.” He looked at me with those dark eyes that reminded me so much of his mother’s eyes. “If it was in your power to prevent it, could you let that happen to one of those children back at the Jesus Lode? I’ve done all I can to keep children like them, and their mothers, from falling into the hands of a coyote who might leave them to die in the desert. Or worse, sell them into a life that’s so bad they might as well be dead. But I never wanted killing to be a part of it.”

  “Unless we can figure out who’s been feeding intel to Las Calaveras, the killing probably isn’t over. I think they may be playing two sides against each other.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whoever started the shooting in the firefight that night in the desert knew about the rendezvous location and probably knew Rodriguez would be there.”